archy and mehitabel

The Sound of One Genius Typing

Thought I’d try something different this week: step away from the daily disaster feed and introduce readers to one of my favourite poets. A cockroach named archy.

The bug was the invention of Don Marquis, a jazz age newspaper reporter and columnist. Though Marquis is not much more now than a footnote in lit-class anthologies, he was once hailed as one of America's greatest humourists.

In a 1916 column for The New York Sun, Marquis told readers of finding a mysterious poem, signed only “archy,” when he returned to his typewriter in the morning. Discovering it to be the work a cockroach, he began leaving out blank paper each night for his little correspondent, who banged out his nocturnal thoughts one painful lowercase letter at a time by hurling himself from key to key. Because archy was unable to work the shift key at the same time, his missives were free of capitals and full punctuation, preceding the poet ee cummings in style.

The bug’s concerns, faithfully reported via Marquis in ongoing columns, ranged from the crumb-sized to the cosmic. Claiming to be the reincarnation of a “verse libre poet,” archy wrote luminous stanzas about other creatures in and around “shinbone alley,” including mehitabel the alley cat, a free-spirited feline who claims an exalted previous existence of her own as Cleopatra.

Readers who feel some poets “muddy their waters so they appear deep” will have no trouble with archy's straightforward leaps from key to key. A tough-minded versifier with a romantic streak, archy bemoans his reincarnation from human to a less poetic station.

gods i am pent up in a cockroach

i with the soul of a dante

am mate and companion of fleas

i with the gift of homer

must smile when a mouse calls me pal

tumble bugs are my familiars

this is the punishment meted

because i have written vers libre

…

i with the brain of a milton

fell into the mincemeat at christmas

and was damned-near baked in a pie.

The little poet takes a shine to mehetibel, one of life’s survivors. A bohemian whose dancing careeer was hampered by the birth of “one damn kitten after another,” she strives to keep her dignity and proclaims “wot the hel wot the hel…the life i led was the life i like and theres pep in the old dame yet.”

In the lesson of the moth, archy asks a smoldering survivor why it was trying to acquaint itself with a light bulb filament. The moth responds:

we get bored with the routine

and crave beauty

and excitement

fire is beautiful

and we know that if we get too close it will kill us

but what does that matter

it is better to be happy

for a moment

and be burned up with beauty

than to live a long time

and be bored all the while.

Comments archy:

i do not agree with him/myself

i would rather have

half the happiness and twice the longevity

but at the same time i wish

there was something i wanted

as badly as he wanted to fry himself

The cockroach has less patience with some of the other creatures he meets. A cricket who incessantly declaims "cheer up, cheer up” is dismissed as a tiresome and insincere optimist. A vain lightning bug named Broadway is deflated when reminded that thunderclaps don’t accompany his marquee effects. And in warty bliggens the toad, archy encounters a self-important amphibian who believes his pond environment was constructed for his benefit by a vast, benign frog.

Occasionally archy wrote from a perspective other than his own. In the astounding the robin and the worm, a worm's last thoughts of self-preservation turn to joyous, avian assimilation as it's ingested by a robin (which in turn meets a similar fate in mehitabel’s belly). Obviously, this isn't children's literature.

Don Marquis died in 1937, and many of his manuscripts and scrapbooks were simply gathered together, locked in a steamer trunk and stored in a Brooklyn warehouse. Among the papers were hundreds of unpublished archy and mehitabel stories, discovered in the late nineties by Marquis fan and archivist Jeff Adams. The resulting books, archyology and its sequel, archyology II (the final dig), are mostly b-sides. But you’ll find all the hit singles in the anthology, archy and mehitabel, which features the charming original illustrations by cartoonist George Herriman, of Krazy Kat fame.

Marquis once said that “writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo.” A delayed response is better than none at all. The musings of his offbeat bug echo past century-old sounds of speakeasies and gin joints, with the music of the spheres playing in the background.