“Toujours gai” -- and Snow at Last!

Friday morning surprise

archy seeks to vary his diet

I’d been up since six o’clock, smiling over Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel, the antics of two transmigrated souls, one formerly a free verse poet, the other Cleopatra, now embodied respectively in the forms of a cockroach and an alley cat. The stories come directly from archy, still a poet but now also a necessarily resourceful little cockroach who can only pound out his adventures and reflections by jumping on one typewriter key at a time, landing on his head with all the force of his little body. Unable to work the shift key, he makes do without capital letters and punctuation.

boss i am disappointed in 

some of your readers they 

are always asking how does 

archy work the shift so as to get a 

new line or how does archy do 

this or do that they 

are always interested in technical 

details when the main question is 

whether the stuff is  

literature or not

Now inhabiting a cockroach’s body, archy has a new view of life: i see things from the under side now

But it is mehitabel the cat who so often steals the show. While protesting that she is “always a lady” and “toujours gai,” mehitabel’s amorous adventures take place within a perilous life of want and near-starvation, and she is not above tearing the ear off some tomcat who promises her luxury and then fails to stand and deliver. Neither do periodic litters of kittens cramp mehitabel’s style for long. She knows she will end on a garbage scow, but until then,

i never sing blue 

wotthehell bill 

believe me you 

i never sing blue 

there s a dance or two 

in the old dame still 

i never sing blue  

wotthehell bill

Underneath the humor and courage of these entertaining characters is the pathos of life in the America of World War I, Prohibition, the stock market crash, and subsequent Great Depression. In “pity the poor spiders,” archy is saddened by roach exterminators and shares the sad tale of a spider who bitterly lament the advent of flyswatters:

curses on these here swatters 

what kills off all the flies 

for me and my little daughters 

unless we eats we dies

The mother spider’s mate, “lured off by a centipede,”  made no excuses for abandoning his family but said only as he left them, “tis wrong but i ll get a feed.”

The cockroach makes do with apple parings left in the newspaperman’s wastebasket but pleads for “a crumb of bread” sometime, while mehitabel’s adventures are as much about food as art or love. In one particularly haunting piece the cat, now with one frozen, crippled paw and nowhere warm to sleep, must dance all night.

whirl mehitabel whirland 

show your shadow how  

tonight it s dance with the bloody moon 

tomorrow the garbage scow  

… 

whirl mehitabel whirl 

leap shadow leap 

you gotta dance till the sun comes up 

for you got no place to sleep

mehitabel remains "toujours gai"

I can’t help wondering if the social commentary aspect reached many comfortable, well-fed readers at the time these pieces first appeared. Illustrations by George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat,” undoubtedly contributed to the reception of archy and mehitabel as comic characters — which, of course, they are, and that implies no contradiction.

As I said at the beginning, though, I was up early, reading, while darkness still surrounded the cabin, and when I finished my book and looked out the windows, what a surprise! We’d only been expecting a rainy day and maybe some snow up on the peaks. Instead, peaks are hidden from view, and snow blankets every twig. Snow is all around us.

wotthehell - as mehitabel would say. archy would add, in words rather than sign, exclamation mark