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« Back to Ogden Nash Revealed main page    Transcript for: Ogden Nash RevealedTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1325 OGDEN NASH REVEALED FEED DATE: September 15, 2005 Douglas Parker Opening Billboard: Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. 'Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker'. You may have heard this before and laughed, but like so many other wonderful poems, it has become such a part of American culture that many cannot even remember the source. Well, the author was Ogden Nash. While his verse was often witty and humorous there was also a somber side to his story. Who was Ogden Nash? And why do we still read his work? To find out, Think Tank is joined by Douglas Parker, author of ’Ogden Nash: The Life And Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse.’ The topic before the house: Ogden Nash revealed, this week on Think Tank. MR. WATTENBERG: Doug Parker, welcome to Think Tank. MR. PARKER: Thank you. MR. WATTENBERG: And let me tell our viewers that your book, the full title of which is Ogden Nash, subtitle, The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse, is a terrific book. MR. PARKER: Well, thank you. MR. WATTENBERG: It is just - magic words in publishing as you know are, it’s a good read in its own right. Even without the remarkable poetry it’s just a fascinating story. So tell me, let’s begin at the beginning. Where was he born? MR. PARKER: Ogden was born in Rye, New York. He grew up in Rye as a young child and also in Savannah where his father headed up a naval stores business. MR. WATTENBERG: Rye at that time was sort of a well-to-do suburban community. MR. PARKER: Oh, very much. Very much. And he lived on a rather large estate and the New York Central would make a special stop at the foot of the estate to let his father off. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Is there anyone writing his strange, I don’t know, form of poetry now? MR. PARKER: There are imitators from time to time, of whom there were a great many during his lifetime. But no one really in his lifetime or since, I think, captured the style of Ogden Nash. MR. WATTENBERG: Why should we care today about Ogden Nash? I mean, he said in the book somewhere that he was a good/bad poet, something like that. MR. PARKER: Well, he did, but I argue in my book that he was really a good poet. MR. WATTENBERG: Oh, yes. MR. PARKER: A very different poet, indeed, a unique poet. But I think he was a poet in the full meaning of the word and indeed his poetry was appreciated and praised by many of his more serious colleagues. MR. WATTENBERG: I’m going to ask you now to read he Turtle poem. MR. PARKER: ’The Turtle’ is one of the earliest poems that Nash wrote when he was working as an editor at Doubleday. One of the Doubleday authors had written a book of verses about animals. And Nash read them, thought some of them were pretty good, some not so good, thought he could improve on a couple of them and offered the author a couple of his own, which the author not too surprisingly declined. But Nash’s boss at Doubleday said, 'That’s pretty good. You ought to keep doing that.' And one of the poems was ’The Turtle’. 'The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle in such a fix to be so fertile.' MR. WATTENBERG: There’s a great love story involved with him and his wife, Francis, and he writes about her frequently. Maybe you could read us that one 'For Any Adorable She' and see how... MR. PARKER: Well, I will. I will just say by way of introduction that when Nash met Francis Leonard down in Baltimore, it was love at first sight from his standpoint. From Francis’ standpoint it was sort 'not so fast there, Ogden' and he pursued her in a courtship over two years and this poem he wrote along the way. MR. WATTENBERG: And this is entitled 'For Any Adorable She.' MR. PARKER: 'For Any Adorable She' and this is an excerpt from the poem, and he asks, 'What shall I do with so and so? She won’t say yes and she won’t say no. She tiptoes around the cunningist traps with a smile and a murmur of ’perhaps’. At nine I’m ’darling’; at ten I’m ’you’. Tell me, what is a man to do when the lady his life is based upon likes to be wooed but won’t be won? What shall I do with so and so? She confesses that I am her favorite beau but let the topic of marriage arise and see the astonishment in her eyes. Why am I chosen to be harried? Other people have gotten married. Is every courtship conducted thus, or is it only confined to us?' And when Francis finally yielded and became Mrs. Ogden Nash there were newspapers around the country that bore the headline, 'The Adorable She' or 'So and So Finally Gives In.' MR. WATTENBERG: Alright. Now, he had – let’s see how nicely we can put it - he had a tendency to drink too much. MR. PARKER: Well, he did, certainly in the eyes of Francis, and this came... MR. WATTENBERG: But he sort of beat it. He never became more than a heavy social drinker. MR. PARKER: He was a social drinker who enjoyed alcoholic beverages throughout his life in a social context. There was a time when in the ’30s when Francis thought things had gotten out of hand and she went off on a trip to Europe and told him to get his act together while she was gone and he did and they lived happily ever after. He wrote a wonderful poem called 'A Drink With Something In It', the first stanza of which deals with a martini. