The Best of Archy and Mehitabel

by Don Marquis, George Herriman (Illustrator), E.B. White (Introduction)

A poet in a former life, Archy has been reincarnated as a cockroach who types by diving headfirst onto a typewriter (and is famously unable to operate the shift key to produce capital letters); his side-kick Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims to have once been Cleopatra. Archy's poems irresistibly evoke Jazz Age New York - as seen from the alley; funny, wise, tender and tough, they represent the very best of American humour. Including George Herriman's whimsical illustrations and a classic introduction by novelist E.B. White, this Pocket Poet selection will make a beautiful volume, perfectly sized for its tiny hero.

Genres: Poetry, Humor

223 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2011

About the author

Donald Robert Perry "Don" Marquis was a newspaper columnist as well as a playwright, novelist, and poet, best known for his "Archy and Mehitabel" free verse and his "Old Soak" anti-Prohibition play.

Reviews

[heptagrammaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

one morning
when the poet woke
from troubled dreams
in which he wrote
in rhymeless reams
of greatest goals and smaller beings
and of revolutionary dealings
that would reproach the boss
he found himself transformed
into a roach
and also cross
but whatthehell
he lay onto his calloused head
his helpless legs all kicking
and pressed down on the writing keys

[Moira Fogarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius. Pure genius. I savored 'Archy and Mehitabel'; read every last word. From the insightful introductory essay by E.B. White, to the scratchy pen illustrations by George Herriman of 'Krazy Kat and Ignatz' fame, to the final poem by Don Marquis, the whole thing filled me with glee.

Marquis was a newspaper reporter during and after WWI, and these vers libre poems were published in the New York Sun between 1916 and the early 1920s. The humor is timeless, but they are steeped in the mood and politics and society of that era. The subject matter of the poems varies widely; from ghosts and ectoplasm to Shakespeare and theater, and the narrators are variously cats, parrots, rats, toads, fleas, moths, and dogs.

The poems are written without punctuation or capitalization, using line breaks to give the necessary rhythmic pauses. This is because they were written by a fictional cockroach, Archy, who was a free verse poet in a previous life, and who wrote stories on Don's old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left.

Archy accomplished this in a painful fashion by flinging himself headfirst down onto the keys (thus, no capitals, as it would be impossible for him to hit a key and shift at the same time with his full-body typing technique). When he needs explicit punctuation, he has to type it out full length, as 'exclamation point', 'period' or 'question mark'.

Mehitabel, Archy's partner in crime, is another transmigrated soul. A downtrodden alley cat with loose morals, she claims to have been Cleopatra in a former life. Mehitabel laments the domestic trials of the female artist hampered by kittens, but her constant refrains of wotthehell wotthehell and toujours gai toujours gai show her resilient and devil-may-care spirit.

I don't know what it is about these stories that captured my imagination so completely. The voice of Archy is distinctive, seductive, persuasive. He often despairs of his condition as a bug, not in a Kafkaesque way, but in the manner of a true writer plagued by doubt and angst about the quality of his verse, always struggling against his muse, asking the question "is it literature?". His mastery of language is awe-inspiring. His turn of phrase is quick, nonchalant and witty.

In the poem 'archy interviews a pharaoh' (which is actually about Prohibition and a thirst for beer), Archy devises half a dozen playful ways of referring to the dry pharoah in a deferential yet saucy manner. He calls him 'my regal leatherface', 'old tan and tarry', 'the princely raisin', 'divine drought', 'my reverend juicelessness', and 'the royal dessication'.

I found myself wanting to type out several of these poems - notably, 'the lesson of the moth' - to print and post around my workplace as a constant reminder of the juicy essence of life and romance, and the universal pain of writing. They taste like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, yet they bubble with an effervescence and playfulness all their own. They look forward, towards John Steinbeck and Henry Miller and the Beat generation to come.

This is not your standard poetry. It's not likely to be studied in English literature classes in high school (more's the pity), it doesn't often rhyme and it isn't Tennyson or Milton (although the writer has clearly read and revered these greats, and references them in his work). Marquis speaks in an American voice, a free voice, a laughing, crying, comic, tragic voice. It's great stuff and I hope you read it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

