by Don Marquis
DECEMBER 12
The Cat Show
1 “Clara Vere de Vere” is a poem by Tennyson, included in his 1842 collection The Lady of Shalott. Cats do not appear in the poem, in which the narrator rejects Clara’s high-born charms and guile.
2 The “red star” is actually a planet—Mars. Named for the Roman god of war because of its bloody color, it was once thought to inspire violence and frenzy.
1920
MAY 1
An Archy Drive
1 One luxury Marquis himself almost never experienced was time in which to “think and think and think” before writing. Five years later he abandoned regular columning to pursue fiction and drama.
2 In 1929 Marquis himself spent a few months in Hollywood, but the experience resulted in neither profit nor satisfaction.
OCTOBER 20
Crazy as a Bed Bug
1 The “bed bug,” a minuscule insect that nibbles on humans, is Cimex lectularius; it and several kin are members of the family Cimicidae. They flourish in unwashed bedding and are considerably less common in American homes than they were when Marquis wrote this column. The phrase “crazy as a bed bug” goes back at least to 1832, and refers to the frantic way that these tiny creatures scramble to escape when they are uncovered.
1921
JANUARY 21
This Lenin Person
1 Nikolai Lenin was the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a follower of Karl Marx’s communist economic and political theories who formulated the later Marxist-Leninist policies of Russia and the Soviet Union. He had been a leading figure in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and afterward rose to the position of virtual dictator. He founded the Bolsheviks (see the note for March 17, 1919) and ruthlessly battled opposition and counterrevolution until his death in 1924.
MAY 2
Organizing the Insects
1 Known in English as Tamerlane—or Tamburlaine in Christopher Marlowe’s drama—Timur Lenk or Timur-i-Ling was an infamously barbaric Turkish conqueror who sacked great cities from Baghdad to Delhi. His name meant Timur the Lame.
2 In Greek mythology the Myrmidons are a warlike people of Thessaly who accompany Achilles to the Trojan War. Later the term referred to anyone mindless enough to blindly follow another’s orders. But Marquis clearly also knew that the bellicose instincts of the social insects had inspired entomologists to dub ants myrmidons and the study of them myrmecology.
MAY 19
The Cockroach Its Life History
1 As you might expect from the specificity, it was a real book, or at least a pamphlet, published by the British Museum.
JUNE 16
My Private Comet
1 People were asking Archy about Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke, which visits Earth’s night skies roughly every five years. It was named for the French astronomer Jean Louis Pons, who observed it in 1819, and German astronomer Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke, who accidentally rediscovered it in 1858. Based upon these and other observations, astronomers calculated the comet’s parabolic orbit and realized that it is associated with the Boötid meteor showers (so called because they seem to radiate outward from the constellation Boötes). Usually this comet is faint, but the 1916 appearance was the most vivid on record.
AUGUST 16
Dodo Birds and Cubist Posters
1. The “twelve mile line” was the offshore border of the territorial waters of the United States, beyond which ships providing hooch (illegal liquor) were not violating Prohibition laws.
SEPTEMBER 13
Ku Klux Klam
1 Archy is mocking the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist terrorist organization formed in the southern United States in 1867 to oppose Reconstruction and prevent the enfranchisement of African Americans after slavery had been abolished during the Civil War. Its members engaged in murder, extortion, and robbery to further their fear-driven goals. In 1915 William J. Simmons led the reform of the Klan into an organization that was officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic as well as anti-black, and at this time the Klan received a lot of national attention. The Klan faded but was revived in the 1960s to resist the Civil Rights movement.
OCTOBER 5
Krew Krux Kranks
1 See note for September 13, 1921.
2 The Klan called itself an “invisible empire,” and its officials were called kleagles.
OCTOBER 14
Cursed Fly Swatters
1 See the note for July 25, 1916, for more on fly swatters.
1922
APRIL 22
Waiting for a Vacant Body
1 Arthur Conan Doyle was a rich source of unintentional comedy to a humorist such as Don Marquis. The creator of the always rational Sherlock Holmes was in reality one of the most gullible public figures of his time. A tireless advocate of spiritualism, especially after the death of his son, Conan Doyle resisted Houdini’s claim that he was merely an escape artist and insisted that instead Houdini must have occult powers. Ectoplasm was a mysterious substance that supposedly emanated from the body of a spiritualist during communication with the dead. Conan Doyle even defended obviously faked photographs portraying the appearance of ectoplasm around a medium in a darkened room. See also October 19, 1922 and its note for Conan Doyle’s predictably enthusiastic attitude toward fairies.
APRIL 26
Interviewed the Mummy
1 In a couple of later columns not included in this collection, Archy refers to Tutankhamen (“King Tut”), and some commentators have speculated that this interview was in response to the Tut fervor. Actually Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon would not open the tomb of the boy king until November, so again Marquis was ahead of the game.
2 Ra was the Egyptian god of the sun. For several decades Rah!, a shortened form of hurrah, had been a college cheer, and for about ten years the term rah-rah had been an adjective applied to hortatory boosters. Seti, son of Ramses I, was a Nineteenth-Dynasty Egyptian king who reigned from 1290 to 1279 BCE; the mummy’s yearning for beer must have led him to exaggerate in his claim of “forty centuries of thirst.”
