YOU can say practically anything you like about Ogden Nash without incurring his displeasure. He has been writing anachronistic verse for many years and it has made him enormously rich.
The words are not mine. They are those of Mr. Odgen Nash.
Perhaps, of course, it is as well not to mouth them too loudly in his hearing. lle claims to have 10,000 cousins in North Carolina and it is possible that they will all descend upon you in fury-aided, perhaps, by the half a million or so citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, which was
named after his great-great-grandfather's brother,
All of these people have a A very geed one, but still a proprietary interest in Mr Nosh joke. who rates as probably the ly profit-making. Amerizan pret is living memory.
ife does. Indeed, by his own. admission. live in a mansion in Haltinere, Maryland, a plaer on the whole, regarded as cultural wilderness at least since the death of H.L. Mencken,
U
Mr Nash. mild man who is hot merly 20 ballered and bruised by the oddities of Filliation is the charnelers in his poems, would probably not resent being called a joke.
What worricg him-and what has brought him to the popular attention at the moment is the nonigh fact that there aren't jackosters 1 American Ulers-
This to doubt makes him more popular with his 10,000 cousins, but not with rival ports, rival poets, he is just a jolte ture.
Τη
"My watch is my constant
companion" says
PAT SMYTHE
The world's &ading woman show-fumper
Photograph reproduced by the greets of Nis ParSmythe. “O 2.E., and the British Eqensate Fund
CHOW-JUMPING is not so effortless at the experts make is look, to a watch has to bo pretty lough to take it in Ita stride. That's why Pat Smythe is so pleased with her lovely Rolex Oyster Perpetual. She says:
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"I've worn it salfing, where it often gets wet. I've worn it ski-ing, where it gris covered in snow, and I've worn iz lny 30" of fest, as well os in the heat and dust of the Sahara desert. Nothing seems to affect is: **it just goes on keepina perfect time-ană winding itself, which means there's uno thing less to remember.
"I'm delighted with my beautiful Oyster Perpetualandit'amyconstantcompanion.”
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ROLEX
· A landmark in the history of Time measurement
THE CHINA MAIL, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST ́7, `1957.
OGDEN NASH
The
man who made
Poetry
He puts it succinctly: "(Young writers) fect is their business to attack inecat."
The nearest to this point of view that Nash ever came was in a two line, jingle for whileh he is afraid ist he will be re- membered for a long time:
Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker He did not, however, having pointed out the dangers in herout in liquor, feel it his duty to go on and attack it. On the contrary, he even went so for once as to write a poem for a distiller's recipe book,
a little desperate, gay, Amerien It started out to be.
Books on Incest get you the Nobel Prize. Books of light verso would not, nowadays, even get you a mansion in Balllmere. Light verse might still win you 3 corner in the "Saturday Evening Pest" but, if like Nash's, it had a sting underneath, the editors might easily reject it.
For Nash, like Thurber, de- lights in putting banana skins under the things American hold dear. Money is funny in Nash's book. So is Dale Carneige d the slightly oily theology which preachers on national networks pour over troubled souls.
He started his career on the foilt
"New Yorker in the great days of Thurber Dorothy Parker, Frank Sullivan Denchley.
ond
Robert
That was not, as a matter of fact, so very long ago. Nash is only 54. Thurber is still in busi- ness. So is the "New Yorker."
But that estimable journal nowadays more often rends like a Freudian case book than like the light-heeled chronicle of a
Pay
People expeel old men in die, They do not really mourn old
men.
Ok men are different. People
lock
Al them with eyes that won-
der when...
People watch with unstocked
eyes....
But old men know when an
old man dies.
for a year, drifted to New York. sald bonds for a couple of years, drified into publishing, and final- ly cased himselt on to the staff of the "New Yorker."
Nowadays young men do not move so easily from job to job. Great corporations have training schemes, pension plans, an in- inite array of devlees to keep young men from floating about the world.
And instel where is Nash's America has been stabilled, successor? Where is Thurber's regularised. The comle poet is successor?
13 1957's neccssarily a born dritter, un- fu entertain tied to place, free Benchley?
any whim that comes into his
Where
The answer, perhaps, is that There is, for instance, the there is none because Americans poon which begins "Roll on are nowadays a little less sure ihou dark blue copy writer, of themselves and, so, a little afraid to laugh at themselves, And, at the moment when Nash is a bit of a publle em- President Elsenhower and Sena- barrassincal. tor McCarthy were
wrangling over the Republican Parly, Nash took a long look at the party's 160. symbol, the elephant, and wrote:
Elephants are useful friends,
And there is another answer.
Nash e Havard after
+
head,
There is not much place for him any more.
But perhaps all this is taking Nash far too seriously. Perhaps he should be taken at his own fourd a valuation "Just formula for making really bad poetry pay."
Even so it is a little hard not le cheer as he goes on fill- ing at the foibles of Americans even it, in the words of the title of his new book "You Can't
They have handles at both year, taught in a boy's school Get There from Here,"
ends.
Underneath the surface, 100, there is the serious, perceptive Nash, the Nash who wrote:
by Les Armour
Really!
THIS GAP IN AGES
IS GETTING TOO MUCH!
soos
I
by Leonard Mosley
AM all in favour of real life imi- taling the moro romantic forms of fiction, but I really am getting a bit tired of this Old Man mar- ries Young Girl lark, uren't you?
For years the stock plot of bedroom novelists and boudoir film-makers has been that old thing about the innocent young girl who fals in love with the middle-aged philanderer and
ends up by leading him to the altar,
But isn't it about time we stopped up- setting the balance of nature by trying to make it work out in everyday life too?"
