The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel

by Don Marquis

  OCTOBER 12

  My Last Name

  1 The Blattidae family does indeed proudly claim Archy as a member. Variations on the name include the suborders Blattaria and Blattodea. Family is a taxonomic unit, smaller than an order and larger than a genus, and to zoom in more closely Archy is presumably a member of the genus Periplaneta and the (in this case quite apt) species americana, the common American cockroach.

  2 C. L. Marlatt (the Archy collections have always misprinted the first initial as “e”) was the author of many scientific papers. He named several species, including Pontania pacifica, a gall-inducing sawfly who would have made a great character.

  NOVEMBER 6

  Where Is Archy?

  1 Helmets at the time were a simple affair, thick layered leather with fur-lined ear guards that hung down and led to the nickname “dog ear helmet.”

  1917

  MARCH 30

  Between Him and His Masterpiece

  1 Perhaps it is worthwhile to explain, for the benefit of those born in the computer age, a bit about the forerunner of the keyboard and printer. In Marquis’s time a typewriter required a ribbon on a spool to provide ink for the keys to strike and carbon-coated paper to produce a copy behind the first page. The ribbon spool could be rewound, and later models did so automatically. Economical writers could type increasingly pale pages until the ribbon gave up the ghost. Archy’s method of inserting carbon paper and using the copy as the original image meant that he would have to type blindly. The column on December 13, 1922 includes a reference to a red ribbon; typewriter ribbons came mostly in black and a combination of black-and-red.

  APRIL 16

  War Times

  1 On April 4 the U.S. had officially entered the war.

  JUNE 15

  Comma Boss Comma

  1 Archy’s signature was printed in lowercase as usual in this column. He wanted small caps because that was how Marquis’s own name appeared at the end of each column.

  JULY 7

  Workman Spare That Bathtub

  1 The poem parodies a popular song, based upon a poem by George Pope Morris published in 1830:Woodman, spare that tree!

  Touch not a single bough!

  In youth it sheltered me,

  And I’ll protect it now.

  ’Twas my forefather’s hand

  That placed it near his cot:

  There, woodman, let it stand,

  Thy axe shall harm it not! . . .

  JULY 27

  Washington D C

  1 In 1917 the U.S. legislature was wrangling over the Lever Food Control Bill, which would permit government regulation of food production during the war. There were many attempts to add Prohibition measures to the bill, but at President Wilson’s request they were removed, and the bill passed on August 10.

  SEPTEMBER 24

  Out of the Cockroach Body

  1. Marquis was quoting a beautifully apt passage from Edward Fitzgerald’s 1859 translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát (see December 16, 1918 and its first note):

  Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,

  And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,

  Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him

  In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

  OCTOBER 13

  A German Periscope

  1 Heinie was an offensive slang term, borrowed from Canadian soldiers and dating from around 1904, for German soldiers or at times for any German. It was adapted from the German proper name Heinrich. British soldiers employed a different slang term, from another common German name: Fritz. World War I was also the time when Kraut, from the cabbage dish popular in Germany, became a British and American slang term for a German.

  OCTOBER 19

  Patience Worth

  1 See March 29, 1916, note 4.

  NOVEMBER 1

  Beware the Demon Rum

  1 Demon rum had been a common phrase in the temperance movement for decades, especially associated with militant anti-alcohol activists such as Carrie Nation. See also note 1 for June 10, 1918, and the note for January 20, 1919.

  NOVEMBER 8

  Sounds Like a Jolly Gang

  1 Archy is incorrect; not all of the partygoers are germs. True, the Treponema pallidum bacterium causes syphilis, and Diplococci is the plural of a genus of bacteria no longer employed by taxonomists. But Pediculus capitis is the head louse, kin to the patriotic body louse (“cootie”) in the column on June 24, 1918. Three of the other scientific terms, while printed correctly in the original column, have always been misprinted in the Archy collections: A pleochroic (misprinted “pioochroic”) halo is a discoloration around radioactive material in a rock, a scar of radioactive decay. Protococcus nivalis (misprinted “nivalls”) is the red snow plant, a unicellular algae. Phologopite (misprinted “phlogopito”) is a rare mineral of the mica group.

  1918

  MAY 28

  Named after the Washington Arch

  1 Archie was originally a British term, thought to have emerged from the Royal Flying Corps’ joking references to a recurring line in a monologue by the music hall comedian George Robey: “Archibald, certainly not!” Supposedly a flier said this aloud to shells narrowly missing his plane.The dominant feature of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, the Washington Arch is a marble monument, dedicated in 1895, which was sculpted to replace a wooden one built for the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration. In 1918 a sculpture of Washington as president was being added to match the 1916 addition of a statue of him as general.

  Is Archy referring to his human or his cockroach parents meeting under the Arch? At what point did his soul enter the body of a cockroach? He doesn’t say. Probably Marquis chose this site because he had identified Archy as a vers libre poet and he liked to mock Greenwich Village pretensions. But surely he also knew that before it was turned into a park in 1828, the site had been a cemetery and execution site, a fitting place from which to launch a reincarnation.

