as toastmaster, Nash transcends all forms of
criticism but polite applause: ‘‘In the face of the
unanalysable I must not be analytical. / And
when a writer is beyond criticism it is stupid to
go all critical’’. Or, as Thumper’s mother advised
Bambi: ‘‘If you can’t say something nice about
someone, you shouldn’t say anything at all’’.
Nash had another mode, not so patentedly
his, but one no less essential to his position as
laureate to Middle America—the mini-maxim.
‘‘In the Vanities / No one wears panities’’ and,
apropos of Baby, ‘‘A bit of talcum / Is always
walcum’’ are fair samples. The object of these
Ad-Age adages is not so much to be witty and
epigrammatic as to be remembered and produced
at the appropriate cue, to become a supply of
verbal small change for those whose sense of
humour is limited to rote performance. In my
childhood, in the 1940s in Minnesota, Nash’s
most famous mini-maxim, ‘‘Reflection on Ice-
Breaking,’’ (‘‘Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is
quicker’’) was trotted out on all occasions of cere-
monial imbibing, always with the same prelimi-
nary chuckle of obeisance to the god of mirth and
catch-phrases.
Time has not been kind to these jingles, since
it is difficult to be at once pithy and innocuous,
but even Nash’s most skilful drolleries suffer for
being heaped together into aSelected Poems.
Candy may be tasty one piece at a time, but
this is a gross of Snickers. Very soon the same-
ness of the product will cloy for even the avidest
consumer. If there must be a big book, why not
go whole hog and give us Nash’s Complete
Poems? There is no rationale given for the
poems excluded (of the 101 poems fromVersus
of 1949, forty-one are reprinted) and no attempt
to produce a semblance of variety by including
the lyrics Nash wrote for the musicalOne Touch
of Venusor any sample of his books for children.
Anything to take the curse of sameness off the
enterprise would have been welcome.
Measured against the general level of
accomplishment in any standard anthology of
humorous verse, Nash’s limitations are glaringly
evident. Narrative is not in his line, nor comic
monologue (one must observe to be able to
mimic), nor (least of all) satire, nor yet parody.
His frame of intellectual reference remained,
until his death in 1971, that of a well-brought-
up eleven-year-old, and his allusive power is
limited accordingly. His attention to public
events is nil. He has nobeˆtes noires, only pet
peeves: uncomfortable beds, incompetent caddies,
anything smelly or noisy or odd-tasting. He has
but a single persona—Dagwood.
What is left, and what Nash was best at, is
word-play, as in ‘‘The Lama,’’ where, after
doubting whether a ‘‘three-lllama’’ anywhere
exists, he caps his verses with a prose footnote:
‘‘The author’s attention has been called to a type
of conflagration known as the three-alarmer.
Pooh.’’ Yet for every poem that’s genuinely risi-
ble,I Wouldn’t Have Missed Itoffers a dozen
that range from perfunctory to bromidic.
Finally it was not Thalia, that sharp-tongued
shrew, who was Nash’s muse, but Emily Post,
who advised, concerning ‘‘The Code of a Gentle-
man’’: ‘‘Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embar-
rassment, ardor, or hilarity are all bad form in
public.’’ No one can say of Ogden Nash that he
was not a gentleman.
Source:Tom Disch, ‘‘With the Best of Intentions,’’ in
Times Literary Supplement, February 3, 1984, p. 118.Sources
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Grossman, Mark, ‘‘Rhineland Crisis,’’ inEncyclopedia of
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How Americans Lived through the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’
and the Great Depression, Ivan R. Dee, 2002, pp. 91–105.
MacLeish, Archibald, Introduction toI Wouldn’t Have
Missed It: Selected Poems of Ogden Nash, Little, Brown,
1975, p. vii.
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