Rhyme for Silver

Abstract

Rhyme for Silver George Monteiro (bio) Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verseby Douglas M. Parker (Ivan R. Dee, 2007. xiv + 318 pages. $27.50, $18.95 pb) Ogden Nash was not exactly a "McCloud with a silver lining," though, judging from Douglas M. Parker's amiable and sympathetic biography, he at times came close to it. Nor was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he so lived his life—house servants in Baltimore, debutante daughters, apartment in New York City, and a house manager (who was buried in the Nash family plot next to Ogden beneath the same monumental stone)—that he came to enjoy many of the social benefits accruing to the so-called well born. In his forty-some years as principally a writer of verse (but also as a screenwriter and playwright, radio and television performer, lecturer and reader whose tours took him across the United States), he published fifteen books of original verse, ten volumes of collected and selected poems, and fourteen books of verse for children; composed lyrics for musicals, including famously One Touch of Venuswith Kurt Weill and S. J. Perelman; and made perhaps the best living of any poet qua poet in his day. Everything he did after giving up his job as an editor in New York stemmed from the public response to his poetry. His biographer tells us that he published more than a thousand poems, and, astonishingly, well over four hundred of them in the New Yorkeralone, resulting from a connection that began in Harold Ross's [End Page xxxii]early years and lasted until, as Parker says, the day Nash died. Perhaps he was ingratiating himself with a valued contributor, but Roger Angell, Nash's last editor at the magazine, admitted that he could not conceive of the New Yorkerwithout Ogden Nash. While Nash started careers in advertising and publishing, he soon began to sell the verse he was writing, much of it on the job. "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," declared Samuel Johnson. Judging from Nash's practice, one would say that it was Nash's first principle. The exception to his second rule—searching out the best pay—was his first-refusal agreement with the New Yorker, which still permitted him to enter into other exclusive agreements with higher-paying venues; he could thus maintain his somewhat illusory loyalty to the New Yorkerto the end of his life. One guesses that it would have pleased him to know that following his death the New Yorkerpublished the one poem it had purchased from him but had not yet published. How did Nash do it all? He did it with hard work, close attention to his craft, a persistent seriousness about what has always been fashionable to consider merely "light verse." His poetry had many admirers among the literati of his day—Dorothy Parker, W. H. Auden, F. Scott Fitzgerald, et al.—and of ours—Dana Gioia, Billy Collins, X. J. Kennedy. Auden's admiration for Nash, it seems, led him to begin one of his most memorable poems, "September 1, 1939"—"I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street"—by echoing the beginning of a Nash poem—"As I sit in my office / On 23rd street and Madison Avenue." Auden had agreed to preface the posthumously edited collection of Nash's poems, but died before he could explain why Nash's poetry mattered. Others have offered differing explanations. In his foreword to Parker's biography, Gioia ventures that "Nash was in his odd way a product of Modernism. He was an inveterate experimentalist—a congenial one, to be sure, but also a wildly inventive artist. . . . Many of his poems are rhymed free verse. Some consist of ingeniously rhymed prose. His rhymes were not merely amusing but often revelatory—playing on the differences between speech and writing or brilliantly contrasting levels of diction, shades of etymology, or arbitrary features of English like the inconsistency of our language's spelling and pronunciation." Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter, evaluated Nash's technique: "Ogden...