  2 Mithridates was a first-century-BCE king of Pontus, who was defeated by Pompey in the battle that earned him the sobriquet “the Great.” He is remembered for the legend that he ingested a small amount of poison every day in order to build up his resistance to assassins, and he actually did test poisons on prisoners. Marquis’s generation were reminded of Mithridates by a long reference to him in A. E. Housman’s poem “Terence, this is stupid stuff,” in A Shropshire Lad in 1896.

  JUNE 6

  Not a Fish

  1 Mola mola is the scientific name, and one of the common names, of the giant ocean sunfish, the largest bony fish on Earth. They can weigh 5,000 pounds (2,250 kilograms) and reach a length of more than 10 feet (3 meters). If any fish could be suspected of being an enemy invention, it would be the mola mola.

  JUNE 10

  Prohibition Rushes Toward Us

  1 The theme of Prohibition recurs in this collection frequently, but not as often as it shows up in Marquis’s life and other writings. Throughout his youth and early adulthood, the American temperance movement had grown in force. Such groups as the Prohibition Party formed in 1869 and the Anti-Saloon League founded in 1895 agitated vociferously for a national ban on alcoholic beverages. In 1919, three years after Archy’s debut, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act. It was designed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment (which another famous Marquis character, the saloon-frequenting Old Soak, dubbed the Eighteenth Commandment), which prohibited the production, sale, transportation, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Naturally the law, which was in effect until the Twenty-first Amendment voided it in 1933, proved a godsend to organized crime; it may have been the single greatest boost for the career of Chicago gangster Al Capone. No decade in American history is as associated in the public consciousness with drinking and wild parties and violent crime as the Prohibition Era.

  2 Most Latin poems did not have titles, and generally scholars refer to them by the first words of the first line. Eheu fugaces labuntur anni (roughly �
�Alas, our fleeting years pass away”) are the opening words of the fourteenth ode by Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE), better known as Horace. The Roman poet laments that age and death cannot be held at bay—not by trying to avoid war and illness and accident, not even by bribing the gods. In his 1919 book Prefaces, Marquis refers to the Eheu Fugaces Chop House, which he later calls “Eheu’s place.” As E. B. White pointed out, “In 1916 to hold a job on a daily paper, a columnist was expected to be something of a scholar and a poet. . . .”

  3 In Greek mythology the River Lethe flows through Hades, where its waters slake the spiritual thirst of the dead by causing them to forget their lives before.

  4 For all his unlikely tales, the braggart cockroach at least has his chronology straight. The sixteenth-century English playwright Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and both did indeed frequent London’s popular Mermaid Tavern. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were English essayists roughly a century later. Edgar Allan Poe published “The Raven” in 1844. Although already famous when this column appeared in 1918, the English poet and playwright John Masefield was only forty; he lived another half century, three decades longer than Marquis. A bung was a cork or other stopper used to plug the bunghole of a cask, which had to be dislodged with a strong tap by a wooden mallet called a bung-starter . What it started was the flow of spirits out of the cask.

  JUNE 19

  Income Tax Slacker

  1 The United States didn’t have an income tax law until 1862, when Congress enacted it to fund the Civil War. It was eliminated in 1872 and replaced with a “sin tax” on distilled spirits and tobacco. Not until 1913, only five years before Marquis was writing, did the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permanently establish the income tax. In 1918, the first year in which collected taxes exceeded one billion dollars, it was still a contentious topic.

  JUNE 21

  The Raiding Habit

  1 The New York district attorney was joining in a national fervor of privacy invasion and unwarranted arrest, which had begun during World War I. In the name of protecting the United States against its enemies, law enforcement agencies illegally spied on American citizens, determined to suppress dissent and prevent organized representation of labor. During 1917 and 1918, for example, more than 2,000 members of the International Workers of the World were prosecuted, many simply for criticizing the war. The previous year, J. Edgar Hoover had joined the staff of the Department of Justice, beginning the unscrupulous scramble for power that would result in his directorship of the FBI in 1924. The year 1918 saw the beginning of three years of largely illegal “Palmer Raids” at the behest of Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who had presidential ambitions of his own. On May 16, less than a month before this column, the U.S. government enacted the Espionage Act, which provided legal loopholes for further broadening the invasive tactics of law enforcement agencies.

  JUNE 24

  Loyal Allied Cootie

  1 Cootie is a slang term for the body louse, Pediculus corporis, which flourishes in unwashed clothing and therefore plagues soldiers and the poor.

  2 Paul von Hindenburg was the second president of Weimar Germany and had a profound impact on German history. In 1916 he had been appointed Chief of the Greater German General Staff, and he helped influence Kaiser Wilhelm to go to Holland. In 1933 Hindenburg would appoint Hitler Chancellor of Germany.

