★★★★☆ Always funny, and occasionally (if cryptically) profound

archy and mehitabel

Don Marquis

I first read Archy and Mehitabel as a high-school student. My aunt from New York City, Aunt Althea, who always knew the hottest new books, recommended it to my family, and it went through us like a Covid outbreak, but with far more pleasing results. (I am not sure what brought A&M to Aunt Althea's attention, as it was published in 1916.)

The premise of A&M is that Don Marquis hears the sound of typing from his office one night. He checks it out and finds that a cockroach is operating the typewriter by climbing up on the carriage and leaping head-first onto the keys. (By the way, I am old enough to have used mechanical typewriters, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, this would not work. So, I have the unpleasant duty of informing you that A&M is fiction.) A&M consists of these missives from the cockroach, who calls himself Archy. In addition, there are pen and ink drawings (presumably by Marquis) to illustrate most of the chapters. Archy is a Vers Libre poet reincarnated into the body of a cockroach. He implies more than once that his transmigration into a cockroach is "punishment" for being a Vers Libre poet -- why that deserves punishment is entirely a mystery to me.

Archy tells of several other characters around New York that he talks with. The most important of these, of course, is an alley cat called Mehitabel. Mehitabel claims to have been Cleopatra in a past life. Archy suspects (and he's clearly right) that Mehitabel just made this up. Mehitabel knows no more about Cleopatra than her name and that she was a queen of Egypt. Mehitabel likes to think of herself as an artist and a lady, but she has no more idea of how to be those things than how to be Cleopatra. My favorite Mehitabel quote is "to hell with anything unrefined has always been my motto".

There are some other characters in the cast, but Archy and Mehitabel are definitely the main draws. Anyway, it's heaps of fun.

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