Nash, Rash

A decade and a half ago the instructors of snobbish St. George's School were periodically awed by examination papers dashed off in blank verse by a student named Ogden Nash. Few years later Manhattan admen chortled over bits of doggerel, rhymed only by weird feats of spelling, which cluttered the advertising offices of Barron Collier. Ogden Nash, after one year at Harvard, one year of teaching; and two years of painful attempts to sell bonds, was struggling over Collier car-card copy, setting down, meanwhile, the verses which popped into his wandering mind. While working for Collier, Rhymester Nash collaborated on a book for children, published by Doubleday Page, which did not earn him enough to pay for the copies he bought himself. No good to Doubleday Page as an author, he went to work for them writing book blurbs. One spring afternoon he sent over the teletype to Doubleday's Garden City office a discontented little verse which began: I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?

Delighted friends made him send it to The New Yorker, which snapped it up, asked for more & more & more. Today Poet Nash gets big money from the nickel weeklies and mass monthlies.

Nash's fluttery doggerel is as American as a Mississippi drawl and as tempting to imitate. Last week reviewers were tempted to another outburst of meterless, rhyme-twisting verse by the appearance of Nash's fifth book of poems, The Primrose Path. In that outburst they were led by Critic John Chamberlain of the New York Times, who turned out a whole re-view in Nashiana. Excerpts:

Verily, -verily quoth I to myself as I flipped the pages (354) of The Primrose Path (Simon and Schuster, $2.50), by Ogden Nash. This once exceedingly merry fellow has busted out with more antipathies than the face of a man with the measles has of the rash.

For example, bankers Give him cankers.

And in this great big world there doesn't exist, I trow, a single radio announcer That he would spouncer.

Furthermore, if timid Mr. Caspar Milquetoast should sit down next to him in a train and commence, out of nervousness, to talk about the weather,

It would mean, ipso facto, to Mr. Nash that of brains by weight and volume Mr. Milquetoast has no more than a feather.

Newest of topflight U. S. literary critics is the Times's Chamberlain. Some months ago a lady who admired his column called at his office, found a diffident young man, with an armful of books, who looked about 26. Gasped the lady: "Are you Mr. Chamberlain?" Actually Critic Chamberlain is 31 and ten years out of Yale, where he chairmanned the funny Yale Record. The Times got him after he had spent one year in an advertising agency, kept him as newshawk and associate editor of the Sunday Book Review until 1933. In the autumn of that year Publisher Adolph Ochs so far foreswore his prejudice against signed columns as to spread a boxed daily review over the top of three Times columns, set young Mr. Chamberlain to writing it. Like few others, Bookman Chamberlain has resisted the pressure to submerge his style in the turgid stupidity of the Times. Conscientious, he spends about five hours a day reading, three more writing. Healthy, pink-cheeked, he wears a hat only in downpours. He plays tennis summer and winter, hard and often, with his smart, blonde wife, Peggy.

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