Light verse used to be a vital part of American culture, high and low. It was by no means the exclusive turf of "real" poets: anyone could, and did, turn their hand to it. A birthday, wedding, or anniversary was always an excuse, if excuse were needed, for enthusiastic amateur versifying.

What brought this charming custom to an end? My grandmother, born in the late Victorian era, was an avid practitioner of the art; so were many of her friends and contemporaries. Nowadays the only person I know who still cranks out the occasional humorous ode or epithalamium is my 82-year-old uncle, who has an ear for an eccentric rhyme. ("I'll have a scotch; sit down with Cammy; / And watch Green Bay take on Miami.") Even children, who used to be encouraged to mark holidays and public events with celebratory poems, have succumbed to the minimalistic William Carlos Williams red-wheelbarrow aesthetic, forsaking the rhymed doggerel of the past—though I was pleased to see that in a recent issue of The Chronicle of the Horse where little girls were invited to eulogize their ponies, they did so in a decidedly retro fashion: one poem, I remember, began with: "My pony, Snickers, is snobby and rude / And he has a very bad attitude."

The high priest of this sort of fun was of course Ogden Nash (1902–71). He took the mere wit of much light poetry and consistently raised it to the level of true wit, in Alexander Pope's formulation: "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." As a young and enthusiastic reader of poetry, good and bad, he had reflected that "if someone who knew the rules of versification, began writing bad poetry deliberately and consciously instead of unconsciously" it might "turn out to be fairly amusing." The result was stuff like the following (from "Spring Comes to Murray Hill"): "I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue / And say to myself You have a responsible job, havenue?"

The difference between Nash's version of bad poetry and the real thing was his thorough internalization of rhythm. F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed this out in a letter to his daughter, who had been attempting some Nashian verse of her own. "Ogden Nash's poems," he told her, "are not careless, they all have an extraordinary inner rhythm. They could not possibly be written by someone who in his mind had not calculated the feet and meters to the last iambus or trochee. His method is simply to glide a certain number of feet and come up smack against his rhyming line." Thus a couplet like the following: "I wonder if the citizens of New York will ever get sufficiently wroth / To remember that Tammany crooks spoil the broth."

When the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative Nash stamp on the poet's hundredth birthday, it was nice to see that he looked exactly as one would have wanted him to: droll rather than handsome, clever eyes glinting from behind outsized spectacles. Now, with the publication of Douglas M. Parker's new biography, I find that he lived, too, as one would have hoped: he was decorous, exceedingly gentle and polite, a loving family man thoroughly imbued with the Protestant work ethic. If one sometimes detects a faint odor of melancholy both in his poems and his letters, this aberrance is always kept strictly under control, for in the WASP ethos to which Nash faithfully adhered, melancholy is a symptom of self-indulgence and not an artistic treasure trove to be cultivated or explored.

Nash came from a family that was distinguished and well-to-do. His great-great grandfather had been the Revolutionary governor of North Carolina, and the family gave its name to the city of Nashville. Nash spent his childhood in Savannah, Georgia and on a large estate in Rye, New York, but the family had to give this up after the business collapse of Nash's father. He attended St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island, where he came under the influence of at least one wonderful teacher, Arthur Roberts: Roberts' grounding in correct usage enabled Nash, he later wrote his former mentor, to "hit upon the conscious employment of incorrect usage for my own devious ends," and it was "the love for the mother tongue that you instilled in me which enabled me to tease it and flirt with it to the limits of decency." Nash dropped out of Harvard after a single year and returned briefly to St. George's as a French master.

In 1922, with the Jazz Age in full swing, Nash arrived in New York, still with no inkling that he could make a living by writing. His first job was as a bond salesman; after a year and a half on the job, he had still sold only one bond—to his grandmother. He next turned to writing streetcar advertising, which he stuck with for a full two years. Believing that children's literature would offer the best possibility of actually getting into print, he and his roommate Joe Alger collaborated on a story called The Cricket of Carador, which was accepted for publication by Doubleday, Page & Company. Dan Longwell, the head of Doubleday's advertising department, took a shine to Nash and offered him a position as his assistant. Nash moved up in the ranks, becoming an editor of a Doubleday subsidiary called the Crime Club, and eventually a higher-level editor.

