Barbara Hepworth once wrote this:‘Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood, and the rest of one’s life is spent in trying to say it.’In her case, it was through great contemporary sculptures. In my case? Well, my first English schoolmaster judged:‘Flippant boy. That’s what you are. Flippant. About serious matters and great human endeavours. All I can hope is that for your sake you will grow out of it.’At this time, my hero was A.A.Milne’s Sir Brian. I walked up and down repeating what I remembered of the words and energetically miming the accompanying action:Sir Brian had a battle-axeWith great big knobs onHe went among the villagersAnd blipped them on the head.On Tuesday and on SaturdayBut mostly on the latter dayHe called them all togetherAnd this is what he said:‘I am Sir Brian, sper-lash!I am Sir Brian, sper-losh!I am Sir BrianAs bold as a lionIs anyone else for a wash?’I would roll around in delight at this picture of extrovert schadenfreude at work. Seventy years later, I decided to finish it off, thus:One man said ‘Please, Sir,Can I have my say?Most TuesdaysAnd on SaturdayBut always on the latter day,I wear my special suiting,‘Cos I am SDA.So, yes Sir, for your blipping,Could you choose another day?’My English master would have been disappointed. I didn’t—grow out of it, that is. In fact I got worse. It was all the fault of Ogden Nash, that great American rhymester. I never could resist:VERSUSThe Golden TrasheryOf Ogden NasheryThe grand outrageousness of his puns was matched by his deliberate flouting of syntax conventions and scanning; and by his manipulation of invented words to produce an end-ofsentence rhyme, often lines away from its mate.Then there were his little pieces:Men never make passesAt girls who wear glasses.Parsley…Is garsley.The trouble with a kitten’sTHATEventually it becomes aCATThus Ogden Nash on the progressive inevitability of vanishing childhood innocence and playful dependence. But Nash remains silent about the nine or so lives of adult cat-ness; tom, cool, hep,fat, and nap for example. As the poet might have put it, but didn’t:Protection rules for MotherSWAN,Until one day, the cygnet’sGONESo Mother Swan just nods herHEAD‘Come on, Dad. Let’s go toBED‘After all,’ said MotherHEN‘Cyclic life means startAGAIN’I still laugh out loud at the Nash longer cautionary tales, mostly with stings in them. And I continue to marvel at his versatility—he might say ‘versustility’—and range of subject matter. His curiosity was insatiable. Nothing was sacred to that penetrative pen.Yet he was never destructive, vulgar or crude.(Unlike some pieces included here,When even apostasy may be seen to intrude.)Nash remains uniquely funny for his gentle ridicule of the pompous, the pretentious, the gruesomely ordinary and the outrageously bizarre. He would have approved of calypsos and calypsonians who can be sharp, bitter and iconoclastic.I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest. Now I have to distance myself from it. Someone said that a sense of indebtedness is the most corrupting form of human relationship. Distorts everything and satisfies no one. Especially if a second-rate acolyte is thought to be clutching at the coat-tails ofthe inspired and sucking at the cloth of that inspiration.So if the fault is by distant derivation that of Ogden Nash, the excuse for this claim is the old one about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Or something like that.I wish it were indeed so. But Ogden Nash is inimitable. The Doggerel Ditties that follow are relieved in their pedestrian parochialism by one or two which, in places, are less bad than the others. Let me know when you find one. It would be a kindness. As that English teacher also once wrote:‘HE IS TRYING—VERY’So you have been warned. If you are nonetheless determined on mindless masochism, proceed now. The contents eschew strict chronological sequence and are accordingly without opus numbers.
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