A Pash for Nash

When I was about 12 my father gave me the Penguin collection, Comic and Curious Verse, selected by J. M. Cohen and priced three shillings and sixpence. Being a rather over-heated adolescent I was immediately enchanted by a short verse by Gavin Ewart:

Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath When she heard behind her a meaning laugh And to her amazement she discovered A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard.

Miss Twye – what a wonderful name. She could have been a librarian, or perhaps a superior shop assistant. Quite soon, however, I gave up imagining myself in that cupboard and moved on to another bath-time poem, ‘Samson Agonistes’, in the same collection.

I test my bath before I sit, And I’m always moved to wonderment That what chills the finger not a bit Is so frigid upon the fundament

This is by Ogden Nash, of course. As well as expressing a profound truth, it did wonders for a boy’s vocabulary. Since then Nash’s couplets have always been floating about in my mind like notes of old favourite tunes. I fondly remember the turtle living ’twixt plated decks, or the ostrich with its lofty legs, and I’m happily stuck with the last two lines of ‘The Panther’:

Better yet, if called by a panther, Don’t anther.

And also by the whole of his ‘Geographical Reflection’:

The Bronx? No thonx!

Quite recently, I decided I needed more than these snippets and I bought a copy of Candy Is Dandy: The Best of Ogden Nash. This collection has an introduction by Anthony Burgess and, as well as an index of first lines, an index of last lines which is a brilliant service for those of us who are plagued by half-remembered poems. In his introduction, Burgess has a plucky go at a pastiche of Ogden Nash (something the poet did not always appreciate) and this certainly captures the way some of Nash’s lines seem to set out on a long and arduous journey before eventually ending up triumphantly with a rhyme. He also shrewdly notes the influence of W. S. Gilbert:

Americans have learned from the music hall the importance of accurate timing But from Gilbert the wittiness of unusual rhyming.

I marvel at the enormous poetic output of Ogden Nash, but even more at the lengths he went to in order to come up with a rhyme. ‘Parakeet’ leads to ‘prevarikete’, and ‘insouciance’ to ‘nouciance’. There is a splendid daring (or, indeed, insouciance) about the way he lays about the language to suit his ends. In one limerick we meet the brave girl of Connecticut who waved down the express with her pecticut but then (unlike the young heroine of The Railway Children) was regarded as showing a deplorable absence of ecticut. Oh all right, I’ll give just one more example, then I really must move on. These are the first four lines of a poem called ‘How Now, Sirrah? Oh, Anyhow’:

Oh sometimes I sit around and think, what would you do if you were up a dark alley and there was Caesar Borgia And he was coming torgia, And brandished a poisoned poniard, And looked at you like an angry fox looking at the plumpest rooster in a boniard?

