A husband who could make a living from light verse

Nash snapped out of it when composer Kurt Weill asked him to write lyrics for what turned out to be a Broadway hit musical, "One Touch of Venus."

Parker makes the offstage scene a drama in itself. Weill would work all day on an Army training film for the Office of War Information, take a ferry and train home, finally go to his desk, and "promptly turn out an enchanting melody." Director Elia Kazan and writer S.J. Perelman had words not in the script.

Marlene Dietrich avoided discussion of playing the title role by seeking "refuge in her favorite instrument, the musical saw." She finally said no, concerned that "showing her legs on stage might offend the sensibilities of her nineteen-year-old daughter." Those were the days.

Mary Martin took the part, and it led to her triumph in "South Pacific."

Nash's words for the show's most enduring song, "Speak Low," came after Weill referred him to Shakespeare's line: "Speak low, if you speak love." Nash freely gave Weill credit. Not exactly a surprise when another composer, Vernon Duke, called Nash "the finest human being I was ever privileged to know."

And just in case anyone doubts that Nash's verses' edgy version of matrimony was grounded in affection, read his letters to Frances, his wife of four decades. They keep sounding like those of a love-smitten swain, while she demands he control his drinking and the children marvel at how he weathered her mood swings. He took his own advice in "A Word to Husbands":

Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

Nash can turn from kidding with and about his daughters to writing a Daddy letter to one of them tempted by a dubious relationship: "You should be intelligent enough to know that in various eras of history it has been fashionable to laugh at morals, but the fact of the matter is that Old Man Morals just keeps rolling along, and the laughers end up as driftwood on a sandbar."

Back in poet mode, Nash was "endlessly innovative in his versification and diction," to cite the foreword by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Look at collections like "Verses From 1929 On," "You Can't Get There From Here," and "Everyone But Thee and Me." The present book strings a mini-anthology through the pages of biography and publishing lore.

In today's world of war and rumors of war, one would like to add "Is There an Oculist in the House?" It's about people not seeing eye to eye, then fighting, and then becoming friends - as Americans did with the Italians, the Germans, and the Japanese. The final lines are these:

Once again there is someone we don't see eye to eye with, and maybe I couldn't be dafter,
But I keep wondering if this time we couldn't settle our differences before a war instead of after.

• Roderick Nordell is the Monitor's acting book editor.

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