Douglas M. Parker Ogden Nash:
The Life & Work of America’s Laureate of
Light Verse. Ivan R. Dee, 336 pages, $27.50

For me, at any rate, the name “Ogden Nash” brings a smile to the lips and an itch to quote. Some poems stick easily in my increasingly diminished memory: “A little talcum/ Is always walcum.” Alas, talcum is now most unwalcum—its silicates can cause death. But “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” will surely never date. “Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker.” Most of my favorites, though, are too long to fit comfortably in my memory and the columns of The New Criterion. High in my high school pantheon, right up there with “Terence, this is stupid stuff” and “Do not go gentle into that good night,” is “Very Like A Whale,” Nash’s anti-simile grouse against Byron’s poem in Hebrew Melodies beginning “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold/ And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.”

In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in
        our philosophy there are a great many
        things,
But I don’t imagine that among them there is a
        wolf with purple and gold cohorts or
        purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this
        Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must
        have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy
        tail and a big red mouth and big white
        teeth and did he say Woof woof?

The big difference between Nash and, say, Housman and Dylan Thomas is that it little profits a high school student, idle or not, to analyze him. As Groucho Marx said, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. You can do it, but no one much enjoys it and the frog tends to die in the process.”

Nash’s background is roughly what you’d guess. Born in 1902, he grew up more than comfortably off until his early teens when his father’s business started teetering. There was still enough money for prep school and a year at Harvard, perhaps more, but Nash wasn’t all that interested. He lit out for New York and eventually ended up at Doubleday, first in advertising, then as an editor. The comic novelist Thorne Smith was one of his authors. Being an editor meant he read the reams of bad poetry that tumble over the transoms. Pollyanna-like, Nash decided it might be funny to write bad poetry on purpose: “As I sit in my office/ On 23rd street and Madison Avenue/ I say to myself:/ You’ve a responsible position, havenue?” The rest, as they say, is history, and light verse paid the bills.

Nash could hold his own in Round-Table Manhattan, cracking wise with the likes of Dorothy Parker and S. J. Perelman and The New Yorker crowd. He did just fine in Hollywood, too, where he worked on The Firefly, a Jeannette MacDonald movie without Nelson Eddy. Back in New York, he aimed for Broadway, and did pretty well with Perelman and Kurt Weill in One Touch of Venus. Meanwhile, he was quite happily married and paternal to two daughters, Linell and Isabel: “In spite of her sniffle/ Isabel’s chiffle/ Some girls with a sniffle/ Would be weepy and tiffle.” He apparently drank a tad too much until his wife told him not to. Parker tells us he had spells of “depression and inability to write,” but since the worst such spell lasted from the end of 1967 to the beginning of 1968, it doesn’t sound too dire.

As you can see, Nash had appalling luck for a poet: he was happy, prolific, and financially stable. Nash was especially unlucky because chronologically if not temperamentally he is in the generation of Modernist poets, whose standard for significance is measured in angsts. Parker and Dana Gioia, who contributed the foreword, do what they can to make Nash academically relevant. The usually sensible Douglas Parker makes me cringe when he talks about Nash’s “seminal rendering” of “haven’t you” as “havenue.” Gioia boldly claims that Nash was a Modernist, of sorts: “He was an inveterate experimentalist—a congenial one, to be sure, but also a wildly inventive artist. In terms of technical experimentation, his work sits comfortably beside that of his critically acknowledged revolutionary contemporaries like … ” I mostly think that their dissection of this bright particular frog proves Groucho right, but it’s not wholly unprofitable to think of Nash in relation to the complicated imperatives of Modernism.

Nash could be as topical and timeless as Cole Porter’s Bendel bonnets, Shakespeare sonnets, and cellophane. But the pleasures arising from his goofy linguistic virtuosity are essentially aesthetic.

Often, Nash’s effects can be surreally vertiginous as in “My Trip Daorba,” which summarizes a family trip to Europe where Nash, the male in a family of females, always had to sit in the backward-facing seat:

I added little to my knowledge of the country-
side but much to my reputation for docility
Riding backwards through ecnarF and ylatI.
I am not quite certain,
But I think in siraP I saw the ervuoL, the rewoT
leffiE, and the Cathedral of emaD ertoN.

(Parker quotes Richard Pipes, who wrote Nash that his poems had been translated into Russian and had “swept the literary circles of Leningrad.” I just can’t wrap my brain around this.) Added to Nash’s almost purely verbal pleasures are his allusions, from José Iturbi to Shakespeare and Palgrave. Are these fragments shored up against somebody’s ruins? They certainly mark the decay of Common Knowledge; poor Mr. Parker feels he must identify Shakespeare’s Mr. W.H. and Coleridge’s Person from Porlock.

I’ve been toying with this idea of Nash as Popular Modernist (a group that includes Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes), as Gioia claims, but I’m not completely persuaded. The high seriousness of high modernists such as Eliot trickled down into the middlebrow seriousness of “A Lincoln Portrait.” Nash isn’t in their class, and that’s meant as a neutral observation, possibly a compliment. He knew quite well that “there’s many a false word spoken in jest.”

By the 1960s, Nash was a bit out of step with the world around him. He updated “Ice-Breaker” with the addition: “Pot/ Is not.” Marijuana struck him as a solipsistic rather than a convivial ingestion. Sex had not improved. Nor had children’s literature, which tried to “suit the book to the little mind” by giving them “hat, cat, mat, rat, vat” instead of trying to “sneak a few words in on them.” Nonetheless, although he could be crotchety on occasion—“My fellow man I do not care for/ I often ask me, what’s he there for?”—he was never misanthropic.

Is this the problem? Is the right true way to transcend light verse to become Swift? Maybe. Nash isn’t. The best parallel for Nash might be P. G. Wodehouse, a writer he much admired who returned the compliment. Both are comically and variously allusive and verbally playful within the constraints of their genre. Both have styles that seem facile but are in fact inimitable. Both were politely self-disparaging about their genius; Nash, for instance, claimed merely to have a “certain knack for rhyming and versification, which is something like the knack for sinking an eighteen-inch putt.”

Alexandra Mullen is an advisory editor at Hudson Review.