When the Turtles Sing

by Don Marquis

This was a sweet book.

It’s ten short stories, published in 1928, by Don Marquis, a humorist and poet that I have been long acquainted with because my parents read and shared with the family Marquis’s collection Archy and Mehitabel, about a cat and a cockroach who are both reincarnated spirits; the cockroach was a poet, and he sneaks out at night and types poems on Marquis’s typewriter, one key at a time, without any capital letters because he can’t hold down the Shift key. I loved that book, and got my dad’s old copy of it a few years ago, whereupon I read it to my wife, who also loved it. So when I was at the Friends of the Library Book Sale, and I saw this lovely old hardback with a great title and a familiar author, I had to get it.

I’m glad I did. Marquis had a hell of a sense of humor, and more important, he had a hell of a sense of fun: these stories are mostly just fun. They’re good ideas, and they’re actually well-realized; a couple of them take really surprising dark turns, which fits the characters and plots, even if it doesn’t seem to fit the book. But it was an interesting choice, because you have what seems a parody, a caricature of human beings, who get into absurd situations – and then, for some of them at least, you have a fairly serious result, one which follows logically from the story’s events; but I didn’t think we were speaking logically.

The humorous stories are in two sets, one a trio of stories recounted to us by the Old Soak, an elderly gentleman who tells us stories about the strange residents of his small town, particularly the ones who live in a nearby swamp. One of the stories, the title one about the turtles singing (which is actually a quote from the Bible), has a mixed-up comic romance worthy of Shakespeare; but another of the Old Soak’s stories tells about a love triangle that might include a murder, as one man dies accidentally while in the presence of the second man. That story might get wacky, except it was much more about the woman’s attempts to become a full and complete version of herself despite the town’s bias against her, as she comes from the swamp and is therefore unclean and unacceptable. Her story is something of a triumph, as she finds a way to go to college and complete the education she had to begin herself, and then travels to Europe, unencumbered by marriage (She does marry both guys, but the second marriage is more open and free companionship than the sort of ownership that would have been common at the time) and child-rearing; all fine and good – except the story ends with her husband going mad with guilt over the death of the first man, and at the end he shoots himself. So, y’know – not funny.

The other funny ones are much funnier: a pair of tall tales told by an Irish father to his two sons; Marquis gives in to the temptation to write in Irish dialect, which isn’t my favorite thing to read, but he does it well and not too excessively. He does it with the Old Soak stories, too, which have a Twain-esque hillbilly style to them, with a number of malapropisms and strange spelling/pronunciations from a Southern American English dialect. More important, he doesn’t rely on the accent for humor: the stories are funny, and the narrator is hilarious, in both cases.

So I enjoyed the book, which was generally light-hearted and well-written. But now I’m sort of stuck: you see, I liked it, but I wasn’t inspired by it, so normally, I’d sell this book back into circulation so someone else could enjoy it. But this copy is actually from 1928, and it’s falling apart; the binding is broken, and the pages are coming loose from the spine. So I can’t sell it, and if I give it away, it will just get trashed. I can’t let Don Marquis get trashed. Not a book about singing turtles, either. I think that this book will get to sit on my shelf, hanging around like the Old Soak, just waiting for someone to sit for a spell and listen to his stories.

I like that.