expression is the need of my soul

Don Marquis decided to create the character of archy, a deceased vers libre poet whose soul had transmigrated into the body of a cockroach, for the usual hodgepodge of inspirations that motivate any writer, but principal among them was laziness. Marquis was a columnist for the New York Evening Sun, and as such, responsible for filling a daily column in a way that would be interesting enough to keep people buying the Sun.

So why archy, the vers libre bard? Well, if Marquis was writing free verse, he didn’t have to fill out whole lines, and since a newspaper column’s length is measured in column inches, not word count, he could get away with writing less.

Typing on a typewriter was a lot more like manual labor than using the keyboard of a laptop. Poets like e. e. cummings had made it easier on themselves by eschewing capital letters, but an imitation of  cummings would have been a little too highbrow for the average newspaper. Unless…

Unless the writer were a cockroach who typed by hurling himself headfirst onto one key after another and could not possibly have worked the shift key. And punctuation, as well, was too much to ask of poor archy (Marquis insisted that although archy could not reach the shift key, the rest of us could, and we were to call him Archy, but that has never stuck – archy he is, and archy he will always be).

Hard to imagine a set of less worthy motives for creating poetry, right? Not up there with being hurt into it by mad Ireland, as Auden said of Yeats. Or the modest desire to be thought of as one of the English poets, like Keats. Or, as Frost would have it, a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

And yet Marquis created something that lives on, a century after it was written.

Art isn’t always the product of struggle. Well, yes it is, but individual works of art aren’t always the product of struggle. Carl Perkins struggled to get out of the cotton fields, struggled to learn to play music on a homemade guitar built from a cigar box and a broomstick, then later Gene Autry model with old strings that kept breaking, and since he couldn’t afford new ones, he would tie the old ones back together. He struggled to learn to write songs, and to find places that would let him play. Then one night he got an idea for a song and wrote it in fifteen minutes on a grease-stained paper grocery bag. He called Sun Records owner in the middle of the night and told him he’d written a song called “Blue Suede Shoes.”

“A gospel tune, like ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’?” Phillips asked.

“No, this is a song about a guy who has a new pair of shoes and he doesn’t want his girl friend to step on them.”

“Uh-uh, Carl, I don’t think so.”

“Just listen to a little of it………” and Perkins began to sing it through the phone.

“How fast can you get down to the studio?”

“Blue Suede Shoes” is a song of not a little emotional complexity. It’s got a lot of humor—he’s making fun of the poor redneck who sets such value in these new shoes. But he feels the boy’s pride, too—Perkins knows something about what it means to not have a lot, and to get something special. And still today, blue suede shoes have a symbolic resonance. You put on a pair of blue suede shoes, you’re going to feel a little different about yourself. A little silly, but a little special.

“Blue Suede Shoes” came from an interesting time in American popular culture. It was a blending of two cultural threads – country and rhythm and blues – neither of which were taken remotely seriously by the guardians of America’s culture. People who were making records in those genres, and their hybrid offspring, rock and roll, had no idea that their creations would last for more than a few weeks on the charts, then to be forgotten forever. And yet many of them have proved timeless, have woven themselves into the fabric of our culture. Some decades later—some time in the 1970s or ‘80s. maybe—popular musicians decided they would make anthemic songs that would last forever, and they’re mostly forgotten.

“archy and mehitabel” came from an interesting time in American culture, too. E. B. White, in an appreciation of Marquis, wrote: "In one sense Archy and his racy pal Mehitabel are timeless. In another sense, they belong rather intimately to an era--an era in American letters when this century was in its teens and its early twenties, an era before the newspaper column had degenerated. In 1916 to hold a job on a daily paper, a columnist was expected to be something of a scholar and a poet--or if not a poet at least to harbor the transmigrated soul of a dead poet. Nowadays, to get a columning job a man need only have the soul of a Peep Tom, or of a third-rate prophet. There are plenty of loud clowns and bad poets at work on papers today, but there are not many columnists adding to belles lettres, and certainly there is no Don Marquis at work on any big daily, or if there is, I haven't encountered his stuff."

archy asks an interesting question in one of Marquis’s early columns:

How do you know? “Blue Suede Shoes” probably isn’t literature. It relies too much on the total package—the melody, the guitar, the beat. Chuck Berry’s songs probably are literature. I’ve made that case in a previous column, and I probably will again. And archy?

Don Marquis was to some extent making fun of vers libre, but if fun doesn’t have a place in literature, well, then, all I can do is paraphrase Emma Goldman, revolutionary icon (and this is itself a bit of a paraphrase), “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Marquis had a background in poetry. In 1915, pre-archy, he published a volume of verse, Dreams & Dust. Given Marquis’s generation, it’s not surprising that he was not a vers libre bard. Here’s a sample:

THE NAME

  IT shifts and shifts from form to form,
    It drifts and darkles, gleams and glows;
  It is the passion of the storm,
    The poignance of the rose;
  Through changing shapes, through devious ways,
    By noon or night, through cloud or flame,
  My heart has followed all my days
    Something I cannot name.

  In sunlight on some woman's hair,
    Or starlight in some woman's eyne,
  Or in low laughter smothered where
    Her red lips wedded mine,
  My heart hath known, and thrilled to know,
    This unnamed presence that it sought;
  And when my heart hath found it so,
    "Love is the name," I thought.

  Sometimes when sudden afterglows
    In futile glory storm the skies
  Within their transient gold and rose
    The secret stirs and dies;
  Or when the trampling morn walks o'er
    The troubled seas, with feet of flame,
  My awed heart whispers, "Ask no more,
    For Beauty is the name!"

  Or dreaming in old chapels where
    The dim aisles pulse with murmurings
  That part are music, part are prayer—
    (Or rush of hidden wings)
  Sometimes I lift a startled head
    To some saint's carven countenance,
  Half fancying that the lips have said,
    All names mean God, perchance!"

There are some archaisms that feel a little embarrassing today, like “eyne” (Shakespeare actually uses it, not infrequently), but there are some nice lines, too (“  My heart has followed all my days /   Something I cannot name”). It suggests the influence of Marquis’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay.

It's not Marquis’s best work, although it’s part of the literary landscape of the time, and not a bad example. If you read the early issues (all of which are now available online) of Poetry, you’ll find much that did not stand the test of time. Marquis’s formal verse given to characters in archy’s world is much better, like this song of a mother spider:

And a last word on literature, from archy. He has been recounting a dialog between a spider and the fly he is just about to eat. The fly has begged for release on the grounds that he serves a great purpose in the world. He carries typhoid and influenza into the households of the weak and iniquitous. The spider admits that this may be true, but counters – in evocative language -- that he serves a much greater purpose, filling the world with the beauty of his gossamer webs. The fly has no counter-argument, and consents to being eaten, only adding:

The spider acknowledges “of course you could,” but goes on, as he begins eating the fly: