Author: Don Marquis
Category: Humorous
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From early in his career Marquis often fell into the trap of phonetically misspelling words for humorous effect—spelling was as wuz, for example, or specially as speshually. The rationale for this gimmick collapses when a reader realizes that even when people misspell words they don’t do so phonetically—and there is no rationale at all for stories in which a presumably omniscient narrator reports words that someone else spoke. Joel Chandler Harris used this style consistently. So did many other humorists of the era, especially those we now call the Literary Comedians, most of whom posed as unlettered jesters and cracker-barrel philosophers. Josh Billings, the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw, had been the chief perpetrator of faux-naïf dialect humor, most famously with his 1860 “Essa on the Muel” and his long-running parody of The Farmer’s Almanac entitled Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax. (Archy works in a double joke about language when he criticizes the boss’s “joshbillingsgate” in the poem on April 10, 1916.) Another American practitioner of this sort of humor was Charles Farrar Browne, best known for his writings under the pseudonym Artemus Ward. Each of them—like Mark Twain, who eclipsed them all—began in the diverse and competitive world of newspapers.29
Soon Marquis demonstrated the independent thinking that would issue from the mouth of Archy nine years later. He mocked John D. Rockefeller’s frequent claim that he was rich because Providence smiled upon him; Marquis credited instead “that divinely appointed organization, the oil trust.” He declared flatly that “The Russian government permits, if it does not directly encourage, the massacre of the Jews.” One widely quoted editorial was a proclamation that critics ought to abandon their messianic vigil for the Great American Novel because Mark Twain had already written it in Huckleberry Finn. This was by no means the literary consensus at the time. It would be decades before Ernest Hemingway proclaimed Twain’s novel the fountainhead of American fiction.
In 1907, at the Uncle Remus office, Marquis met a young writer named Reina Melcher, who had sold a story to the magazine. His next move was fateful; he invited her out for an ice cream soda. Within a year they were married. A few weeks later Joel Chandler Harris died, and Marquis began to lose interest in the fledgling publication that had been largely an extension of Harris’s own personality. Soon Marquis (with Reina following) moved to a setting that would ignite his imagination, that would embrace him and make him famous, the town with which Archy and Mehitabel are associated to this day—New York City.
“I began to like New York on account of what I intended it should do for me later,” Marquis recalled about his early days in the city.30 He came of age during the heyday of the great American newspapers. In the last decades of the nineteenth century they had made advances in printing (see notes for the September 4, 1916 column), in reproduction of illustrations, and even in distribution, and had become the voice of a tumultuous democracy. New York was home to many competing papers, each with its own style and market—the Times, the Tribune, the Mail, the Sun, the Evening Sun, the Post, the Globe, the Press, the World, the American, and others. Neither radio nor television even existed as a word yet; their later inroads on newspaper readership were unimaginable.
Consequently it was also a good time to be a columnist. Over the next few years Marquis was friend and colleague—and rival—to most of the legends. Franklin Pierce Adams, known as F.P.A., was writing his popular “Conning Tower” column. Christopher Morley held forth from “The Bowling Green.” (Both columns appeared in a succession of papers.) Alexander Woollcott wrote columns and essays for various newspapers and the New Yorker. These men were not academics but they were literary-minded. They reviewed books and plays; Morley edited Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. This was the era that preceded Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and E. B. White.
It was a riotous time. The muckrakers were finding no shortage of civic and corporate muck. Ida Tarbell’s 1904 history of the Standard Oil Company helped lead to its dissolution, and Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane practices of the meatpacking industry in his 1906 novel The Jungle. President Theodore Roosevelt was busting trusts and posing for photographs advertising his manliness. Houdini was exposing the spiritualists who were hoodwinking the grieving and credulous, including Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes. Archy’s very existence as a character owed much to spiritualism, and he would comment on this topic many times.
