by Don Marquis
In his choice of background for his protagonists, Marquis further prepared the stage for irony and satire. When human, Archy was a poet, a philosophical and artistic man of no social importance; in one poignant aside, he even remembers how homely a man he was. Mehitabel, in contrast, has fallen from a greater height. Once swaddled in privilege as the powerful Cleopatra, she now scrounges for a fishbone dinner:
a cockroach which you are
and a poet which you used to be
archy couldn t understand
my feelings at having come
down to this
Longtime Marquis fans may be surprised to learn in the present volume that in his initial appearance, as printed in the Evening Sun, Archy describes Mehitabel merely as “that cat,” although he names his rival poet, Freddy the rat. For the first six weeks Mehitabel remained nameless. When Marquis gathered the poems together for the first book, in 1927, he inserted her name into the earlier poems in order to establish her from scene one as worthy of sharing the marquee.
“Only fantasy was wide or versatile enough to contain him,” wrote Bernard DeVoto of Marquis; “his mind kept escaping through cracks in the sane, commonplace world out into dimensions that were loops and whorls and mazes of the unpredictable.” 16 Escaping through a narrative crack, Marquis was able to create characters and write about topics otherwise too hot to handle. Mehitabel’s questionable morality, disdain for motherhood, and irreverent mouth would not have been tolerated in a human character in a 1916 newspaper—just as that wily fox Reynard gets away with comments that would have resulted in legal action had they been about human beings. Few books tell us more about Medieval society than the Reynard story cycle, and Archy and Mehitabel likewise immortalize their era.
“Fantasy,” observed V. S. Pritchett, “states what realism will obscure or bungle.”17 It has always been the habitat where humans and animals commune. Beasts caper through mythology and folklore. We have long seen family resemblances in other creatures, usually beginning by interpreting their behavior in terms of our own. We impose symbolic delusions: coyotes skulk, eagles rule. We can barely imagine a scavenger—a hyena, say, or a vulture—as hero. It is as if each animal is born into a rigid social caste. The title of Disney’s movie The Lion King is almost redundant; we know that a lion will be brave, strong, and authoritative. This is why the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz is funny, and this kind of thinking makes a philosophical cockroach funny. We even fantasize about exchanging forms with other creatures—yet another way that Don Marquis turned to a venerable tradition when he first spoke in the voice of Archy. The metamorphoses in Ovid, like those in Marquis, often involve a human being who turns into an animal but continues to think like a human. The freedom, the goad to imagination, in this theme has lured writers from Apuleius to Kafka.
Archy and Mehitabel belong to an ancient and noble family in this class of fictional characters: animals that writers have created in order to explore—and comment from within—their outsider view of human society. Readers of Aesop or Bidpai or La Fontaine immediately understand why Marquis reincarnated his socially conscious narrator as a cockroach rather than as an eagle or a lion. Because they frequent garbage cans, cockroaches must constitute the animal peasantry. Like Tom and Huck’s, Archy and Mehitabel’s adventures and opinions would have been completely different had they come from upper-class characters.
Marquis’s clever use of reincarnation as the bridge between species, however, permits him to employ animal stereotypes without being trapped inside them. Returned to embodiment as a cockroach, Archy now occupies the lowest rung of the natural and social ladder, but his consciousness is still human. Marquis needed this kind of viewpoint character. Like Mark Twain before him and John Steinbeck after him, he examined the American experience from outside the drawing-room window. Viewing life “from the under side”—reviled, persona non grata—Archy embodies a populist sermon against the myth that social status limits perception or relevance. He scurries around the feet of New Yorkers like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, and like Gulliver he alternately laughs and groans over the antics of the giants. Marooned in a new era and a new body, the former poet is a visitor to his own world.
THE BONDAGE OF RHYMING
before i became a cockroach
i was a free verse poet
one of the pioneers of the artless art
As long ago as 1667, John Milton prefaced Paradise Lost with a manifesto about the time-honored virtues of unrhymed verse. Invoking Homer and Virgil on his own behalf, the contentious Puritan argued that “true musical delight” in poetry rejects “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” Of course, Milton was talking about book-length heroic verse, not squibs hammered out by arthropods, but the admonition still applies. Poetry does not demand rhyme.
Milton employed blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, which he and Shakespeare established as the voice of serious poetic utterance in English poetry. (“Of Man’s First Disobedience and the Fruit / of that Forbidden Tree. . . .”) In its regular meter, however, even blank verse is not totally “free.” Our insect anarchist requires absolute liberty for his expression. In his first appearance Archy declares that he is a “vers libre bard”; later he describes himself as in the epigraph above. Anglophone poets and critics use the French vers libre and the English free verse interchangeably. Rejecting predictable meter or even patterns of line length, free verse depends upon language’s natural rhythms, primarily—in a Germanic language such as English, at least—through the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Proponents of free verse argue that poetry’s rhythms are more natural, its nuances more precise, when poets are liberated from the need to carve lines into matching structures that may distort image and meaning. Leaves of Grass is probably the most familiar example of free verse prior to the twentieth century’s flowering. Walt Whitman, however, was not the first to employ this method in English; you can see it used to brilliant effect in the King James translation of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon.
