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A review by oldpondnewfrog
Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis
4.0
An Amazon reviewer said "Writers (particularly journalists) can go lifetimes without attaining such loose-limbed grace," and I think that's a really well-chosen description of his style: loose-limbed grace. Perfect tone for his characters, but fresh, slangy, casual and formal in the same breath, and with an unusual combination of humor and melancholy floating around and within other like an expertly balanced chili-passionfruit margarita.
Archy is a cockroach who used to be a vers libre poet in a former life. He types on Marquis's typewriter at night, jumping on the keys one by one to operate the machine. He can't work the capital letters (because they need the shift key pressed at the same time), and he has trouble with line breaks. "We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before," writes Marquis. Writing is exhausting to Archy, but it's important so he does it.
Archy is polite but also blunt.
His friend Mehitabel, the alley cat, is great too. I love her long-winded repetitiveness. "toujours gai archy toujours gai is what I always say always a lady i m a free spirit archy there s a dance in the old dame yet wotthehell wotthehell there s a dance in the old dame yet. She reminds me of certain older ladies I have known.
Great line breaks.
Archy is a cockroach who used to be a vers libre poet in a former life. He types on Marquis's typewriter at night, jumping on the keys one by one to operate the machine. He can't work the capital letters (because they need the shift key pressed at the same time), and he has trouble with line breaks. "We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before," writes Marquis. Writing is exhausting to Archy, but it's important so he does it.
Archy is polite but also blunt.
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basketI loved Archy trading insults with the Met's pharaoh mummy—the small and the great just having fun jibing each other, almost tenderly, humor and pathos, they are strangers but also strangely intimate, maybe because each has few other friends:
but your paste is getting so stale i can t eat it
...
don t you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy
kingly has beenThe poor desiccated pharaoh mummy just wants beer, it's all he thinks of, ice-cold beer...
says i
what was your ambition
when you had any
insignificant
and journalistic insect
you must be respectful
in the presence
of a mighty desolation
little archy
forty centuries of thirst
look down upon you
His friend Mehitabel, the alley cat, is great too. I love her long-winded repetitiveness. "toujours gai archy toujours gai is what I always say always a lady i m a free spirit archy there s a dance in the old dame yet wotthehell wotthehell there s a dance in the old dame yet. She reminds me of certain older ladies I have known.
Great line breaks.
the longer i live the more iJust realized this is the centennial of Archy's first appearance. I hope he's been reincarnated since into whatever "higher" life form he wants to be. But I think I like him best as a cockroach.
realize that everything is
relative even morality is
relative things you would not do
sometimes you would do other
times for instance i would not consider
it honorable in me as a
righteous cockroach to crawl into a
near sighted man s soup that
man would not have a sporting chance but
with a man with ordinarily good eye
sight i should say it was
up to him to watch his soup himself and
yet if i was very tired and hungry
i would crawl into even a near
sighted man s soup knowing all the
time it was wrong and my necessity would
keep me from reproaching myself too
bitterly afterwards you can
not make any hard and fast rule
concerning the morality of crawling into
soup nor anything else a certain
alloy of expediency improves the
gold of morality and makes
it wear all the longer