Excerpt from The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mrs Higgens kept the whole thing together, cooking and cleaning, and of course it’s a great thing to be among talented people, but all the hurly-burly of their extravagant natures and their sexual lives and everything appeared to quite exhaust Mrs Higgens. Just thinking about what went on in their minds made her want to go for a lie down. Of course she wasn’t scared to have her say and when she lifted me onto the table I spied immediate evidence of her tendency to complain: her wee brown diary sitting there open and quite proud of itself. It was Mrs Higgens who gave me sympathy for the household gods; here she was, this experienced rinser of garments, this Helen of failed cakes, who might have ruined her eyes during forty years of enabling those artists to be free. She sat down, wiped the rim of her teacup, and lifted the book. On the inside cover it said, ‘Grace Higgens, Charleston, Firle, Nr. Lewes’. As she flicked through the pages she was living all that life over again, what wasn’t there as much as what was.* The laughter coming from the dining room seemed an adequate accompaniment to the smell of cinnamon drifting over the kitchen.

* As a diarist, Mrs Higgens was a minimalist. Feb. 5: ‘Bought cream buns with real cream’

Mrs Higgens wasn’t the best cook in the world. She always worked out of a box of clippings – things she’d torn out of The Times or the Daily Express, pages now discoloured, covered in powdered egg, ground spices, dust. (It was the same box she had used to hold the gas masks during the War.) Mrs Bell was forever rolling her eyes at the desperate chore of having to pretend to Grace her dinners were edible. For my own part, however, she was the best feeder of dogs I ever encountered, and I thought of her kitchen long after I’d succumbed to the American way of life.

A supreme effort was being made in the kitchen that day, not for their neighbour Cyril Connolly, a frequent and frequently complaining guest at Charleston, but for Mrs Gurdin, the dog-loving lady from America, a noted Russian émigré and mother of the film star Natalie Wood. I never fully processed the connection, but I think it was that nice writer Mr Isherwood who put them all in touch, knowing from Mr Spender that the Bells’housekeepers bought and sold puppies. Mrs Gurdin, not without grandeur, liked to say that the world’s dogs were her life’s work and her great hobby.

I passed through the dining room, where Mrs Bell was talking quietly. ‘Quentin used to say it was odd how Virginia wanted to know what dogs were feeling. But she wanted to know what everyone was feeling. Do you remember Pinker?’

‘The Sackville hound?’ said Connolly. ‘I remember it only too well. It had Vita’s face. I’m sure Virginia’s little novel Flush was a joke on Lytton. All those eminent Victorians, and here was the little Browning spaniel, the most eminent of all.’

lsquo;Pinker is buried in the orchard at Rodmell,’ said Vanessa, gently touching her wrists in turn, as if dabbing perfume.

When it comes to pedigree, each dog worth his mutton is a font of expertise. We Maltese – we bichon maltais, the Roman Ladies’ Dog, the old spaniel gentle, the Maltese lion dog, or Maltese terrier – are suffered to know ourselves to be the aristocrats of the canine world. A great relative of mine was famous as the boon companion to Mary, Queen of Scots; another one gained the ravenous affections of Marie Antoinette. We have known philosophers and tyrants, dipped the pink of our noses in the ink of learning and the blood of battle, and Publius, the Roman governor of Malta, having given house to my distant relative Issa, had a portrait painted of the little dog that is said to have been more lifelike than life itself. That is our habit and also our creed. Once I came to know myself, to know that my relatives in art are no smaller than the story of my own cells, I understood at once that I must be a scion of that contemplative muse, the little dog in Vittore Carpaccio’s Vision of St. Augustine. Nothing is lost on the littlest of all dogs. We served inthe heroic narratives of the Mediterranean, in the Holy Wars, we sat on the laps of evil-doers and saints, were passed by marriage across the princes of Europe to lick the tragic boots of Charles Edward Stuart, producing, in our turn, heirs out of the houses of Eduardo Pasquini and the Contessa di Vaglio, the Conte Anselmo Bernardo de Pescara and the Principessa de Palestrina. After princes and pups alike were murdered by Hanoverian agents, the surviving brother prince and brother pups married into the house of Dalvray and later into the house of Claude Philippe Vandenbosch de Monpertigen and the Comtesse de Lannoy. From there, by ferry, a son of that union, married to Germaine Elize Segers de la Tour d’Auvergne, came to Leith with a litter of pups that included my ancestor Muzzy. In good time Muzzy met a full Maltese bitch against the park railings on Heriot Row, right across from the house of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose cousin Noona once patted them both.* It was some of their noble grandpups who were taken from Edinburgh to the Highlands, where the next generations grew up in a castellated mansion at the end of an avenue of silver firs.

Excerpted from The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan. Copyright © 2010 by Andrew O'Hagan. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.