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During his lifetime, Ogden Nash was the most widely known, appreciated, and imitated American creator of light verse. Many Nash admirers, both scholars and the general public, maintain that the poet’s reputation has grown still further in the years since his death. Certainly, few writers of light or serious verse can claim the same extensive dissemination of their poems that Nash’s works enjoy. Certain Nash lines have become bits of popular American folklore. Nash’s peculiar variety of poetic buffoonery combines wit and imagination with eminently memorable rhymes.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Frederick Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York, to Edmund Strudwick and Mattie Chenault Nash. Nash’s great-great-grandfather was governor of North Carolina during the American Revolution, and that ancestor’s brother was General Francis Nash, for whom Nashville, Tennessee, was named. Nash was raised in Savannah, Georgia, and several other East Coast cities, as his father’s import-export business necessitated that the Nashes make frequent moves. Nash described his unique accent as ”Clam chowder of the East Coast—New England with a little Savannah at odd moments.”

Schooling and Early Career

Following his secondary education from 1917 to 1920 at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, Nash attended Harvard for the 1920-1921 academic year, and then, as he put it, he ”had to drop out to earn a living.” He first tried teaching at his alma mater, but left after a year.

After St. George’s Nash tried working as a bond salesman on wall Street. The results left something to be desired; following his failure at high finance, Nash took a job writing streetcar advertising for Barron Collier. He moved on in 1925 to the advertising department at the Doubleday, Page publishing house, which was to become Doubleday, Doran in 1927. Nash had considerable aptitude for advertising, according to George Stevens, a colleague at Doubleday, Doran, who felt that Nash could have made quite a success at the business. Stevens later recalled Nash’s ad copy for Booth Tarkington’s The Plutocrat (1927), one of the house’s titles which was then high on the bestseller lists. Nash’s slogan, ”First in New York, First in Chicago, and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen,” was effective and catchy but, much to Stevens’s delight, Nash’s paraphrase of the epithet commonly applied to George Washington scandalized an elderly vice-president at the company.

Nash’s humorous advertising sallies were by no means his sole writings during this period. in off hours, he tried to write serious poetry. ”I wrote sonnets about beauty and truth, eternity, poignant pain,” he remembered. ”That was what the people i read wrote about, too—Keats, Shelley, Byron, the classical English poets.” Yet, Nash’s final judgment on his serious literary efforts was that he had better ”laugh at myself before anyone laughed at me,” and he restricted himself increasingly to writing the whimsical verse that was to make him famous.

Writing “Seriously”

Early in his stay at Doubleday, Doran, Nash made his first attempt at writing a children’s book, collaborating with his friend Joseph Alger on The Cricket of Carador (1925). This slight but imaginative fantasy forecast his lifelong fascination with animals. While working at Doubleday, Doran, Nash collaborated with Christopher Morley and another colleague to create his first published piece of comic writing, an effusion of youthful good spirits that parodies various forms of serious literature: Born in a Beer Garden or, She Troupes to Conquer: Sundry Ejaculations by ”Christopher Morley, Cleon Throckmorton, and Ogden Nash, and Certain of the Hoboken Ads, with a Commentary by Earnest Elmo Calkins” (1930). It was at Doubleday, Doran, as he faced Stevens across their desks, that Nash began scrawling brief verses on pieces of yellow paper and pitching them over to his friend. Nash’s first published humorous poem occurred to him one summer afternoon in 1930 as he gazed out his office window at an urban prominence, a mound covered by high-rise buildings. He titled the verse ”Spring Comes to Murray Hill” and mailed the poem to The New Yorker, which accepted it. The poem shows the characteristic mental process of the Nash character’s voice: a moment’s boredom spiraling into an absurd festival of fractured rhyme.

Nash soon had a second poem taken by The New Yorker, quickly gained additional acceptances from other periodicals, and in 1931 saw his first collection of verses, Hard Lines, with Otto Soglow’s illustrations, published by Simon and Schuster. The book’s success was immediate and substantial as seven printings of Hard Lines were sold out in 1931 alone. In a very short time Nash noticed that he was making more money from selling poetry— about forty dollars a week—than he was receiving from his advertising job. Quitting the advertising business, he took a position on the staff of The New Yorker in 1932, but kept the job for only three months and thereafter wrote on a freelance basis.

Family Life

Nash married Frances Rider Leonard in 1931 and shortly afterwards began a family. The Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse (1936) expresses a variety of new concerns. His wife had borne him two baby girls by this time, and Nash, in his role as protective father, had developed new views on boys, which he mocked in verse. As he settled, supposedly with much comic catastrophe, into parenthood, Nash continued to feature his thoughts on children along with his original themes in I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938), The Pace is Familiar (1940), Good Intentions (1942), and Many Long Years Ago (1945).

Multimedia Efforts

From 1936 to 1942 he had a well-remunerated but frustrating sojourn in Hollywood. He wrote three screenplays for MGM, though none of these met with success. During this screenwriting interlude, however, Nash met S. J. Perelman, who was in Hollywood on similar business. The two quickly became friends and decided to collaborate on a musical, for which Kurt Weill was recruited to provide the score. The resulting effort, a book by Perelman, lyrics by Nash, and music by Weill, was One Touch of Venus, a smash hit of the 1943 Broadway season. Although Nash was to try two more musicals, he did not repeat the success he achieved with his first attempt.

Nash had more consistent, if less spectacular, luck with radio and television than he did with the stage. In the 1940s he was heard on radio’s ”Information, Please!” and on the Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee shows. He was

a regular panelist on the guess-the-celebrity show ”Masquerade Party” in the 1950s and was in frequent demand as a panelist for other such shows. He wrote lyrics for the television show Art Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf, based on Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and for two other television specials for children.

