White-Collar Laureate

FAMILY REUNION (146 pp.) -- Ogden Nash--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Ogden Nash, whose books have sold more than 1,000,000 copies, is probably the only writer of doggerel who has made a good thing, as well as a career, of giving calculated affront to poetry. The difference between Nash and his imitators is that somewhere in the cunningly dislocated gears of his lines he imprisons a patented point of view. It was observable in one of his earliest verses (sold to The New Yorker, in 1930), which began:

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?

He delights in the domestic confusions and job hazards of a composite American male who is made up of equal parts Caspar Milquetoast and Mr. Blandings.

His touch with a bottle opener is sure,

But he cannot help you get a tight dress over your head without catching three hooks and a button in your coiffure.

Yet the Caspar Blandingses in a real jam can always be sure they'll find Ogden Nash coming to their defense in rubber-legged rhyme:

It doesn't mean, my boy, that they ought to be in an asylum like Nijinsky the dancer,

It only means that they got into the habit of talking to themselves at home because they themselves were the only people they could talk to and get an answer.

Nash may seem gleefully ready with complaining gibes at his white-collar victims of 20th Century living, yet in the end his motto reads: Homo Americanus, right or wrong, but my boy.

Family Reunion is Nash's own scissors & paste job, selections from his books which he himself can still read "without visibly wincing." His hero, the distraught male, lurks everywhere, but Nash is here saluting the American family, which consists, by his definition, "not only of children, but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold." Nothing delights him more than working over the darkest thoughts of harried parents:

Men and women everywhere would have a lot more chance of acquiring recreation and fame and financial independence

If they didn't have to spend most of their time and money tending and supporting two or three unattractive descendants.

But few real poets have written more fondly about their own children:

Roses red and violets blue,

I know a girl who is really two.

Yesterday she was only one;

Today, I think, will be twice the fun . . .

Kiss me again for a lucky start,

And Happy Birthday, with twice my heart.

This doesn't mean that Parent Nash doesn't understand the nature of his offspring:

Innocent infants have no use for fables about rabbits or donkeys or tortoises or porpoises,

What they want is something with plenty of well-mutilated corpoises.

And in a clutch, he's quite prepared to throw his weight around:

Well, you may be a genius, child,

And I a parent dull and mild;

In spite of which, and nevertheless,

I could lick you yet, I guess.

Like his own long-suffering, middle-class hero, Nash has his inexplicable ups & downs, of the spirit as of the body. Some days he feels like a million, but life is a transient thing and no one is more sharply aware of it than Poetaster Nash:

My little dog ten years ago

Was arrogant and spry,

Her backbone was a bended bow

For arrows in her eye.

Her step was proud, her bark was loud,

Her nose was in the sky,

But she was ten years younger then,

And so, by God, was I.

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