Every time I pick up the paper, nowa- days, I see that one of my old pals, usually on the shady side of 40, has been racing off to the nearest re- gister office with a pretty girl young enough to be his daughter (grand-daughter
in some cases)..
My reaction is to say: "Well, jolly good luck to you." But I can't help add- ing, in my own heart; “But. you know it's all wrong, don't you --- and it won't
Inst."
ore
films The trouble is, making these spring-and- autumna romatos {as they used to call them in Victorian limes) into a fashion and
tal.
ful, and so foolproof on the ANNOZI,
Tear-drops
ret albowed out older man who have the money, the influence, and the experience to go after what they want and are slupid enough to think they enn keep it once they get it.
The young girls they 100 after get their notions of what
to make KOLS
marriage partnership all twisted up.
A
Trashy
THERE 19, for instance, a nice your man in "Love in the Afternoon" who is in love with Audrey Hepburn, and the is Lond of him until Cooper comes along.
But after that he cannot compete. Cooper buys her gipsy Addican and champagne at the Ritz, The young man takes her to the gallery of the opera, and is shown un as poverty- stricken foot who can't even afford a decent dinner jacket.
By the time the rich oldster has finished turning Hepburn's Filly little head with worldly bribes,
standards have falken
prefers
।
auch a depth that she listening to trashy fango called "Fascination" to the love duct from "Trision" and has begun to share Cooper's aste for cola drinks and the leg-thows at the Folies Bergere, I just shows where marrying somerne old enough to be your grandad can get you.
Pity
JOW don't misunderstand me,
partnerships in which there iz a difference in age. #7! I don' think it matters which one, man or wife, is the older. So long as it Д marriage of love and mutual interefts, and to long as the gap isn't 100 wide.
But at these announcements I sen these days in which it says: "Mr Srooks is the well- known company director. He is His bride is 21," nauseate
55.
me
ROMANTICS COOPER AND HEPBURN
BEWARE OF THE BIG BAD GREYHEAD
Miss Hepburn is an unsolled propeginta for u falsification elf in her early twenties and of the true facts of life.
eld. roue in Mr Cooper is an his late fifties. It doesn't szem 10 have occurred 1o anyone
It encourages greyheads
making this fim that this, as to cherish hopes that will a mating-schem, is disgusting.
In fact, it is suggested at the not be fulfilled, and it per end of the story that they are
going to live happily ever after. suades young people that there is nothing wrong in stepping out of their age
False
ALL right, so it is just a group. A ̈alm. But the flood of this
Xind
of fictional wishful- thinking (usually dreamed up So what do you get? by on aging writer suffering Young men who are strug- from an overdose of nostalgia) gling for a encer, a position,
No, that's wrong. They
don't nauseate me.
Mid Week Selection
"As I was saying, if we can remove the danger of surprise attack we can concentrate on further
WESS
Mard Low
CAST
REUNIFIED REUNIFIED
GERM
Need for
GERMANT
progress...
DIPLOMAT
"Of course we both have the same slight reservation, at prosent we feel safer with o deunified Germany."
"All the money I've spent on that stuff was just wasted—I'll have my gin neat from now on!"
SELWYN
LEOYO
&
Copyright in all countries,
OMAN
"Well, no, Mr. Dullos, 1 wasn't thinking of you when I said we must give full support to a staunch friend."
INFLATIONARY TRENDS.
They
fill me full of pity, for both of them.
Afternoon"
In "Love in the Cooper says to Hepbum:
"Aren't you bit young for this sort of thing?"
She replies: "Ären't you a bit old for this cort of thing?"
"You shouldn't have said
"That that," he answers.
hurts."
It can hurt even more
is, the way I see il, pernicious and the right sort of partner in real life.
-Comets May Race The Red Jets-
air challenge, British
a
MOSCOW is sending in European Airways may switch but we schedule of four hours
from slower turbo-prop airliners On the present Umetable via
Fare
It looks to easy, so wonder negotiate the opening of a to Comet IVbs, whose four jet Copenhagen and Helsinki_the
direct route between the engines give an 85-mile-an-hour flight totals 10 hours. cities next April-and that edge over the Russian (win jets. £142 85. return, may develop into a. racc
Russia is now mass-producing MOSCOW: The newspaper over the Iron Curtain to Tu104s and showing them off la Pravda says that four new types provo who has the best jet- the free world as well as in the of aircraft are on view at a
Estellite countries.
Moscow display:-- -- And the is offering them at the Tu104a, twin-jet, 620 miles an Which in turn could start a cut price of £450,000 against hour, 70 passengers.
£1,000,000 for the Comet,
Tul10, four-jet, 100° pas- line Will Canets be availabler venners
TT looked wonderful, the other liner.
day, for instance, when I
raw the latest version xẻ it in
a film called LOVE IN THE Europe-wide battle, for orders, AFTERNOON, in
The Russian Aeroflo! which
becsusso - on order by Ukratos, four turbo-props, havo done the America's Capital Airlines for Bà passengers,
Moskve, four furho-props, 75 down the cynical defoncos of 1,200-mile Moscow-London trip 14 has boca deferred. Mr Gary Cooper,
in three and a half-hours. To explotach that the jols will fly passengers,
the maidonly tear-drops muy at first niy en la Tupolev Yes, of Miss Audrey Hepburn break [1048, which
"I think we ought to issue another grim warning of the bright prospects which foam ahead if we don't face up to it.”
REGIMENTS
TO BE
DISSANDER
"Couldn't wo, Sir, join with the St. James's' Theatre and Third Programme mobs in a grand protest rally?"
Copyright in of countries,
by Friell
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