archy’s life of mehitabel was published by Doubleday, Doran & Co. in 1933. The second collection of archy’s writings shifts focus somewhat toward mehitabel, who is aging — she has been on the streets for years now, her beauty is fading, her teeth are fewer, and the toms who once fought for her attention are less ardent. But her spirit remains unbroken: “toujours gai” persists as her motto, even when the evidence for gaiety becomes harder to find.
The collection includes some of Marquis’s finest individual poems. “the song of mehitabel” is a magnificent comic monologue in which the cat celebrates her own indestructibility. Other poems address the lot of the ordinary cockroach (archy’s reflections on mortality, on the meaninglessness of existence, on the consolations of poetry), the behavior of humans observed from below (literally — from floor level), and the various animals who populate the nocturnal world of newspaper offices and back alleys.
The George Herriman illustrations — the creator of Krazy Kat was a natural match for Marquis’s sensibility — add a visual dimension that perfectly captures the work’s combination of sophistication and roughness, elegance and vulgarity.
The undertone of melancholy is stronger in this volume than in the first: Marquis was experiencing personal tragedies (the deaths of his wife and children) that darkened his humor without destroying it. mehitabel’s aging, archy’s philosophical resignation, and the general sense of a world running down give the collection a depth that the first book’s exuberance sometimes conceals.
Collecting archy’s life of mehitabel
First edition (Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, NY, 1933): Cloth binding, dust jacket with George Herriman illustrations.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100