There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the
victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of
your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be
considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war
and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew
with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly
misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be
offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn
Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives
in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout....
Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well,
call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob
pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and
Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening
Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists
and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is
far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian
Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a
novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes
the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in
his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk
he is a dramatist.
He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre
Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting
satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only
"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:
A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other
evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time
to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair
broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us
sad.
The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul
into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in
the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more
than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral
chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or
flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its
heart and soul.
Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as
a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well
known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier.
Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing
sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done.
The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to
look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship.
The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill
Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially
warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged
from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to
transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his
best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on
an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a
picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_
got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy
race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would
dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_
building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle.
"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like
dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the
echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come.
Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading
their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for
that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses,
fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into
circulation. Any reader who went to _Dreams and Dust_ (poems, published
October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a
blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this
man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question
the answerless face of life--
Still mounts the dream on shining pinion,
Still broods the dull distrust;
Which shall have ultimate dominion,
Dream, or dust?
Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble
verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of
Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can
turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll
Durham cigarettes.
How neat this is: