A life in rhyme

Ogden Nash wasn’t satisfied just being the American master of light verse. He wanted to be a novelist, a serious poet, a Hollywood screenwriter and the toast of Broadway. Mostly he wanted a Pulitzer Prize. And so he wasted a lot of years on other pursuits at a time when there was still a lucrative market for light verse and when he might better have focused on what he did best.

Even so, as David Stuart reports in his 2000 biography The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash, he produced hundreds of poems and numerous popular collections of those poems. He became one of the most prominent writers of the mid-20th century, even if few people today know who he was.

Many of his verses are universal and timeless — such as Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker — but many others were topical, and thus quickly dated. Even during his lifetime he often updated poems to make them more in step with current culture. Partly for this reason, much of his work means little to 21st century readers. That is unfortunate, for his poems can amuse us even if one doesn’t catch all the cultural references.

One thing that makes Nash’s light verse unique is his outrageous rhymes: perverseness and worseness,  useless and mooseless and sun around and run-around, to cite three examples from just one poem. He invented words as needed, and these creations were usually both comical and fitting. His poems could make a serious point even as they delighted.

Stuart’s book delights, as well. He includes generous examples of Nash’s work. He tells of Nash’s long courtship of a woman who seemed to spend most of that courtship in Europe with her mother. Even after their marriage she preferred living with her mother during the early years. Yet Nash could never be drawn to another woman. Stuart tells, too, about the man’s early years in publishing and his long career with The New Yorker until changing editors and changing times began to pass Nash by.