Poetry

AND WHAT'S MORE--David McCord --Coward-McCann ($1.75).

THE FACE is FAMILIAR--Oqden Nash Little, Brown ($2.75).

Beneath the surface jitterbugging of the American way of life, destiny seems to be working to establish a relaxed civilization.

If ever and whenever democracy really goes to town, laughter that betrays nobody and expresses all will be a commonplace accomplishment. Fore-echoes of such laughter can occasionally be heard in the light verse of Thomas Temple Hoyne (TIME, Jan. 1, 1940), David McCord and Ogden Nash.

Of the latter two McCord is the more substantially humorous, because he does not, so much as Nash does, get funny with his own first-person. McCord is a Harvardman, a scout for a Manhattan publisher, a quadruple club man--and he writes as such. His social prerogatives as a gentleman and scholar are great. In much of his verse he is not above writing like a dandy in a Conning Tower. At his plenary best --in Mother Liquor and Yellow Chartreuse, for instance--he can speak of life as a bee might speak of its hive. He can also give masterly expression to his generally impeccable distastes, as in his Lines on Anyone's Lines along Certain Lines: Is this the shape Of the sour grape? Perhaps the most uncommonly good poems in And What's More are a half-dozen among a group about a baby.

In the mornings I peruse my orange juice: I did not choose this juice, nor yet excuse its clinical continual use.

Do I refuse, however, or become obtuse with muttered phews! or by some simple ruse upset the cruse, in the end I lose.

More juice, by my porringer, and or anger! There are few creatures on earth more manly than the diapered hero of McCord's Perambulator Poems. Ogden Nash writes: The interest I take in my neighbor's nursery Would have to grow, to be even cursory, And I would that performing sons and nephews Were carted away with the daily refuse.

Yet he can write as tenderly about his own children (see his Rainy Day} as any other man living. Nash does most of his writing, however, in the guise of a sensitive prune. He speaks for the cartoon 20th-century American male--the subway-ridden goofus whose personality is deeply engraved on his cigaret lighter, and whose most ambitious ethical concept is "if it's trite, it's right." Nash knows his American civilization, and he can write about it like an efficiency expert in baggy pants. His light verse is a remarkable rhetorical invention. Where McCord, a traditionalist, makes his words walk a tightrope of perfect succinctness, Nash makes his walk a slack rope of complete long-windedness.

Oft when I'm sitting without anything to read waiting for a train in a depot, I torment myself with the poet's dictum that to make a house a home, livin' is what it takes a heap o'.

Now, I myself should very much enjoy makin' my house a home, but my brain keeps on a-goin' clickety-click.

If Peter Piper picked a peck o' heap o' livin', what kind of a peck o' heap o' livin' would Peter Piper pick?

Nash is able to make sharp practical recoveries from such nonsense.

. . . it takes a heap of other things besides a heap o' livin' to make a home out of a house.

To begin with, it takes a heap o' payin', And you don't pay just the oncet, but

agayin and agayin and agayin. The Face Is Familiar is the definitive omnibus of Nash's best work. In that part of it which isn't coy or silly the book pioneers a yawping American humor homely enough to make the Statue of Liberty grin on her pedestal.

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