Marquis’s use of the phrase “artless art” reminds us that he created Archy to parody the vogue for free verse. Good free verse isn’t artless—although, like abstract painting, it looks at first glance as if anyone can do it. By 1916 this misconception was inspiring a torrent of unrhymed, meter-free writing. But the era also produced much strong and original free verse by writers such as Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Amy Lowell (whose work Marquis particularly disliked). The year before Archy arrived, Edgar Lee Masters published his influential volume of elegiac free verse, Spoon River Anthology, and T. S. Eliot inaugurated the Modernist era with his free-verse “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”18 Also in 1915 Kafka brought invertebrate vermin to twentieth-century literature by having Gregor Samsa awaken as a beetle—not, as some writers have claimed, as a cockroach.19 It is worth pointing out, however, that Kafka’s story had not yet been translated into English when Marquis invented Archy.
Although Marquis composed plenty of free-verse poems that he did not credit to a cockroach with a typing disability, it is the insect, not the newspaperman, who flatly proclaims himself a vers libre poet. Marquis was certainly not opposed to rhyme and usually found it crucial in his bag of tricks. Unforeseen rhyme is a staple of comic verse. Shortly after Mehitabel appears on the scene, she begins caterwauling stanzas that are much funnier because of their sometimes tortuous rhyme scheme. In the Archy poems, Marquis turns to rhyme whenever he wants to—probably whenever the first couple of lines arrived rhyming and he surrendered to their momentum. He explained it on the first occasion—April 10, 1916—by casually remarking of Archy that “he was a rhymester too.” Glib facility was Marquis’s trademark from newsroom to saloon, but it required that he trust inspiration. And spontaneity was no guarantee of quality, as a few of the Archy and Mehitabel columns (not reprinted here) demonstrate.
Because Archy calls himself a free-verse poet, we tend to think of all his contributions to Marquis’s column as poems. Actually some
are poems, some sketches, and some transcriptions of songs, usually but not always Mehitabel’s. Archy dislikes restrictive categories. Like Wagstaff, Groucho Marx’s college president in Horsefeathers, he could sing, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He even lives a bandit’s life on the frontier between poetry and prose. He couldn’t survive without enjambment, the continuation of verse from one line to the next with no pause such as a grammatical break or a rhyme.
Christopher Morley described Marquis’s choice of lower-case for Archy’s writings as a waggish stunt that once begun could not be discontinued.20 True, but it was also a reasonable outgrowth of the premise, and it afforded Marquis an opportunity to do what Alfred Hitchcock advised filmmakers to do: exploit the setting. Lowercase invites other experimentation, such as Archy’s parody of the Simplified Spelling movement. Language-conscious writers create narrators who exist within and because of their unique manner of expression; witness Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange or Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime—or even Huckleberry Finn. Archy’s voice doesn’t merely report his character. It helps fashion it.
THE TYRANNY OF CIRCUMSTANCE
While preparing a biographical essay about Marquis, Christopher Morley once complained that he was having trouble sorting fact from fiction. “It is true that I have invented for myself a good many experiences which I never really had,” replied Marquis. “But they were all experiences which belonged to me by right of temperament and character. . . . I was despoiled of them by the rough tyranny of Circumstance.”21 He insisted that he balanced accounts by omitting many real-life incidents because they were lies told about him “by the slinking facts of life.” His unpublished autobiographical fragments include the admission, “I must begin being honest by telling you that I shall lie a little here and there.”22 He so loved speaking through characters that he wrote his memoir in the third person. Therefore it is prudent to note that, although most of the following incidents can be confirmed, a handful may be embroidered.
The most outrageous story that Marquis told about his life, however, was true. Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born in the Illinois hamlet of Walnut, west of Chicago, on July 29, 1878. In his unpublished memoirs, Marquis wrote that he was born at three o’clock in the afternoon, “during an eclipse of the sun—not merely on the same day, but during the eclipse itself.”23 For once Marquis was not pulling the reader’s leg. The eclipse’s path of totality was south of Walnut, but the town definitely witnessed it.24 Marquis cherished this ancient omen as a parallel to Comet Halley attending the birth and death of Mark Twain.
Marquis’s father was from Ohio, his mother from Virginia. When he was born the American Civil War had been over for only thirteen years and scars were still fresh. The abuses of Reconstruction constrained relations between his father’s and mother’s families. It was not a progressive era. Proposed laws and constitutional amendments advocating racial and gender equality were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1878. Some physicians were recommending whiskey and tobacco as defense against the yellow fever epidemic that would claim fourteen thousand American lives during the year. Yet change was in the air. Marquis—who reached adulthood before automobiles were common or airplanes even in existence, whose grandfather fought in the War of 1812—grew up to write poems in which Archy is interviewed by Martians who contact him via radio.
Appropriately for a writer whose best-known creation types with his entire body, Marquis was born in the same year that the typewriter leaped forward technologically with Remington’s introduction of the shift key. Mark Twain had only recently become the first prominent author to deliver a typewritten manuscript to a publisher.25 Archy can’t work the shift key that would enable him to capitalize words, and he can barely manage the carriage return. (See the columns for August 17 and 23, 1916.) Had the newfangled typewriter not existed, Marquis might have had to reincarnate his poet as a rat or some other creature that might grasp a pen. Freddy and Mehitabel? Inconceivable.
