Author: Don Marquis
Category: Humorous
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2 Winsor McKay was an innovative American cartoonist and illustrator best known for two creations—Little Nemo in Slumberland and Gertie the Dinosaur. The former, which revolutionized the comic strip with its beautifully drawn full-color panels in the New York Herald, ran from 1905-1911; it evolved into McKay’s first animated film. In 1914, only four years before this column, McKay had debuted Gertie the Dinosaur, a stunning animated film which almost single-handedly launched popular awareness of this infant genre.
3 Boche was a French slur against Germans that was quickly adopted into English during the war. Before the war it could mean either German or obstinate, but soon it joined kraut, heinie, and other terms that Marquis did not hesitate to employ in his column.
OCTOBER 28
The Influenza
1 In 1918 the worldwide influenza epidemic (called Spanish influenza because it was erroneously thought to have started in Spain) killed more people than did the Black Plague during the four years of its most infamous outbreak in the mid-fourteenth century. In October alone, almost 200,000 Americans died of the virus. By the middle of 1919 the number would reach 675,000. Various public health agencies were emphasizing the many ways that influenza germs might be transmitted, including aboard insects.
NOVEMBER 9
A Tall Story
1 An armistice is a cessation of hostilities prior to treaty negotiation. The “false armistice” had occurred two days before, on November 7; it was premature because what had actually been signed was a preliminary surrender agreement that still had to be ratified by both Germany and the Allies. The official Armistice was signed on November 11, two days after this column appeared.
2 The Woolworth Building, commissioned by the owner of the department store chain and completed in 1913, stands at 233 Broadway and is now considered one of the great buildings in New York City. If Archy was 600 feet off the ground when his adventure began, 192 feet still rose above him. With its Byzantine mosaic lobby ceiling and Gothic revival exterior—complete with gargoyles—it was quickly nicknamed the Cathedral of Commerce.
3 The ticker-tape machine was an adaptation of the telegraph; it sent stock market quotations via telegraph wires, but in letters and numbers rather than the dots and dashes of Morse code. Invented in the 1870s to provide relatively up-to-date stock quotations surpassing the former daily summary of activity, it spat out prices on a long narrow stream of paper. Used ticker tape made excellent confetti. Although a ticker-tape parade—a parade between high buildings from which flutter a snowstorm of confetti—can occur anywhere, it originated in New York City with the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 and is mostly associated with Archy’s hometown.
NOVEMBER 23
I Saw Archy
1 For three or four decades the slang term dipso had been a common abbreviation for dipsomaniac, a drunkard, and some chronic alcoholics hallucinate visions of snakes while experiencing delirium tremens. Combining these two ideas into a real snake would have been a strong enough joke, but it started the other way around. There really is a dipsas snake, Dipsas variegata, found mostly in Central and South America. Perhaps Marquis had again been browsing through the science dictionary that seems to have inspired the column on November 8, 1917.
DECEMBER 3
Peace Conference
1 The Orizaba was a real ship, which had been commissioned only the previous May and assigned to the Atlantic Transport Service, eventually convoying more than 15,000 troops during the war and afterward bringing almost 32,000 home. In December it was temporarily assigned to assist the French government in the repatriation of prisoners of war from France, Italy, and Belgium.
DECEMBER 6
Poet Overboard
1 The George Washington was a real ship, and its history encapsulates a bit of Archy’s era. It was originally German, one of several of Norddeutscher Lloyd’s North Atlantic passenger liners to bear the name of a U.S. president, supposedly with the intention of luring German immigrants to this line. It began transatlantic routes in 1909, but with the outbreak of war in 1914 it was ordered to remain at the company’s Hoboken docks. In 1917, when the United States joined the war, the ship was seized and recommissioned as a U.S. naval transport. In did indeed carry President Woodrow Wilson to the Versailles peace conference.
2 During World War I George Creel was director of the Committee on Public Information, with far-reaching authority over U.S. newspapers, film companies, even songwriters and cartoonists; he was often denounced for his authoritarian censorship. In 1919 Marquis published his collection Prefaces (inspired by and at times parodying H. L. Mencken’s 1917 Book of Prefaces), in which he says, “Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.”
3 In Greek mythology Triton was a sea god, son of Poseidon (Neptune) and later the name of one of Neptune’s moons. He was usually represented as a merman, with the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish replacing his legs.
4 Such archaisms as charnel sea (from the many human bodies lost there) and briny lips—like the word corse for corpse—occur in many older works of literature; Archy wasn’t quoting a particular source.
5 It didn’t matter to Marquis that cockroaches have neither lips nor, as mentioned farther down, teeth.
6 President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, was elected to his first term in 1912 and narrowly reelected in 1916 on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”
7 A mine sweeper was a military ship, much quieter than ordinary ships and constructed with a hull of plastic or wood or a low-magnetic steel, used to locate and destroy—or at least disable—floating explosive mines.
