FullReads

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 mots would adorn any pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts.

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.

If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know you are loafing?

Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that minorities are always right.

Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.

I am tired of being a promising young man. I’ve been a promising young man for twenty years.

In most of Don Marquis’s japes, a still small voice speaks in the mirthquake:

If you try too hard to get a thing, you don’t get it.

If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come–the little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper colour–the girl will marry the other man–the public will cry, Bedamned to him! he can’t write anyhow!–the cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity–the Welsh rabbit will be stringy–you will find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your ballade–the primrose by the river’s brim will be only a hayfever carrier–and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers.

But Don Marquis’s mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:

This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth …
As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,
Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb–
Who frowned above him, proud and grim,
While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore
Of fire and steel and stone and war:
She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth

Of spirit, honour and clean mirth …
His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.

Tip from the wild red Welter of the past
Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last.