“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

A Little Random Reading

Here at week’s end, I’m sorry to report that February has brought illness to many Up North residents—colds, flu, what-have-you. The only way I can think to turn the sad fact of illness in a happier direction is by telling you of a children’s book that has won both the Caldecott Medal and the award for Best Illustrated Children’s Book from the New York Times. Here it is, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, written by Philip C. Stead and illustrated by Erin E. Stead.


Amos the zookeeper loves his job at the zoo and always manages to spend “quality” time with his animal friends. What will the animals do when Amos has to stay home sick? You might make a general guess, but you’ll want to investigate more closely so as not to miss each engaging encounter.


Making this an even better story, I can report to you that the Sneads divide their time between NYC and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I’m in Part VI (of VIII parts) of Anna Karenina, and things are not going well with Anna and Vronsky, which is no surprise to anyone who has read the book before, as I have, but would probably not surprise anyone coming to it for the first time, either. I set Tolstoy aside to read yet another delightful book by Oliver Sacks, this one his memoir, Uncle Tungsten, which allowed me to live a vicarious boyhood in London. Then it was off for a trip to New York City during Prohibition with Archy and Mehitabel, the irrepressible cockroach and alley cat duo created by Don Marquis. Everyone should make the acquaintance of Archy. It’s difficult, though, as the fictional bookseller in The Haunted Bookshop learned when his wife objected to his taste, to find excerpts to convey that adequately convey Archy’s charm.

i heard a
couple of fleas
talking the other
day says one come
to lunch with
me i can lead you
to a pedigreed
dog says the
other one
i do not care
what a dog s
pedigree may be
safety first
is my motto what
i want to know
is whether he
has got a
muzzle on
millionaires and
bums taste
about alike to me

That was the cockroach talking, but it’s Archy’s pal, the alley cat named Mehitabel, the free spirit claiming to be “always a lady,” who is the star.

i look back on my life
and it seems to me to be
just one damned kitten
after another
i am a dancer archy
and my only prayer
is to be allowed
to give my best to my art
but just as i feel
that i am succeeding
in my life work
along comes another batch
of these damned kittens

I want to go back a couple of weeks to say a word about Allen Shawn’s memoir, Twin. Well, two words. First, it is called a memoir, so I’m not sure why I expected it to be more about his autistic sister than about his own life; once I got over my faulty preconception, however, I enjoyed the book much more. Second, the audience I expect to be most fascinated and moved by this book is not parents or siblings of autistic children or memoir readers in general but people interested in what goes on in musical composition. Shaw is a composer, you see, and the way he writes of composition and how he grew into it is unlike anything else I’ve read. Musicians and music lovers, here is a book for you, though actually it will interest anyone interested in odd “corners” of the world and the human psyche.

Finally, you could do worse this week than to pick up a copy of the New Yorker magazine, the Feb. 14 & 21 issue. An Adam Gopnik essay begins on page 124 and is, as always, worth several times the cover price of the magazine. Bear with me while I quote just a fragment (and I promise to do so briefly, despite all the many underlined sentences and bracketed paragraphs in the magazine in front of me). He has introduced “cognitive entanglement” and the ways spouses’ memories intertwine, and then comes the Gopnik arabesque:

Google is really the world’s Thurber wife: smiling patiently and smugly as she explains what the difference is between eulogy and elegy and what the best route is to that little diner outside Hackensack. The new age is one in which we all have a know-it-all spouse at our fingertips.

I happen to have in stock, right now, a new paperback copy of Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon and have no hesitation in saying that this writer is a treasure of our time. If Don Marquis hadn’t created Archy the cockroach, Adam Gopnik might have.