‘dipsomognac’. Burgess’s exercise sticks close to
full true rhyming, and his mimicry is best when he
is imitating those long rambling lines which, after
50 or more words, finally discover their destina-
tion in a sometimes surprising but, by hindsight
inevitable, rhyme word. In Burgess’s pastiche the
rhyme will be honest, while in Nash it will quite
often be bent.
Nash went on doing this kind of thing from
1931 (Hard Lines) to 1972 (The Old Dog Barks
Backwards), producing in all some 14 volumes of
verses, with very little change of manner. Some
of the Bellocian short pieces go well enough. The
wombat
May exist on nuts and berries
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods—
but you can’t help noticing that ‘moods’ is
not themot juste—while ‘The Python’, 300 pages
later, is in much the same vein, and still not quite
a direct hit.
Most would agree that Nash’s strength lay
in those wantonly rambling couplets, often with
a gross disparity between the length of lines that
are always, in the end, married by predestined if
comically distorted rhymes. But the repetition of
this structural jest over 40 years makes, in a large
selection (and perhaps especially in readers who
loved the joke 40 years back), for a certain mild
tedium.
You all know the story of the insomniac
who
got into such a state
Because the man upstairs dropped one shoe
on the floor at eleven o’clock and the
unhappy insomniac sat up till breakfast
time waiting for him to drop the mate.
Well...
So begins a rather early poem.
Since the non-book and the anti-hero are
now accepted elements of modern
negative living
I feel justified in mentioning a few examples
of the march of progress for which I
suggest a heartfelt non-thanksgiving.
So begins a late one. It may be superficially
up to date but deep down it’s a bit old hat; this
may seem unfair, since the skills are the same and
highly individual, but it was the success of the
earlier work that made them too familiar. Per-
haps we are so conditioned by the idea that poets
change and develop over a lifetime that it seems
strange to have a collection of this sort which
you can open anywhere and be sure to find just
the same sort of things going on.
Nash was self-consciously American in other
ways than rhyming, writing about baseball and
basketball (which he commendably despised),
about the problems of living in New York, or
dieting, or the way women always keep you
waiting when you are going out; or taxes, middle
age, and the general awfulness of children. These
are all genuine matters of poetic concern, but the
tone is often slightly defeated, wanly jocular,
and sometimes even a reader who feels himself
entitled to be described as genial and sympathetic
may from time to time feel bloodymindedly
inclined to niggle, and even withhold the expected
tribute of a giggle.
Now and then Nash allows himself a small
explosion of dislike for the British; no harm in
that, especially in work that belongs to the iso-
lationist, pre-war, pre-jet, pre-special-relation-
ship age. However, I remember him performing
at a South Bank Poetry Festival around 1971
and reading his poems in a rather British way,
quietly, and with much success. In fact he went
close to stealing the show from such stars as
Ashbery, Auden, Bly, and so on down the alpha-
bet. He seemed very pleased at the time, and
perhaps wrote no more nasty things about us
thereafter, just going on about how, in his holiday
haunt, the birds kept him awake, or how confus-
ing directions to other people’s holiday haunts
can be, with suitably facetious allusions to the
major English poets.
If memory isn’t deceiving me he read at his
London appearance a funny poem called ‘Very
Like a Whale’ about simile and metaphor, ridi-
culing Byron at considerable length for claiming
that the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the
fold. The poem, included in this volume, was
published in a collection of 1935, and of course
I don’t say there’s no point in reading on after
that, but nothing more elaborately funny may be
expected. Incidentally, the editors, who are his
daughters, tell us that Nash constantly revised
his poems, so he can’t just have been churning
them out to meet deadlines. Possibly, like Yeats,
he tried in revision to make his early poems
sound like his late ones. That could be one rea-
son why they tend to sound rather similar.
Source:Frank Kermode, ‘‘Maturing Late or Simply Rot-
ted Early?’’ inSpectator, Vol. 273, September 24, 1994,
pp. 36–37.The Hippopotamus