On his first day in New York, exploring the newspaper district, Marquis stumbled upon Lipton’s bar, in the triangle where Park Row and Nassau Street met. He swung open the door and walked into newspaper lore. Over the years, wherever he lived, Marquis accumulated admiring friends. He liked to drink and he wrote many an ode to saloons and bars. During his lifetime his tipsy anti-Prohibition character Clem Hawley, the Old Soak, became a household name (and went on to theater and film) through his harangues against the evils of temperance. Marquis was famed as a good listener and a man always willing to lend a dollar or buy a drink. He also possessed a quick and capacious memory. Ministers were surprised to find how much of the Bible this heretic seemed to have on file in his brain, and rival F.P.A. called Marquis his favorite Shakespeare concordance.
In 1912 a review of his first novel, Danny’s Own Story, was headlined “Don Marquis, the New Humorist.” A few months later he was invited to edit a magazine page at the Evening Sun and then moved to the editorial page with a column called “The Sun Dial.” Finally Marquis had the journalistic home for which he had so long yearned. He began filling it with material he had been saving, and it was an immediate success. “I began to create characters,” he recalled, “through whom I might comment upon or satirize current phases of existence, or whom I might develop for the sheer pleasure of creation.”31 The best known characters to regularly visit his column were the Old Soak and the flighty Hermione, whose pseudo-intellectual Little Group of Serious Thinkers in Greenwich Village smugly embraces every craze from spiritualism to free verse. Both characters were already successful when, in March of 1916, Archy jumped onto the keys of Don Marquis’s typewriter.
THE CREATOR OF A COCKROACH
After he retired from his full-time column in 1925 to write more fiction and drama, Marquis admitted, “I got to seeing my column as a grave, twenty-three inches long, into which I buried myself every day....”32 His other writings demonstrate his restlessness and ambition. Always drawn to the easy humor of dialect, but lacking Twain’s mastery of it, Marquis has the narrator of Danny’s Own Story tell a colloquial tale that includes itinerant actors, con men, and other types familiar from Huckleberry Finn. In The Cruise of the Jasper B., his second novel, he satirizes adventure stories. Other books besides the Archy and Mehitabel volumes were drawn largely from columns; The Almost Perfect State is a hodgepodge on the general theme of utopian societies. Marquis also adapted the Old Soak columns into a successful Broadway comedy, at one point acting the role of Clem Hawley himself.
Like Archy, Marquis could have claimed theology as his favorite sport. He devoted considerable energy to his solemn Crucifixion drama The Dark Hours. Closer to the spirit of Archy is his 1934 semi-novel Chapters for the Orthodox, which consists of twelve adventures set mostly in New York City and starring Jehovah, Satan, Jesus, and other biblical characters. Although the book has funny and provocative moments, many scenes go on too long, reminding us that for Marquis newspaper columning imposed a constructive brevity.
Marquis’s last years were fraught with loss and illness. His first wife, their daughter and son, his second wife—each pre-deceased him. He had twice been a devoted husband and was a famously doting father. Bereft, Marquis began suffering strokes. His third, in 1936, left him barely able to move and almost entirely unable to speak. He spent his last year and a half cared for by his two sisters, whom he had previously supported for their entire lives. He died on December 29, 1937.
Newspapers around the country, especially in New York, ran affectionate obituaries. In a gesture that would have made Marquis guffaw, Christop
her Morley visited the undertaker who had embalmed his old friend’s body and instructed him to remove the too-dressy suit and replace it with Marquis’s favorite brown tweed. Morley swapped Marquis’s necktie with the one that had been around his own neck. In early January, E. B. White wrote to James Thurber about Marquis’s death, describing their fellow humorist as “one of the saddest people of our generation.” He enumerated Marquis’s sufferings and added, “What a kick in the pants life gave that guy!”33
It is axiomatic that clowns have painted smiles for a reason. “Gravity and levity,” remarked Christopher Morley, “were so mixed in Don’s mind that it puzzled even himself....”34 Humor, whether in despair or camaraderie, was not just Don Marquis’s profession. It was his creative medium. Under false names he typed notes to fellow columnists—seeking romantic advice, submitting awful poems, claiming to be an outraged reader or a lawyer suing for libel. After Marquis’s death, Morley and other friends tearfully reminisced about his pranks. Marquis’s narrator in Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady admits, “My dreams I hedge about with bitter wit.” Apparently this attitude was true until the end. During Marquis’s long inarticulate decline, his sisters reported that sometimes they found him laughing quietly to himself—but no longer able to explain the joke.
