A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor by Ogden Nash

Cafe Society
1

Nash is probably best known as a writer of light verse and doggerel. (His poem Fleas-Adam had’em.) Then there’s “A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor”, which…isn’t. If anything, I get a sort of Robert Service vibe from it. If you haven’t read it, it’s about a man who goes to a hotel to kill the man who seduced and then betrayed his daughter, when the elevator operator, as a warning, takes him to the usually hidden 13th floor, which is a vision of hell where victims torment their murderers for eternity.

It’s a good poem, it’s just not very “Nashish”, for lack of a better word. Any idea the background?

2

There are, oddly, only two biographies of Nash I know of and that poem isn’t mentioned in either. Nor it is referenced in his book of collected letters.

He was trying for longer poems in the 1950s because they brought in more money and because many of the venues for his short poems were dying off. “A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor” originally ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, e.g. He was also turning to children’s books because they were solid markets. Perhaps he just wanted something opposite for fun.