Ogden Nash, Native Son

A Little Local History
Ogden Nash, Native Son
By Paul Hicks

Frederic Ogden Nash, who was born in Rye in 1902, was widely acclaimed for his witty poems:
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.

And droll sayings:
“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”

Biographers note that he was baptized at Christ’s Church and his family lived on Boston Post Road, but little else about his youthful days in Rye is known. His father, Edmund S. Nash, owned an import–export company, which apparently required the family to relocate often.

Throughout his life, Nash loved to rhyme. “I think in terms of rhyme, and have since I was six years old,” he said in a 1958 news interview. He had a fondness for crafting his own words whenever rhyming words did not exist and admitted that he “intentionally maltreated and manhandled every known rule of grammar, prosody, and spelling.”
Graduating from St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, Nash entered Harvard University in 1920, only to drop out a year later because of family financial problems.
After a bad start on Wall Street, he succeeded in advertising. On the side, he tried to write serious poetry and once told an interviewer that he wrote sonnets about beauty and truth, eternity, poignant pain,” because “that was what the people I read wrote about, too — Keats, Shelley, Byron, the classical English poets.”
Finally, however, he decided that he’d better “laugh at myself before anyone laughed at me,” and started writing witty and nonsensical verse. In 1930, as he sat at his office desk, he jotted down some lines of verse, which he titled “Spring Comes to Murray Hill,” and sold it to The New Yorker. It began:

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue, and say to myself, You have a responsible job, havenue? Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel? If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggerel.

When he died in 1971, the obituary in The New York Times noted that, “The poem had the essence of the scores that were to come from Mr. Nash’s word‐pummeling pen over the years — the near rhymes and the extended line, which he likened to ‘a horse running up to a hurdle, but you don’t know when it’ll jump.’”
After publishing his first collection of verse, he went to work briefly for The New Yorker magazine but decided to work as a freelance writer for the rest of his life. Showing his versatility, he collaborated with S. J. Perelman, and Kurt Weill on a musical, “One Touch of Venus”, which was a smash hit of the 1943 Broadway season. He also wrote the verses set to Saint‐Saens’s “Carnival of the Animals,” Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
Sometimes Nash could be serious, as in the poem “Old Men”:
People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when…
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

In the course of doing research for this article, I found an article in a 1954 issue of The Rye Chronicle that reported on a meeting of the Rye Women’s Cub at which Ogden Nash spoke and read some of his poetry. Although he apparently said little about his years as a boy in Rye, he mentioned that one of his poems had been published by The Chronicle in 1916 (when he was only 14).

Fortunately, I was able to find a copy of the poem, which was in the May 20, 1916 issue of the Chronicle. What is fascinating, in addition to how young Nash was at the time, is the subject matter. It is written about the Battle of Verdun, which had just begun two months earlier on the western front of France and long before the U.S. entered the First World War. There is a hint of “Verdun” in his much later “Old Men”.

Verdun
There they lie, the torn and dead and bleeding,
There upon the ground, the heaps of slain.
Who to God will answer for the carnage?
“What soul shall bear the burden of this stain?
England,” cries the slaught’ring German soldier.
“Germany,” cries England, all insane,
But still lie there, the thousand’s dead and dying
Who to God will answer for the stain?
German, French or English, now it matters
None to them; their bodies still remain
Rotting, freezing, mould’ring there in Flanders;
On what soul shall rest the bloody stain?
Bodies there providing feasts for ravens,
Stretched out in an endless human chain,
Widows and their children dead of hunger.
Who is there to blame for such a stain?
When the dreadful holocaust is over,
And the Reaper’s harvest’s gathered in,
Still will live the marker of the slaughter
Gloating o’er the profits of his sin.
Just a mile or two of cov’ted country;
Just to make one great man’s power more;
This the cause of dead men, widows, orphans,
Slaughtered children; this is glorious war!
When the shells scream over smoking ruins,
Stifling with their burning, pois’nous breath,
It is nothing but the kings of Europe
Sending lives in tribute to grim death.
There they lie, the torn and dead and bleeding,
There upon the ground, the heaps of slain—
Who to God will answer for the carnage?
What soul shall bear the burden of this stain?