Just as Marquis was himself influenced by the Literary Comedians, so have his style and his characters already influenced generations of writers and other artists. James Thurber patterned his early newspaper columns on those of Marquis and Franklin P. Adams.35 E. B. White insisted that his own writing was influenced more by Marquis than by literary heavyweights such as Hemingway.36 When he moved to New York City, White was in awe of Marquis and his generation of columnists, and he wrote that he “would hang around the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway, thinking: ‘Somewhere in that building is the typewriter that archy the cockroach jumps on at night.’ ”37
In 1949, prior to writing an affectionate tribute to Marquis for Doubleday’s omnibus volume, White reread all three Archy collections. Soon he began writing his own story about a talking animal, and his hero was also an invertebrate writer. In letters he specifically compared Charlotte the spider to Mehitabel the cat. When a film studio representative wrote White about plans for an animated adaptation of Charlotte’s Web, White was anxious to avoid the imposition of some kind of moral upon his novel. “I would hate to see Charlotte turned into a ‘dedicated’ spider: she is, if anything, more the Mehitabel type—toujours gai.”38 But surely the philosophical ancestor of Charlotte—who is compassionate, opposed to injustice, and able to extract words from her very essence at great personal toll—is actually Archy.
Don Marquis the aspiring dramatist might be pleased to know that Archy and Mehitabel began capering across stages in 1954 and haven’t stopped yet. In that year composer George Kleinsinger and lyricist Joe Darion, who was later famous for Man of La Mancha, premiered in New York City a musical entitled Archy and Mehitabel. Variations of it still make the rounds of regional theater. Soon afterward they produced an album entitled Archy and Mehitabel: A Back-Alley Opera, with Carol Channing giving voice to Mehitabel and Eddie Bracken as Archy. In 1957 a revamped musical appeared on Broadway as Shinbone Alley, the result of a collaboration between Kleinsinger, Darion, and a little-known comedian named Mel Brooks. The Broadway version starred Bracken again as Archy but replaced Channing with Eartha Kitt, who would round out her sex-kitten phase by portraying Catwoman on the 1960s Batman TV series. Unfortunately the Broadway version betrayed the spirit of its own inspiration by portraying Archy in love with Mehitabel; when the show closed after forty-nine performances, Marquis purists were not distraught. The musical appeared on television in 1960. Then in 1971 Shinbone Alley achieved permanent form as an animated film directed by John Wilson.
There have been other artistic responses to Marquis’s characters. Taking homelessness as his official theme, composer Andrew Stiller set Mehitabel’s midnight dance with Boreas to violin—“the traditional fiddle of the danse macabre,” he explained—and gave Mehitabel herself musical voice through accompanying soprano. The opera premiered in 1989. The stage musical still reappears in theaters around the world—including in Australia in late 2005—and actor Gale McNeeley has been honing his one-man performance piece for years.
Unlike many newspaper columnists, Don Marquis never claimed to be a prophet, but he was positively oracular when he complained that it looked like he was going to be remembered as the creator of a cockroach. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, who ranked his phenomenally popular detective far below his historical novels, Marquis eventually found the demand for Archy and Mehitabel tiresome. He actually killed Archy a couple of times, only to have him migrate into the body of another cockroach.
