(2 of 2)
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.
Nash came into his metier after a spotty early career. Born in Rye, N.Y., into a family with a pre-Revolutionary pedigree, he attended St. George's School in Newport, R.I., and then became "a quarterbred Harvard alumnus"—he dropped out after freshman year. He returned to teach briefly at St. George's, where, he said, "I lost my entire nervous system carving lamb for a table of 14-year-olds." He tried selling bonds in New York; later there was a job writing streetcar advertising, which led him to the advertising department of the publishers Doubleday, Doran & Co. Then he found what he called "my field—the minor idiocies of humanity."
Neither Got Tired. Once established as a light versifier, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, worked in Hollywood and collaborated with S.J. Perelman on the 1943 Broadway hit One Touch of Venus. The verse came out by the volume. He once remarked: "I often wonder whether I will get tired of writing them before the public gets tired of reading them, or whether it will happen the other way." He never tired of writing, and his public never tired of reading him.
Nash always enjoyed that consummate reward, the honor and respect of his friendly rivals in the making of light verse. Poet Morris Bishop offered a tribute in Nash's own language:
Free from flashiness, free from
trashiness,
Is the essence of ogdenashiness.
Rich, original, rash and rational Stands the monument Ogdenational.
*"Frappe, frappe." "Qui va la?" "Alenyon." "Alengon qui?" "Alengonfants de la patrie."