Ogden Nash, craftsman humorist, is dead

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32612, 21 May 1971, Page 9

Ogden Nash, craftsman humorist, is dead

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright; NEW YORK, May 20. “The only lines I’ve ever written that I think have any chance of surviving were lines written in my unregenerate youth,” Ogden Nash, the American poet and humorist who died yesterday, at the age of 68, was once quoted as saying, the New York Times News Service reports. Mr Nash, who in a highlyproductive writing career, over 40 years, became America’s best-known pro-

ducer of verse, was referring to hts now classic “Reflections on Icebreaking’’:

"Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker."

In 1968, Mr Nash said that he believed liquor was still quicker, and pot was not. “Marijuana is an individual thing while liquor ripens acquaintance to intimacy,” he said.

The liquor lines are probably the most familiar, but their : author was no doubt ' indulging in excessive mod- ' esty when he pronounced them his sole claim to fame. For he was considered by many of his admirers to be a kind of Abraham Lincoln of poetry, and they described his mangled verse as an emancipation proclamation for all would-be poets who harboured the illusion that poetry, had to follow some strict law of, rhyme and metre. , Actually, the man who could blithely rhyme “pe-! tunia” with “Pennsylvunia," 1 and deprecate a hated herb! with the line, "parsley is 1 gharsley,” was a careful craftsman. 1

Much of his reputation was based on his long, straggling lines of wildly irregular length, often capped with extravagantly misspelled words to create weird rhymes; but they were lines that, on close examination, revealed a carefully thought-out metrical scheme and a kind of relentless logic. In addition to being a writer of droll and witty verse, however, Mr Nash was an ingenious critic of frailty

and absurdity, whose targets. 1 ranged from animals to in- < come tax, and to the boring teller of dirty jokes who,’

, “trots out a horse of another off-colour.” As one critic put it, Nash [was “a philosopher, albeit

a laughing ohe,” who wrote of the “vicissitudes and eccentricitudes” of domestic life as they affected an apparently gentle, somewhat bewildered man.

Finally, Mr Nash was that rarity among poets, a poet who made an excellent living at his craft. His 20 volumes of verse, with .such engaging titles as, "You Can’t Get There from Here,” -“l’m a Stranger Here Myself,” and "Bed Riddance,” always sold well.

This fact notwithstanding, in “Everybody Makes Poets,” a verse in which he detailed the frustrations of the poet’s life, he concluded:

“So my advice to mother is if You are the mother of a

Poet don't gamble on the Chance that future generations will crown him. Follow your original impulse and drown him."

Ogden Nash attended St George’s School, Newport, Rhode Island, and then Harvard University for one year, but had to drop out to earn a living. He taught for a year at St George’s, but fled, “because,” he said, “I lost my entire nervous system carving lamb for a table of 14-year-olds.”

The experience was apparently so traumatic that, in later years, Mr Nash was noted among his friends for his ragged nerves. He was, moreover, a bit of a hypochondriac—-one who. a friend recalled affectionately in 1970. “seemed to enjoy poor health.” Mr Nash, who published his first book, “Hard Lines,” in 1931, described his work as •‘verses, not poems, a means of concealing my illit-

eracy.” The poetic style he perfected hinged on an ability to rhyme words which never had rhymed before. He wrote in his days in the advertising industry: "I sit in an office at 244 Madi-

son Avenue. And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?"

“The human race provides my humour, not me," he once said.