by Don Marquis
with liquor and iniquity1
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses
it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song2
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and a demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food i need in order
to continue to create
beauty i tell you
plainly mister fly it is all
damned nonsense for that food
to rear up on its hind legs
and say it should not be eaten
you have convinced me
said the fly say no more
and shutting all his eyes
he prepared himself for dinner
and yet he said i could
have made out a case
for myself too if i had
had a better line of talk
of course you could said the spider
clutching a sirloin from him
but the end would have been
just the same if neither of
us had spoken at all
boss i am afraid that what
the spider said is true
and it gives me to think
furiously upon the futility
of literature
Notes
1916
MARCH 29
Expression Is the Need
For this first appearance we are reprinting Marquis’s entire column rather than just the Archy material, to provide a glimpse into the usual mix of topic and commentary. The rest of this volume will consist of Archy’s contributions and occasional responses from Marquis, omitting the bulk of most columns and all of those in which Archy does not participate.1 A former governor of New York and then Associate Supreme Court Justice, Charles Evans Hughes left the court in 1916 to campaign for president on the Republican ticket. In one of the narrowest vote margins in U.S. history, Woodrow Wilson would defeat him a few months later.
2 Pancho Villa was a Mexican revolutionary and bandit. In 1910 he and his gang, along with Emiliano Zapata and many others, had joined the popular revolt against Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz and had been praised at home and abroad. By 1916, however, times had changed. Villa had been leading murderous raids across the U.S. border, eluding capture in both countries—even escaping a highly publicized expedition led by General John “Black Jack” Pershing, in which George S. Patton participated.
3 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a Russian-born mystic, author of The Secret Doctrine and other books. She founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Theosophy (“divine wisdom” or “wisdom of God”) is a mystical religious philosophy, a smorgasbord of Buddhism, Gnosticism, Platonism, and many other belief systems. Blavatsky claimed to possess a variety of occult powers. Related to and congenial toward Spiritualism, Theosophy still provides fertile ground for many New Age beliefs, including the one that most interests Archy: reincarnation.
4 In 1916 the New York publisher Henry Holt was publicizing a new book supposedly dictated to a woman named Pearl Curran, via Ouija board, by the spirit of a seventeenth-century woman named Patience Worth. This ethereal collaboration resulted in several novels and many poems, and until her death in 1937 Curran claimed to be merely channelling for Worth. Marquis returns to Patience Worth on October 19, 1917. On November 18, 1919, Marquis wrote in his column, “ ‘I’m amused at science,’ says Mrs. Curran, the medium through whom speaks that remarkable Patience Worth. Which makes it about an even thing between science and Mrs. Curran, we dare say.”
5 The popular 1914 book Letters from a Living Dead Man, by the American journalist, poet, and novelist Elsa Barker, claimed to be a collection of spiritual communications from beyond the grave. Barker also wrote a novel, The Son of Mary Bethel, in which Christ is living in the early twentieth century, an idea related to the themes behind Marquis’s 1934 book Chapters for the Orthodox.
6 Note that in the original columns Mehitabel remained unnamed until May 11, although, as noted in the Introduction, when gathering the first collection Marquis named her earlier to establish her as the second important character.
APRIL 10
Simplified Spelling
In only his fourth appearance Archy is already switching to rhyme.1 This topic seems an inevitable joke for a cockroach who already can’t use capital letters or punctuation. Ever since Gutenberg, there have been movements to simplify English orthography, which is burdened (or enlivened) by many rules borrowed from many languages. The Simplified Spelling Board was formed in 1905 with the sponsorship of Andrew Carnegie and the support of many prominent figures, most notably George Bernard Shaw, whose own simplifications form speedbumps in reading his plays. In 1916 the Board voted to modify the established past tense of verbs ending in -ed to end in t; e.g., a word such as dropped would become dropt. Note that while feigning support, Archy is anything but consistent in his phonetic spelling.
2 For more on Josh Billings, see the Introduction. In this word Marquis merges the colloquial humorist’s name with the word billings-gate , which means foul or insulting language, from a former London fish market renowned for its off-color banter.
3 Archy types by butting his head against the typewriter key, but it has also been only two weeks since Marquis let the cockroach butt into his already well-established column.
4 This is the first of several references to the still-new term lowbrow. See especially September 18, 1922 and its notes.
APRIL 26
Hell
1 In 1916 simp was a recent slang term, less than a decade old, shortened from simpleton.
2 Because the size of letters on a newspaper page indicate a subject’s relative importance (one reason why advertisements are so much larger than news stories), Archy petitions again and again for a larger type size as reward for his efforts. Here is the progression, from smaller to larger, among the type sizes that Archy mentions in various columns: agate, nonpareil, minion, and brevier. For reference with the one type size most of us know, each of these is smaller than pica. See also note for May 1, 1922.