To learn more about this ingenious rhymester I got hold of a copy of his biography, Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse, written by Douglas M. Parker and published by Ivan R. Dee of Chicago. This is a painstaking, sympathetic work, perhaps a little solemn for its subject matter, but still full of fascinating information. Nash comes across as a thoroughly genial chap, a devoted family man and, like many humorists, quite beady about the business side of things. He also had a tenuous connection with Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music – where the lyric writers, on the whole, stick to simple rhymes, such as ‘you’ and ‘feelin’ so blue’. Nashville was named after General Francis Nash, who was the brother of Ogden’s great-great-grandfather, the revolutionary Governor of the State of North Carolina. For some reason I had always imagined Ogden Nash as a solitary figure; in fact he was a popular member of that group of humorous writers, such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, who did their best to cheer up America in the depression of the 1930s. And, like so many writers of that generation, he was lured to Hollywood where he was kept hanging around for much of the time, then put to work on various doomed projects. I was surprised to learn that he also wrote the lyrics for a successful Broadway musical. Nash was born in 1902 in Rye, New York, the son of a businessman, and he began his career in publishing, working for Doubleday. It was while he was in that job that he started writing his light verse. He got his first cheque from the New Yorker (for $22) for a poem, and the magazine was soon asking for more. Very soon too, Harold Ross, the genius eccentric editor of the New Yorker, offered him a job and he became what was known as ‘the new Jesus’, in other words, one of a long line of short-lived assistants to Ross. One of his jobs was to coax Dorothy Parker into delivering her weekly article. After a short time, like all the other Jesuses, he left. In 1936 he went to Hollywood where one of his first assignments was to collaborate with Perelman on the screenplay of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which, like so many other Hollywood projects, was eventually scrapped. Scripts were handed round from writer to writer, like a game of ‘Pass the Parcel’, and Ogden Nash was a member of the club of underemployed authors. It was the start of his lifelong friendship with Perelman, and Groucho Marx would join them at the writers’ table in the studio canteen. Nash also became friends there with Scott Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham. He was now writing poems to entertain his fellow Hollywood inmates, and Fitzgerald became one of the many people to try his hand at a Nash pastiche. (Not a brilliant effort.) A collection of Ogden Nash’s poems, published in 1931 and called Hard Lines, was intriguingly dedicated to ‘Mrs Parker, Mr Hoffenstein, Mr Roget and the Sweet Singer of Michigan without a complete and handy set of whose works this book could not have been written so quickly’. Mrs Parker is easy to understand, and Mr Roget’s Thesaurus would certainly have been handy, and the Sweet Singer of Michigan, it turns out, was the title chosen for herself by Julia Moore, whose poetry was so comically awful that it attracted quite a following in the nineteenth century. I was curious about Mr Hoffenstein, though. He was Samuel Hoffenstein, a Russian-born immigrant who became a newspaper columnist and poet and, like Nash, did the statutory stint as aHollywood scriptwriter. I tracked down a copy of his Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing (1928), and I can see why Nash admired him. However, his light verse has its dark side, and where Nash can occasionally be a little folksy, Hoffenstein can be pessimistic, even a little acerbic. Here is a sample:

When you’re away, I’m restless, lonely, Wretched, bored, dejected; only Here’s the rub, my darling dear, I feel the same when you are here.

That one appears in a section of the book headed ‘Poems of Passion Carefully Restrained so as to Offend Nobody’. One of the charms of Hoffenstein is that he chooses such world-wearily droll headings for his groups of poems as ‘Songs to Break the Tedium of Riding a Bicycle, Seeing One’s Friends, or Heartbreak’ or ‘Poems Intended to Incite the Utmost Depression’ or ‘Songs of Fairly Utter Despair’. Writers of light verse are frequently concerned with the eternal quest to find a decent rhyme for the word ‘orange’. Ogden Nash must have admired Hoffenstein’s stab at the problem in ‘Sad, Mad Song’:

So, partly serious, more in jes’ I try to find rhymes for oranges.

When I was dipping into Comic and Curious Verse recently I discovered that J. M. Cohen had included some of Hoffenstein’s poems in the anthology, but I had somehow missed them first time round. I must have been distracted by Miss Twye. Reading Parker’s biography of Ogden Nash I get the impression that he was always rather stage-struck, so he must have been delighted when he got the opportunity to write the lyrics for that Broadway musical. On 7 October 1943 One Touch of Venus opened at the Imperial Theatre, starring Mary Martin, with book by S. J. Perelman, lyrics by Ogden Nash and music by Kurt Weill. It was directed by Elia Kazan, who was later famous for directing films such as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire. The show, which was a success, was about a statue of Venus which comes to life, and was based on a story by the British author F. Anstey, who also wrote Vice Versa – another book my father gave me to read when I was in my teens. It’s probably better to see Ogden Nash’s words on the page to enjoy the ingenuity of the rhymes, but there’s one jaunty lyric in One Touch of Venus that I particularly like. It’s a song called ‘How Much I Love You’ and this is the start of the second verse:

I love you more than a wasp can sting, And more than a hangnail hurts; I love you more than commercials are a bore, And more than a grapefruit squirts.

The big romantic number in the show is ‘Speak Low’ which Nash based on the line in Much Ado about Nothing, ‘Speak low, if you speak love’. The song has outlived the musical and I found a charming version sung by the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald. As a matter of fact, I now have it on my iPod. One of these days I might listen to it in the bath – having carefully tested the temperature first.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 24 © Oliver Pritchett 2009