Few of Don Marquis’s other characters seem to possess what show business people call legs. His novels and short stories are mostly forgotten. The Old Soak is inescapably pickled in his gin-mill era. Hermione and her pretentious coterie can still be relevant in our gullible age, but they too appear to be mummifying into museum exhibits. So far only Archy and Mehitabel have joined the rowdy club of characters who escape their creator’s mortality and find themselves embraced by the world and posterity.1. The Evening Sun was the less well-behaved sibling of the Sun, a morning paper once edited by the legendary Charles Dana. Marquis began his column at the Evening Sun. In 1920 The Sun merged with the New York Herald, at which time the Evening Sun dropped the adjective and became a new version of The Sun. In 1922 Marquis moved to the New York Tribune, where his column was called “The Lantern.”
2. Bernard DeVoto, “Almost Toujours Gai,” in Harper’s, March 1950. Reprinted in DeVoto’s collection The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
3. Dorothy Lobrano Guth, ed., Letters of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 649. Letter to Edward C. Sampson, dated May 31, 1973. The title “Archy and Mehitabel” refers specifically to the first collection, published in 1927, but it is often used to denote the entire series.
4. Philip Roth, “The Hurdles of Satire,” New Republic, September 9, 1957.
5. For the origins of satire, see Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). For an introduction to and anthology of satire in America, and to the context for Marquis’s work, see Henry C. Carlisle, Jr., American Satire in Prose and Verse (New York: Random House, 1962). See also Edward A. Martin, H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), especially Chapter 8, “A Puritan’s Satanic Flight: Don Marquis, His Archy, and Anarchy.” Horace and Juvenal are available in countless editions.
6. Quoted in Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 169.
7. The entire text appears as the first entry in this volume, with notes.
8. For Archy’s likely species, turn to the note for the poem on October 12, 1916.
9. E. B. White, “Don Marquis,” in The Second Tree from the Corner (New York: Harper & Row, 1954). An earlier, less polished version appeared as his “Introduction” to The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel (New York: Doubleday, 1950).
10. John McAleer, Rex Stout: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), p. 247.
11. DeVoto, “Almost Toujours Gai.”
12. Richard Schweid, The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999), p. 100.
13. Christopher Morley, “O Rare Don Marquis,” in his column “The Bowling Green,” Saturday Review, January 8, 1938.
14. John Batteiger, www.donmarquis.com. His Web site provides an excellent introduction to Marquis and his various creations.
15. Shinbone Alley is where Archy reports, in later poems, that Mehitabel is living. It became the title of a musical and animated film, as dicussed later in this essay. It is an actual alley in New York City, connecting Lafayette Street, across from Jones Alley, with Bleecker Street, across from Mott Street. See the “Forgotten New York” Web site, http://www.forgot
ten-ny.com/Alleys/Soho/soho.html. Truly obsessive Marquis devotees may wish to know that there are references to Shinbone Alley on Merle Haggard’s 1971 album A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, in the song “Stay a Little Longer” and on the Spin Doctors’ 1991 album Pocket Full of Kryptonite, in the song “Shin Bone Alley.”
16. DeVoto, “Almost Toujours Gai.”
17. V. S. Pritchett, “A Dandy,” in Complete Collected Essays (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 929. An essay on Max Beerbohm.
18. On free verse see especially these sources: T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” New Statesman, March 3, 1917; reprinted in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965). Paul Fussell Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965). Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
19. Kafka describes Samsa’s insect form as ungeheuren Ungeziefer, roughly “monstrous vermin,” and wisely avoids identifying it more fully. Nabokov in his lectures on “The Metamorphosis” argues from textual description (even employing diagrams) that Samsa awoke as a dung beetle. See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. by Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
20. Christopher Morley, “Archy—From Abdera.” Saturday Review, May 15, 1937, in his “Bowling Green” column.
21. Quoted in Edward Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 43.
22. Anthony, p. 44.
23. Anthony, p. 21.
24. See NASA’s Web site: http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhistory/SEpath/SE1878Jul29T.html.
25. Mark Twain, “The First Writing Machines,” in “From My Unpublished Autobiography,” Harper’s Weekly, March 18, 1905.