The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  1916

  1917

  1918

  1919

  1920

  1921

  1922

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

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  THE ANNOTATED ARCHY AND MEHITABEL

  DON MARQUIS was born in 1878, the second of four children of a physician in Walnut, Illinois. In 1898 he briefly attended Knox College in nearby Galesburg, but he was largely self-educated. As a teenager he began working for local printing offices and newspapers. After short-lived stints on newspapers in Washington and Philadelphia, Marquis moved to Atlanta in 1902 and worked for the News, the Journal, and Uncle Remus’s Magazine. Marquis moved to New York City in 1909 and soon became a well-known journalist. In 1912 he launched his now legendary column “The Sun Dial” in the New York Evening Sun and four years later Archy and Mehitabel began to appear.

  Marquis published three novels—Danny’s Own Story (1912), The Cruise of the Jasper B. (1916), and Off the Arm (1930)—and four short story collections. He also collected the episodic adventures of his characters the Old Soak and Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers. His several plays include a successful run of The Old Soak (1922), in which he himself starred at one point; and The Dark Hours (1924), which his second wife later directed in an unsuccessful Broadway production. Prefaces (1919) consists of forewords to imaginary books, and Chapters for the Orthodox (1934) is religious satire. By far his best known works are the Archy and Mehitabel columns, which he collected into three volumes—Archy and Mehitabel (1927), Archy’s Life of Mehitabel (1933), and Archy Does His Part (1935).

  Marquis’s personal life was plagued with illness and loss. He married his first wife, Reina Melcher, in 1909. They had one son, who lived only six years, and one daughter, who lived only thirteen years. Reina died suddenly in 1923. Marquis married Marjorie Vonnegut three years later; she died in 1936. After years of illness, including strokes that paralyzed him and prevented speech, Don Marquis died in 1937 in New York City.

  MICHAEL SIMS is the author most recently of Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book. He first wrote about Archy and Mehitabel, as well as other animal characters, in Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts. His articles and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Statesman, American Archaeology, and Skep-tic . More information is available at www.michaelsimsbooks.com, including links to Archy and Mehitabel Web sites.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2006

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  Introduction

  A VIEW FROM THE UNDER SIDE

  Many books attain classic status primarily because teachers keep them alive for students. Some, in contrast, age into celebrity on their own, because readers continue to find them engaging and relevant. They wind up stuffed into backpacks, read aloud to friends, posted on favorite-quotation Web sites. Such has been the fate of the Archy and Mehitabel books. Long ago the characters outgrew the newspaper in which they were born in 1916.

  Don Marquis wrote stories, novels, plays, and “serious” poetry. But by far his best known works are the satirical poems and sketches through which Archy and Mehitabel cavort. A free verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach, Archy reported faithfully to Marquis’s newspaper column “The Sun Dial,” in the New York Evening Sun.1 He narrated his adventures and those of his friend Mehitabel, an alley cat who once was (or at least claims to have once been) Cleopatra. In New York newspapers and later in magazines and syndication, hundreds of thousands of Americans followed their antics. Many newspaper columns in the early twentieth century featured poems, jokes, news commentary, and recurring characters—but none had been visited by such spirits as these. Generations of readers unacquainted with Marquis’s columns have enjoyed collections mined from them, following Archy’s sardonic accounts of his adventures with humans, with fellow animals (some of whom are also reincarnates), and even with ghosts and Martians.

  No American humorist in the first three decades of the twentieth century was more acclaimed than Marquis. “What a deeply humorous man Don is,” wrote fellow columnist Franklin P. Adams, “and far closer to Mark Twain than anybody I know....”2 Marquis was already thirty-two when Twain died in 1910, and he was often proclaimed the heir to the grand old man of American humor; one of his many awards came from the Mark Twain Society. Marquis was a finalist three times for the O. Henry Memorial Prize for short fiction and was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He would have been amused to learn that during World War II, after he had been safely dead for several years, the U.S. Navy even christened a carrier the SS Don Marquis.

