When craft lifts the protest into art, it has a chance of surviving.

But if the work outlives its creator, it faces another hazard: its allusions become increasingly antiquated. The Archy and Mehitabel adventures appeared between 1916 and 1936. For many twenty-first-century readers, especially students, they already teem with references as archaic as Voltaire’s. In the present volume, readers will find a broad selection of the Archy and Mehitabel columns (many of them never before reprinted), annotated with biographical and historical context, in the order of their original newspaper publication. This narrative format not only demonstrates the growth of Marquis’s characters and themes; it also chronicles his fascinating era.

A NEW OUTLOOK UPON LIFE

i will write you a series of poems showing how things look to a cockroach

Don Marquis prefaced Archy’s debut in “The Sun Dial” with an account of their first meeting. On March 29, 1916, his column opened with its usual brief jibes at the world around him—at a prominent judge, at the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa, at scarlet fever.7 Then he told his readers about a strange phenomenon that he had witnessed a couple of weeks before: “We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys.” There is no further reference to Archy’s large size; in the rest of the series he is able to quickly scurry out of sight on those rare occasions when anyone notices him.8

Marquis describes the now classic scene in which he witnessed the cockroach’s herculean efforts:

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 paper so that a fresh line may be started. . . . 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.

And then Marquis walks over to his own typewriter and reads Archy’s first words to appear in print—at least in this lifetime:

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

It is true, as some commentators have remarked, that there was a practical side to the creation of Archy. Free verse was at its faddish height and ripe for mockery, and its short unrhymed lines permitted the deadline-haunted Marquis to fill column inches quickly. A longtime newspaperman, Marquis knew also that variety on the page draws a reader’s eye and promises a lively mix. “In the very act of spoofing free verse,” wrote E. B. White of Marquis, “he was enjoying some of its obvious advantages.”9 Typographical stunts may have lured browsers to the column, but such effects didn’t make the series memorable. The characters did.

The mystery novelist Rex Stout once explained that his character Nero Wolfe differed from other detectives that he wrote about because he wasn’t invented: “He was born. A born character arrives completely created.”10 Archy arrived this way. Marquis didn’t consciously sit down to invent a character who might serve his artistic and commercial needs; he was the last to realize the insect’s significance. His description of Archy’s first appearance is true in the way that dreams are true. One day a cockroach showed up on the desk in his mind, and Marquis stood aside and watched to learn what it would say. The most artistic side of Don Marquis is distilled into Archy’s cynical humor and artistic struggles. Skeptical, world-weary, Archy nonetheless yearns to communicate his response to life and to the mystery of consciousness embodied.

Archy laments the state of the world but no longer expects reform. Poetry is his solace and irony his defense. “His thought is spun of contempt and holy anger,” wrote Bernard DeVoto of Archy, “down some dizzy slant of the mind where only he could keep his feet—happily, he had six.”11 Yes, but let’s not forget that these conceptual fireworks arrive inside a versatile wit that is no less amusing for sometimes being gallows or gutter humor. The Archy and Mehitabel stories—many in the form of poems, but usually still narratives—are marvelously funny, even if their comedy sometimes becomes, as Richard Schweid remarks, “a humor as sharp as the grave.”12

Marquis turns his sardonic view itself into an art form. A pharaoh’s mummy awakens after arid millennia to find Prohibition denying him relief. When Archy tires of his high-flying soul being trapped in such an earthbound form, he attempts suicide, but he can’t figure out how a cockroach can kill itself. Archy and his creator play many roles. Often Marquis casts himself as an exploitative boss and the cockroach as a long-suffering employee who appeals for raises—in the form of larger type and more edible scraps around the office—and finally strikes for better working conditions.