Author: Don Marquis
Category: Humorous
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26. Anthony, pp. 29-30.
27. The Morning News was renamed the Record in 1890, when Marquis was twelve.
28. Anthony, p. 66.
29. For more on the Literary Comedians, see David B. Kesterson, “The Literary Comedians and the Language of Humor.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 1 [New Series], no. 1 (June 1982), 44-51. For general background on later American humor, see Norris W. Yates, The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1964), especially Chapter 11, “The Many Masks of Don Marquis.” Numerous anthologies of humor include selections by and commentary upon Marquis.
30. Anthony, p. 117.
31. Anthony, p. 139.
32. Marquis, “Confessions of a Reformed Columnist,” Saturday Evening Post, December 29, 1928, p. 62.
33. Letter to James Thurber, dated January 8, 1938. In Guth, Letters, p. 171.
34. Morley, “O Rare Don Marquis.”
35. Harrison Kinney, James Thurber: His Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), p. 267.
36. Guth, ed., Letters, p. 574. Letter to William K. Zinsser, dated December 30, 1968.
37. E. B. White, “Here Is New York,” reprinted in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 125-6. This is one of the rare occasions on which White, the most important commentator on Archy, failed to capitalize the cockroach’s name.
38. Guth, ed., Letters, p. 613. Letter to Gene Deitch, dated January 12, 1971.
Suggestions for Further Reading
BOOKS BY DON MARQUIS
Danny’s Own Story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912.
Dreams & Dust. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1915.
The Cruise of the Jasper B. New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1916.
Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers. New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1916.
Prefaces. New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1919.
The Old Soak and Hail and Farewell. Garden City, NY, and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921.
Carter and Other People. New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1921.
Noah an’ Jonah an’ Cap’n John Smith: A Book of Humorous Verse. New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1921.
Poems and Portraits. Garden City, NY, and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922.
Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady (By a Gentleman with a Blue Beard) and Famous Love Affairs. Garden City, NY, and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922.
The Revolt of the Oyster. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922.
The Old Soak’s History of the World, with Occasional Glances at Baycliff, L.I., and Paris, France. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924.
The Dark Hours: Five Scenes From a History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924.
The Awakening & Other Poems. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924. (First U.S. edition published 1925 by Doubleday, Page & Co.)
Out of the Sea: A Play in Four Acts. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927.
The Almost Perfect State. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927.
Archy and Mehitabel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927.
Love Sonnets of a Cave Man, and Other Verses: Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928.
When the Turtles Sing, and Other Unusual Tales. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928.
A Variety of People. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929.
Off the Arm. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1930.
Archy’s Life of Mehitabel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1933.
Master of the Revels: A Comedy in Four Acts. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934.
Chapters for the Orthodox. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934.
Archy Does His Part. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1935.
Sun Dial Time. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1936.
Sons of the Puritans, edited by Christopher Morley. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1939.
The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940. An omnibus edition comprising the three previous collections.
The Best of Don Marquis, edited by Christopher Morley. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1946.
The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1950. An omnibus edition comprising the three previous collections, with the addition of an introduction by E. B. White.
Archyology: The Long Lost Tales of Archy and Mehitabel, edited by Jeff Adams. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1996.
Archyology II (The Final Dig): The Long Lost Tales of Archy and Mehitabel, edited by Jeff Adams. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1998.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL WORKS
This list omits articles and most books already cited in the endnotes to the Introduction.
Anthony, Edward. O Rare Don Marquis. New York: Doubleday, 1962.
Batteiger, John. www.donmarquis.com.
Lee, Lynn. Don Marquis. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
McCollum, William, Jr. Selected Letters of Don Marquis. Stafford, VA: Northwoods Press, 1982.
A Note on the Text and Format of This Edition
This book is the first to present the adventures of Archy and Mehitabel in the order in which Don Marquis wrote them. Its extensive selection has been compiled from newspaper files rather than drawn from the text of a previous edition. To orient readers, the date of each poem’s first publication appears at the top of the page—year on the left page, month and day on the right. Marquis compiled the original volumes without regard for chronology and omitted entries he considered too stale for reprinting. In an annotated edition, however, topicality is a gateway rather than a barrier, because the notes explain historical, cultural, and biographical allusions.
Few of these works bore any title in their newspaper incarnation except for the recurring subhead “A Communication from Archy,” because the cockroach jostled for attention alongside other material. Even when collecting parts of a series, such as Archy’s strike, Marquis disregarded their original order and retitled entries. At times he merged columns that originally appeared on different dates or separated those that originally appeared on the same date. When one of Archy’s contributions included a title on its first appearance, it is retained here. For the majority, however, a chronological format demanded a new title for each work; to minimize editorial presumption, each consists of a word or phrase taken directly from the poem. Two poems have been slightly shortened. In the January 27, 1917 column, the ellipsis indicates the excision of a long-winded tangent. In the February 26, 1918 column, several more definitions of poetry have been omitted.
Readers familiar with the three collections published during Marquis’s lifetime and the two small posthumous collections (see “Suggestions for Further Reading”) may notice some differences. The poem “Cleopatra,” dated August 28, 1916, for example, includes several lines about religion that either Marquis or his editor excised for book publication in 1927.
