Allen Ginsberg and Archy and Mehitabel
February 19, 2020
Did Allen Ginsberg read Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel?
Me-OWL!
Was Allen Ginsberg influenced in some small way by the poetry of Don Marquis? One poem in particular, “archy declares war”, reminds me powerfully of “Howl” and certain other poems by Ginsberg. It is a powerful and impassioned speech on behalf of the insects of the world and against their foes, human civilization. And it is probably more than that.
I first read the 48 poems of Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel back around 1979, and enjoyed them considerably. Marquis’s reincarnated cockroach and alley cat were excellent vehicles for his observations of society - by turns sweet, ironic, and poetic. But the poems still felt like light verse, even if Marquis had a lot to say that was by no means trite, banal or merely sentimental. Maybe it would be better to say that, as verse (mostly free-verse), its tone was light, modest, suggestive, polite. I’ve never been much of a reader of poetry, but back then I found Ginsberg’s visionary urgency much more involving: Ginsberg’s commitment to elevated consciousness, and to a possibly elevated human civilization, reflected my feelings about my role as an artist, and his poetry rang loudly and true inside my own mind, my own zone of imaginative potential. So his little books were prominent on my small poetry shelf.
My copy of Archy and Mehitabel had been sorted among some novels for years, out of easy reach, when I picked it up again recently. This was largely due to the attention I’ve been paying lately to the life and work of George Herriman, a favorite of mine for some years. (I read Michael Tisserand’s Krazy - George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, which I recommend highly not only as a biography, but for the historical context it provides about Herriman’s era and before.) Herriman did the illustrations for Archy and Mehitabel, since he had the right bohemian feeling, and he certainly knew how to draw a cat. I wanted to look again at what Herriman did when he wasn’t doing Krazy Kat. Mehitabel as a character is very close to Krazy Kat, Herriman’s greatest creation, and Archy makes a perfect foil for Mehitabel, but much friendlier, smarter, and deeper, more loving and sympathetic, than Ignatz Mouse, who after all mainly beaned poor sweet Krazy Kat with bricks.
This time around I connected with Archy and Mehitabel much more than before. I now appreciate more the subtlety of the poetry, even if it doesn’t grab me by the shoulders like a doomsday preacher - or like Ginsberg sometimes. (By the way, all those doomsday preachers - they were right after all, look what’s happening!) Don Marquis’s more frequent, homier themes are friendship, loyalty, selfishness, hypocrisy, and prejudice. For example, in one poem Archy points out the unfairness of seeing an insect as an ugly, brute thing, while a butterfly is seen as a thing of beauty. With their love and modesty, the poems evoke good feelings in me, or at least my admiration for the the soul who has had these feelings and put them down on paper.
But there is one poem stands out for its rhetoric, for its anger, for its apocalyptic tone: “archy declares war” may be the strongest poem in the volume. It is a cry of indignation about man’s inhumanity to insects, and a rallying cry to the insect world to rise up and fight back.* Borrowing from the language of today, the slogan could be “Six-Legged Lives Matter”. Or from Orwell, “Six Legs Just as Good as Two Legs”. In song it could be compared to Dylan’s “Masters of War”, or Tom Rapp’s “Fourth Day of July”. But in poetry I can’t help but think of Allen Ginsberg’s ”Howl”.
For the uninitiated, I should note that Archy’s use of lower-case letters is no mere stylistic conceit. It is simply because, as a cockroach, he must type by jumping with all his force on one key after another, and so can not hold down the shift key at the same time. I suppose the typewriter had no shift lock - or that for Archy to operate it would just have been too much of a pain in the malpighian tubules. He is constrained to stick with lower case, so it’s not something to brag about. You might say that it’s a stylistic conceit on Marquis’s part - though he doesn’t go on about it. As Archy writes,
the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not
xxxi archy declares war
i am going to start
a revolution
i saw a kitchen
worker killing
water bugs with poison
hunting pretty
little roaches
down to death
it set my blood to
boiling
i thought of all
the massacres and slaughter
of persecuted insects
at the hands of cruel humans
and i cried
aloud to heaven
and i knelt
on all six legs
and vowed a vow
of vengeance
i shall organize the insects
i shall drill them
i shall lead them
i shall fling a billion
times a billion billion
risen insects in an army
at the throats
of all you humans
unless you sign the papers
for a damn site better treatment
volunteers volunteers
hearken to my calling
fifty million flies
are wanted may the first
to die in marmalade
curses curses curses
on the cruel human race
does not the poor mosquito
love her little offspring
that you swat against the wall
out of equatorial
swamps and fever jungles
come o mosquitos
a billion billion strong
and sting a billion baldheads
till they butt against each other