Many readers talk about Archy and Mehitabel and Don Marquis (at least the semifictional Marquis who narrates the column) as friends. Actually Marquis establishes early, less than a month after Archy’s debut, an edgy and often adversarial relationship between the cockroach and the boss. Because he was willing to try anything, and because his column was always responding to the troubled world around him, Marquis often cast Archy as oppressed laborer and himself as cruel management, a situation that mirrored his own relationship with some editors. And, as we shall see, Archy fears Mehitabel’s violent predatory instincts, and more than once has to flee for his life. (When he considers suicide on June 28, he knows that he could let Mehitabel “damage” him.) No wonder Marquis fans were disappointed in the Broadway musical that portrayed Archy smitten with Mehitabel.
MAY 11
Up or Down the Scale
1 A scale that one’s soul can ascend or descend doesn’t appear in all versions of transmigration—the idea that the spiritual essence of a human being can occupy a succession of human or animal bodies— but Marquis found it useful and funny and returned to it several times
. See also note 1 for September 20, 1922.
2 This is the first time that Mehitabel’s name appeared in the column. As described in the Introduction, Marquis moved her name and her history forward when he assembled the first collection.
MAY 23
Raise in Salary
1 Not for the first time, Marquis expresses his own worries as a writer through Archy. Before launching “The Sun Dial” in 1912 he had been laboring for years to get a featured regular column, only to learn that filling it with quality material was a daily burden.
JUNE 19
Capitals
1 Parnassus is an actual mountain, now called Liakoura, in Greece. In Greek mythology the mountain was named after a hero who founded divination by birds and the oracle of Python, but the term came to represent the noble height of artistic excellence, the club of the immortals. For experimental poets such as Archy, however, it refers more specifically to the art-for-art’s-sake school of French poetry launched by the 1866 collection and manifesto Le Parnasse Contemporain.
JUNE 28
Why Not Commit Suicide
1 Suicide will become a common theme in the series. See especially the five-part “Suicide Club” series beginning on September 21, 1916, and “Assisting at a Suicide” on June 4, 1918.
JULY 25
We Rushed Forward and Swatted 1 The term fly-swatter was still quite new, as was the mass-produced
version of the implement it describes, which is why Marquis employs it in several columns. Many sources date the term to 1917,
but this column pushes the official date back a bit. Naturally Marquis quickly took the term swatter and applied it to the person
swatting. See also October 14, 1921, for a spider’s opinion.
2
It has taken Marquis less than four months after introducing Archy
to kill him.
AUGUEST 5
Ballade of the Under Side
This was Marquis’s original newspaper title for the poem.1 Wried, the past tense of wry, was an already archaic literary term, used by Browning and few since. Here Archy uses the word about himself in its meaning of wrongheaded, but on November 6, 1916, Marquis uses it about him in its meaning of unnaturally twisted.
2 Originally L’envoi meant a detached verse or verses at the end of a poem or other literary composition, intended to encapsulate a moral or address the work to a particular individual. In English it is sometimes used as a synonym for coda.
AUGUST 12
Aeroplane
1 Airplanes at the time were primitive and crash-prone, and flying was a dangerous and glamorous enterprise. The Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk only thirteen years before.
2 Originally the term water wagon referred to a literal wagon that transported water either to drink or to sprinkle on dusty roads during dry weather. But in the first decade of the twentieth century it acquired the meaning of abstention from alcoholic beverages, evolving into “on the wagon,” a term still in use long after water wagons ceased to exist.
3 “that jonah story” was of course the account of Jonah’s sea change inside the belly of, according to the Bible, “a great fish.” Marquis had wrung many humorous variations on this fable, including a remark by Clem Hawley that only the story’s friends had a right to make fun of it as well as a tedious ballad entitled “Noah an’ Jonah an’ Cap’n John Smith.” The poem was often reprinted in various places, and because it was precisely the length of an entire column Marquis often reprised it himself when he wanted a day off, under the heading “Reprinted by Request.” Apparently he overplayed this column-padding, because finally his editor at the Evening Sun, George Smith, asked him to refrain unless “the request is quite overwhelming.” In 1921 the poem became the title piece in a new Marquis collection of humorous verse. The reference a few lines earlier to “that cosmic stuff ” was also self-advertisement; it referred to Hermione’s hopelessly vague love of the word cosmic.
AUGUST 28
Cleopatra
When Marquis included this column in Archy and Mehitabel he cut all references to religion and rearranged the line lengths. Note Archy’s skepticism from the first about Mehitabel’s veracity.1 Some of the technical details of Archy’s craft remind us that as a human he was already a free verse poet, that this mode of poetry is a stylistic choice rather than an invention mothered by his current inability to operate the shift key. He also ignores the period key, which is available even in lower case, as every decapitaled e-mail writer knows. The chief question is how Archy operated the heavy return bar on these big manual typewriters (see the column for August 17, 1916). He needed a word processor.
