![]() But she gives as good as she gets – a generation of pampered house cats in New York have missing ears after showing her disrespect. Mehitabel is forever being seduced and betrayed by sleek smooth-talking tom cats who lure her to their opulent kitchens with promises of unlimited access to the icebox. He muses on the world as he finds it in a modern set of fables his encounter with warty bliggens the solipsistic toad, who believes that his very own toadstool is at the centre of a universe created just for him, resonates in this or any age. ![]() Vers libre is his chosen medium, but when called upon he can rhyme like Longfellow.Īrchy is the stoic observer, his transmigrated soul lets him wander through the centuries to the age of Shakespeare (sorry, shakespeare) and the pharaohs, to chat with their contemporaries such as pete the parrot from the Mermaid Tavern, and the dead scarab from the pharaoh’s mummy, and to play with the ghosts in Westminster Abbey. He becomes her chronicler and his life is not in such constant danger. Mehitabel starts off as a nameless alley cat, generally eyeing archy with such a hungry look that he prefers to retreat right inside the typewriter’s works and engage in conversation with her from there. In the instantly recognisable voice of a unique character, with all the coherence and rhythm you could ask for, and no punctuation, it’s just breath-taking. ![]() Leaving aside the hilarity of the results, let’s just pause and think of the technical challenges Marquis just sweeps away in producing these daily poems of elegance and humour. ![]() Thereafter Marquis (the ‘boss’) leaves a sheet of paper in the machine overnight, and returns to find his work for the day done by archy. The conceit is that archy is discovered by Marquis one day tapping out his free verse on the office typewriter, laboriously hurling himself head first at each key, lacking the strength to work the shift key or the energy to waste on punctuation marks. Archy feels he has got the rough end of it and frequently muses on ending it all as a cockroach (sadly thwarted when he does by being reincarnated as another cockroach), while mehitabel’s ego feeds on a monstrous sense of entitlement dragged behind her from a past life (or several). Both creatures have transmigrated souls: archy that of an avant garde poet, mehitabel that of Cleopatra, naturally. They are archy (to capitalise or not to capitalise? that is the question) the cockroach with the soul of a vers libre poet, and mehitabel the cat whose life is her art. He wrote a daily newspaper column and got a tremendous following for a cast of regular characters, but of these only two, and their friends, rose above their era and survived, because they are works of incomparable fantasy. New readers start here: Don Marquis bridged the generations of American humorists between Mark Twain and James Thurber. I also brought out my latest purchase, that I hadn’t really looked at properly, the Penguin Classics Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, and discovered that I really should have done more market research before I bought that one – more anon in the buyer’s guide. Yes, archy mehitabel and I have been together for a long, long time. Out of the first one fell a bookmark: a deep purple card bearing a grim reaper skeleton and the words ‘DEATH a travelling discotheque’ with the names of the two posh boys who ran it and a 3-digit Wheatley phone number. So I came home and dug out my faithful old Faber collections archy and mehitabel and archy s life of mehitabel. Once I’d stopped laughing and regained the power of speech, it reminded me that I hadn’t got nearly enough archy and mehitabel in my life at the moment, which was making me grumpy. One of our number brought along a collection of American verse, and his choice to read from it was Don Marquis’s work of towering genius, pete the parrot and shakespeare. This time, we were asked to bring along a favourite anthology. I’ve brought back tales from the poetry group before. Actually i think that should be archy and mehitabel a buyers guide as poor little archy couldn t shift the keys to insert any capitals or punctuation so in homage i shoudn t either
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