  As epigrammatical as Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary , as irreverent as Lord Byron in Don Juan, as happy to puncture humbug as his contemporary H. L. Mencken, Don Marquis at his best stands among the great satirists. In 1973, more than three decades after Marquis’s death, E. B. White admitted to a correspondent that he didn’t like to see the words humorist and classic applied to Marquis and his books (perhaps because such terms were applied to himself and his own work), but also made it clear that Marquis’s best writing was here to stay:

  “Archy and Mehitabel” is, to my mind, a distinguished work in American letters, and whether it is a classic or not, it doesn’t deserve the adjective “minor.” There is not a minor word in it.3

  E. B. White protested the designation humorist because it wasn’t broad enough to contain Don Marquis. True, much of his daily writing falls into the category of “mere” humor; and, as was the case for every writer paid by the column inch to amuse, not all of it rises above flippancy. We think of humorists as comedians, deriving amusement from topics no more controversial than marital squabbles. Marquis produced
plenty of this kind of humor, but he was also a satirist.

  “Satire,” wrote Philip Roth, “is moral outrage transformed into comic art.”4 Different people might describe a satirist as the watchdog of society, a humorist whose wit is barbed with insight, or a danger to the state. Roth’s definition admits plays by Aristophanes in ancient Greece, political caricatures by Honoré Daumier in nineteenth-century France, and stand-up comedy by Lenny Bruce in mid-twentieth-century America. It embraces Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, Cintra Wilson’s pop-culture criticism, and Aaron McGruder’s comic strip Boondocks.5

  Literary taxonomists used to herd every satirist into one of two great phylla, Horatian or Juvenalian. The Latin poet Horace, who lived in the first century BCE, comes across in his satires as mildly amused by his fellow human beings, shaking his head in a will-they-ever-learn sort of way. More than a century later, his countryman Juvenal is distinctly not amused. His satires are born in outrage; he is as morally offended as a television evangelist. Don Marquis employs both styles, sometimes in the same poem. “A man can’t write successful satire,” wrote Mark Twain to William Dean Howells the year after Marquis was born, “unless he be in a calm judicial good humor. I don’t ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANYthing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it and curse it, and foam at the mouth—or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp.”6

  Don Marquis often felt the same way. For him, as for his readers, the virtue and risk in his newspaper column was that he could write as the mood struck him. Like earlier satirists such as Pope, Swift, and Voltaire, he found folly and vice depressingly common and couldn’t resist flailing them. The Archy and Mehitabel series wrestles with the signature issues of its era—unemployment, Prohibition, unionization, barriers of class and race, the growing influence of science and technology, the League of Nations, isolationism versus internationalism, the progress of World War I, and the religious yearning behind spiritualism.

  To ripen toward inclusion in the world’s shared culture, however, satire must avoid the historical dead end of mere topicality. Newspaper editorials and barroom quarrels—however effectively they mock the buffoonery du jour—seldom age well. They tend to be long on complaint and short on art. When craft lifts the protest into art, it has a chance of surviving.

  But if the work outlives its creator, it faces another hazard: its allusions become increasingly antiquated. The Archy and Mehitabel adventures appeared between 1916 and 1936. For many twenty-first-century readers, especially students, they already teem with references as archaic as Voltaire’s. In the present volume, readers will find a broad selection of the Archy and Mehitabel columns (many of them never before reprinted), annotated with biographical and historical context, in the order of their original newspaper publication. This narrative format not only demonstrates the growth of Marquis’s characters and themes; it also chronicles his fascinating era.

  A NEW OUTLOOK UPON LIFE

  i will write you a series of poems showing how things look to a cockroach

  Don Marquis prefaced Archy’s debut in “The Sun Dial” with an account of their first meeting. On March 29, 1916, his column opened with its usual brief jibes at the world around him—at a prominent judge, at the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa, at scarlet fever.7 Then he told his readers about a strange phenomenon that he had witnessed a couple of weeks before: “We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys.” There is no further reference to Archy’s large size; in the rest of the series he is able to quickly scurry out of sight on those rare occasions when anyone notices him.8

  Marquis describes the now classic scene in which he witnessed the cockroach’s herculean efforts:

  He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. . . . After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.

  And then Marquis walks over to his own typewriter and reads Archy’s first words to appear in print—at least in this lifetime:

  expression is the need of my soul

  i was once a vers libre bard

  but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach

  it has given me a new outlook upon life

  i see things from the under side now

  It is true, as some commentators have remarked, that there was a practical side to the creation of Archy. Free verse was at its faddish height and ripe for mockery, and its short unrhymed lines permitted the deadline-haunted Marquis to fill column inches quickly. A longtime newspaperman, Marquis knew also that variety on the page draws a reader’s eye and promises a lively mix. “In the very act of spoofing free verse,” wrote E. B. White of Marquis, “he was enjoying some of its obvious advantages.”9 Typographical stunts may have lured browsers to the column, but such effects didn’t make the series memorable. The characters did.