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me read that one. That’s... MR. PARKER: You must be a fellow martini drinker. MR. WATTENBERG: No. No, I’m not. Let me – 'A Drink With Something In It' is the title and it says, 'There is something about a martini, a tingle remarkably pleasant. A yellow, mellow martini. I wish that I had one at present. There is something about a martini ere the dining and dancing begin and to tell you the truth, it’s not the vermouth; I think that perhaps it’s the gin.' And it is. You know, people – we all know people who drink it in a ratio of twenty to one vermouth to... MR. PARKER: Yes, yellow martinis would not pass muster today. MR. WATTENBERG: No. That’s right. Now, so he goes to – starts out as a bond salesman, doesn’t do well, the Depression comes along, goes to work for Doubleday as an editor. Is that right? MR. PARKER: Well, first in the advertising department and then he sort of worked his way into editorial work and thrived at that. MR. WATTENBERG: And then he starts selling poetry and his number one client right off the bat is... MR. PARKER: The New Yorker Magazine. That was in the days of Harold Ross and Katherine White as their primary editors. MR. WATTENBERG: Could you read for us his first poem in the New Yorker called 'Invocation' and it refers to Senator Smoot who was a – he was the coauthor of the famous tariff act called the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. So why don’t you read that one for us? MR. PARKER: Right. And what you have to know about this is that Smoot’s interests were not only economic but he included in the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act a bill that was designed to keep out of the country a material that he considered to be obscene or pornographic. And he also in order to make his point told everyone that he had collected a group of this material himself. Now I’ve never seen – I don’t think that collection still exists and it might be pretty tame compared to what one can get exposed to today, but he had a collection of this material and Senator Smoot from Utah introduced that bill and that provoked Nash to write the poem which said in part, '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.' MR. WATTENBERG: And the Balt he refers to is.. MR. PARKER: Baltimore. MR. WATTENBERG: Baltimore, Maryland, which is sort of his principle residence over the years. MR. PARKER: Soon after writing the Smoot poem, which was very well received at the New Yorker, they said 'come on, give us more things'. And he began to send in more and more poems. Some of them were quite short and titled random reflections about this or that, the most famous of which was his 'Reflections on Ice-Breaking', which became the immortal 'Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.' And a poem that he ultimately became very tired of but he – from which he could not... MR. WATTENBERG: He was sort of identified with that... MR. PARKER: ... escape. He could not escape. MR. WATTENBERG: Now he and Francis have children. One of the famous little short poems is 'A little talcum is always welcome', which is – but maybe you could tell us about that family and read us a couple of these poems. MR. PARKER: Sure. Well he had great, great fun with his children. Because he was a freelance writer he was living at home. He had a chance to participate in their early childhood that a lot - most fathers do not have. So he participated very directly, and of course being Ogden Nash, anything that he experienced in his life was apt to find its way into his verse and he had a number of verses about the children as they were growing up. But he may have felt just a tiny bit self-conscious about it because one of the poems that he wrote in those days was called 'My Daddy' and it went like this: 'I have a funny daddy who goes in and out with me, and everything that baby does my daddy’s sure to see, and everything that baby says my daddy’s sure to tell. You must have read my daddy’s verse; I hope he fries in hell. (Laughing) Well, this is one of the many Nash poems that I think is fresh and applicable today as when they were written. Says, 'The wise child handles father and mother by playing one against the other. ’Don’t’, cries this parent to the tot. The opposite parent asks, ’Why Not?’ Let baby listen, nothing loathe, and work impartially on both. In clash of wills do not give in, good parents are made by discipline.' MR. WATTENBERG: He has another one about marriage which is – it’s entitled 'A Word To Husbands' and it goes, 'To keep your marriage brimming with love in the loving cup, whenever you’re wrong admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.' So... MR. PARKER: Excellent advice, but like most advice it’s easier to give than to follow, I have found. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, Ogden Nash did other things – tried to do other things – other than this light verse. And he collaborated – he did the lyrics to Kurt Weill’s music in a Broadway program – show called ’One Touch of Venus’ and why don’t you read that? It’s – remember it’s a song; it’s not a rhyme. but it’s very beautiful. MR. PARKER: Well, it is a lovely ballad and this is just a couple of excerpts from it which I will not attempt to sing but I think even speaking it you can sense the melodic quality. 'Speak low when you speak love. Our summer day withers away. Too soon, too soon, speak low when you speak love. We’re late darling, we’re late. The curtain descends. Everything ends. Too soon, too soon. I wait darling, I wait. Will you speak low to me? Speak love to me, and soon? MR. WATTENBERG: That’s – and the music to that was written by Kurt Weill. MR. PARKER: Kurt Weill. MR. WATTENBERG: Nash, as you write later, recalled to some friends, 'In my Hollywood years I was regarded as a harmless fascist and my friends in the east dismissed me as a parlor pink.' That was – parlor pink was the euphemism for sort of left-winger at that time. Did he write about politics and can you give us some examples? MR. PARKER: Well he was interested very much in politics. He was a great fan of Al Smith. That was his first great political enthusiasm. In writing about politics he never did it really in a partisan way. But writing in the Depression, many of his poems had something of an edge to them that you could view in the context of the day. For example he wrote some poems that were satirical of bankers and I think in addition to the climate of the Depression, Nash may have blamed bankers on some of his father’s financial problems. But one of them he wrote said, 'Bankers – most bankers live in marble halls, which they dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals, and particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betide the banker who fails to heed it, which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don’t need it.' MR. WATTENBERG: Truer words have never been said. If you’ve got lots of money bankers will loan you more and if you don’t, you got problems. MR. PARKER: He had some one-liners he said about the democrats. 