When The Moon Sings - May 3, 2025

This week, I was reminded of Don Marquis.  It’s spelled markee, but he pronounced is Marquiss – he said so himself.  Marquis isn’t much remembered any more, and that’s more a comment on us than him.

Marquis was variously a journalist, playwright, author, and poet of the early 20^th Century.  If by chance you know his work, it’s probably Archy and Mehetabel, the adventures of a roach and an alley cat. If you don’t know them, Archy, the roach, was a reborn free verse poet who communicated by jumping on the keys of a typewriter one at a time.  Mehetabel was frequently the catalyst for Archie’s thoughts, being no better than she should be, as they said in those times. Marquis was primarily a journalist, a writer for periodicals. He started with the Atlanta Constitution and moved to the New York Sun, the Herald Tribune, and too many magazines to list.  But he also wrote 35 books and scripted a hit Broadway play and two movies, one a talkie and one a silent film.

Marquis was wildly popular in his day, and was remembered fondly after it.  In the midst of World War II, the Navy named a ship after him, a distinction given to few authors.  I can’t find another ship named after someone who was purely an author.  Father Bridgeport, who regarded all public words with suspicion, thought he was a genius.

Nobody reads much of Marquis’ work now for the same reason that so many people read it back then.  Popular authors, especially those who feed periodicals, capture the tenors of their times. Those who speak to today’s issues rather than yesterday’s attract more of our attention.  There are gems of observation in Mr. Dooley’s 1900s or the many writers that made the 1930s and 1940s survivable, but they speak with eloquence about past issues and manners, which we have replaced with newer, shinier ones.

But Marquis was also a poet, and poets wrestle with more lasting ideas as well.  Lord Byron sacrificed his wealth and eventually his life for Greek independence, but he’s less remembered for that than his poetry.  Even Ogden Nash, who people still remember for his clever wordplay, wrote sobering couplets about the business of life.  Marquis wrote Archy and Mehetabel mainly to amuse rather than inform, but some of his work goes far beyond that.

Marquis was above all a writer, and anyone who has tried to write anything beyond rent checks knows the feeling he expressed in this opening verse:

So let them pass, these songs of mine,
Into oblivion, nor repine;
Abandoned ruins of large schemes,
Dimmed lights adrift from nobler dreams,

He was aware of the power of words, from this musing on ancient empires:

By Tigris, or the streams of Ind,
Ere Colchis rose, or Babylon,
Forgotten empires dreamed and sinned,
Setting tall towns against the dawn,

Which, when the proud Sun smote upon,
Flashed fire for fire and pride for pride;
Their names were . . . Ask oblivion! . . .
"They had no poet, and they died."

He was also aware of their lack of power:

Words are not guns. Words are not ships.
And ships and guns prevail.
Our liberties, that blood has gained,
Are guarded, or they fail.

Truth does not triumph without blows,
Error not tamely yields.
But falsehood closes with quick faith,
Fierce, on a thousand fields.

Marquis wrote most of the poems I quoted in his early years, 1915 and 1916, as his newspaper career was ascending.  At the time, he edited columns as well as writing.  His son, who had a brief life, was born in 1915.  He began writing his column in 1916, and many of his subsequent thoughts were filtered through his characters – not just Archy and Mehetabel, but the Old Soak.  Clem Hawley, otherwise known as the Old Soak, was a fictional friend of Marquis, and his adventures were the basis of a Broadway play, two movies, and gave Marquis a considerable income.  The Old Soak gave Marquis a platform to comment on Prohibition, and his thoughts resonated with the rest of the country.

But of all Marquis poetry, the one that appeals to me most is called The Plan.  He runs through what Shakespeare called the ages of man, and ends this way.

But when I'm eighty I intend

To turn a fool again for twenty years or so;

Go back to being twenty-five,

Drop cautions and conventions, join some little group

Fantastically rebel and alive,

And resolute, from soup

To nuts; I'll reimburse myself

For all the freak stuff that I've had to keep upon the shelf;

Indulge my crochets, be the friend of man,

And pull the thoughts I've always had to can--

I'm looking forward to a rough, rebellious, unrespectable old age,

Kicking the world uphill

With laughter shrill

And squeals of high-pitched, throaty rage.

In Marquis’s prime time, society had finally started to confront the suffering of intense industrial life.  His was the era of Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, and the other reformers who confronted the respectable with words and images of how others lived.  Even those who lived comfortably felt unease and wanted change.  He died in 1937, when much of the nation had sunk to that basic economic level, and those who lived comfortably were much harder to find.  He left us well short of the age where he could indulge in those ideas.

If Marquis reflected the mind of his time so well, those words and general enough to consider in our current circumstances.  Since his passing, the country has had moments that deserved criticism and will have them again no doubt.  Those of us creeping up on his specified age see much, right this very moment, that seems odd and counterintuitive, to say the least.  Some people see history as a circle, but perhaps it’s more of a corkscrew – each high and low is a little further on.

Our stock of elders has lived largely bourgeoise lives and protest seems stale and futile.  In more stable circumstances, perhaps that would be true.  But we wonder if a squeal or two of high-pitched, throaty rage wouldn’t be appropriate.  Some think it might even be necessary.