2 George Moore was a prolific Irish writer who published fiction, drama, poetry, and autobiography. Several of his works were considered scandalously frank about sexual matters, which may be why our heroes want to read them during the night. In 1916 Moore published a novel denounced for its irreverence, The Brook Kerith, in which Jesus doesn’t die on the cross but is rescued and continues his life as a shepherd in Palestine. In 1934 Marquis published a volume of religious satire, Chapters for the Orthodox , which follows the adventures of God and Jesus around New York City.
3 Cleopatra was a descendant of the Greek and Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty that had ruled Egypt for three centuries prior to her birth in 69 BCE—one of the many dominoes knocked over by Alexander the Great. Her reputation for tempestuous and opportunistic amours, most famously with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony (see September 1, 1916), certainly tallies with the personality of Mehitabel.
4 Valerian was a Roman emperor who was actually born two and a half centuries after Cleopatra died. Archy’s reference is merely a joke about his name; valerian root affects cats much like catnip.
SEPTEMBER 1
The Queens I Have Been
1 Antony and Cleopatra met in 41 BCE. After Julius Caesar’s assassination three years before, Antony ruled Rome along with Lepidus and Caesar’s nephew Octavian. Cleopatra captivated Antony from the first time they met, when she answered a summons from him and arrived on a magnificent barge, dressed as Venus, the goddess of love. His involvement with her led to neglect of his family and political commitments; soon, like Mehitabel, she bore illegitimate children.
2 The reference is to a verse of the Mother Goose rhyme “A frog he would a-wooing go,” from the seventeenth or eighteenth century:A frog he would a-wooing go,
Heigh ho! says Rowley,
Whether his mother would let him or no.
With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach,
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.
3 Cleopatra became romantically involved with Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, after he pursued his rival Pompey to Alexandria and became involved in the war between Cleopatra and her brother, husband, and co-ruler Ptolemy XIII. Caesar sided with Cleopatra, defeated Ptolemy, and installed her as ruler. She bore him a son.
SEPTEMBER 4
Unpunctuated Gink
1 Invented in 1886, the linotype machine revolutionized the newspaper business. The older Gutenberg style of printing had required a printer to place a single character—letter, space, punctuation mark—at a time. The complex linotype printer used a ninety-character keyboard; each keystroke retrieved a letter from the machine’s magazine. When an entire line was ready, the machine poured molten type metal—the “nice hot bath” with which the linotyper threatens Archy—into the stacked molds. The result was a line of type in reverse, ready to print. Each line was placed by hand into the page layout. This innovation enabled much faster production and therefore more up-to-date newspapers. For most people it turned the newspaper into their daily vehicle for contact with the outside world, leading to the popularity of such writers as Don Marquis.2. For joshbillingsgate see the Introduction and also note 2 for April 10, 1916.
SEPTEMBER 8
Drunken Hornet
1 Speakeasy was a nickname for an illicit bar, where drinks were available despite Prohibition.
SEPTEMBER 21
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br /> Suicide Club, Part 1
Marquis dusted off and reprinted the already hoary joke about the glue factory several other times in his column.1 “R L S” was Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The three tales comprising “The Suicide Club” appeared in his 1882 collection New Arabian Nights, which also contains “A Lodging for the Night,” a story about the French scoundrel and poet François Villon, whose reincarnated self will show up in Mehitabel’s saga of her life.
SEPTEMBER 23
Suicide Club, Part 3
1 Tonic was a generic term for a restorative or invigorating medicinal beverage. The unsupervised production of supposedly healing tonics, claiming to do everything from reverse baldness to cure disease to prolong life, was one of the most lucrative scams available to confidence tricksters, as demonstrated in O. Henry’s stories of the “gentle grafter” Jeff Peters. Many variations on the game still go on today.
SEPTEMBER 27
Suicide Club, Part 5
1 This cockroach’s sad fate never appeared in the column.
SEPTEMBER 30
Killing Off the Sparrows
1 Archy’s comparison of sparrows to “the common people” wasn’t as much of a stretch as it seems. Only two weeks before this column appeared, an article in the New York Times called for the destruction of the English sparrow (which is actually a weaver finch that was never limited to England). In his 1913 book Our Vanishing Wild Life, William T. Hornaday, a New York Zoological Society curator, had denounced the English sparrow in terms that sounded remarkably like anti-immigration rhetoric: “It is a bird of plain plumage, low tastes, impudent disposition and persistent fertility. Continually does it crowd out its betters, or pugnaciously drive them away. . . . It has no song, and in habits it is a bird of the street and the gutter. . . . The English sparrow is a nuisance and a pest, and if it could be returned to the land of its nativity we would gain much.”