3 Isis was an Egyptian goddess, mother of Osiris. Some commentators think that the traditional Christian representation of Mary holding Jesus was adapted from Egyptian images of Isis and Osiris.
4 Phthah, or Ptah, was the Egyptian god credited with shaping the material universe. Marquis invented Pish and Phthush, and surely it is no coincidence that they sound like skeptical interjections.
MAY 1
Archy to the Radio Fans
1 The message is in Morse code, the dot-and-dash language of telegraphy. Translation: I / GREET / YOU / HOW / IS / YOUR / WAVE / LENGTH / TODAY2. In this column Marquis also describes how “ten years ago,” before he began his signed “Sun Dial” column, much of his best work was ignored because it appeared too far down in the column and in too small a type size. Archy was demonstrating his knowledge of the profession when he struck for a more prominent type. See note 2 for April 26, 1916.
JUNE 21
Once Every Seventeen Years
1 . Bacchus was the Greek god of wine and revelry, the convivial deity who had been banished by Prohibition.
AUGUST 2
Warty Bliggens
1 Besides providing the best-named character in the series, this poem encapsulates the favorite target of satirists throughout history—arrogance. “The piece about Warty Bliggens,” wrote E. B. White more than a half-century later, “is a brilliant exposure of man’s startling assumption about his relationship to nature. I have never read anything to beat it.” (From a letter addressed to Edward C. Sampson and dated May 31, 1973, reprinted in Guth, Letters of E. B. White, 1976, p. 649.) As one of America’s foremost essayists, White was often compared to Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century Frenchman who founded the modern genre and gave it its name—essai, from “attempt.” White had read Montaigne, but apparently he didn’t remember a famous section in the master’s long and wide-ranging essay “Apology for Raimond Sebond.” It conta
ins an amusing forerunner of the batrachocentric toad, which is worth quoting (from John Florio’s sonorous 1603 translation) if only to place Marquis in a longstanding tradition:For why may not a goose say thus? All parts of the world behold me, the earth serveth me to tread upon, the Sunne to give me light, the Star-res to inspire me with influence; this commoditie I have of the wind, and this benefit of the waters: there is nothing that this worlds-vault doth so favourably look upon as me selfe; I am the favorite of nature; is it not man that careth for me, that keepeth me, lodgeth me, and serveth me?
In this essay Montaigne also talks about transmigration, in a remark quite relevant to Archy’s daily crisis of identity: “For in the Metempsychosis or transmigration of soules of Pythagoras, and the change of habitation which he imagined the soules to make, shall we thinke that the lion in whom abideth the soule of Cæsar, doth wed the passions which concerned Cæsar, or that it is hee?” (For Pythagoras see also the note for September 20, 1922.)
Alexander Pope must have been thinking of Montaigne when he wrote in his 1734 Essay on Man,
While man exclaims, “See all things for my use!” “See man for mine!” replies a pamper’d goose.
AUGUST 8
My Favorite Poem
1 “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?” is the first and last line of the fourteen-stanza poem “Mortality,” written by the Scottish poet William Knox in 1824. Lincoln did indeed declare it his favorite poem; he memorized and often quoted it. Lincoln wrote the occasional poem himself, and many people thought he had written this one, despite his repeated denials.
AUGUST 12
Always the Lady
1 “Come live with me and be my love” is the fist line of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
AUGUST 28
Archy’s Own Short Course in Entomology
1 Entomology is the study of insects, a class that technically doesn’t include either wood lice (arthropods) or spiders (arachnids), but Archy is a poet, not a scientist.
2 Xylophagous: wood-eating.
3 Presumably the spider’s eight legs give her a certain Buzby Berkeley air all by herself. In classical mythology, Terpsichore is the goddess of choral song and dancing; lowercase can refer to any dancer, more often as a terpsichorean. Terpsichore is one of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory); her sisters include Clio (history) and Thalia (comedy).
SEPTEMBER 14
The Most Luckless Creature
1 This was the first Archy appearance after Marquis left the Sun and moved to the New York Tribune. His column there was to be called “The Lantern,” but for two weeks it appeared under the heading of a column that had already existed there, “The Tower,” presumably a title designed to ride on the popularity of FPA’s “Conning Tower.”
SEPTEMBER 18
Low Brow
1 Archy refers to the drawing published as frontispiece in the present volume; a close-up appears on the cover. This illustration, the first portrayal of Archy, appeared several years before George K. Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, was hired to illustrate the first collection. It was published in the Tribune on September 11 in a half-page advertisement welcoming their new columnist and his most popular character. Marquis was always quick to respond in his column to tributes or jibes; it helped keep alive the sense of dialogue with the readers.
2 The term occiput merely refers to the back part of the head; it is better known in adjective form, as in the occipital lobes of the brain.
