The Fun of Don Marquis

by CHESTER T. CROWELL

1

LIKE most humorists, Don Marquis greatly enjoyed giving away his best in conversation; writing was hard work and the results always unpredictable. Editors would order six Archy the Cockroach and Mehitabel the Cat pieces and turn down two or three, but a listening audience never failed to register ecstatic enjoyment. Don and I were companions over a period of about fifteen years. I would walk into the Players’ Club, find him, and ask, with anxious tone and expression: “How’s Archy?” Don would pretend that he was troubled, and just a bit uncertain about taking me into his confidence. There were dozens of these dead-pan acts, but one will serve adequately as an example.

Don leaned across the luncheon table and said in a low tone: “I haven’t seen Archy for days. He’s in hiding. He’s in pretty serious trouble. It’s about his income tax. The silly fool has committed perjury. He lied about the number of my paste pots he has consumed.” Archy the Cockroach, if you recall him, lived off Don’s paste pot. It was his source of income. And now he had lied about the quantity of paste. The Internal Revenue Bureau had issued an order of distraint and Don’s paste pot had been sequestered, to his great annoyance. He was also uneasy lest he be involved in possible criminal charges as Archy’s accomplice in flimflamming Uncle Sam. Pretty serious business. Archy, being very ignorant, was afraid that he might spend the remainder of his life in a debtors’ prison, and had fled. This cut communication and made further articles about Archy impossible, thus robbing Don of a major portion of his income. If he could find Archy and renew their profitable relations, he would be glad to lend him some money. But, as matters stood, both were likely to land in the poorhouse. Still worse, Don had discovered, in the course of his search for Archy, that Archy had a large and profitable harem of lady cockroaches, the income from which had not been reported. But the Internal Revenue Bureau had found and seized them under the order of distraint. Then Don leaned still farther forward and whispered. What the Internal Revenue Bureau was doing with these lady cockroaches he did not know, but he knew a little about the Internal Revenue Bureau, and he “feared a fate worse than death.”

One snowy December night I met Don in the Players’ Club and said: “I haven’t seen you for ten days. What news of you?” (We had played pool together the evening before.)

“I drove down to Philadelphia,” he answered, “and got lost.” (Don always made up these stories on the instant. During fifteen years I certainly never saw him drive a car, nor ever heard of his driving one. But Philadelphia was a famous place for motorists to get lost, and now he was going into his dead-pan act.)

“Lost for days,” he continued. “But it is all going to turn out all right. I think I am going to get rich. I stopped at a filling station and got a map of Philadelphia; did me no good as far as getting out of the place, but when I finally stumbled out and got back to New York, I found a bootlegger I knew and he wanted to make a tank of bathtub gin, but he had lost his recipe. I showed him the map of Philadelphia and sure enough it worked. He made the gin, sold it, and paid me a thousand dollars. He said it was the best gin he ever made. And then I met a rich oilman from Texas. He wanted to build a house and his architect was no good. So I showed him the Philadelphia map and he looked it over, and there was exactly what he wanted. He dismissed the expensive architect and called a contractor, and the house is going forward with everyone delighted. He’s going to pay me a thousand dollars. I have got to attend one of those Fifth Avenue weddings pretty soon and I haven’t got the right clothes. If you go to a Fifth Avenue tailor they cost a lot of money. I showed this Philadelphia map to a Greek waiter I know and he told me that it was as simple as two and two. He is going to make me my suit for eighteen dollars, two per cent discount for cash, and he says I will be a knockout. This oilman from Texas says the Philadelphia map shows where to drill the next well and he has cut me in on the royalty. I think I am going to be rich.”

Don was always worried about money; that probably explains why he loved fantastic stories about coming riches.

But most of all Don liked to play with words. I remember an evening at the club when the captain of a ship arrived with snow on his hat and told us that snow at sea was far worse than fog because snow silenced the foghorn beyond one hundred yards, not to mention sight within ten yards.

“Snow?" Don said, with a lift of his eloquent eyebrows, and then an insinuating look at the rest of us, carefully avoiding the captain’s eyes, “Snow!” It was clear that no decent human being would utter the word “snow” in a gentleman’s club. He continued with a few rambling remarks about the degeneracy of our (imes and the decline of conversation into sheer nastiness. Nothing more about snow, but nothing more was necessary. The captain was puzzled for a few moments, but he caught on and bolstered Don’s act with one of his own that was nearly as good. He made absurd efforts to change the subject and indicated by tone and gesture that if the assembled company would kindly forget his dreadful and accidental vulgar remark he would never be guilty of a similar offense. Don stared at him sternly while he took a draw from his pipe, then relented, and suggested a game of pool. He invited the captain to be his partner. All was forgiven. An erring guest had been properly rebuked.

On another occasion the indecent word was “tendril.” A fellow member of the Players’ Club had returned that day from France and had been telling us about a delightful visit to the grape orchards. The crop was enormous, and he marveled that the slender tendrils could hold the laden vines to their supports.

“Tendrils?” queried Don. “Did you look at them? And it was obvious that he should not have looked at them. Not in their nakedness. No gentleman would have done such a thing. The act consumed about forty minutes and I am sure that an innocent stranger, if he had been present, would have wondered for months afterward whether the word “tendril” could properly be used in mixed company, and what other meanings the word might have.

Don loved telling bawdy stories without ever using a word to which a minister of the gospel could have objected. It was part of his enjoyment of playing with words, the omissions being a special form of fun. The movement of his eyebrows more than adequately replaced the missing words. An innocent, looking at him, would never have suspected him of being capable of a bawdy story, anyway. He was my idea of what a saint would look like. His head was the noblest I have ever seen. His skin was milk-white, his expressive eyes blue-gray, his great shock of hair burnished silver. He was a barrel-shaped man, utterly male, with a gorilla s chest, but his speaking voice and his eyes caressed you. He liked people, and they knew it instantly, and responded.

