Writers are a lot like wildlife. Some, like
coyotes are widely adaptable and flourish in almost any environment. They
turn out novels, plays, poems, short stories, essays and straight reporting
with equal ease dazzling observers with their versatility. Others are
like rare tropical tree frogs who can only exist in the shade of a particular
tree that grows only on the south side of a single mountain. These
writers find a narrow niche, an unexplored genre, and dominate it. Ogden
Nash, born on August 19, 1902 in Rye, New York was one of the
latter.
He mastered the art of light verse, rescuing it
from frat boy doggerel, cutesy pie drivel, and angry if inept satire and
transformed it into a kind of fine art all its own. He dominated the
field for a good chunk of the mid 20th Century. And he even
managed, occasionally, to stray from his niche to write screen plays and to
collaborate on a successful Broadway show, One Touch of Venus. But is for those fabulously funny short poems
on which his lasting fame relies.
Nash was born into a comfortable, established
family with deep roots in American history, a descendent of Brigadier
General Francis Nash, a fallen Revolutionary War hero form
whom Nashville, Tennessee other places were named. His father’s
import/export business caused the family to move frequently but young Nash was
sent to a first class boarding school St. George's in Middletown,
Rhode Island, where he excelled as a student and felt comfortable. He
felt less comfortable at Harvard in 1920 and dropped out after his
freshman year, scampering back to St. George’s to teach.
From
there he drifted to New York City and a variety of jobs. He tried
his hand at advertising, composing copy for subway and streetcar card
ads, a job previously held by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Eventually he
landed a job in the marketing department the publisher Doubleday and was
promoted to reading submissions from the slush pile, the quality of
which was so poor that he took to dashing off comic poems to relieve the
tedium.
He
began to submit the poems to the New Yorker where they rapidly
became a favorite feature in 1930. The following year he published his
first collection, Hard Lines which became an astonishing success
going through seven printings in its first year—unheard of for poetry of any
kind.
He
soon abandoned Doubleday and went to work for the New Yorker. He
also married the love of his life, Frances Rider Leonard.
Frances yearned for her native Baltimore and in 1934 the couple moved
there to raise their two children and Nash concentrated full time on his
verse.
He continued to appear in the New Yorker,
but also regularly contributed to other top magazines including Harper's,
The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Vogue.
His prodigious output spawned several collection and his work was also
respected by serious poets and often was anthologized alongside work by American
contemporizes contemporaries like e.e. cummings and William Carlos
Williams. Nash was also in demand to read on radio and later on
television and toured college campuses and other venues.
In addition to light hearted non-sense, many of
his poems from the Depression years featured a scornful
anti-establishment satirical attitude and he was particularly scathing about conservative
hypocrisy, and religious moralizers. He was favorably compared to the top
satirists of the day including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and H.
L. Mencken.
Like many top writers, Nash was lured to Hollywood
to try his hand at screen writing at MGM. Between 1937 and
1940 he was credited as principle writer on three films: The
Firefly, an adaptation of an operetta by Rudolf Friml staring Jeanette
MacDonald and Allan Jones; The Shining Hour, a
romantic melodrama starring Joan Crawford, Margaret Sullivan, Robert
Young, and Melvyn Douglas; and The Feminine Touch, a
broad farce with Rosalind Russell, Don Ameche, Kay Francis,
and Van Heflin.
In 1943 he teamed as lyricist with fellow humorist
S.J. Perlman, the librettist, and composer Kurt Weill on the hit
Broadway musical One Touch of Venus which featured the American standard
Speak Low. The play became a hit film in 1948 featuring a
young Ava Gardner as the goddess Venus come to life in her first
starring role. In 1952 he returned to lyric writing for Bette Davis’s
star crossed musical sketch review Two’s Company. After
that debacle, he retired from theatrical productions.
But he remained as busy as ever. He was
passionate about sports, particularly Baltimore sports. Line-Up
for Yesterday, an alphabetical poem listing baseball immortals was
published in Sport magazine in 1949. Nearly two decades later Life
commissioned poems to accompany photos of his beloved Baltimore Colts.
Also in 1949, Nash was commissioned to pen a set
of humorous verses to accompany a Columbia Masterworks recording of Carnival
of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns conducted by Andre
Kostelanetz and read on the original album by Noel Coward.
They are now usually included when symphony orchestra’s perform this popular
piece.
As he enjoyed time with his grandchildren in the
‘50’s he turned his attention to light hearted poems for children including The
Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus, Custard the Dragon, and Girls
are Silly. His playful use of language was compared to Dr.
Seuss.
As his health deteriorated in the ‘60’s he
ridiculed the medical establishment and lampooned his own deteriorating
condition almost to the end. Nash died of painful Crohn's disease
at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on May 19, 1971. Several
collections and anthologies of his work have been published posthumously and he
continues to be read and enjoyed.
Always Marry an April Girl
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.
--Ogden Nash
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