Nash focused his poetic experimentation during this period. He quickly decided that he did not have the makings of a serious poet. "There was a ludicrous aspect to what I was trying to do; my emotional and naked beauty stuff just didn't turn out as I had intended." Possibly; then again, one suspects that the sort of self-exposure involved in writing serious poetry was completely inimical to Nash's guarded character. Inspired by light poet Samuel Hoffenstein and by a volume of animal verses by Roland Young, Nash tried his hand at the form. His success was immediate, as testified by a very early verse: "The turtle lives twixt plated decks / That practically conceal its sex. / I think it clever of the turtle / In such a fix to be so fertile."

Nash's development as a poet was intimately entwined with his courtship of Frances Leonard, whom he met late in 1928 and married two-and-a-half years later. It was a love match and a happy marriage, but possibly not always very easy: Frances could be dauntingly chilly and moody. Reading Nash's letters to his wife (collected by his daughter, Linell Nash Smith, and published in 1990 under the title Loving Letters from Ogden Nash: A Family Album), one gets the impression that Nash usually approached his wife hat in hand, anxious to please and propitiate. His brilliant little poem "A Word to Husbands" contains, as well as the best general matrimonial advice ever given, a clear enough picture of his own home life: "To keep your marriage brimming,/ With love in the loving cup,/ Whenever you're wrong, admit it,/ Whenever you're right, shut up." In one of his rare non-humorous poems, Nash celebrated his wife's changeable temper:

Praise the spells and bless the charms
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing ever true—
I love April, I love you.

Fair enough, but reading between the lines one suspects that March might have been the more appropriate month to have chosen. Parker has written his biography with the cooperation of the two Nash daughters, so it's easy to understand why he doesn't venture very far in this direction.

Nash's long association with The New Yorker began in January, 1930, when they published "Invocation," a satirical jab at Senator Smoot of Utah, who in his earnest effort to protect the American public from imported pornography had assembled an impressive personal collection of the banned items:

Senator Smoot is an institute
Not to be bribed with pelf;
He guards our homes from erotic tomes
By reading them all himself.
Smite, Smoot, Smite for Ut.
They're smuggling smut from Balt. To Butte.

Nash is not widely thought of as a political writer, but he frequently produced pointed rhymed commentary on current events and outrages, much as Calvin Trillin does today. (Another gem of a political poem from that period is "Peekaboo, I see A Red": "The results of the activities of the D.A.R. might not be so minus— / Were the ladies not troubled by sinus. / Alas, every time they try to put people who don't agree with them on the stand as defendants / They find themselves troubled by the sinus of the Declaration of Independence.")

Nash's long association with The New Yorker was of course an extraordinarily fruitful one; not only did the magazine help to shape his style, but he personally did a great deal to define the tone of the magazine as it developed: Ogden Nash was as integral a part of Harold Ross' New Yorker as James Thurber or Dorothy Parker. But it is possible to wonder whether Nash's talents might have developed rather more broadly if he had not been kept within the perimeters of the New Yorker sensibility by his editors. Katharine White, who was to be his principal editor at the magazine until her final retirement in 1958, rejected an early Nash short story, "Preface to a Wedding Trip"—which Dorothy Parker thought the best story she had read in years—because she found the characters and situation too vulgar. She also turned down his poem "Are Sects Necessary," which makes fun of the fastidious Protestant contempt for Catholicism: "Their righteousness runs too high a steeple; / I prefer the purple papal people." "Mr. Ross says he really just can't come out so wholeheartedly for the Catholic church," commented Mrs. White. "I wonder if you couldn't change the poem, making it against all sects and anti-everything." (Nash declined that suggestion, and included the original poem in his first collection.) All this emphasizes the fatal flaw in The New Yorker, a sort of prissiness and gentility that limited its aesthetic and limited, too, Nash's growth.

