Shandygaff | Page 8

verses,
fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way
into circulation. Any reader who went to Dreams and Dust (poems,
published October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter,
was on a blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul
of this man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to
question the answerless face of life--
Still mounts the dream on shining pinion, Still broods the dull distrust;
Which shall have ultimate dominion, Dream, or dust?
Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble
verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of
Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He

can turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll
Durham cigarettes.
How neat this is:
TO A DANCING DOLL
Formal, quaint, precise, and trim, You begin your steps demurely--
There's a spirit almost prim In the feet that move so surely. So
discreetly, to the chime Of the music that so sweetly Marks the time.
But the chords begin to tinkle Quicker, And your feet they flash and
flicker-- Twinkle!-- Flash and flutter to a tricksy Fickle meter; And you
foot it like a pixie-- Only fleeter!
Not our current, dowdy Things-- "Turkey trots" and rowdy Flings-- For
they made you overseas In politer times than these In an age when
grace could please, Ere St. Vitus Clutched and shook us, spine and
knees; Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!
But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he
sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from
the slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme
is a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from
Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious
inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his
brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real
earnestness that underlies his chaff.
I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the
hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a
submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago
by Plato in the Republic (not the New Republic) or by Samuel Butler in
his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of
letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some
contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but
nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six
times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret

compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops:
MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)
TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea.
(COLD ROAST BEEF.)
WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF
STEW.)
THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)
FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued,
sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main
business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR
CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)
SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself
for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN
IT.)
SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we
have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.
But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always
tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry battery
has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real
voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre
Cockroach, the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle,
Suggestions to Popular Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the
sequence of Prefaces (to an Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of
Euripides, a Diary, a Book of Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most
admirable and delicious fooling has been poured into these Prefaces: I
hope that he will put them between book-covers.
One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a

number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the
aphorisms and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their
weekly envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their
employees. They had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo,
and other panhellenists, and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted
suggestions as to where they could find more.
I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether
they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon