Archy and the Camel

[anteros_lmc]

When nodbear discovered Susan Pellew's astonishing letter admonishing her husband for bringing home stray tigers, baboons and monkeys it immediately recalled the previous report we had discovered of Pellew arriving at Plymouth and landing a cargo comprising "a beautiful male tiger, a tigercat, several sheep from the Cape of Good Hope, a land and sea tortoise, together with many other oriental quadrupeds". Since then we have speculated endlessly as to the exact nature of the "oriental quadrupeds" and eventually came to the conclusion that they must be camels. Hence the camel in nodbear's delightful latest fic The Sailor's Return, an Indy menagerie story.

All this talk of camels inevitable made me think of my favourite camel poem:

oh deride not the camel
if grief should make him die
his ghost will come to haunt you
with tears in either eye
and the spirit of the camel
in the midnight gloom
can be so very cheerless
as he wanders round the room.

Now I had always thought this masterpiece was the work of Spike Milligan. Not so! On googling the lines, <cliché>imagine my astonishment</cliché> to discover the author was a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach called Archy!

Both Archy and the camel were the work of New York Herald Tribune journalist Don Marquis. According to wikipedia:

Archy was a cockroach who had been a free verse poet in a previous life, and took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach. Archy's best friend was Mehitabel, an alley cat. The two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made satiric commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910s and 1920s.

Because he was a cockroach, Archy was unable to operate the shift key on the typewriter (he jumped on each key to type; since using shift requires two keys to be pressed simultaneously, he physically could not use capitals), and so all of his verse was written without capitalization or punctuation. (Writing in his own persona, though, Marquis always used correct capitalization and punctuation. As E. B. White wrote in his introduction to The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, it would be incorrect to conclude that, "because Don Marquis's cockroach was incapable of operating the shift key of a typewriter, nobody else could operate it.")

There was at least one point in which Archy happened to jump onto the shift lock key—a chapter titled Capitals at Last (styled as CAPITALS AT LAST).

Presumably some of the US peeps on my flist will be familiar with Archy and Mehitabel but, aside from the camel, they are entirely new to me. How delightful!

Comments

[elin-gregory.livejournal.com]

I used to know someone who had a cat called Mehitabel - that must be where she got the name from.

I'm imagining Pellew with this camel now. The tiddler must be laughing at his tricorn.

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I think she is a bantling.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

*nods* or a cub.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Mehitabel is a splendid name for a cat! And that is an even more splendid camel :D I love camels but I have never had the pleasure of meeting a bactrian camel!

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I read Archy and Mehitabel years ago. Have not thought of it in a long long time.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

See? I knew you guys would have heard of them! :)

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Funny, I knew about archy and mehitabel through a reference to it in another book entirely (a pithy little ditty as a chapter-opening epigram).

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I am now very intrigued by the pithy little cockroach. I must look out more of his works!

[vespican.livejournal.com]

i had heard of archy and mehitabel before as well. don't know if i've read any of it, but...

dave

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

hi dave, i knew you guys would have come across these guys before :)

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

i am acquainted with archy and mehitabel. read their works when I was a child.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

having just met them, i would certainly like to become better acquainted :)

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Delightful tales indeed.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Aren't they?! I must find more or Archy's works!

[esmerelda-t.livejournal.com]

He should have got Mehitable to operate the shift key. But as Bartholmew will attest to it is so very difficult to get the help these days.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

But didn't you say it was hard for Bartholomew to use the keyboard because of his paws?! Perhaps Mehitabel has the same problem?

[esmerelda-t.livejournal.com]

But cats are more limber than overweight spaniels!

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I loved archy and mehitabel when I was young. I especially loved Mehitabel and her "toujours gai" and "there's a dance or two left in the old dame yet." Grizabella but cheerful!

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I am delighted to have made archy and mehitabels acquaintance :) I was so sure the camel ode have been written by Spike Milligan. I even though it had come from the Book of Milliganimals!

[nodbear.livejournal.com]

archy and mehitabel - yes had an aunt who was a fan but had forgotten about them. Intetrested to read original post and peoples thouhgts
Reminds me of the story of three real life Mehitables -yes, three! which I might get on to in real life stories in the Lent column.
Thanks for this though Anteros!

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Three Mehitabels?! Good heavens! I have never even met one!