Archy converses with ghosts and hornets, mollusks and birds. Marquis mutters asides about everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to Shakespeare; karma and kismet come up as often as unemployment and hunger. At one point Archy admits that his favorite sport is theology. “A human being so largely and kindly planned,” wrote columnist and friend Christopher Morley after Marquis’s death, “moves always in widening rings of irony.”13

Through the reincarnated cockroach, Marquis could also express the sense of fleeting time that haunted him. His long-range view of history, frequently including prehistory, fueled his melancholy. He felt that human life was a mess and always had been, that greed and ignorance destroyed the civilizations of the past and probably will destroy the current ones. “every time i die,” sighs Archy, “it makes me more of a fatalist.” John Batteiger, a journalist and Marquis bibliographer whose detective work contributed greatly to the present volume, writes that over the years Marquis exposed “a progressive heart and an increasingly cynical soul.”14 A smaller version of the same heart and soul animates the cockroach who throws himself bodily against the keys of Don Marquis’s typewriter.

 

Despite high hopes for his own art and occasional indulgence in self-pity, Archy is a Cynic philosopher who obsessively watches other creatures and even plays Boswell for Mehitabel. The cat, in contrast, sings about herself. She belts out the themes of Don Marquis the tippler, the tavern habitué and bon vivant. Hedonist, reprobate, Mehitabel pipes rhyming stanzas about free love, the burden of reproduction, back-alley heartbreak, and the need to dance away your sorrows. Many songs carry the refrain that despite the paradoxes of reincarnation and the villainy of toms she remains ever a lady. Quick to resent and quick to draw blood, Mehitabel would have wreaked havoc among Old Possum’s cats, even Growltiger and the Great Rumpuscat. T. S. Eliot’s rarefied London is a long way from the garbage cans of Shinbone Alley.15 Old Deuteronomy must not have his nap disturbed, while Mehitabel dances to keep from freezing because she has nowhere to sleep.

Mehitabel’s essentially static character—no reader expects her to find true love or repent her ways—is indicated by the Dickensian catch-phrases that surround her in our memory. Like Mr. Micawber or Sairey Gamp, she walks onstage accompanied by pet phrases: toujours gai, “a dance in the old dame yet,” and that Vonnegutian tic wotthehell. She is funny and outrageous and poignant, but she doesn’t learn anything, even though this is her ninth (and presumably her final) life. She goes where chance leads her, from the ancient Nile to Jazz Age Hollywood, pausing occasionally to forgive herself: “the things that i had not ought to / i do because i ve got to.”

In his choice of background for his protagonists, Marquis further prepared the stage for irony and satire. When human, Archy was a poet, a philosophical and artistic man of no social importance; in one poignant aside, he even remembers how homely a man he was. Mehitabel, in contrast, has fallen from a greater height. Once swaddled in privilege as the powerful Cleopatra, she now scrounges for a fishbone dinner:

a cockroach which you are
and a poet which you used to be
archy couldn t understand
my feelings at having come
down to this

 

Longtime Marquis fans may be surprised to learn in the present volume that in his initial appearance, as printed in the Evening Sun, Archy describes Mehitabel merely as “that cat,” although he names his rival poet, Freddy the rat. For the first six weeks Mehitabel remained nameless. When Marquis gathered the poems together for the first book, in 1927, he inserted her name into the earlier poems in order to establish her from scene one as worthy of sharing the marquee.

 

“Only fantasy was wide or versatile enough to contain him,” wrote Bernard DeVoto of Marquis; “his mind kept escaping through cracks in the sane, commonplace world out into dimensions that were loops and whorls and mazes of the unpredictable.” 16 Escaping through a narrative crack, Marquis was able to create characters and write about topics otherwise too hot to handle. Mehitabel’s questionable morality, disdain for motherhood, and irreverent mouth would not have been tolerated in a human character in a 1916 newspaper—just as that wily fox Reynard gets away with comments that would have resulted in legal action had they been about human beings. Few books tell us more about Medieval society than the Reynard story cycle, and Archy and Mehitabel likewise immortalize their era.

“Fantasy,” observed V. S. Pritchett, “states what realism will obscure or bungle.”17 It has always been the habitat where humans and animals commune. Beasts caper through mythology and folklore. We have long seen family resemblances in other creatures, usually beginning by interpreting their behavior in terms of our own.