When praising the Archy and Mehitabel chronicles, few readers comment upon their offhand violence. Characters maul and maim each other. Mehitabel faces mayhem every day, from dark alleyways to suburban lawns. Archy flees numerous threats—often from Mehitabel herself. Several characters die in this saga, most of them unpleasantly.
At a young age Marquis was exposed to violence and hypocrisy, and he didn’t lose his hatred for or his fascination with either. His father was a physician, although he never achieved financial success in Walnut. Several years before Don’s birth, he was called to the deathbed of a pregnant woman, where he discovered that she had been beaten. He found the weapon—an iron stove leg—hidden nearby, and her husband went to prison for the murder. By the time that Marquis was five or six years old, the old man had been released from prison and would stand up before the local Baptist congregation and gleefully lament his despicable sinning before he learned to love Jesus.
Disturbing events surrounded young Don as they did so many children of his era. When he was about twelve years old, he and a friend found the body of a man who had hanged himself. The man had misjudged the height of the tree limb that served as gallows and “had danced himself to death,” wrote Marquis; when they found him “he was dead, but still dancing.”26 In Walnut Marquis saw on display the corpse of a man who had been shotgunned during a drunken rampage. Later he witnessed the 1906 Atlanta race riots, whose horrific events inspired his short story “Carter,” which describes the brutal treatment of a mixed-race man and finally his murder at the hands of a mob. Later Archy would work a lynch mob into his review of the movie The Three Little Pigs, and describe how clams were forming the Ku Klux Klam to battle the alleged threat of oysters.
Other circumstances planted seeds that would flower in Marquis’s writings. When he was five or six years old, the Marquis family moved into a three-story house owned by a spiritualist. The landlady occupied the top floor herself—along with, she claimed, numerous spirits. Don and his brother David agreeably pretended to hear ghostly rapping. David and his friends also feigned a conversion to spiritualism, even holding séances—including one for a deceased dog. Prankish humor was part of the family heritage.
Historians consider the spiritualist movement to have begun in upstate New York in 1848, when three sisters began snapping their toe joints and claiming that the resulting raps were produced by ghosts. By the time that Don Marquis encountered his clairvoyant landlady, the movement had been gaining force for more than three decades. Through séances, in which a medium would channel a ghost on demand, spiritualism seemed to offer to an increasingly materialistic age some encouraging evidence of life beyond the grave.
Injustice, hypocrisy, and violence haunt the lives of Archy and Mehitabel as they did the youth of their creator. Marquis was always skeptical about spiritualism, too, which may be why he employed it as the centerpiece of the Archy and Mehitabel chronicles.
“DON MARQUIS, THE NEW HUMORIST”
Like most aspiring writers, Marquis started out working odd jobs. He plucked chickens and delivered groceries; he sold clothes and sewing machines; he taught briefly in a country school. But he began writing at a young age. Reminiscing about early influences, he recalled yearning to emulate the jokey columns of Eugene Field. In Marquis’s youth Field would have been writing his “Sharps and Flats” column for the Chicago Morning News.27 He ranged from lampoons of Chicago’s nouveau riche to homilies in mock rural dialect, and often threw in poems such as the one now called “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”
Marquis was still a teenager when he wandered into a printing office and quickly found himself helping to edit the regional weekly. “Besides the local news and editorials,” he recalled, “I started a column, consisting of verse, sketches, jokes, character studies, and so forth. I didn’t get paid anything for this work; I was more than gratified to get the opportunity of doing it.”28 After only three months at Knox College in nearby Galesburg, and brief newspaper stints in Washington and Philad
elphia, Marquis moved to Atlanta in 1902 as associate editor of the Atlanta News. He was permitted to contribute signed (but unpaid) tidbits—poems, observations—only after he had completed writing editorials. In 1904 he moved to the Atlanta Journal, where his signed work was still basically unpaid.
Atlanta provided another crazy true story worthy of the natal eclipse. A runaway circus lion simply walked in through the open door of the bar where Marquis was drinking. This aged, toothless beast yawned with boredom and flopped onto the floor, but in Marquis’s variations on this anecdote he promoted the lion to a Fiendish Cat from Hell with whom he nonetheless shared a convivial drink. Years later the lion was still showing up in his writing.
In Atlanta Marquis met Joel Chandler Harris. A popular humorist, Harris specialized in regional dialect tales such as those of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox, told by the slave Uncle Remus to the son of a plantation owner. Although employing American characters—human and animal—the original stories told by slaves were based on African folklore. In early 1907 Harris launched Uncle Remus’s Magazine and hired Marquis as associate editor. The magazine got off to a promising start, immediately publishing such popular authors as O. Henry and Jack London. Marquis wrote book reviews, editorials, poems, and short stories—so many that he signed some with initials or variations on his three given names. Much of this writing appeared in his first regular column, “A Glance in Passing.” Harris’s animal characters may have helped inspire Archy and Mehitabel.