{"id":6016,"date":"2013-08-27T16:53:35","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T20:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=6016"},"modified":"2016-05-25T09:02:04","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T13:02:04","slug":"archy-and-mehitabel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/archy-and-mehitabel\/","title":{"rendered":"Archy and Mehitabel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"ArchyI can’t recall exactly how old I was when I first cracked open Don Marquis’s book<\/strong>, archy and mehitabel<\/a><\/em>, sitting there among the other books in the basement, black spined, stiff, yellowing pages. \u00a0That old book smell.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I was 11 or 12, but not much older, because we moved from that house in the summer after my 12th birthday. But I still remember it well.*<\/span><\/p>\n

The book was one of those oddities on our basement family bookshelf. I ignored it, at first, then looked at the pictures – cartoons by George Herriman<\/a>, the creator of Krazy Kat<\/a> . Long after I’d checked out the cartoons, I started reading the text. It was wildly absurd, deeply philosophical, whimsical, silly, obscure, cynical, yet compelling. Way outside my depth. Who was this guy and what was all this nonsense about a cockroach and a typewriter?<\/p>\n

Krazy Kat I knew from other books and publications, reprinted strips, and old, faded and brittle \u00a0cartoon strips cut out from newspapers and placed in between pages of other books, long since forgotten. Herriman’s wild style of drawing always intrigued me, even as a child.<\/p>\n

Perhaps there’s some astrological connection: two months after Herriman’s death, the last of his completed Krazy Kat strips, a full-page Sunday comic, was printed. The date was Sunday, June 25, 1944. That day the British were assaulting Caen, in France, to begin the bloody Operation Epsom. The Allies bombed Toulon. The 8th AF bombers and fighter bombers flew missions to attack bridges and airfields in France as the Allies pushed the Nazis back towards Germany. Ships of the United States Navy and Royal Navy attacked German fortifications at Cherbourg to support American troops taking the city and the entuire Normandy peninsula.<\/p>\n

\"Mehitabel\"<\/a>I<\/em> was also born on a Sunday, in June, too. Okay, that’s wild and silly synchronicity and many years later. Just foolin’ with you. Astrology is claptrap<\/a>. And I digress. Just wanted to put some context around Herriman and throw some misdirection your way. Ignosce mihi, dear reader.<\/p>\n

Marquis died years before that, in 1937, after his third or fourth stroke. He was 59. No astrological connection there, I’m afraid. And also long before my time.<\/p>\n

The book I opened, back in the early 1960s, seemed impossibly old. Published in 1927. The age of flappers, ukuleles, gin joints. When my father was a boy, not much old than I was when I discovered it. Had he read it then, and kept it ever since? Brought it with him from England after the war, a beloved volume too treasured to part from? Or had he picked up a copy here? I never knew.<\/p>\n

Beside it on the shelf was archy’s life of mehitabel<\/em>, 1933. Both sitting on the bookcase of forgotten volumes, tucked away in the basement, beside bound copies of the Boys’ Own Annual, a first edition of Tarzan, some tattered Mickey Spillane paperbacks, old hardback novels, books on time management, others on handyman skills, a few Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, and odd volumes of an outdated encyclopedia.<\/p>\n

All treasures to an inquisitive youngster. But this book hooked me in other ways, a sparked jumped across some subconscious wiring that connected literature, poetry, and writing. And maybe politics, too, although I was too young to realize it then.<\/p>\n

Imagine reading these lines from the literary cockroach Archy to his feline friend, Mehitabel, when you were that age:<\/p>\n

i suppose the human race
\nis doing the best it can but hell’s bells that’s only an explanation
\nit’s not an excuse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Or imagine reading the lesson of the moth<\/a>, which opens with the following, and trying to understand its meaning with your adolescent brain:<\/p>\n

i was talking to a moth
\nthe other evening
\nhe was trying to break into
\nan electric light bulb
\nand fry himself in the wires<\/p>\n

why do you fellows
\npull this stunt i asked him
\nbecause it is the conventional thing for moths or why
\nif that had been an uncovered
\ncandle instead of an electric
\nlight bulb you would
\nnow be a small unsightly cinder
\nhave you no sense<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who were Archy and Mehitabel? The donmarquis.com<\/a> site explains:<\/p>\n

THEY ARE THE MOST UNLIKELY OF FRIENDS: Archy is a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat with a celebrated past \u2014 she claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. Together, cockroach and cat are the foundation of one of the most engaging collections of light poetry to come out of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

\u201cexpression is the need of my soul,\u201d declares Archy, who labored as a free-verse poet in an earlier incarnation. At night, alone, he dives furiously on the keys of Don Marquis\u2019 typewriter to describe a cockroach\u2019s view of the world, rich with cynicism and humor. It\u2019s difficult enough to operate the typewriter\u2019s return bar to get a fresh line of paper; all of Archy\u2019s dispatches are written lowercase, and without punctuation, because he is unable to hit both shift and letter keys to produce a capital letter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sam Waterston explains it in this YouTube video:<\/p>\n