8 Dr. Cary Grayson was President Wilson’s personal physician.
DECEMBER 10
Freedom of the Seas
1 The previous January President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech had translated his progressive domestic policies into international terms by promoting free trade, democracy, the formation of a League of Nations, and other tenets of self-determination. The territorial ambitions of many of the nations in the war had prevented them from publicly admitting their war goals, as Wilson had proposed, and therefore this speech became the foundation for the terms of German surrender and for shaping the peace treaty. Complete freedom of marine travel, without fear of attack, was one of the fourteen points. In this poem Bill’s irresolution reflects the muddy rhetoric pervading discussions of this topic.
DECEMBER 13
Passing the Bock
1 December 13 was the day that President Wilson arrived in Brest for the peace conference, unaware that Archy had saved his life aboard the George Washington.
2 Gott is simply the German word for God, but throughout the war Marquis had been pretending that he was a peculiarly German deity who answered to the Kaiser. In one column Marquis himself, rather than Archy, interviews Gott.
3 “am i wrong in castle” is Marquis’s silly phonetic version of Amerongen Castle at the Hague in Holland, where the Kaiser would stay for the next two years.
4 Bock is a kind of malt beer that originated in Germany.
DECEMBER 14
The Former Kaiser
1 Blutwurst is a German blood sausage, surely the most apt food imaginable for a tyrant.
DECEMBER 16
Abdication Underneath the Bough
1 The style of Archy’s rhyming lines parodies Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát—or rather Edward Fitzgerald’s exotic 1859 paraphrase of the standard Farsi text. A rubai (plural rubaiyat) is an ancient Persian verse form, a quatrain in which lines 1, 2, and 4 rhyme. These particular verses are relevant:A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor al
l thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
2 The German popular song “Ach du lieber Augustin” originated in Vienna in the eighteenth century. It was a brilliant choice for Wilhelm to be singing, because it is narrated by a man who bemoans to his dear friend Augustin his lost good times and keeps repeating that he “just can’t win.”
DECEMBER 23
The Former Czar
1 Nikolay Aleksandrovich Romanoff (now usually spelled Romanov) had been tsar of Russia since 1894 when he was forced to abdicate during the 1917 Russian Revolution. He and his entire family had been executed only a few months before Archy was writing; already rumors were circulating that Nicholas or his son Alexei or his daughter Anastasia had actually been spirited away and saved. The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia from 1613. The year after this column, 1919, a Lithuanian-born American named Harry F. Gerguson would begin impersonating Nicholas’s illegitimate son Michael, attracting so much attention that he would open Romanoff’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills in the late 1930s.
2 A verst is a Russian measurement of land distance, equal to roughly two-thirds of a mile.
1919
JANUARY 14
Preliminary Peace
1 In March 1918, French general Ferdinand Foch, who had been steadily promoted throughout the war, had been placed in charge of Allied forces in Europe. He led the July counterattack, at the Second Battle of the Marne, that led to Germany’s downfall, and it was he who accepted Germany’s surrender in November. He would also be prominent in the approaching peace negotiations at Versailles.
2 Georges Clemenceau had been French premier between 1906 and 1909, and had regained the office in 1917. He played a crucial role in rallying French forces. His second government would be ousted after his opponents argued that he settled for easier terms than necessary in Germany’s peace negotiations.
3 “Bull” was Bull Durham tobacco. In 1918, continuing its promotion of tobacco as a patriotic donation to the war effort, the U.S. government bought the entire output of the Bull Durham company, which had been advertising with such slogans as “When our boys light up, the Huns will light out” and “The smoke that cheers our sailor lads.”
JANUARY 20
No Water Bug
1 The U.S. Congress had passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1917, and, upon ratification by three-fourths of the states, the so-called “Dry Law” officially went into effect on January 16. Two days before this column, the Volstead Act provided federal enforcement strictures, and soon the supplying of bootleg liquor became the most lucrative business in America. Marquis returned to this theme many times. On March 27 he wrote, “Before that amendment is yanked out of an otherwise excellent Constitution, a good deal of water will run under the bridges.” See also note 1 for June 10, 1918.
MARCH 3
No Beer No Work
1 NO BEER NO WORK buttons were real and can still be bought through collectors or online. (Nowadays the slogan appears on new hats and T-shirts, including in Spanish, No cerveza no trabajo.) The phrase emerged from a short-lived offshoot of the labor movement protesting Prohibition, but soon it was everywhere. A song entitled “No Beer No Work,” by Sammy Edwards also dates from 1919: “‘No beer, no work’ will be my battle cry / After the first of July. . . .” As often happened, with this comment by Archy Marquis was ahead of many of his colleagues. Five months later, the magazine Snappy Stries published a poem by American humorist Ellis Parker Butler entitled “No Beer No Work.” It consisted of twenty-five tedious verses slangily parodying “Excelsior,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem beginning with the famous line “The shades of night were falling fast . . .” Marquis knew Butler, who was a slightly older contemporary. They had been photographed together in 1912 at Doubleday’s reception for Marquis upon publication of his first novel, Danny’s Own Story, leading to ongoing joshing about how the face of an alarm clock on the shelf behind Marquis’s head appeared in the photograph as a halo. On August 16 the Literary Digest ran a cartoon of a yawning cop complaining to a cobwebbed judge, “Oh, ho hum! No beer, no work!”