Don could tell a story that would be the envy of Rabelais in such a manner that your Aunt Minerva would enjoy it and never suspect that it wasn’t a parlor story. To the best, of my recollection he never uttered an oath and certainly never uttered any of the four-letter, “short and ugly” words.

He told me one evening, as casually as you might remark that you do not like cauliflower, that he had never been untrue to his wife, although he had no moral objections to dalliance. “I never did,” he said, “because she might find it out and it would have caused her pain.”

2

DON especially enjoyed being asked about Mehitabel the Cat, whose aesthetic sense was so different. He would pucker his brows and appear to be greatly embarrassed, then he would lean forward and tell, in a low tone, what had happened to Mehitabel. It was always something related to the scientific reports of Krafft-Ebing. As a rule the reports on Mehitabel ended with her tragic death. The reports on Peter Fitzhurse also ended with his heroic and tragic death. A death never interfered with the next adventure, however.

Peter Fitzhurse, in case you do not recall him, was the character who had three fingers missing from one hand and was always explaining how he lost them, but every explanation he made was totally different from any preceding explanation. Don followed this pattern of utter confusion in his extemporaneous recitals when reporting on the current status of Peter Fitzhurse. One afternoon when I asked him about Peter, he said: “Fitzhurse is dead. The report is all over the front page of the Times this morning. Didn’t you see it?” I confessed I had not. Don often reported that the tragic news relating to his puppets had been on the front page of the New York Times, especially if it was the sort of news the Times would be certain not to print.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

This was Don’s clue for one of his characteristic improvisations. Peter Fitzhurse, he reported, had sot forth upon a tour of the world to have amorous experience with one woman of every ethnological classification. Evidently this expedition, except for its peculiar specialization, was inspired by that of Pickwick. Fitzhurse proved a better man than he had suspected himself to be before he started. Moreover, the women were not so different as he had thought they might be and they soon bored him. He explored canyons, the crevices in great glaciers, and sought prehistoric fauna whose names end with “saurus.” Finally he decided to rape the interstellar spaces since only these were worthy of his prowess. Seeking advice, he was told to go to Naples. There he noticed a curl of smoke from near-by Vesuvius. He fell in love with Vesuvius and, being his own true self, rushed to that volcanic mountain to embrace its crater.

“I need not tell you what happened,” Don concluded. “You know the impetuosity of Fitzhurse. The volcano became excited. There was an eruption. Poor Peter is dead. Burned to a crisp. It’s on the front page of the Times, I don t know how you missed it.”

One evening when I came into the Players’, Don hailed me and asked me to be his partner in the next pool game. I nodded assent. He was a poor player and greatly enjoyed attributing defeat to his partner, on such fantastic grounds that the fun was worth ten times the cost of the defeat.

We had been playing about ten minutes when Don leaned his cue against the wall, grasped the table, and seemed to be staring at the pool balls. Franklin Pierce Adams and Rollin Kirby were also in the game. They stacked their cues and stared at Don. I was studying the table because I would shoot after Adams and he was an opponent to be respected.

“I can’t see,” Don said. “I’ve gone blind.

Some eight or more of those present rushed to his side. I couldn’t. I was stricken. They led him to a taxicab and took him home. I waited at the club for their report.

This affliction, the doctor reported, was nervous and not physiological. He would be able to see again in a few days. And so he was. We sent him flowers by the bale, and awaited his return.

One night when I came in he said: “Has anyone ever called you an egg? A good egg or a bad egg makes no difference. Has anyone ever called you an egg?”

“Well,” I said, “I am sure I have been called an egg. What of it ? ”

“Just this,” Don answered. “I have been forbidden to drink any alcoholic beverage except a glass of sherry wine with an egg. And you are the egg.” So we had a drink.

But the doctor’s prohibition continued for months and Don obeyed until one midnight when I entered the club after having attended the Metropolitan Opera and discovered him with a very large glass of sherry wine in his hand.

“What do I see, Don?” I demanded, reprovingly. “Don, what do I see?”

And Don promptly answered: “Chester, we must not let our self-control get the better of us.”

In any club a few men furnish the spirit that gives it spiritual life. Don was one of the seven or eight who made the Players’. During the time I was close to him his wife died, his son died, his daughter died. The daughter, although in her early teens, had already shown some promise as a poet. And she delightfully inherited Don’s best features.

But even before these tragic events Don had a deep sense of the futility of human effort. We should struggle bravely, he thought, but there would be no victory parade. We should struggle bravely because that was the best way of meeting life’s challenge. Sometimes when remedies for national and international problems were expounded Don would brush them aside, gently but firmly. They would be such remedies (common in the 1920’s) as that all the Mohammedan, Confucian, and Buddhist nations should abandon their foolishness, join the Baptist Church, the Rotary Club, and march forward to the millennium. Don would offer an alternative solution of the world’s problems. It was that we should all gather and root for another ice age. Or cheer for the insects to take over the earth, displacing mankind, since mankind had obviously failed.

When Don was too ill to write he had always one ace in the hole. He could reprint “Noah an’ Jonah an’ Cap’n John Smith,” originally published in his column in the New York Sun. While he conducted that column he had a serious illness which lasted many months. Whenever “Noah an’ Jonah an’ Cap’n John Smith” reappeared, the circulation would rise by thousands. If you, dear reader, have not yet read it, I envy you the experience. Don is dead now. There may not be its equal in the future.