  The mystery novelist Rex Stout once explained that his character Nero Wolfe differed from other detectives that he wrote about because he wasn’t invented: “He was born. A born character arrives completely created.”10 Archy arrived this way. Marquis didn’t consciously sit down to invent a character who might serve his artistic and commercial needs; he was the last to realize the insect’s significance. His description of Archy’s first appearance is true in the way that dreams are true. One day a cockroach showed up on the desk in his mind, and Marquis stood aside and watched to learn what it would say. The most artistic side of Don Marquis is distilled into Archy’s cynical humor and artistic struggles. Skeptical, world-weary, Archy nonetheless yearns to communicate his response to life and to the mystery of consciousness embodied.

  Archy laments the state of the world but no longer expects reform. Poetry is his solace and irony his defense. “His thought is spun of contempt and holy anger,” wrote Bernard DeVoto of Archy, “down some dizzy slant of the mind where only he could keep his feet—happily, he had six.”11 Yes, but let’s not forget that these conceptual fireworks arrive inside a versatile wit that is no less amusing for sometimes being gallows or gutter humor. The Archy and Mehitabel stories—many in the form of poems, but usually still narratives—are marvelously funny, even if their comedy sometimes becomes, as Richard Schweid remarks, “a humor as sharp as the grave.”12

  Marquis turns his sardonic view itself into an art form. A pharaoh’s mummy awakens after arid millennia to find Prohibition denying him relief. When Archy tires of his high-flying soul being trapped in such an earthbound form, he attempts suicide, but he can’t figure out how a cockroach can kill itself. Archy and his creator play many roles. Often Marquis casts himself as an exploitative boss and the cockroach as a long-suffering employee who appeals for raises—in the form of larger type and more edible scraps around the office—and finally strikes for better working conditions. Archy converses with ghosts and hornets, mollusks and birds. Marquis mutters asides about everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to Shakespeare; karma and kismet come up as often as unemployment and hunger. At one point Archy admits that his favorite sport is theology. “A human being so largely and kindly planned,” wrote columnist and friend Christopher Morley after Marquis’s death, “moves always in widening rings of irony.”13

  Through the reincarnated cockroach, Marquis could also express the sense of fleeting time that haunted him. His long-range view of history, frequently including prehistory, fueled his melancholy. He felt that human life was a mess and always had been, that greed and ignorance destroyed the civilizations of the past and probably will destroy the current ones. “every time i die,” sighs Archy, “it makes me more of a fatalist.
” John Batteiger, a journalist and Marquis bibliographer whose detective work contributed greatly to the present volume, writes that over the years Marquis exposed “a progressive heart and an increasingly cynical soul.”14 A smaller version of the same heart and soul animates the cockroach who throws himself bodily against the keys of Don Marquis’s typewriter.

  Despite high hopes for his own art and occasional indulgence in self-pity, Archy is a Cynic philosopher who obsessively watches other creatures and even plays Boswell for Mehitabel. The cat, in contrast, sings about herself. She belts out the themes of Don Marquis the tippler, the tavern habitué and bon vivant. Hedonist, reprobate, Mehitabel pipes rhyming stanzas about free love, the burden of reproduction, back-alley heartbreak, and the need to dance away your sorrows. Many songs carry the refrain that despite the paradoxes of reincarnation and the villainy of toms she remains ever a lady. Quick to resent and quick to draw blood, Mehitabel would have wreaked havoc among Old Possum’s cats, even Growltiger and the Great Rumpuscat. T. S. Eliot’s rarefied London is a long way from the garbage cans of Shinbone Alley.15 Old Deuteronomy must not have his nap disturbed, while Mehitabel dances to keep from freezing because she has nowhere to sleep.

  Mehitabel’s essentially static character—no reader expects her to find true love or repent her ways—is indicated by the Dickensian catch-phrases that surround her in our memory. Like Mr. Micawber or Sairey Gamp, she walks onstage accompanied by pet phrases: toujours gai, “a dance in the old dame yet,” and that Vonnegutian tic wotthehell. She is funny and outrageous and poignant, but she doesn’t learn anything, even though this is her ninth (and presumably her final) life. She goes where chance leads her, from the ancient Nile to Jazz Age Hollywood, pausing occasionally to forgive herself: “the things that i had not ought to / i do because i ve got to.”