and break like egg shells
caterpillars locusts
grasshoppers gnats
vampire moths
black legged spiders
with red hearts of hell
centipedes and scorpions
little gingery ants
come come come
come you tarantulas
with fury in your feet
bloodsuckers wriggle
out of the bayous
ticks cooties hornets
give up your pleasures
all your little trivial
sunday school picnics
this is war
in earnest
and red revolution
come in a cloud
with a sun hiding miracle
of small deadly wings
swarm stab and bite
what we want is justice
curses curses curses
over land air and water
whirl in a million
sweeping and swaying
cyclonic dances
whirl high and swoop
down on the cities
like a comet bearing death
in the loop and flick
of its tail
little little creatures
out of all your billions
make great dragons
that lie along the sky
and war with the sunset
and eat up the moon
draw all the poison
from the evil stars
and spit it on the earth
remember every planet
pivots on an atom
and so you are strong
i swear by the great
horned toad of mithridates
i swear by the vision
of whiskered old pythagoras
that i am very angry
i am mad as hell
for i have seen a soapy
kitchen mechanic
murdering my brothers
slaying little roaches
pathetic in their innocence
damn her red elbows
damn her spotted apron
damn her steamy hair
damn her dull eyes
that look like a pair
of little pickled onions
curses curses curses
i even heard her praised
for undertaking murder
on her own volition
and called the only perfect
cook in the city
come come come
come in your billions
tiny small feet
and humming little wings
crawlers and creepers
wigglers and stingers
scratchers borers slitherers
little forked tongues
man is at your mercy
one sudden gesture
and all his empires perish
rise
strike for freedom
curses on the species
that invented roach poison
curses on the stingy
beings that evolved
tight zinc covers
that you can t crawl under
for their garbage cans
come like a sandstorm
spewed from the mouth
of a great apocalyptic
desert making devil
come like the spray
sooty and fiery
snorted from the nostrils
of a sky eating ogre
let us have a little
direct action is the
sincere wish of
archy
However, the poem shouldn’t be read at face value, that is, merely on behalf of the insects. (Just as the Jains of India forbid the taking of any sentient life, not just that of insects.) The Bolshevik Revolution was a pretty hot phenomenon at the time Marquis was composing these poems**, and the comparison to insurrectionary speech can’t be missed. Was Marquis expressing his sympathy with the revolutionaries, or with other current radical trends that aspired to overturn the bourgeois-capitalist order of exploitation of the masses and endless war? Or - without necessarily endorsing any political course of action - simply his solidarity with the salt of the earth, the tired, the poor, the cheated and the loathed, against a rigged, hypocritical system? Using the insects as a stand-in for the common people?
Back to the original question: was Allen Ginsberg influenced by Don Marquis, or by this particular poem? It goes without saying that Ginsberg read widely. (But there, I’ve said it anyway.) Herriman and his work were well known during Ginsberg’s early years, and Archy and Mehitabel enjoyed a status sufficient in 1957 to justify a Broadway musical production. Marquis (pronounced “MAR-kwis”), a novelist, poet, and newspaper journalist of some note, was from an ambit of culture not far from Ginsberg’s: both frequented intellectual and artistic circles in New York, with their journalists, writers, poets, painters, socialists, anarchists and such, with the usual quota of moochers, characters, and hangers-on. Both shared an affinity for the lower orders of society. So I think it likely that Ginsberg at least knew of the work of Marquis (who wrote quite a bit more than just Archy and Mehitabel, which itself appeared serially in newspapers starting in 1916.) But I find no mention of Marquis or Archy and Mehitabel in anything by or about Ginsberg. Plenty about Jack and Bill and Neal and Gregory and the others, the whole holy lot. So I have proved nothing, but there was clearly something in the Zeitgeist that led to a comparable poetic result. Or was it just something in the Greenwich Village beer?
I owe thanks to Jono Davis for his transcription of the poem, which he posted on his blog 15 September 2006. He saved me a lot of effort. (Too bad my blog editor requires plain text; I still had to put in a lot of line breaks and indents one by one.) I found two mistakes, on lines 39 and 93 if I counted right:
line 39 - lover for love (“love her little offspring”)
line 93 - stong for strong (“and so you are strong”)
http://jonodavis.info/blog/old/month/2006-09.html
* In a prior poem, xii, “certain maxims of archy”, there is a verse that seems a germ of “archy declares war”. It begins with two pages or so of maxims, some admirably clever, but shifts into something more polemical:
insects are not always
going to be bullied
by humanity
some day they will revolt
i am already organizing
a revolutionary society to be
known as the worms turnverein
(This last phrase will make no sense even as a pun, unless you know the expression “the worm turns”. The German word “Turnverein”, perhaps better known to English-speakers of New York City in the 1920s, means a gymnastics society. “Verein” means society, while “Turn” refers to gymnastics.)