- i make a debatable decision about a book review

boss
i read that book you did
about archy and mehitabel
with transmigrations and observations
on insects and alley cats
actors and aristocrats
politicians
prohibitions
and dried-up pharaohs

it was pretty good
for vers libre
humourous
satirical
not too lyrical
but wotthehell boss wotthehell
it was made into a musical

it made me chuckle
more than once
which is no mean feat
i try to be
toujours gai and jamais triste
but mehitabel i ain t

the illustrations were krazy
i could ve done
with more
pen scratch
line hatch
there was so much
more to draw

well
my time in
shinbone alley s
over
though i m sure to
visit agen
there s a read in
the old book yet

meanwhile i ll try
to keep
toujours gai boss toujours gai

so cheerio my deario

[Aly Fox-Laverick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Archy the cockroach - a free verse poet in a former life - relates his ideas on the world at large from his view from the underside. Along with his spontaneous and always ladylike friend Mehitabel the cat, they IVE it up and down in the the American roaring 20s.
Don Marquis’ Archy is a wonderfully intelligent and witty poet who gave the world a new and exciting - and underrated - view on humanity.

[Avery Legendre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius! Great art is a treasure chest with jewels and other little treasure maps inside. I think this was mentioned in a Patti Smith book.

‘ wotthehell o wotthehell i m a lady thats toujours gai ‘

‘ some day my guts will be fiddle strings but my ghost will dance while they play ‘

Some favorites: a spider and a fly, the lesson of the moth, ghosts, unjust, quote and only man is vile quote, mehitabel sees it through, what the ants are saying*

*my shit + crazy this is roughly 100 years old….

[Terry Springer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wish I'd read this decades ago.

I would recommend this book for high school and up. The history of the years this was written would be an interesting addition but not necessary. Many good insights from a cockroach looking at the world from the underside.

[Richard French · Rating 4 out of 5]

An American gem -- original, humorous, will probably always have readers.

[M. Winslow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at these two unlikely friends and comments on their times.

[ALLEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters of Archy & Mehitabel go back to about 1920, when reporter Don Marquis invented Archy, a poetic cockroach who stayed after hours in Marquis' newspaper office but could only communicate -- with difficulty -- by jumping up and down on the keys, banging his head for each painful character. Of course, upper case was out of the question. In the newspaper office, Archy's first and bestest friend was Mehitabel, a pussy cat -- or should we say alley cat, since Mehitabel's affairs are torrid and occasionally sordid. But wotthehell (to use a common Mehitabel expression), she has always been passionate in all her prior lives, going back to Cleopatra, though she is not all that well informed about the dynasties of Egypt (a failing Mehitabel attributes to the passing of thousands of years and possibly dozens of reincarnated lives). This book is an entryway into an era in which newspapermen (and they were still always men) were expected to be moody, literate, and even poetic.

All in all, the whimsy, sharp good sense, bracing blank verse and poetic outcries (even if they are cat-calls) are well worth exploring, even by us moderns. THE BEST OF ARCHY AND MEHITABEL is a bit of Americana people are still enjoying today.

Excerpt from the poetry in this book, a complaint by none other than Mehitabel:

archy she said to me
yesterday
the life of a female
artist is continually
hampered what in hell
have i done to deserve
all these kittens
i look back on my life
and it seems to be
just one damned kitten
after another

NOTE: This is an Everyman's edition, so hardbound but modest in trim size.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, for several reasons:

> It came highly recommended by people I know as well as reviews online.
> I enjoy a vast variety of poetry, and this looked along the lines of one of my favorites, Ogden Nash (humorous blank verse).
> The illustrations looked charming (particularly since I'm a fan of "Mutts")
> I even liked the cheerful yellow cover and the small binding. Nothing to judge a book on, to be sure, but a pretty package always is a plus when I own a book.

But I didn't find it reached my expectations at all. Sure, I saw the humor in the poems, but it was so dark and negative. The poetry itself lacked a certain "flow" that I've come to expect from good blank verse like T.S. Eliot. Frankly it seemed lazy more than ground-breaking, and mean rather than witty.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I collect poetry via Everyman’s Library Pocket Poetry. I’d never seen nor heard of this title before until visiting San Francisco’s City Lights Book Store. These are more stories than poems, written by Archy, a cockroach who lives in the author’s typewriter. We hear the adventures of archy (he can’t hold two typewriter keys down at the same time, so nothing is capitalized) and mehitabel, the cat (who was Cleopatra in a former life.) The verse was written between 1916-1937, and holds up fairly well. Which also makes the whole collection rather depressing as the more things change, the more the stay the same.

[Rich Bergmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a JOY this was to read! A collection of short stories from the previous turn of the century that capture the zeitgeist of the time. And lest we think our time is so unique, many of the issues and concerns of the day translate well to that time nearly a century ago.

[Meg]

Toujours gai, kid, toujours gai.