Happy 100th, Archy the cockroach

The soul of the newspaper industry is a 100-year-old cockroach.

I mean this with the utmost affection for both newspapers and the cockroach in question, who made his first appearance in the New York Evening Sun a century ago.

Don Marquis — at 37 years old, already a novelist, short-story writer, editor, and editorial writer — began his column for March 29, 1916 with a couple of off-hand jokes and observations. Then:

We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a giant cockroach jumping about upon the keys.

The column went on to reproduce the poem the cockroach had left after a painful labor, hurling himself head-first at each key:

expression is the need of my soul
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 on life

Among other things, this was an inside joke about the vermin-infested office where Marquis worked, and a send-up of free verse poetry. Archy would have liked to capitalize and punctuate (including his own name) if he could only reach the necessary keys. In a later poem, the shift-key gets stuck and Archy goes into a Twitteresque all-caps squee.

One wonders what Archy would have got up to with a mobile news app, whether he would have found a way to use emoji and gifs.

you ask me where I have been
but you had better ask me where I am
and what
i have been drinking
exclamation point

My Dad introduced me to Archy, years before I became a newspaper journalist myself.

Archy’s poetry is worth reading today, not only in its own right, but because he is the perfect avatar for the newspaper industry. Those who wish to understand that industry, even save it, can do neither without getting to know the need of its soul.

“Archy was the child of compulsion, the stern compulsion of journalism,” wrote E. B. White in 1950. “The compulsion is as great today as it ever was, but it is met in a different spirit.”

The very short lines of Archy’s poetry, White wrote, helped Marquis fill space on deadline when the bar was calling him, while “at the same time it allowed his spirit to soar while viewing things from the under side, insect fashion.”

It was, in other words, quintessential newspaper copy: sublime space-filler flung at the reader in a state of devil-may-care exhaustion; ephemeral, eternal fishwrap.

It caught the imagination.

Marquis wrote hundreds of sketches featuring Archy, the alley-cat Mehitabel, and the other inhabitants of their world. Like Sherlock Holmes, the popular Archy could not be killed, no matter how Marquis tried.

“There is some sort of queer vitality in it which I don’t understand myself,” Marquis once wrote of his Archy poetry.

Archy, in his grim workaday approach to the numinous through the stories of the residents of New York’s alleys and gutters, is an avatar for newspaper journalism itself. He is despised. He is present. He is always, always, one boot-heel away from death.

Like many newspaper columnists, Marquis had a hard time giving up the job.

In 1925, he wrote, “I got to seeing my column as a grave, twenty-three inches long, into which I buried a part of myself every day — a part that I tore, raw and bleeding, from my brain.”

His biographer, Edward Anthony, quotes that line in his book, O Rare Don Marquis. Anthony writes, “Marquis’s friends were not surprised when they learned, in 1933, that he planned to return to columning.”

Marquis once swore to “take as his province everything from hell to breakfast” — as fine a description of the general interest newspaper, or of Archy the cockroach, as I can imagine. This is a cockroach who saunters into a hotel kitchen for a bite to eat and ends up assisting a suicide.

Everything that a newspaper covers, from the strawberry socials to the genocides, is Archy’s beat.

you thought I was only
an archy
but i am more than that
i am anarchy

His foil, the cat Mehitabel, keeps up her “toujours gai” attitude in the face of hard luck and her own mistakes. Toujours gai, the journalists who crack bleak jokes at story meetings, who continue to take the work more seriously than they take themselves.

Anthony’s biography reprints an account Marquis wrote for the Saturday Evening Post of how he and his wife decided to try one last throw of the dice to stay in New York when they had less than a dollar between them. Marquis pitched 20,000 words to an editor, who said yes, but wanted it in a day and a half.

It was understood that it was to be funny stuff. Gay, you know. Humorous; light easy reading.

Marquis worked until he collapsed; when he woke he found that his wife had finished the piece.

“Did you keep it gay — the way he wanted it?” I asked her quite seriously. “Yes, it’s gay right to the end,” she said, and she broke down a minute for one of the only half dozen times I ever saw her cry in the fourteen years we were married.

White wrote that when Marquis described, in that first 1916 column, Archy’s hard labour and exhausted collapse, the newspaperman was “writing his own obituary notice.” He died in 1937.

Obituaries for newspapers have been appearing for a while now. In an odd way, as a lover of newspapers, that gives me comfort. So long as death notices keep appearing for the cockroach, he’s not quite dead.

every time I die
it makes me more of a fatalist

Kate Heartfield was, until Dec. 2015, the editorial pages editor of the Ottawa Citizen, the daily broadsheet in Canada’s capital. Although she (mostly) left daily newspapers (for now), she still writes a column for the Citizen. She is nominated for a National Newspaper Award for editorial writing this year. She also writes fiction. Follow her on Twitter at @kateheartfield

Several celebrations are planned this week for Archy’s 100th birthday.