Customer Reviews

The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (Penguin Classics)

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Generations go by, but Don Marquis's cockroach Archy and his pal, the cat Mehitabel, who originally occupied Marquis's New York newspaper columns nearly a century ago, still have the power to move and amuse, and to speak to us about the human condition. This wonderful roach, a free verse poet's soul in a roach's body, wholly deserves the excellent job that Michael Sims has done in providing us with facts about both Marquis's life and his times. Sims's carefully crafted introduction and annotations serve to put Archy's poems in both the context of their era and of their creator's biography. Michael Sims manages here, as he does so skillfully in his other books, to blend erudition and readability in an engaging and intruiging fashion.
For those who are unacquainted with Archy and Mehitabel, the poems will be a welcome and wonderful discovery. For those who already know and enjoy Marquis's work, Sims's edition will provide a fresh and deeper appreciation.

Archy is a familiar character in an unfamiliar situation, a witty and sympathetic poet stuck in the body of a cockroach thanks to reincarnation. His cat friend Mehitabel is equally interesting, claiming she is actually the reincarnated Cleopatra, which I think most cats believe. Each poem is funny and memorable, made all the more charming by their e.e. cummings style of writing...because Archy the bug is too small to hit the shift key of his unknowing human's keyboard. He's always in character, which is pretty impressive to write as though one were a cockroach...it almost makes you believe in Archy at any age, and that is a treasure.

I cannot recommend this book enough, though I do say that often in my reviews...because I only review books I love or hate. I LOVE this book. I performed parts of it for competitive Speech in high school and a great many people who hear a great deal of poetry thought it was great. It stands alone in terms of style and subject. I haven't read the annotated version, but I think it should be reviewed because it contains all the original poems and extra material. The extra material is new to me, but the poetry is well worth it and the prices are similar. Just buy this book already! You won't regret it.

I first read an excerpt from the "Archy and Mehitabel" series of newspaper columns (written by the exceptionally dry wit and skilled humorist Don Marquis back in the early 1900s, around the time of World War I) in an old American literature anthology owned by my mother, and remember that as I read it aloud with my mother listening, I had to stop several times because my laughter was making it impossible to keep speaking. That same column, and probably all the others in the series, are presented in this annotated collection. The 'poems' are presented in order for probably the first time since they were originally printed in Don Marquis's original newspaper column. Archy can only type one key at a time on the typewriter, literally by thrusting himself headfirst onto the key. He cannot operate a shift key to create capitalization or punctuation, so the effect of his "vers libre" (free verse) poems are--at least to his mind--unintentionally hilarious. What a great collection! And the annotations add to the background information in helpful ways, giving context to Don Marquis's world of prohibition, WWI, speakeasys, and the slang of the day. A masterpiece of early twentieth-century humor!

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now

So began the first contribution of a cockroach named archy to the newspaper column of Don Marquis in the New York "Evening Sun". Marquis was one of the leading humorists in the U.S. circa 1915 to 1935 (he was admired and even emulated by the likes of E.B. White and James Thurber), and archy was perhaps his most inspired creation. As mentioned in the above extract, archy had been a free verse poet whose soul, after death, transmigrated into the body of a cockroach. Using Marquis's typewriter, archy the cockroach would bang out his poetry by standing on its frame and propelling himself headfirst onto a key, one slow letter after another. With great effort he could also operate the line-shift lever, but the shift mechanism for capital letters was beyond him, as was all punctuation.

mehitabel is an alleycat who appears in a relatively small fraction of archy's free verse tales. She too is a reincarnated - or transmigrated - version of earlier beings, including, most famously, Cleopatra. mehitabel aspires to the highbrow (unlike archy), but in truth she is a bit of a lush and she tends to be louche; she is the queen of insouciance and her credo is "toujours gai". She does not have archy's social conscience or his penchant for seeing things "from the under side". The addition of her name to the title gave it a poetic ring, but she is most definitely second fiddle. archy is the star.

In 1927 Don Marquis put together a collection of his archy and mehitabel pieces, somewhat revised, and I believe that it has been in print ever since. THE ANNOTATED ARCHY AND MEHITABEL is more extensive than Marquis's 1927 collection; this volume includes ALL of the pieces relating to archy and/or mehitabel as originally published in the "Evening Sun" from March 1916 through December 1922.

The entries mix humor, flights of fancy, silliness, satire, and social commentary. Marquis himself was, for his time, a social and political liberal, somewhat like H.L. Mencken. (One of Marquis's sardonic epigrams was, "Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.") It appears that he often found it easier to comment critically on events and social developments through the free verse of a cockroach. Among the topical subjects that he addresses through archy are Prohibition, labor unrest, Bolshevism, and the Ku Klux Klan (or, as archy calls it, the "krew krux kranks").

On my family's bookshelves as I was growing up there was a copy of the 1927 collection of selected "archy and mehitabel" poems. From time to time, someone would pull it down and read aloud several of the entries, invariably providing entertainment, even hilarity. I hoped that reading THE ANNOTATED ARCHY AND MEHITABEL would reincarnate, so to speak, some of those pleasant experiences, but the present experience was a wan facsimile of those of my youth. Frankly, reading ALL of the pieces, in order, and annotated with semi-scholarly footnotes, was not an especially joyous endeavor. (I am well aware that the passage of time and my aging sensibilities also are factors.)

The ideal book, in my mind, would combine the intelligent Introduction from this volume by Michael Sims with the more judicious selection of entries from the 1927 volume (sans annotations, of course). In that form, I suspect that many folks even today would enjoy the unique comic contributions to American letters of archy the cockroach.

I got this because the original Archy & Mehitabel is no longer available. Well, the annotations really take away from the book IMHO, they are very intrusive & all through the book. If they were at the beginning or the end, one could skip them & JUST read the book, but this way you have to wade through them to find the actual writing. Phooey.

I was so glad to find this book still in print. I read it when young, and it has lot none of its charm in the last 50+ years.

Have you been looking for a job and can't find one? Perhaps an internship or apprentice program would work. It did for Archey! His poet's soul has been reincarnated into a cocky roach making his literary way through a newspaper reporter's typewriter. Archey speaks to us as he pounds his head (literally) night after night. His poet's vision ignores all reasonable advice from his mentor, Don Marquis. As Archey polishes his art, the reader sees that nothing much has changed in the nearly one hundred years since Archey hit the keys. Don't miss a little sage advice from the floor.

This is a very funny book about the cockroach writing on the typewriter. However I had an earlier version, which I lost, that had the letters in the book mixed around like it would have been written by a cockroach!!!!!!

This version is just straight reading.