Shinbone Alley
Incidentally, my investigation of Archy and Mehitabel turned up also the animated feature film of 1970, “Shinbone Alley”, based on Don Marquis’s book. Although the film has its good points, I really didn’t care much for it on the whole. (I must admit I haven’t seen the whole thing.) The animation style is too close to “Top Cat” or other Hanna-Barbera cartoons, although certainly much better - looser, sketchier, rather than canned and formulaic. The background painting is also much better than in industrially-made cartoons; you can feel the drawing. Some of the characterization is just plain goofy, like the beatnik spider with the bongos and beret. The voices (Archy’s provided by Eddie Bracken, and Mehitabel’s by Carol Channing) often do not quite capture the natures of their characters as I feel them in the poems. Channing especially made of Mehitabel too much of a femme fatale - not nearly as smart or deep as the Mehitabel of the poems. (Perhaps they were directed this way.) On the other hand, Channing struck the right chord in rendering Mehitabel’s ambivalence about motherhood - usually mothers are required to suppress their cold-blooded instincts toward their little ones.
However, there is an extraordinary sequence in the middle of the animation, and it is based on “archy declares war”. The animation itself is much more interesting, very rhythmic and violent, and it seems to be the only part of the whole film where Herriman’s artwork is used (or the work of a fairly good imitator). It starts at around 51:30 and lasts about five minutes. I think it may also be the only part where an extended part of any poem is used directly in the screenplay, although many shorter passages are used. (Two parts of the poem are omitted: a passage of seventeen lines about two thirds of the way into the poem, right after “i am mad as hell” and before “come come come come in your billions”, and the last eighteen lines of the poem, right after “rise strike for freedom”. Aside from these, there are only a few minor changes in the poem as recited by Archy in the animation.) Bracken’s recitation is very good here, rolling his rs in “r-r-revolution!” with a touch of the old-fashioned stage actor. (Archy and Mehitabel was also produced in 1957 as a Broadway musical, with Eartha Kitt - nomen omen - as Mehitabel, and with Bracken pre-prising his 1970 role as Archy. Mel Brooks, of all people, wrote the script. This was many years before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats.)
Worth noting as well is a very brief sequence (when a drunken Archy meets the ladybugs of the night, who sing, at about 1:14:35, a sort of animated pastel abstraction, something like early Kandinsky - that takes off from the shapely shapes of the ladybugs. It only lasts about three seconds, then is followed by something very Peter Max-y and not very interesting. But one can imagine the potential of such an animation technique if it were to last longer.
** The poems were published serially in various newspapers from 1916 to 1925, and copyrighted by them as well, and further copyrighted from 1925 to 1930 by two publishers, I presume in collected form.
P.S. - In the later poem xxxiii “ghosts”, Archy offers some observations on the transmigration of souls, a subject that would seem far from revolution. But near the end of the poem, he manages a dig at the Internal Revenue Service (which is fun but still falls short of a call to insurrection):
personally my ambition is to get
my time as a cockroach shortened for
good behavior and be promoted
to a revenue officer
it is not much of a step up but
i am humble
I met Ginsberg myself once by chance way back. I had just left the Whitney Museum with a friend, and we were walking up Madison Avenue when I saw him walking down, with his partner Peter Orlovsky and a woman unknown to me. On principle (of not making a nuisance of myself) I have always avoided making a fuss over famous people, so we just let them pass. But a few steps later I remembered that I had just happened to have stuck his ”Planet News” in my pocket that morning. I ran back to them and said, “Excuse me, I really wouldn’t bother you, but I just happened to have one of your books with me - would you…?” But he wasn’t bugged at all, he was very gracious. He took the book from me, and asked where I’d bought it, what my name was, and how to spell it (“Same as you! And like Schiller without the er”), and inscribed the title page with a sort of mini-poem, consisting of the time and place of our encounter: ”For Allen Schill - Madison & 77th - N.Y.C. Sidewalk, Dusk February 21 Sunday ‘81”. Clearly a poetic method good for many such occasions, one-size-fits-all. In spirit, still of a piece with his less casual writing.
Still having to do with Ginsberg: Some years back we used to spend an occasional evening with our Torino friends Graeme and Silvia, two individuals (mainly filmmakers now) with voracious intellectual and artistic appetites. Graeme is quite a musician too, a multi-instrumentalist with a very broad knowledge of music. We talked about Allen Ginsberg more than once, and got the idea to do a musical reading of Howl, or an accompanied reading. Although I have little experience in recitation, and a voice that tends toward the unmodulated, I felt I had the enthusiasm that Howl requires, especially after a glass or two of wine. The necessary psychic state achieved, I declaimed the poem forcefully while Graeme improvised some incredibly appropriate and loud jazz on their upright piano. It was perfect, and we had another glass.
Allen Schill, February 2020
P.S. - Here’s an appropriate photo of an enjoyable bit of wall art, taken in Cagliari, Sardegna, in July 2008. We can imagine it’s Archy.
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