A lonely roach is a sad creature; if it were a poet, it would chant dirges “of surpassing beauty and pathos.”
Review by Christopher Irmscher of Ashley Ward’s “The Social Lives of Animals.”
Sunday morning, and I’m flipping through The New York Times Book Review, just in case I’ve become a best-selling author since I went to bed last night, and my eyes encounter the usual fare. You can’t get out of the first paragraph of a book review these days without a first-person reference to the reviewer; I, me, my, mine, the editorial “we,” by which the writer really means “I” or “me,” but hypes it up to the plural number in order to appear less conspicuously egotistical. Maybe my memory’s failing, but I don’t seem to recall Edmund Wilson or Dorothy Parker exposing their inner souls when they wrote book reviews. I fear that in the crab bucket of publishing these days–with fewer people reading books while M.F.A. programs across the country churn out legions of underemployed literateurs–a writer who snags a book review assignment feels compelled to turn it into, as Norman Mailer would put it, an advertisement for himself.
I’m about to go directly to the unfunny cartoon panel on the inside back cover when I’m struck by a passage that might be of interest to Archy, the cockroach I live with despite my wife’s best efforts to trap him in a Roach Motel.
“Hey Arch,“ I call out to him.
“Yeah?”
“There’s a new book you might be interested in.”
“What’s that?”
“Ashley Ward’s ‘The Social Lives of Animals.’ He says cockroaches are very sociable, and ‘hunker down in large, multigenerational groups during the day.’”
Archy gives me a side-eye. “A human–expounding on the lives of cockroaches. How . . . droll.”
“And he says ‘A lonely roach is a sad creature. If it . . .”
“Did he just mis-gender me?”
“You’re not an ‘it’ to me. Anyway, he called your species one ‘of our planet’s most unpromising residents.’”
“I never promised nobody nothing, but go on.”
“He says if a lonely cockroach were a poet, it would chant dirges of surpassing beauty and pathos.”
I could hear the sound of Archy’s eyes rolling from the far corner of the kitchen table, where he was ready to dart behind a toaster if my wife appeared. “Tell me,” he said sarcastically, “something I don’t know.”
“I didn’t know that you knew . . .”
“Has my star fallen so far that the freaking New York Times Book Review has forgotten me?”
“They don’t make book reviewers like they used to,” I replied. “A certain solipsism is required of the liberal arts majors who work on the dailies these days, and while you don’t have to be ignorant of all literature outside the narrow confines of the current canon to write book reviews, it helps.”
For those keeping score at home, Archy is the dean of cockroach poets. He first appeared in The New York Sun in 1916, and with that early lead no poet of the 4,600 cockroach species found in human habitats has ever surpassed him. He is the Homer, Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath of cockroach poets all rolled into one.
Archy grumbled, and I couldn’t blame him. His first effort, which he painstakingly banged out by hopping up and down on typewriter keys, has held up quite well:
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but I died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook on life
“Don’t let it get you down,” I said. “East Coast media-types have always been indifferent at best and hostile at worst to your branch of the order of Blattodea. Maybe because they encounter you in the tiny urban apartments they live in before they wise up, take jobs in advertising and move to the suburbs.”
“I’ve been cranking out dirges of surpassing beauty and pathos for 106 years, and this guy is only interested in the next bright young thing to emerge from a low-residency creative writing program,” he groused.
“It’s pretty much the same in all the art forms.”
“Even your favorite–jazz?”
“Even? Particularly. When the symphony or the ballet goes into their bi-annual self-flagellation about not using music by Black artists, it’s all I can do to keep myself from writing an angry letter to the editor . . .”
“Which your wife would kill you for.”
” . . . there is that disincentive–pointing out that they could play Ellington, or stage ballets by Sidney Bechet or Sir Roland Hanna.”
“When are you going to give up your cockamamie crusade?”
“As soon as I recover the Holy Grail.”
We sat in silence for a while, each musing on his own particular frustration. I heard Arch stifle a sniff, and it occurred to me that maybe I should console him.
“Loneliness comes with the territory for poets,” I said. “Maybe you could join a fraternal order.”
“I don’t think there’s a Benevolent and Protective Order of Cockroaches.”
“How about a bowling league?”
“Pretty sure I couldn’t pick up a twelve-pound ball. Anyway, I’m happy with my trade-off.”
“Giving up your fellow cockroaches in order to make art?”
“Yeah. I just wish I could get a little late-in-life recognition.”
“Have you thought about applying for a poet-in-residence gig?”
“I did, but I didn’t like the looks of the janitor over at the junior college.”
“How about one of those goofball ‘poet laureate’ positions that municipalities fund with $250 and all the foolscap you can eat?”
“I’m not cut out for ceremonial verse. Ode to Our New Solid Waste Transfer Station, Valediction to This Year’s High School Valedictorian, that sort of thing.”
I was stumped, but then a lightning bolt of inspiration struck me. “Have you ever heard the expression avoir le cafard?”
“‘To have the cockroach’? Sure–it’s from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.”
Charles Baudelaire
“He meant the whole cockroachy feeling you get when life sucks.”
“Go on.”
“Well, that kind of stuff sells like hotcakes among the educated classes. The more depressing the better!”
“So instead of writing, light, humorous, funny stuff, I should . . .”
“Open a vein–figuratively of course–and let the blood flow.”
He made a little moue with his mouth and nodded perceptively.
“You may just be onto something.”
“Of course I am.”
“You’re pretty cocky.”
“I have a right to be.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because if you’re looking for somebody who’s had a little success as a poet, I’ve had as little as anybody.”