MARCH 5
An Interview with Mehitabel
1 Eau de vie is a brandy distilled from fermented fruit juice.
2 Mehitabel seems to think that she is merely saying “dear old friend,” but vieux as in vieux jeu, means old-fashioned or antiquated.
3 Noblesse oblige refers to the honorable behavior supposedly required of persons of noble birth or rank.
4 Haute classe: high class, noble.
5 See note 1 for September 1, 1916.
6 Marquis was probably referring to the British actress Lily Langtry, legendarily beautiful and notoriously dissolute. Three years before, however, D. H. Lawrence had referred to an actress as “the lily of the stage” in Twilight in Italy.
7 Canaille: French, the rabble, the lower classes.
8 Don is a respectful Spanish form of address, as in Don Quixote.
9 “The Arrow and the Song” is Longfellow’s famous poem that includes the oft-quoted lines “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth, I knew not where.”
10 July 1, 1919 was the date on which the War Prohibition Act was scheduled to go into effect.
11 Toujours joyeause: always merry, a variation on her usual toujours gai.
MARCH 17
Royal Blood and Anarchy
1 The Russian word bolshevik originally meant majority. Led by Lenin (see January 21, 1921), the radical faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party gained the political high ground in 1903 when it dubbed itself the Bolshevik Party and its opponents the Menshaviks, or minority. Since the revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks had eliminated all other parties. In 1918 the Bolsheviks named themselves the official Communist Party, and in 1952 promoted themselves further to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In Marquis’s time, bolshevik was already a common slang term not only for actual members of the Communist Party but also for anarchists, agitators, even labor organizers.
AUGUST 6
A Poem in the Kipling Manner
1 Rudyard Kipling was one of the leading English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, author of The Jungle Book and many other volumes of fiction and poetry. He was an enthusiastic apostle of British colonialism, especially in India, where he served in the military and where many of his tales and poems are set. In 1907 he became the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize. Marquis admired Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim and often reread it. He found a great deal of irresistible humor in his poetic style, however, which this poem beautifully parodies.
AUGUST 14
The Best Thing You Have Done Yet
1 Although smaller venues had been exhibiting contemporary European art for a few years before, in 1913 the Association of American Painters and Sculptors hosted a huge and well-publicized exhibition of “modern” American and European experimental artworks at New York’s Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory. This event is generally referred to simply as “the Armory Show.” Featured works included Picasso’s then-outrageous 1907 painting Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, which featured highly stylized nude women with distorted heads inspired by Iberian and African masks. In the wake of the Armory Show, many New York galleries began exhibiting such works. As usually happens when confronted with originality, many commentators expressed amusement or annoyance and proclaimed the death of art. Marquis often mocked the pretensions of Greenwich Village “artistes,” and in this poem he lampoons the inflated doubletalk that critics and artists fall into. But he also simply resisted change in some fields.
OCTOBER 6
To Settle the Controversy
1 The British writer Margaret Mary Julia “Daisy” Ashford wrote her only novel, The Young Visiters [sic] or Mr Salteena’s Plan, in 1890 at the age of nine. She rediscovered the manuscript and published it in 1919, when she was thirty-eight. Replete with childlike misspellings (as in the title), it is popular for the child’s straightforward point-of-view and easygoing humor;
it quickly became a stage play and in 2003 became a BBC television drama. J. M. Barrie, the popular British playwright and author of Peter Pan, wrote a rather twee introduction to Ashford’s little book, passionately attesting to its authenticity and praising the author’s style. It was this introduction that inspired the legend that Ashford was in fact a pseudonym for Barrie himself. (See also the previous column and the following.)
2 Although much of Shakespeare’s life and career is well documented, there have been countless attempts to attribute his works to someone else. Usually the nominee is a titled personage, such as the Earl of Oxford, or at least someone better educated than Shakespeare, such as the essayist and pioneer scientist Francis Bacon. A passionate fan of Shakespeare and almost entirely self-educated himself, Marquis had little patience with the labyrinthine shenanigans of Baconians and Oxfordians who scorned the commoner who actually wrote the plays and poems.
DECEMBER 3
This Monster Man
1 The Entente Cordiale was a 1904 “cordial understanding” between France and Britain to parcel out colonial boundaries, which Russia joined three years later to form the Triple Entente. Handily for Archy, in lowercase the term applies to any unofficial but well-understood agreement.
2 “Hands Across the Sea” was a term for international cooperation between the United States and Europe. It soon became the title of books and films, and the idea of expressing goodwill with “hands across” something became a running joke.