[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=MoKeTajP2y4]<\/p>\n

Archy first appeared in Marquis’s Sun newspaper column in 1916, almost a century ago. Mehitabel, a cat of questionable reputation, was also introduced then. As Marquis told it in the introduction to his first book of collected Archy tales, this is the first message on the typewriter:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

expression is the need of my soul
\ni was once a vers libre bard
\nbut i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
\nit has given me a new outlook upon life
\ni see things from the under side now
\nthank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
\nbut your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
\nthere is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
\nremoved she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
\ncatch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore
\nthere is a rat here she should get without delay<\/p>\n

most of these rats here are just rats
\nbut this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
\nhe used to be a poet himself
\nnight after night i have written poetry for you
\non your typewriter
\nand this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
\ncomes out of his hole when it is done
\nand reads it and sniffs at it
\nhe is jealous of my poetry
\nhe used to make fun of it when we were both human
\nhe was a punk poet himself
\nand after he has read it he sneers
\nand then he eats it<\/p>\n

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
\nor get a cat that is onto her job
\nand i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
\nto a cockroach
\nthat rats name is freddy
\nthe next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
\nbut something smaller i hope i will be a rat
\nin the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
\ni will teach him to sneer at my poetry then<\/p>\n

dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
\ni haven\u2019t had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
\nor a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
\nand paste and leave a piece of paper in your machine
\nevery night you can call me archy<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That early piece launched Marquis’s career on an entirely different tangent. He would pen his column in The Sun for another six years, with Archy as its most popular – wildly popular – subject. Then he took it to the New York Tribune for four years, and then to Collier’s Magazine, eventually writing some 500 pieces.<\/p>\n

In the introduction to the 1950 edition of The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel<\/em>, EB White wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Archy has endeared himself in a special, way to thousands of poets and creators and newspaper slaves, and there are reasons for this beyond the sheer merit of his literary output. The details of his creative life make him blood brother to writing men. He cast himself with all I his force upon a key, head downward. So do we all. And when he was through his, labors, he fell to the floor, spent. He was vain (so are we all), hungry, saw things from the under side, and was continually bringing up the matter of whether he should be paid for his work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Archy would tell his own tale several times, in many ways, as read and shown in this video:<\/p>\n

[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KL4cCuBQDqY]<\/p>\n

Sitting beside me as I type this are three of Marquis’s original “archy” books – archy and mehitabel<\/em> (1933), archy’s life of mehitabel<\/em> (1933, , first edition) and archy does his part<\/em> (1936)*<\/span>. Plus I have a copy of the “archyology<\/a><\/em>” collection of lost writings only recently discovered (one of two such collections printed in the mid-1990s).<\/p>\n

I still read this stuff, I still get a kick out of it, and I still guffaw over it. It was truly a genius idea and well executed (compared at times to the work of poet\u00a0e.e. cummings<\/a>, but I disagree; Marquis was not so avant-garde<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Today some of the references and the style may slide past me, but it’s very readable nonetheless. My copies on the table here aren’t the family’s originals. They’re long gone, sold, given away, maybe donated to a library or charity. Mine were bought later in used bookstores. But treasured, anyway. Eighty years old, two of them, so they deserve our respect.<\/p>\n

Marquis’s Archy books are still in print, although his other works have gone OP for some time. They didn’t have the longevity of Archy. Maybe they weren’t cynical enough. But the image of the little cockroach bashing his head on the keys as he punches out his blank verse still capitvates writers today, still has its fans. I’m one of them. There’s dance in the old dame yet, as Mehitabel would sing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There’s even an Annotated Archy & Mehitabel<\/a>, with notes to explain the references (I have it on order).<\/p>\n

[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Rji1_Pt73ao]<\/p>\n

Two excellent sites about Don Marquis: here<\/a> and here<\/a>. You can read excerpts from The Best of Archy and Mehitabel, here<\/a>.
\n~~~~~<\/p>\n

*<\/span> Yes the under-capitalization is deliberate. Archy could not operate the shift key on the mechanical typewriter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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I can’t recall exactly how old I was when I first cracked open Don Marquis’s book, archy and mehitabel, sitting there among the other books in the basement, black spined, stiff, yellowing pages. \u00a0That old book smell. Perhaps I was 11 or 12, but not much older, because we moved from that house in the summer after my 12th birthday. But I still remember it well.* The book was one of those oddities on our basement family bookshelf. I ignored it, at first, then looked at the pictures – cartoons by George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat . Long \u2026…… click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,222,73,9,72],"tags":[406,227,137,61,134],"class_list":["post-6016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-language-grammar","category-personal-reminiscences","category-books-by-the-bedside","tag-books-reviews","tag-humour-2","tag-literature","tag-politics","tag-writing"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":10478,"today_views":1},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6016"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16724,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6016\/revisions\/16724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}