Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken and Archy and Mehitabel
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- April
- 29
I was holding an e-mail conversation with Ken Valenti, who is one of the people we’re hoping to entice to post on this blog since he’s a struggling author in addition to being a fine Journal News reporter, and I was bemoaning the youth of the reporter who sits next to me who had never heard of Dorothy Parker.
I picked up a copy of the 1944 Viking Press anthology (with the foreward by W. Somerset Maugham) last summer and began reading it last night as a change from the science fiction/fantasy I’d been buried in for the past few days.
Parker, for those who are as young as the reporter who sits beside me, wrote short stories and poetry for Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, McCalls and the New Republic before moving on to screenwriting and whatnot. She had an acerbic wit and a jaundiced view of suburban-dweller arrogance, and is mostly known these days as having founded the Algonquin Round Table. The 1994 movie “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” was about her.
I was going to write about Parker, but got involved in a discussion with Ken about callow youth and the old masters like H.L. Mencken and I said I was worried that youth didn’t even know who Archy and Mehitabel were.
Neither did Ken.
Sigh.
Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat were the creations of Don Marquis, who wrote for the New York Sun way back in the 1920s. Marquis’ line was that Archy would steal into the newspaper office late at night and type comments on the manual typewriter by hopping from key to key, ergo no capital letters. Mehitabel, who was always bemoaning her love life (ah, those toms! love you and leave you with kittens!), was his companion in dissecting the politics and world around them.
Here’s a piece from one of his columns in the New York Evening Sun, March 29, 1916, introducing Archy and with a local twist:
“Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story.
”… We do not pretend to know anything about the Dobbs Ferry rat at first hand. But since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago. We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys…. Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found:
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/thank you for the apple peelings in the watebasket/but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it/there is a cat here at night i wish you would have/removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she/catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for…
… you can call me archy
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 11:15 am by Randi Weiner.
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Thank you for the Dobbs Ferry rat! I found this page via RSS and I too was bewailing the fact that archy and mehitabel seem to be disappearing from the consciousness of youth! I did however find some videos by young people who had heard of them thanks to Youtube. I was introduced to them 35 years ago and I think the time has come for those who know and love them to reintroduce them to a new generation.
All the best!
Lisa
http://www.squidoo.com/katzenkokroches