The poet's relationship with the magazine heated up when Ross, having run into Nash in a speakeasy, offered him a position as managing editor. Although Nash was not aware of it at the time, the job was essentially un-doable: no one ever measured up to Ross' impossible demands. Colleagues at the magazine referred to each successive occupant of the post as "the new Jesus"; by most counts, Nash was the twenty-fifth "Jesus" in six years. Nash was under no illusions about his own qualifications for the job, as he later related to Thurber. "I don't need to tell you that in many ways [Ross] was a strangely innocent man and he assumed that my presence in a speakeasy meant that I was a man about town. He was, I believe, still in mourning over the departure of [Ralph] Ingersoll, who had apparently been the ultimate in men about town, and was looking for a suave and worldly editor. He hired me practically on the spot." Nash lasted three months in the job, then moved on to an editorial position at Farrar and Rinehart.

Eventually Nash's success enabled him to leave office work and make his living as a freelancer. The money he made from poetry was augmented, occasionally, by his forays to Broadway and Hollywood. His most gratifying showbiz venture was as the lyricist for the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus; after this triumph he was bitten so hard by the theatrical bug that he tried several more stage ventures, all of them more or less disastrous, while as a contract screenwriter in Hollywood he underwent the degrading treatment, mindless assignments, and eventual depression that was the lot of all first-rate literary writers who tried to peddle themselves to the studios. He would later say that his stint in Hollywood "almost destroyed" him.

Other projects that supplemented the income he earned from his more than two dozen volumes of poetry (much of it originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, his major outlet aside from The New Yorker) included giving lectures, writing verses for Hallmark cards, limericks for Playboy, and advertising copy: he would sell just about anything but drew the line, he said, at writing a jingle for a constipation remedy. "If they want anything on pellagra, leprosy or syphilis I'm their man, but I'm afraid constipation is eliminated, if that isn't a contradiction in terms." He was especially brilliant on the subject of the countless petty irritations of modern life: Clifton Fadiman aptly dubbed him the Laureate of the Age of Friction. ("Progress was all right once," Nash remarked, "but it went on too long.") How much further he could have taken this theme if he had survived into the computer era!

Nash's verse may look ageless and timeless from the perspective of the 21st century, but that was not the case during his own lifetime: like so many writers who achieve a certain age, he lived to see himself go out of date. With the death of Harold Ross in 1951 The New Yorker was taken over by his deputy, William Shawn, whose sensibility was very different from that of his predecessor. By 1970 Nash was writing to his agent that the most recent rejection letter "really drives me up the wall. Maybe we should sign the next offering Donald Barthelme and see what happens."

Nash died in 1971; he did not have to undergo the indignity of slipping further out of fashion, and his final poem was published posthumously in The New Yorker, along with a memorial tribute. The obituaries were adulatory, with the Washington Post describing him, succinctly and truly, as a "serious man who wrote funny." With Nash as with most of the world's great funny men, humor was not a pure substance but a composite one, a colorful mass of striations in which we can pick out not only comedy but pathos and even a sense of tragedy. But let Nash say it himself. Humor, he believed,

is not brash, it is not cheap, it is not heartless. Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. … How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.

Parker has done a tremendous service by writing this readable and workmanlike biography—the first biography of Nash, amazingly enough. His tale, within the inevitable constrictions attendant on writing an "authorized" life, is well told. But he and Dana Gioia, who has written the introduction, fail in their effort to persuade the reader that Nash was in some way "a product of modernism," a "populist modernist." To try to squeeze him into this category along with such uncongenial peers as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay seems, in the end, pointless. Almost perfectly free of influence and the anxiety that comes with it, he was what he was. And isn't that enough?

Brooke Allen is the author most recently of Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior (Ivan R. Dee).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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