'When will they learn that Tammany Crooks spoil the broth.' (Laughing) And he compared republicans looking at Herbert Hoover to regarding Mona Lisa in the Louvre. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, I get the feeling from your book, I’m not sure I can cite chapter and verse, but he gets ill several times – quite ill – and depressed and you get the feeling that behind this funny and witty man, like all the great clown stories, is a somber man at times and sad. MR. PARKER: Well it’s – that’s certainly true and it was particularly true in the ’60s. He did have bouts of depression. He had periods of time when he found it very difficult or impossible to work, but he never – he never gave up. He just kept at it. He kept on writing and he kept on working and, as I said before, he might go through periods where the New Yorker would reject half a dozen of his poems in a row. MR. WATTENBERG: And that stung. MR. PARKER: And that stung and it hurt and – but he’d keep writing and he would write letters to his agent and then she to him commiserating about this, but he’d keep on writing. And then, what do you know, he’d have three or four in a row accepted by the New Yorker. And when it came time to put out a new book, a new collection, he’d put in the ones that were rejected, which had often found a home in another magazine... MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. PARKER: ... along with the ones that the magazine had accepted and the public and the critics seemed to enjoy them all. MR. WATTENBERG: He pulled one trick, which I think is funny. I gather he sent in a poem, I believe to the New Yorker, that was designed to be a parody and a fake and they ran it thinking it was for real and then he later in some of his many anthologies, he later ran it. MR. PARKER: And it’s a somber poem and in places a touch macabre. Here’s one little excerpt from it. 'The bubbles soar and die in the sterile bottle hanging upside down on the bedside lamppost. Food and drink seep quietly through the needle strapped to the hand. The arm welcomes the sting of mosquito hypodermic, conveyor of morphia, the comforter. Here’s drowsiness, here’s lassitude, here’s nothingness. Sedation in excelsus.' And his editor at the New Yorker, Roger Angell, said that, 'it was an interesting, frightening and the best thing of its kind about hospitals I’ve ever read'. And as I mentioned, John Updike said some very nice things about it and poet Josephine Jacobsen wrote Nash that it was brilliant technically, psychologically and poetically. And so it – among other things it gives a little hint of the kind of thing that Nash might have done more of if his career had taken him in that direction. MR. WATTENBERG: He begins, obviously, as we all must, to see that life is finite and he writes about it. And as I said, that gives me the sense of a certain somber quality to his life. MR. PARKER: Well, that’s right and he – in fact the poem that I’ll read just now called 'The Middle' is one that he wrote to his – about which he wrote to his editor at Little Brown – his publisher – expressing the sort of wistful hope that maybe he would be remembered for this poem instead of 'Candy is Dandy'. So he was – he liked this poem. It said, 'When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn, So many I loved were not yet dead, So many I loved were not yet born.' MR. WATTENBERG: Now that’s a very moving and touching poem. And he has this one about senescence. Is that an excerpt? MR. PARKER: Yes, this is an excerpt from another poem and he writes, 'Senescence begins and middle age ends, the day your descendants outnumber your friends.' MR. WATTENBERG: Now, he has one, which I will read a part of, and then I’ll let you read a part... MR. PARKER: Okay. MR. WATTENBERG: ... the other part of it. It’s called 'Come On In, The Senility Is Fine'. 'You have to personally superintend your grandchild from diapers to pants and from bottle to spoon because you know your own child hasn’t sense enough to come out of a typhoon.' MR. WATTENBERG: He wrote a verse which was intended to be read at his funeral. MR. PARKER: Well, this was read at his funeral. It had been written some years before, but it was written in connection with his church in New Hampshire where he was very active. He was a member of the vestry, it was an Episcopal church, and it was very important to him. And he was a very close friend of the rector, Matt Warren, who was also the headmaster of St. Paul’s. And at Nash’s funeral service the rector read this verse: 'I didn’t go to church today. I trust the Lord to understand. The surf was swirling blue and white, the children swirling on the sand. He knows, he knows how brief my stay, how brief the spell of summer weather. He knows when I am said and done. We’ll have aplenty of time together.' MR. WATTENBERG: Very, very touching and there is a little one that I’ll read where – or perhaps it’s an excerpt - that says, 'Here lies my past. Goodbye. I have kissed it. Thank you, kids, I wouldn’t have missed it.' MR. PARKER: That’s the concluding two lines of a poem called 'Preface to the Past' which sort of recounts the growth of his early marriage, the growth of his children, and the arrival of his grandchildren. And it’s a summing up and his daughters, Isabel Eberstadt and Linell Smith, took that 'I wouldn’t have missed it' as the title of the Nash compilation that they published after his death. MR. WATTENBERG: On that note, Doug Parker, we will have to stop because of time constraints, but thank you for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Remember to send us your comments via email; we think it makes our show better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. 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