1/7/2024 0 Comments Ogden nash quipLeithauser, who teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a poet and novelist. A mild and witty man, Ogden Nash was grateful for the sort of golden memory that grows more blurry and more vivid with each passing year. The lines may be shaded with ruefulness, but mostly they radiate a sunny thankfulness. That now-distant afternoon was wonderful. The poem recalls an encounter with two lovely girls: And about chaste romance - one touch of Venus, you might say. My favorite Nash poem, "The Private Dining Room," relies less than others on preposterous rhymes and, when it does so, does so with good license: The poem is all about drinking. Parker's portrait of Nash suffers from an occasional highlighting of the obvious ("the pun was a lame one - since sinus and signers do not have an identical pronunciation"), but in its general lineaments it feels accurate. ![]() He achieved the far more enviable position of being somebody who recognized fools for fools but, in his gentlemanly way, won their affection anyway. Nash took Will Rogers's pious pronouncement - "I never met a man I didn't like" - and set it on its head. ![]() The songwriter Vernon Duke once said of him: "There are a good many people he doesn't like, but I've never met a man who doesn't like him." (The libertinism of the 1960s confused and repelled him he was no bohemian poet.) A hint of barroom roguery enlivens his famous quip that "Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker" - but no more than a hint. He was a temperate man who shunned the splenetic and the lurid. When Nash paired "avenue" with "havenue" (meaning "haven't you"), he was striking a gentle blow against conversational slovenliness. His rhymes remind us of the distance between the dictionary's clean enunciations and the pell-mell deliveries of daily life. Meter could go hang spelling could go hang even coherence could go hang - but a rhyme must be arrived at: His primary comic effect, employed over and over, was achieved through what might be called a tyranny of rhyme: Everything in the poem was subordinated to the pursuit of some wild semblance of an exact rhyme. Readers who consume him in bulk may feel they get the joke - and get the joke. ![]() Nash's poems are best taken in small batches. And wherever he went, he sold books by the crateful. Parker's biography conclude, by reading between the lines, that Frances could be a bit of a pill, Ogden remained a surpassingly devoted husband, whose dying words were: "I love you, Frances." He was a doting father to two daughters. He married a beautiful woman, Frances Leonard, from a wealthy and distinguished Maryland family. By nearly every measure he was a successful man. In retrospect, there is little to regret in Nash's life. These lyrics have the soaring colloquial grandeur of Cole Porter's "In the Still of the Night," and they leave one wishing that Nash had found more frequent and happier collaborations in the theater he might have become one of America's finest lyricists. And he wrote lyrics for Broadway shows, including a notable collaboration with Kurt Weill, "One Touch of Venus," whose score includes the great popular song "Speak Low": For a number of years he worked, with greater financial than artistic profit, as a Hollywood script-doctor. He fashioned advertisements, sometimes painfully pedestrian ("I'm persnickety about what I like / And for thirty years I've smoked Lucky Strike"). Dee, 316 pages, $27.50), Nash did far more than create funny poems. ![]() Parker points out in his admirably concise " Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse" (Ivan R. At one point, Nash was on contract to provide 25 poems a year to the Saturday Evening Post, 12 to Red Book and a weekly poem to the New York American - while appearing frequently in The New Yorker, whose poetry in those days was mostly restricted to humorous verse.Īs Douglas M. Another was its insatiable appetite for light verse. One striking characteristic of his era was that his sort of gentility encompassed a casual but intense literacy for all his determined silliness, Nash was an erudite man. As he once noted, "I must say that I approve of the very rich." Insatiable Appetite Although his father's business eventually collapsed (Nash senior was president of a company that sold naval stores, chiefly turpentine and rosin), Ogden managed to preserve a plush gentility. His childhood was divided between Georgia and New York, but the family's Southern heritage ran deep Ogden's great-grandfather had been chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, and another forebear had given his name to Nashville, Tenn. To note that Nash made a living - a good living - by composing light verse is to observe that he belonged to a now-vanished world.
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