![File:Ogden Nash in Los Angeles, 1949.jpg File:Ogden Nash in Los Angeles, 1949.jpg](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8aa4ad5-eb24-4529-86e4-7d61dbab82a3_588x600.jpeg)
Welcome to this inaugural entry in From My Bookshelf, a newsletter for anyone who can’t walk into a bookstore and emerge again empty-handed. I’ll be writing here about whatever I’m reading, twice a week, and you can expect a pretty eclectic mix of subjects: from current affairs and history, to classics of the Western canon, to literature in translation, to philosophy and theology, to the random volume that caught my eye the last time I failed to emerge from a bookstore empty-handed. There should be something for everyone, so I hope you’ll enjoy reading and will share with your book-lover friends.
As you can imagine, I agonized for a while—well, maybe it wasn’t that long—about what to discuss in this first post. The pressure was on to make just the right choice to get things started. A classic work? Something of monumental importance? A recent prize-winner or headline-grabber? Would I need to go out of my way in order to read a “first-post book” that I hadn’t been planning to read otherwise?
No. The whole idea here is to write about what I’m reading, not to read what I need to write about. So off we go, in medias res, with a light-hearted title that caught my eye this weekend: Everyone But Thee and Me, by Ogden Nash.
When I was in high school, I read several American humorists with great pleasure. All of them shared a bemused, self-deprecating attitude towards middle-class American life, combining a certain in-the-know urbanity with a feeing of being almost but not quite overwhelmed by everything around them. James Thurber was at the top of the list and the writer with the greatest claim to literary significance. Robert Benchley, mostly forgotten now, was the semi-sophisticated but gently bumbling Everyman, not quite Thurber’s match as a writer but very funny. And the third member of the humorist trinity was Ogden Nash.
All three were verbally clever, with a wonderful feel for language, but Nash was the wordsmith magician of the group. He could find (or create) a rhyme for anything, however improbably, and he defied all metrical conventions while still writing lines that flowed rhythmically and effortlessly. I’ve got a few collections of his poetry but hadn’t read any Nash in years. But over the weekend my wife and I were killing a bit of time in a used bookstore—Books & Fields in Perry, NY, open only on weekends but with a nice selection and a friendly and knowledgeable owner—when I spotted Everyone But Thee and Me, with its unfamiliar dust jacket, on the shelves. The price was right, so it went home with me.
I then spent parts of Sunday afternoon and evening transported back to my teen years, chuckling along at Nash’s inventiveness and wit. Who else would rhyme “economy” with the “Book of Deuteronomy”? Or “Cousin Emlyn” with “crème de la Kremlin”? Or “entrechat” with “je ne comprends pas”? I met a pair of previously unknown zoo animals, the carcajou and the kincajou, engaged in a death struggle. Learned that “a potted watch never boils.” Discovered the Soviet Union resolving a problematic and tongue-twisting “Cyprus citrus surplus.” Laughed at a twist on Faust in “The Miraculous Countdown,” about a scientist named Dr. Faustus Foster. And found some excellent advice to husbands on the book’s final page: “Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; Whenever you’re right, shut up.”
Nash explores the foibles of American life with a critical but tolerant eye. Kids no longer listen to the wisdom of their elders, advertisers will hawk anything, the suburbs are a modern if somewhat superficial utopia, people’s use of language is deteriorating as euphemisms and bureaucratese flourish, baseball is being overtaken in popularity by basketball, and not even the vamps are what they used to be.
Occasionally a more serious note creeps in. Nash offers a valuable lesson in realpolitik: “Never befriend the oppressed unless you are prepared to take on the oppressor.” Noting that Americans seem to have overcome their hostility toward the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, erstwhile enemies in the Second World War, he looks nervously toward the future and wonders “if this time we couldn’t settle our differences before a war instead of after”—a consideration that is perhaps as relevant today in our domestic politics as in foreign affairs. Nash’s overall attitude is perhaps best summed up in his ironic observation, “Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long.”
It is hard to read Nash and not be tempted to imitate him. In a section of Everyone But Thee and Me entitled “Fellow Creatures,” with short poems on animals from the kipper to the clam to the armadillo, I was suddenly reminded of one of my own past attempts. Back in high school chemistry and physics classes, a friend and I used to sit over in the front right corner of the room, his desk right behind mine. Occasionally, when we got bored (forgive me, Ms. Carlton), we wrote doggerel together, one of us scribbling a few lines on a sheet of paper, then passing the note to the other, who would continue the verse from that point, and so on, back and forth. The results were not typically very memorable, but I still recall one satisfactory couplet I produced, inspired, I am confident, by Nash:
The neck of the giraffe
Makes many folks laugh.
I thought then—and, to be honest, still think now—that for two brief lines I captured a bit of the Nashian spirit. But only a bit, because the man himself kept it up for line after line, poem after book, book after book, year after year. It’s hard to imagine that there will ever be another Ogden Nash.
Thanks for reading. See you later this week for another installment From My Bookshelf.