TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea.
(COLD ROAST BEEF.)
WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF
STEW.)
THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)
FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued,
sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main
business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR
CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)
SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself
for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.)
SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we
have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.
But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always
tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry
battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real
voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach,
the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular
Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an
Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of
Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling
has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them
between book-covers.
One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a
number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms
and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly
envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They
had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists,
and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where
they could find more.
I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether
they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any
pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do
more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts.
By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he
orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know
you are loafing?
Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that
minorities are always right.
Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware.
The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.
I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising
young man for twenty years.
In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the
mirthquake:
If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.
If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the
little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper
colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry,
Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its
revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will
find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your
ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever
carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best
trousers.
But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite
denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the
gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a
clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this,
just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:
This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ...
As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,
Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb--
Who frowned above him, proud and grim,
While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore
Of fire and steel and stone and war:
She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth
Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ...
His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.
Tip from the wild red Welter of the past
Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last.
Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest.
We have been slow as doom. Our dead
Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed--
We have denied each pleading ghost--
We have been slow: God, make us sure.
We have been slow. Grant we endure
Unto the uttermost, the uttermost.
Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord?
Then weld our diverse millions, Lord,
Into one single swinging sword.
I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is
disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this
sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives
of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the
press:
Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be
disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has
swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up
again.
Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all
its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of
more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that
furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!
There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than
the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the
past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or
three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper
some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad
to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to
give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton
Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia
Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.
But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it
the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day
long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope
of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down
on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his
queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his
only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the
street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write
his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in
the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I
have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in
that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben
Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and
set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a
kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the
tavernacular.
He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic,
and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is
best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky,
and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this
country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benét, and (perhaps) Vachel
Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benét
in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and
mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army.
Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the
dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's
Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the
azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more
publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's
drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach,
endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers
libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for
quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter,
opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if
Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something
thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine
him, for instance, in _Punch_? His author has never told us which one of
the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I
feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who
lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell?
Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to
punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the
fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his
typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many
devices to make this possible, but none that seem feasible to the roach
himself.
The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a person with
whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask
a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter.
Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through
an air hole, and prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler
takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the
portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British
cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in
neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative in lower case
agate:
it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for
said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the
captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was
fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where
the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and
serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if
there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me
the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs
to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert
said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top
crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right
under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that
noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking
off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert
said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush
upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i
am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships
surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy
that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the
false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this
pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a
port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling
off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as
he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god
said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered
the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the
hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the
mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top crust
gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us throw
the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the
starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant
cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the british
navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the time the
strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the clock would
start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled down my
forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick said the
first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity wait said
the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful east indian
drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could still see and
hear for days and days a council of war was held about me every
afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save the cockroach
even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty england must
stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me
another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had
been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be
inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh
exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and
here i am.
archy
So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original
contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These
are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust
repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is
compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured
with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product.
Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and
superscription of America.
And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is
unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation
suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great
Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But
Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out
Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society
or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt
away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the
scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true
in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx.
He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some
quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness,
Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea
spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner,
he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates;
faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few
spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until,
chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top
speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly
revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins,
the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as
anywhere else.
What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the
young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of
literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don
Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying
at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a
dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle
Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words:
Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the
Republican party.
My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time
and place free of charge.
Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left
the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat.
In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in
the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled for
some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power.
It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening,
after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late
President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed
through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had
heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of
showing me how greatly he appreciated it.
Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public
tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the
Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a
position as reporter on a Washington paper.
Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier
years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented,
peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since.
There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the
Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting
against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the
Republican party again.
This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which
I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more
particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself.
It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person:
Height, 5 feet 10½ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little
finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good
hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200
pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in
type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears
No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside seam of
trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for
the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw
missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from
possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with
respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates
undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on
little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to
psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his
verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in
possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek
bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a
thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story
writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your
business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of
painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors,
publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in
insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers
as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on
right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of
room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese,
"Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical
comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam
heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized
charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses
on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot;
belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy
eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in
teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn,
with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside;
voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly
wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes
prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose
over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested.
I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that
Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a
cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick
Stevensonian instinct for the moral issue, and the Devil not
infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the _Evening Sun_
comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or
drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment
on some bolshevictory in Russia:
A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of
Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip.
For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a
very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is
purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a
ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and
fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have
made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss
the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of
his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of
the machine:
I pray Thee, make my colyum read,
And give me thus my daily bread.
Endow me, if Thou grant me wit,
Likewise with sense to mellow it.
Save me from feeling so much hate
My food will not assimilate;
Open mine eyes that I may see
Thy world with more of charity,
And lesson me in good intents
And make me friend of innocence ...
Make me (sometimes at least) discreet;
Help me to hide my self-conceit,
And give me courage now and then
To be as dull as are most men.
And give me readers quick to see
When I am satirizing Me....
Grant that my virtues may atone
For some small vices of mine own.
And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his
prayer with this comment:
People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really
want--and intend to have if they can get it--but for what they think
the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be
sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of
affectation crept in.