By 1916 this misconception was inspiring a torrent of unrhymed, meter-free writing. But the era also produced much strong and original free verse by writers such as Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Amy Lowell (whose work Marquis particularly disliked). The year before Archy arrived, Edgar Lee Masters published his influential volume of elegiac free verse, Spoon River Anthology, and T. S. Eliot inaugurated the Modernist era with his free-verse “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”18 Also in 1915 Kafka brought invertebrate vermin to twentieth-century literature by having Gregor Samsa awaken as a beetle—not, as some writers have claimed, as a cockroach.19 It is worth pointing out, however, that Kafka’s story had not yet been translated into English when Marquis invented Archy.

Although Marquis composed plenty of free-verse poems that he did not credit to a cockroach with a typing disability, it is the insect, not the newspaperman, who flatly proclaims himself a vers libre poet. Marquis was certainly not opposed to rhyme and usually found it crucial in his bag of tricks. Unforeseen rhyme is a staple of comic verse. Shortly after Mehitabel appears on the scene, she begins caterwauling stanzas that are much funnier because of their sometimes tortuous rhyme scheme. In the Archy poems, Marquis turns to rhyme whenever he wants to—probably whenever the first couple of lines arrived rhyming and he surrendered to their momentum. He explained it on the first occasion—April 10, 1916—by casually remarking of Archy that “he was a rhymester too.” Glib facility was Marquis’s trademark from newsroom to saloon, but it required that he trust inspiration. And spontaneity was no guarantee of quality, as a few of the Archy and Mehitabel columns (not reprinted here) demonstrate.

Because Archy calls himself a free-verse poet, we tend to think of all his contributions to Marquis’s column as poems. Actually some are poems, some sketches, and some transcriptions of songs, usually but not always Mehitabel’s. Archy dislikes restrictive categories. Like Wagstaff, Groucho Marx’s college president in Horsefeathers, he could sing, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He even lives a bandit’s life on the frontier between poetry and prose. He couldn’t survive without enjambment, the continuation of verse from one line to the next with no pause such as a grammatical break or a rhyme.

Christopher Morley described Marquis’s choice of lower-case for Archy’s writings as a waggish stunt that once begun could not be discontinued.20 True, but it was also a reasonable outgrowth of the premise, and it afforded Marquis an opportunity to do what Alfred Hitchcock advised filmmakers to do: exploit the setting. Lowercase invites other experimentation, such as Archy’s parody of the Simplified Spelling movement. Language-conscious writers create narrators who exist within and because of their unique manner of expression; witness Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange or Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime—or even Huckleberry Finn. Archy’s voice doesn’t merely report his character. It helps fashion it.

THE TYRANNY OF CIRCUMSTANCE

While preparing a biographical essay about Marquis, Christopher Morley once complained that he was having trouble sorting fact from fiction. “It is true that I have invented for myself a good many experiences which I never really had,” replied Marquis. “But they were all experiences which belonged to me by right of temperament and character. . . . I was despoiled of them by the rough tyranny of Circumstance.”21 He insisted that he balanced accounts by omitting many real-life incidents because they were lies told about him “by the slinking facts of life.” His unpublished autobiographical fragments include the admission, “I must begin being honest by telling you that I shall lie a little here and there.”22 He so loved speaking through characters that he wrote his memoir in the third person. Therefore it is prudent to note that, although most of the following incidents can be confirmed, a handful may be embroidered.

The most outrageous story that Marquis told about his life, however, was true. Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born in the Illinois hamlet of Walnut, west of Chicago, on July 29, 1878.