3 Lowbrow, describing a nonintellectual person or one with unsophisticated taste, was still a new concept, and Archy refers to it several times. It emerged in the first decade of the century, an inevitable antonym for highbrow, which since at least the 1880s had referred to an intellectual or cultured person. Archy certainly regards himself as a mental highbrow, although it’s difficult to imagine a creature that could be more physically lowbrowed than a flat-headed cockroach.
4 This kind of joke—as in “I’m sick and dying. Hoping you are the same,”—dates back to before vaudeville.
SEPTEMBER 20
Song of Mehitabel
1 Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher and mathematician in the sixth century BCE. His life is almost entirely unknown and none of his writings survive, yet others recorded enough about his academy in Italy for Pythagoras to greatly influence Greek and Roman thought. His numerological preoccupations included several contributions to geometry. He taught that souls would migrate into a new form after death, and insisted that one’s behavior in this life influenced one’s likely form after the next roll of the dice.
2 Although it sounds worse, shoon is merely an archaic plural of shoes.
3 Yes, in 1922 New York City’s garbage was already being transported down Long Island Sound on barges.
SEPTEMBER 25
Forgets His Littleness
1 betelgoose refers to one of the brighter stars in the sky, the red supergiant Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. It’s pronounced with a long e, as in another distortion of the name, Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetle Juice.
OCTOBER 19
Fairies
1 Here Marquis parodies another pet delusion of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose notions about spiritualism and ectoplasm he had mocked on April 22, 1922. (See also the note for this date.) The photographs to which Archy refers, published in Conan Doyle’s 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies, were pictures of two girls interacting with diminutive figures that looked remarkably like illustrations copied from books. In the summer of 1917, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths visited her cousin, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright, in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford, England. They claimed that they kept seeing fairies in the nearby woodland, and soon they were bringing photographic plates home to Elsie’s father for him to develop in his darkroom. The girls insisted that the fairies in the photos were real, and Conan Doyle leaped to their defense. No wonder G. K. Chesterton once remarked of Conan Doyle’s legendary gullibility, “it has long seemed to me that Sir Arthur’s mentality is much more that of Watson than it is of Holmes.”
NOVEMBER 1
The Dactyl Droops
1 The entire poem plays with poetic terminology for aspects of meter. In prosody meter refers to the acoustical structure of a line of verse—based upon the number of syllables, the alternation of long and short syllables, the fixed number and positions of both syllable and stress, or merely the fixed number of stresses or accents. In English, which emphasizes at least one syllable in every word, the usual meter is the latter—accentual. Archy plays fast and loose with these rules as with most others. Incidentally, in James Thurber’s New Natural History, you will find other metrical terms personified, including spondee and trochee and a charming six-legged beast called a hexameter. Thurber mentioned Marquis as an early inspiration.
2 A metrical foot comprising three syllables, with the first stressed and the others unstressed.
3 An iamb is a foot of verse containing two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed.
4 In poetry, a foot is a group of syllables forming a metrical unit such as the dactyl and iambic above.
NOVEMBER 22
Shakespeare and I
1 This little gem is often acclaimed as the greatest—and certainly the shortest—piece of Shakespearean criticism.
2 Originally fish wife merely described a woman who retailed fish, but this profession was not known for its genteel manners.
DECEMBER 13
Archy Is Excited
1 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, red had been a usually negative term for anarchist or communist, because of the original color of the party badge. In 1917 the Russian communists chose red as the color of their flag.
DECEMBER 23
The Futility of Literature
1 Marquis’s characters often refer to each other. Archy is joking about the alcohol-weakened, Prohibition-hating Old Soak, Clem Hawley.
2
This spider’s ode on her own beautiful works is reminiscent of a moment in Charlotte’s Web, when Lurvy first glimpses the web that will change Wilbur’s life: “The web glistened in the light and made a pattern of loveliness and mystery, like a delicate veil” (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), p. 77. Charlotte also explains to Wilbur the morals of fly-eating (pp. 37-40). See the column for July 23, 1918 for the melancholy of crickets in each book.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to those who helped on this project: my wife, Laura Sloan Patterson, for her always insightful critique and advice; Martin Gardner for encouragement and suggestions; Marquis bibliographer John Batteiger for generously lending microfilm photocopies of newspaper files, for serving as the Encyclopedia Marquisiana, and for the photo that provided the cover illustration. I welcome this opportunity to thank the patient and helpful crew at Penguin Classics: executive editor Michael Millman, for starting the ball rolling and for perceptive editorial guidance; his assistant, Elizabeth Yarbrough; assistant editor Carolyn Horst; cover designer Jasmine Lee; and production editor Jennifer Tait.
My thanks also to Laurie Parker for critiquing the introduction and to Jim Young for discussing my idea of an annotated Archy long before I conceived this chronological format. Thanks to the fine staffs of several libraries: the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University, especially reference librarian Jon Erickson; the Ben West Public Library in Nashville, Tennessee; the Greensburg and Hempfield Area Library in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, especially reference librarian Jim Vikratowski, and above all the generous director, Cesare Muccari; the Carnegie Public Library in Pittsburgh; the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh; and the many libraries participating in the AccessPennsylvania system of interlibrary loans.