Later Output

In the 1950s and 1960s Nash gave increasing attention to writing children’s poems, while he continued his steady output of adult-oriented whimsy. Works such as Parents Keep Out: Elderly Poems for Youngerly Readers (1951), The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t (1957), and Girls are Silly (1962) give a sense of Nash’s increasing emphasis on poetry for children and poetry addressed to adults that focuses on children. In Nash’s adult-oriented later works, considerable emphasis is given to mild complaints about aging and sickness, yet the comedy that always introduces and accompanies the complaint, the implied criticism that introduces the complainer, gives a very limited sense of morbidity. Nash always saw his role as that of cheerful light entertainer and maintained it to the last in his writing.

Nash’s much less comic consideration of death in ”Old Men” suggests his awareness of death and the ominous possibility of one’s passing meaning very little to others However, Nash’s own death was not unmourned. Throughout his life he enjoyed not only the popularity accorded him by his sizable readership, but also the much rarer tribute of respect from his competitors in the creation of light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, his admirers, both amateur and professional, accorded Nash the sincerest form of flattery as, with varying degrees of success, they attempted to couch their farewell tributes in Nash-like mangled meter.

Works in Literary Context

Satirizing Suburbia

The events Nash most often satirizes are the social gatherings in upper-middle-class suburban homes and country clubs. For instance, in ”Out is Out,” from I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Nash scowls poetically upon suburban hosts and hostesses who find it novel to eat dinner outside.

Nash was also intrigued with the friction between his friends and neighbors during their recreation at the country club. In one verse, his speaker plays a somewhat Machiavellian role when he introduces two fellow country clubbers, who, considering their personal temperamental peculiarities, ought to destroy each other once they get tennis rackets in their hands. Watching the two decimate one another with violent outbreaks of temper, Nash’s speaker is satisfied at the outcome of his harsh experiment in human relations: ”To both of you more power, and may your meeting flower / In the slaughter of a vixen and a bully.” Nash’s other themes always keep to the comic treatment of the everyday—dining, buses and taxis, cocktails, the common cold, fashion, love, language, the theater, travel, conscience, money, birthdays, card games, the weather, football, matrimony, child rearing, family arguments, and even death.

Inverted Language

In Nash’s verse, the unusual usages are wild; the standard cliches, literary borrowings, and moralistic saws of banal poetry become altered and refocused with hilarious effects and considerable loss of the expected conventional moral relevance in such lines as ”A good way to forget today’s sorrows / is by thinking hard about tomorrow’s.” The reader’s expectations are constantly overturned. Hard Lines shows the variety of ways in which Nash first demonstrated his cheerful sabotage of conventional spelling, which was to be his trademark, with such lines as ”Philo Vance / needs a kick in the pance” and ”Like an art lover looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre / is the New York Herald Tribune looking at Mr. Herbert Houvre.”

Works in Critical Context

Any attempt to place Nash’s work in the context of other American humorous writing, or the humor of any other country, for that matter, tends to highlight his singularity. George Stevens notes this particularity:

Nash was not the only writer who could make frivolity immortal. But, he was unique—not at all like Gilbert or Lear or Lewis Carroll, still less like his immediate predecessors in America: Dorothy Parker, Margaret Fishback, Franklin P. Adams. By the same token, he was and remains inimitable— easy to imitate badly, impossible to imitate well.

In his most characteristic pose, Nash is a good-natured observer of the passing scene, hopeful that it is going to yield him adequate curiosities to turn into comic capital. One critic has called Nash ”a philosopher, albeit a laughing one,” who writes most typically of the ”vicissitudes and eccentricitudes of domestic life as they affected an apparently gentle, somewhat bewildered man.”

I’m a Stranger Here Myself

I’m a Stranger Here Myself was published at a time when Nash’s style was already well-established, and even well-parodied by lesser writers. Still, the collection was highly regarded by critics. Thomas Sugrue, in his review for New York Herald Tribune Books, states, ”Mr. Nash is alone in his field these days, for the other spirits who were born into our century with the souls of eighteenth century essayists seem to have lost their sense of humor and become psychologists and psychoanalysts.” Peter Monro Jack of The New York Times Book Review concludes, ”He covers almost everything, and we may as well lie down and die laughing at almost everything.” Louis Untermeyer writes in Saturday Review, ”Nonsense and criticism elbow each other in Nash; he is a crazy story-teller one moment, a satirist the next, a wit who takes to clowning to correct pretense and expose hypocrisy.” Untermeyer also predicts that Nash’s humorous verse will one day win him a Pulitzer Prize—an event that unfortunately never transpired.

References:

Axford, Lavonne B. An Index to the Poems of Ogden Nash. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1972.
Benet, Laura. Famous American Humorists. New York: Dodd, 1959.
Blair, Walter. Horse Sense in Literature, from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash. New York: Russell and Russell, 1942.
Parker, Douglas M. Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005.
Newquist, Roy. Conversations. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967.
Stuart, David. The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash. Boulder, Colo.: Madison Books, 2000.
Hasley, Louis. ”The Golden Treasury of Ogden Nashery.” Arizona Quarterly 27 (Spring 1971): 241-250.
Jack, Peter Monro. ”Odgen Nash, Whose Verses Are Highly Contagious.” The New York Times Book Review (June 19, 1938): 2.
Sugrue, Thomas. ”Ogden Nash as Essayist-Poet.” New York Herald Tribune Books (June 5, 1938): 2.
Untermeyer, Louis. ”Inventory of Nash: 1938.” Saturday Review (June 4, 1938): 6-7.