Marquis’ wit and whimsy nearly lost to the ages

Bill Knight column for 8-1, 2or 3, 2019

       Last week was 141 years since the birth of Don Marquis of Walnut, Ill., a place imparting on him a sense of whimsy evident throughout his writing.

            “He was parodist, historian, poet, clown, fable writer, satirist, reporter and teller of tales,” said E.B. White. “He had everything it takes, and more. No one who ever read Don Marquis has forgotten him.”

            Today, unfortunately, too few have read him.

            A newspaper columnist and more, Marquis spoofed pretensions, especially through fictional foils Archy (a free-verse poet reincarnated as a philosophical cockroach) and Mehitabel (a dancing cat and reincarnation of Cleopatra).

            Marquis’s often-bittersweet humor flourished despite sorrow: the unexpected deaths of his children and two wives, the burden of caring for two sisters, and illnesses that incapacitated him in his 50s.

            Marquis graduated from Walnut High School and attended Knox College in Galesburg for one term. He left Knox – where alumni included columnists Eugene Field and George Fitch – a year before Carl Sandburg started there. Marquis didn’t feel like he fit in and returned home.

            Working in a drug store, chicken farm, as a railroad hand and teacher, a Census Bureau clerk and printer, Marquis started in journalism in Walnut, where his first newspaper jobs were at weeklies; he set type and wrote a column.

            After writing news, editorials and ads, laying out pages and even running the press and wrapping newspapers in small-town Illinois, Marquis sharpened his skills in cities. In Washington, he contributed to the old Washington Times but couldn’t get hired (however, while briefly working for the government he studied art). Following a stop in Philadelphia, where he wrote for local papers, Marquis in 1902 moved to Atlanta and wrote editorials and covered theater for the Atlanta News until 1904, when he defected to Joel Chandler Harris’ Atlanta Journal. After joining Harris’ Uncle Remus’s Magazine as associate editor, Marquis in 1909 moved to New York to work for a news service, then as a rewrite man for the American before jumping to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as a reporter. In 1912, he joined the New York Sun, where he launched his column “The Sun Dial.”

            Marquis became popular and respected, writing essays, poetry, fiction and scripts along with pieces for magazines including the New Yorker and the Saturday Review of Literature. He produced five novels and dozens of collections of verse and essays, plus the 1932 play “The Dark Hours,” about Jesus’ final days, starring Henry Fonda on Broadway.

            His fans ranged from novelist Frank Herbert (“Dune”) to Theodore Roosevelt, but all his writings were overshadowed by his journalism – especially columns featuring Archy and Mehitabel. (Michael Sims’ 400-page “Annotated Archy and Mehitabel” from 2006 remains in print.)

            “The creation of Archy was part inspiration, part desperation,” commented White (who described columnists as “men who are hoping their spirit will soar in time to catch the edition”).

            A mouthpiece for witty sneers, Archy lived in a world of fear and violence. He was an alter ego – a literary device used by journalists from Harris (Uncle Remus) to, more recently, Mike Royko (Slats Grobnik). Mehitabel, a promiscuous cat, fancied herself an artiste, commenting on current events, even as Archy mocked poetry.

            Marquis’s columns were mild social criticism, and his verse ranged from zany burlesque to graceful lyricism. Throughout his career, Marquis mixed the madcap and melancholy. He had substance and a flair for strong characters, a light tone and real zeal, and a talent for blending classical material and contemporary mores.

            “Don Marquis was a kindly man who did not fear enmities, but he was a satirist, and he could bring down a stuffed shirt on the wing with the best of them,” wrote fellow New York columnist Heywood Broun. “And when he was of a mind he could and did land punishing punches behind the ear.”

            In 1922, Marquis moved to the Tribune, where his column was named The Lantern, and he retired from daily journalism in 1925.

            After a series of strokes, he died crippled and almost penniless 12 years later, but his last writing effort, “Sons of the Puritans,” was a straightforward, semi-autobiographical novel published in 1939.

            “It was the fate of Don Marquis, the master of comedy, that his life was overlaid with tragedy,” wrote famed newspaperman Stanley Walker. “He laughed much, but in his heart, he was a mystic, a somber, brooding poet.”

            Perhaps White summed up the loss for those who came after Marquis: “The new generation of newspaper readers is missing a lot that we used to have,” he recalled. “Buying a paper then was quietly exciting, in a way that it has ceased to be.”