The Full Mehitabel

            Until I spotted The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (2006) on a bookstore shelf, I had thought that the omnibus edition of Don Marquis’s Evening Sun columns featuring the louche Mehitabel the cat and Archy, the vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach, was all there was of those two. The omnibus edition was called The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel and came out in 1940, combining the three previous Archy and Mehitabel collections Marquis had published; it was reissued in 1950 with a brilliant introduction by E. B. White. In fact, as I learned from Michael Sims’s introduction and notes to The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, there were many more of Archy’s columns (supposedly all the columns were left in Marquis’s typewriter in the morning, having been written by Archy’s launching himself onto each key headfirst during the night) from their inception March 29, 1916 until the last column two days before Christmas in 1922.

            Sims presents the columns in the form and order in which they appeared, while Marquis had selected, rearranged, and sometimes altered them in the previous collections. He omits a few very short walk-ons where Archy makes a pitch for war bonds, including one of these so that we can see what they were like. Otherwise we have all of them, rather more of Archy than of Mehitabel. Archy comments on the war effort, goes to Washington, stows away on the ship carrying American diplomats to the peace conference in Paris, but characteristically spends most of his time there with a down-and-out Russian who claims to be the Czar. Archy talks about the influenza epidemic and the coming of Prohibition as well as many other current events and passing fads.  He has running contract negotiations and threatened strikes with his “boss” Marquis, hoping to get larger type for his column and food left in the newsroom. Most notable of the events omitted from the omnibus edition are Archy’s two deaths: Marquis kills him with a flyswatter, mistaking him for some other insect, early in the series, and later on Archy talks about practicing and mastering getting out of his body (spiritualism and related phenomena were big in the twenties); he returns to his body one day and finds it squashed. Each time, to his chagrin, he is reincarnated as a cockroach again.

            Mehitabel is her usual self, lamenting how she’s come down in the world (she was once, she says, Cleopatra), but always ready for a ramble on the roof tiles or romance with an itinerant tom; “life,” says Mehitabel, “is just one damn kitten after another,” but her motto is toujours gai, almost always with a “wotthehell” added.