If anyone visits Port Richmond Books, wear old clothes and carry a flashlight (nooks and corners lack illumination). I was happy to acquire this artifact of the 1920s. Identifying the first editions of Don Marquis can be a bibliographer's nightmare, especially the archys. This edition is different from the later archy & mehitabel editions: it includes only the first of the three-book archy series, no illustrations by George Herriman, and no introduction by E.B. It lacked the dust jacket and had a former owner's inscription, but at $35 it was decent enough. At the enormous Port Richmond Books, in a former silent-movie theater - long silent - boasting of a stock of 200,000 books in various states of quality, I encountered a legitimate first edition of archy & mehitabel, 1927. On a sweltering July day, 2013, in the final throws of a heatwave, I navigated harrowing I-95 to Philadelphia's well-worn Port Richmond neighborhood, which is in the shadow of that motorized Interstate monstrosity. However, for all their contrast, both Riley and Marquis secured a niche in the history of American letters. It would be fair to say that Riley's poetry struck a popular chord while Marquis' work was favored by a discriminating minority. Census figures cited in a 2007 paper for the Study of Labor found that of all Americans born in 1900, only twenty-six percent graduated from high school and just five percent earned college degrees. We were not an educated nation in the days of Riley and Marquis. Still, Riley's maudlin, mawkish, sentimental, country corn is hopelessly anachronistic. ![]() O ne might suppose that in 1905, when Riley's Songs O'Cheer was published, dialect in prose and poetry could be useful because there were few recordings of actual voices, nor were there radio or motion pictures with sound. Some might claim that the words of archy and mehitabel aren't poetry in the strictest sense, but I view it as free verse on a high level. ![]() Here's a pearl from archy in the 1950 reprint:Īrchy also spells out words that might have been offensive at the time, such as "hell" ("h dash double l"). While Marquis has his own affections (no punctuation) there are, thankfully, no phony Riley-style dialects. M arquis, the urbane, big-city columnist, was the antithesis of Riley, and a sophisticated joy to read even today. His diction is without felicity, his vocabulary is not English. His characters are stupid and forbidding to the last supportable degree he has just enough creative power to find them ignoble and leave them offensive. His pathos is bathos, his sentiment sediment, his "homely philosophy" brute platatudes-beasts of the field of thought. In the dirt of his "dialect" there is no grain of gold. He was Ambrose Bierce, who pulled no punches when he said this of Riley: One important critic, however, despised Riley's work. The odd spellings are, of course, Riley's inventions, and his cracker-barrel sensibilities were beloved by an America that in Riley's time was mostly rural. Because we now have the ability to actually hear accents and dialects (via radio, TV, film, and the Internet), which Riley didn't, it would be absurd to apply them in today's prose - and the subject of ridicule. Sometimes difficult to follow due to the phonetic spellings, much of it is narrated by a "Benj. Riley's work is, by today's standards, painful to read. archy writes commentaries on a typewriter but can't manage the typewriter's shift key, so he must spell out or ignore punctuation thus, the lack of caps. M arquis' column, "The Sun Dial," gave him an outlet for his biting social criticism, manifested best by his creation of archy, a cockroach, and mehitabel, an alley cat. Marquis experienced a series of family tragedies and suffered from several debilitating strokes before his death in 1937. ![]() Postal Service issued a stamp to honor him in 1940. More than 35,000 people passed his bier following his death in 1916, and the U.S. Riley's homespun poems, much in dialect, led him to national fame. Marquis worked for several major newspapers prior to landing a job as a columnist for the New York Sun. Riley was a reporter for the Indianapolis Journal before turning himself into a full time poet. Riley was born in 1849 near the town of Greenfield, Indiana, Marquis in 1878 in Walnut, Illinois. Both Riley and Marquis were Midwesterners.
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