Lunacy & Loveliness

The best wit is the most hospitable; even as it skewers us, it allows room for all our fellows in folly. Phyllis McGinley writes, in “Note to My Neighbor,”We might as well give up the fiction That we can argue any view.For what in me is pure Conviction Is simple Prejudice in you.We recognize ourselves in this quatrain at the same instant as we recognize our “neighbor.” The poem stings a bit but there’s something salubrious in its lash. Or consider how Ogden Nash, in “The Hunter,” flash-freezes our human propensity for engaging in absurdly obsessive pursuits:The hunter crouches in his blind‘Neath camouflage of every kind,And conjures up a quacking noiseTo lend allure to his decoys.This grown-up man, with pluck and luck,Is hoping to outwit a duck.These are two examples of what is commonly called “light” verse. But the lightness lies, I think, not so much in the humorous content as the nonchalance, beneath which lies considerable skill as well as wit. McGinley begins her four-liner in an earnest, almost conversational manner but then, by rhyming “fiction” with “Conviction” (and so belying herself without seeming to know it), she begins to unsheathe the sharp tip of her satire. The capital letters lend a faint 18th-century pomposity, which bamboozles us further until the punchline – the nasty word “Prejudice.” The poem is funny but makes a serious point with the utmost lightness: Conviction and prejudice are often convertible terms.At its best, too, wit is generic; it exposes and lampoons what is comical or false in us as human beings rather than as individuals. There are many perfectly nasty, and witty, poems about specific persons, but they are generally less effective than those that expose our common imbecility. When Dorothy Parker deals with “The Very Rich Man,” in her sequence “Tombstones in the Starlight,” we feel that the malice is just rather than mean-spirited, for it is directed not at this or that wealthy man but at the corrupting effects of too much affluence on us all:He’d have the best, and that was none too good; No barrier could hold, before his terms.He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.Here the most biting phrases are also the most exquisitely turned – “correct in cypress wood” or “the most exclusive worms.” For nothing is more crucial to good light verse than verbal exactitude; while we laugh at the exposed pretension or the unmasked delusion, we are really tickled by the play of words. In the poem by Nash I quoted earlier, the poet sets us up by slamming the words “pluck” and “luck” so that the word “duck” receives an exaggerated clangor that heightens the hunter’s absurdity.These poems, and 47 others, come from the delightful CD “American Wits” in the series “The Voice of the Poet” (Random House Audio, $19.95), edited by the poet and critic J.D. Mc-Clatchy. Parker, Nash, and McGinley are beautifully represented reading their own poems; Parker in a sad and somewhat brittle voice, Nash with a perfect twang, and McGinley, the best reader of the three, in a lovely and subtly modulated delivery. The recording comes with a booklet that contains the texts of the poems together with astute literary and biographical notes on each poet by Mr. McClatchy. I’ve heard a number of recordings in this admirable series, and even when I haven’t much liked the featured poet or his or her reading, I’ve found it fascinating to hear their voices, recaptured from the past. This CD, one of the very best, is no exception.Dorothy Parker had a special gift for finding humor in the dreadful, as in “Resume”:Razors pain you;Rivers are damp;Acids stain you;And drugs cause cramp.Guns aren’t lawful;Nooses give;Gas smells awful;You might as well live.Ogden Nash, by contrast, is almost too zany to categorize. Consider “The Cow”:The cow is of the bovine ilk;One end is moo, the other milk.In sheer wackiness this outdoes the Surrealists, but what makes it funny? It isn’t only the concatenation of “moo” and “milk” but that odd, small word “ilk.” What an improbable syllable! We feel its absurdity in Nash’s treatment of it; we feel how it almost cries out for that re deeming “m” to save it from itself and lend it both euphony and a parlous dignity. Nash can be so word-drunk at times that he approaches “Finnegans Wake” in his vocalic cavortings.Miss Rafferty wore taffeta,The taffeta was lavender,Was lavend, lavender, lavenderest,As the wine improved the provender.Part of the humor arises from Nash’s rather gluttonish greed for the weirdest verbal combinations (how he gambols in the conjunction of “taffeta” and “lavender”!). But part also comes from his witty take on “lavender” as a comparative adjective, from which he spins out a new superlative. Or consider “Tune for an Ill-Tempered Clavichord,” which echoes the clack of some antiquated instrument:Oh, once there lived in KankakeeA handy dandy Yankakee,A lone and lean and lankakeeCantankakerous Yankakee.He slept without a blankaket,And whiskikey, how he drankaket,This rough and ready Yankakee.Phyllis McGinley is probably the most accomplished of these poets; in fact, she often writes with a lethal wit that her lyrical skill only intensifies, as in the final stanza of “Hostess,” her wicked depiction of a social butterfly:No calm must fall, however brief and narrow,Lest to her dread,From some small knothole of silence, some hidden burrow,The scotched snake, Thought, should rear its venomed head.McGinley won a Pulitzer prize for her verse and, as Mr. McClatchy tells us, her books sold in the tens of thousands, though I suspect now she isn’t much read. That is a pity, for McGinley was not only a superb poet but possessed trenchant insight into the America of her time (she died in 1978); insight that still has much to teach us. Before the exhausted word “diversity” became such a shibboleth, she could praise an authentic diversity:Praise ice and ember, sand and rock, Tiger and dove and ends and sources;Space travelers, and who only walk Like mailmen round familiar courses;Praise vintage grapes and tavern Grappas,And bankers and Phi Beta Kappas.Each of these three idiosyncratic poets reveled in the variousness of the world, its lunacy as well as its loveliness, and each came up with verses – sometimes in plain wallflower-words, sometimes in dazzling hybrid coinages – to echo our crazy American comedy. Would that they were with us still!

Lunacy & Loveliness

Lunacy & Loveliness

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