ON CAPITAL LETTERS
Outside Archy’s own text, the names Archy and Mehitabel, like all other proper names, are capitalized. Marquis himself capitalized them in his column. Archy specifically asked others to do so, as you can see in his August 2, 1922, postscript (reprinted here for the first time) to the poem about Warty Bliggens. Archy was by choice a free-verse, not a lower-case, poet; he did not incorporate his shortcomings as a typist into his artistic manifesto.
Titles are also capitalized herein. Marquis capitalized titles in the column because they weren’t provided by Archy, and occasionally the title is even Marquis’s reply to Archy’s following remarks. On rare occasions, however, a capitalized word or a punctuation mark appeared in the original newspaper publication. Because upper-case typing was a physical impossibility for Archy, the editor has corrected these typesetter’s errors (actually errors only in
this context), as well as the rare obvious misprint, without comment. Some of Archy’s communications to Marquis were signed archy or archy the cockroach and some were not; for consistency this edition omits his signature.
There has been no other editorial tinkering.
ARCHY THE FREE-VERSE COCKROACH
On September 11, 1922 the New York Tribune ran a large illustration of Archy to welcome the famous cockroach—and his creator, Don Marquis—as they moved to the Tribune after years at the Evening Sun and the Sun. For Archy’s outraged response to this portrayal, see the poem for September 18, 1922. (Image courtesy of John Batteiger.)
1916
MARCH 29
Expression Is the Need
THE SUN DIAL
The Query of the Hour
Justice Hughes,1
What are your views?
When Villa2 is captured, they will take him to Washington and read to him all the laudatory remarks the members of the Wilson Administration made about him a couple of years ago and watch him laugh himself to death.
The Scarlet Fever germ is cross
And full of cranky notions,
And everywhere he takes his seat
He raises red emotions.
Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story.
It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, instead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. Mme. Blavatsky’s3 ego went into a white horse after she passed over, and someone’s personality has undoubtedly gone into this rat. It is an era of belief in communications from the spirit land—there is Patience Worth4 and there is the author of the Letters of a Living Dead Man,5 and there are many other prominent and well-thought of ghosts in touch with the physical world today—and all the other ghosts are becoming encouraged by the current attitude of credulity and are trying to get into the game, too.
We recommend the Dobbs Ferry rat to the Psychical Research Society. We do not pretend to know anything about the Dobbs Ferry rat at first hand. But since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received, we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago. We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys.
He did not see us, and we watched him. 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 pages so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. 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.
Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found:
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
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here at night i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay
most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it
i wish you would have that cat6 kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems
showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name used to be freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be the rat
in the next transmigration and freddy the cockroach i
will teach him to sneer at my poetry then
dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
havent had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy
We have left a piece of paper in our machine every night since, as Archy requested. But up to date nothing has come of it. We begin to fear that Freddy, his rival bard, has caught Archy unawares and eaten him. It is an interesting problem—and one we refer to the transmigrationists—as to whether Freddy’s personality would be influenced by Archy’s after Freddy had eaten Archy.
But the whole thing, we must admit, has left an unpleasant impression on us. Are poets never to be at peace with one another? We will have to put the case of Freddy and Archy up to some of Hermione’s friends.
DON MARQUIS
MARCH 31
Just Cockroaches
Archy, the vers libre cockroach, has been banging out copy on our typewriter again. When we came to work this morning we found the following poem:
i wish i had more human society
these other cockroaches here are just cockroaches
no human soul ever transmigrated into them
and any soul that would go into one of them
after giving them the once over
would be a pretty punk sort of a soul
you cant imagine how low down they are with no
esthetic sense and no imagination or anything like
that and they actually poke fun at me because I used to
be a poet before i died and my soul migrated into a
cockroach they are as crass and philistine as some
humans i could name their only thought is food but
there is a little red eyed spider lives behind your
steam radiator who has considerable sense
i dont think he is very honest though i dont know
whether he has anything human in him or is just
spider i was talking to him the other day and was
quite charmed with his conversation
after you he says pausing by the radiator
and i was about to step back of the radiator ahead
of him when something told me to watch my step
and i drew back just in time
to keep from walking into a web
there were some cockroach legs and wings
still sticking in that web
i beat it as quickly as i could up the wall
well well says that spider you are in quite a hurry archy
ha ha so you wont be at my dinner table today then
some other time cockroach some other time
i will be glad to welcome you to dinner archy
he is not to be trusted but he is the only insect
i have met for weeks that h
as any intelligence if you
will look back of that locker where you hang your
hat you will find a dime has rolled there i wish you
would get it and spend it for doughnuts a cent at a time
and leave the doughnuts under your typewriter i get tired
of apple peelings i nearly drowned in your ink well last
night dont forget the doughnuts
archy
We are trying to fix up some scheme whereby Archy can use the shift keys and thus get control of the capital letters and punctuation marks. Suggestions for a workable device will be thankfully received. As it is Archy has to climb upon the frame of the typewriter and jump with all his weight upon the keys, a key at a time, and it is only by almost incredible exertions that he is able to drag the paper forward so he can start a new line.
APRIL 7
Something to Say
thank your friends for me for
all their good advice about how to
work your typewriter but what i have
always claimed is that manners and methods
are no great matter compared
with thoughts in poetry you cant hide
gems of thought so they wont flash
on the world on the other hand if you press
agent poor stuff that wont make it live
my ego will express itself in spite of
all mechanical obstacles having something
to say is the thing being sincere
counts for more than forms of expression thanks
for the doughnuts
APRIL 10
Simplified Spelling