  3 Erich Ludendorff was Deputy Chief of Staff under Hindenburg, but his influence was almost unlimited. Together they gained control of most of Germany and unofficially demoted the Kaiser to an almost powerless role. Ludendorff ’s policy of vicious and unrestricted submarine warfare eventually helped draw the United States into war.

  4 Frederick Wilhelm Viktor Albert of Hohenzollern became Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888 upon the death of Frederick II. The Hohenzollern dynasty had ruled for five centuries over what had grown from the German state of Brandenburg to the kingdom of Prussia and finally to the German Empire. A militaristic and authoritarian ruler, Wilhelm was hardly unaware of the war, but ever since he had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908 he had been increasingly sidelined by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

  JULY 23

  One Thing That Makes Crickets So Melancholy

  1 After the redemptive Christmas Carol in Prose in 1843 and the political tale The Chimes in 1844, Charles Dickens published a sentimental and domestic Christmas story, The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, in December 1845. Marquis’s sarcastic little saga cleanses the palate of anyone treacled to death by Dickens’s symbolic cricket, blind toymaker, and miserly business owner.

  2 For other melancholy crickets, see Charlotte’s Web: “The crickets . . . sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad, monotonous song. . . . ‘Summer is dying, dying.’ . . . Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into fall—the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change” (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), page 113. E. B. White began writing Charlotte’s Web in early 1950, immediately after completing his introduction to a reissue of Doubleday’s omnibus collection The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. See the Introduction for more relationships between Marquis’s characters and White’s; see the column and note 2 for December 23, 1922, for another connection between the two books; and see September 12, 1916, for Archy’s opinion of crickets’ false cheer.

  AUGUST 6

  Reports of My Exit

  1 Archy is referring to a famous line by Mark Twain, supposedly cabled in response to a premature obituary: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

  AUGUST 13

  Falling Upwards

  1 In his last few lines Marquis is parodying one of the later stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1858 poem “The Ladder of St. Augustine”:The heights by great men reached and kept

  Were not attained by sudden flight,

  But they, while their companions slept,

  Were toiling upward in the night.

  AUGUST 24

  Smile When You Ride on the Subway

  1 The privately owned IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) system began operation in 1904. In 1918 the Number 4 line reached Wood-lawn. The subway had quickly become the best way to navigate the fast-growing city.

  SEPTEMBER 16

  A Genuine Quip

  1 Further explaining Archy’s explanation threatens to overwhelm his joke with notes, but this column provides a wonderful example of how Marquis’s (or Archy’s) mind worked. Actually the Latin quotation exists in both forms, ending with either nihil or nullus, and means “either Caesar or nothing.” It dates back not to Julius Caesar but to Cesare Borgia, the model for Macchiavelli’s ruthless antihero in The Prince. Like tsar, the term kaiser is adapted from the Latin caesar, and in fact retains the original pronunciation, with its hard Latin C: KY-zer. Archy’s was indeed a genuine quip, but it would have retained its freshness for only a few weeks. The mihiel refers to Saint-Mihiel, a village east of Paris where the first major American offensive of the war had just been fought on September 12 to 14, in which General Pershing’s troops forced the Germans to abandon a site they had held since the beginning of the war.

  SEPTEMBER 26

  Tobacco Fund

  1 To this entry Marquis appended a note: “The money you put into a Victory Bond is still yours. You are only asked to help your country by helping yourself.” During this period he devoted many brief Archy appearances to promoting the sale of bonds to raise money for the war effort; the present volume includes as examples only this one and the one for October 1. A few days before this column, The Nation had run an article lauding Thrift Stamps, or War Saving Stamps, as “fruit of many a little self-denial,” and describing how they added up to a fifty-dollar Liberty Bond, “paid for in instalments by months of thoughtful economy. . . .” In the years 1917-18, individuals, small businesses, and banks purchased more than $21 billion worth of stamps and bonds.

  2 The Sun’s tobacco fund was o
ne of many such drives to raise money for purchasing tobacco that could be sent to soldiers at the front. On July 18 the Sun had published a long editorial headlined “Tobacco Needful in Trenches,” subheaded “Soldiers Testify to Its Helpful Qualities—‘Sun’ Smokes ‘Come in Handy’—New Donations Furnish Ammunition for Pipes.” Many physicians still argued that tobacco had healthful side effects, but most of the promotions emphasized how it helped soldiers to relax during what this article called “the supernervous state produced by modern warfare.” In the January 28, 1918 column Archy himself contributes money to the Sun’s tobacco fund.

  OCTOBER 26

  Jane Gad Fly

  1 Neysa McMein was a famously beautiful popular artist best known for her illustrations of chic young American women. During the war she designed posters for both the United States and France, and she spent six months in Europe entertaining troops. A woman of varied talents, she was both a member of the Algonquin Round Table and the illustrator who created the original image of the fictional ideal-American-housewife Betty Crocker for the General Mills food company.