Shandygaff | Page 7

don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You
know if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply
bankrupt."
The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the
country near New York," he said.
"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes?
He looked like a canary."

DON MARQUIS
There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the
victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of
your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be
considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war
and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew
with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may
utterly misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that

will be offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from
Brooklyn Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and
now lives in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him
stout....
Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well,
call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob pipes,
dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and
Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York Evening
Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists
and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is far
more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian Prometheus
chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of
Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half
of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart
and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk he is a dramatist.
He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre
Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and
cutting satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch,
elicits only "a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:
A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other
evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time
to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair
broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us
sad.
The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul
into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in the
course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more than
happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral
chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or flings
a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its heart and
soul.
Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as
a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well

known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier.
Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing sonnets,
are among the finest pieces he has done.
The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to
look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship.
The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill
Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially
warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has
emerged from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic
ability to transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much
of his best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter
standing on an upturned packing box. (When the American Magazine
published a picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man
of the Sun got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men
are a hardy race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper
office would dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the
old Sun building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle.
"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like
dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the
echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come.
Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading
their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for
that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty