Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss : Essays On the Writings and Life of Theodor Geisel (eBook)

Introduction

“They snap. They crackle. And also pop. If the books of other more staid authors are the oatmeal of children’s literature—solid, nourishing, and warm, but not much fun—those of Theodor Seuss Geisel are its Rice Krispies, blending nutrition with a happily explosive morning racket,” Warren T. Greenleaf wrote, in the educators’ magazine Principal, in May 1982.

And the year after that Dr. Seuss had become “a genre, a category, an institution,” Jonathan Cott said, in his book Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature.

Bennett Cerf, Geisel’s publisher at Random House, called him “a genius, pure and simple,” at a time when both William Faulkner and John O’Hara were being published by Random House. Rudolf Flesch said that Dr. Seuss would surely be read one hundred years from now, when Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Marquand and others may be forgotten.

Since Theodor (Ted) Geisel’s death in September 1991, there have been five additional Seuss books published: Daisy-Head Mayzie, the only Seuss book featuring a little girl (1995); The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss, illustrations Geisel completed during his lifetime which didn’t quite fit the Seuss books (1995); My Many Colored Days, with illustrations by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (1996); the collection A Hatful of Seuss, and Seuss-isms.

Longtime Geisel family friends Judith and Neil Morgan published a rich, evocative authorized biography, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, in 1995, but there has not yet been a comprehensive anthology devoted to Dr. Seuss’s critical reception.

In “On Beyond Zebra with Dr. Seuss,” Rita Roth writes that Seuss was “beloved by his audience, yet, until comparatively recently, he was held at arm’s length by the children’s literature establishment.”

And Jonathan Cott writes, “Aside from The Cat in the Hat and its brilliant sequel The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, most of Dr. Seuss’s Beginner and Bright and Early Books have often been overlooked, patronized and undervalued.”

Held at arm’s length. Overlooked, patronized and undervalued.

Thus it seems high time for a book that discusses, analyzes and studies the nation’s best-known children’s writer. For indeed, as Alison Lurie observes (quoted in Jonathan Cott), Dr. Seuss is now as well known as Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll. Carrying that comparison further, certainly his life has been just as interesting.

What do we see if we examine the life of Theodor Geisel?

For one thing, we see that serendipity played a large part in his early success, as even Geisel acknowledged. Perhaps the first happy accident of fate was in the 1930s, when Geisel accidentally designed an advertising campaign. Looking for the name of an insecticide to use in a cartoon caption, he flipped a coin to decide on Flit, a popular brand of the day, rather than Fly-Tox, a competitor. The wife of a Flit advertising man later found the cartoon in a beauty parlor she normally didn’t patronize—and the Flit account kept Geisel busy for 17 years.

It was surely serendipitous that during a return from Europe in 1936 on the oceanliner M.S. Kungsholm, Geisel found himself obsessed with the rhythmic throbbing of the oceanliner’s engines. A less imaginative man might simply have been irritated by the noise. Geisel, however, repeated the beat until the words came:

… and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street…

Ted Geisel kept playing with the meter until he completed his first book, using that line as the title.

Serendipity struck again one day on the sidewalk in New York City. At that point, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street had been rejected by somewhere between 20 and 30 book publishers (figures vary, even from Geisel himself). But on this day in New York, Geisel, with manuscript under his arm, chanced to meet an acquaintance from his Dartmouth College days, Marshall McClintock. McClintock, who had just been hired as a children’s book editor, asked about Geisel’s package, and an hour or so later, Geisel had a book contract.

It must have been serendipity that placed him, on a commuter train leaving New York City, behind a staid, hat-wearing businessman to whom he took an instant (though unexpressed) dislike. What would happen if I took that hat off his head? Geisel wondered. Would another grow in its place? Thus Dr. Seuss’ second book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, was born.

Not long afterward, serendipity, in the form of a breeze through an open window, blew some of Geisel’s sketches about. A sketch of an elephant landed on a sketch of a tree. What would an elephant be doing in a tree? Geisel thought.

Hatching an egg!

So Dr. Seuss gave the world Horton Hatches an Egg.

Later, in Europe, Geisel overheard a G.I. complain about the weather: “Rain. Rain. Why doesn’t something else fall from the sky?”

Why, indeed? Why couldn’t, why shouldn’t something else fall from the sky? Geisel thought.

Before long came another book: Bartholomew and the Oobleck.

Many years later, Geisel worked and worked over a book that just wouldn’t jell. He fussed and he stewed, he worked and he worked, but nothing happened. Finally, his wife, Audrey, took him on a trip to Africa. There, Theodor Geisel saw elephants on a plain—and Dr. Seuss leaped to work. Writing furiously on whatever he could find, he completed the book. The Lorax was published in 1971.

Serendipity. Plus a big helping of imagination. His first wife, Helen Geisel, once said, “His mind never grew up.” Asked about the strange Seussian animals and the equally strange Seussian places—Whoville, Solla Sollew and elsewhere—Seuss said, “Why, I’ve been to most of those places myself so the names are from memory.”

And hard work. Geisel worked regular hours, day after day, year after year. He threw away far more material than he published.

Early in his career as a children’s book author, he once asked, rather plaintively, if his agents thought he could make $5,000 a year on his books. Surely Geisel couldn’t have anticipated that after World War Two, the baby boom would cause sales of children’s books, and of the Dr. Seuss books in particular, to grow almost geometrically. Sales of all his books have now surpassed 150,000,000 copies. After his death, Audrey Geisel donated $20 million to the library of the University of California at San Diego, which was promptly renamed the Geisel Library. She also donated $1 million to the library in Geisel’s hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts.

And to think it began with the sound of a ship!

At substantial risk of sounding like a dried-up academic, one could wager that the oceanliner with the rhythmic engine had throbbed out some variant of anapestic tetrameter. An anapest is a metric foot consisting of two short unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, editor Chris Baldick writes that this form was originally a Greek marching beat. Tetrameter is four metric feet to a line.

A perfect example from McElligot’s Pool:

And from Horton Hatches the Egg:

The oceanliner engine gave Theodor Geisel a rhythm that pulls readers through the text. (Critics have suggested this is one reason children love the Seuss books.) Even more importantly, with the stress toward the end of the lines, the rhythm gallops. Children repeat it—they chant it, they sing the words.

Dr. Seuss’s books always employ logical insanity. If there is a drawing of a two-headed anything, there are always two toothbrushes in the bathroom and two hats on two hooks. Children understand and accept that logic.

The drawings—Geisel said at least once that he couldn’t really draw—also pull the reader through the book, and they perfectly match the text. Some authors do words; some books feature exquisite illustrations. The Dr. Seuss books offer story and illustrations perfectly matched to each other.

Are children sophisticated enough to accept mature subjects? Ted Geisel thought so. Dr. Seuss gave the world Yertle the Turtle, about the evils of dictatorship; Horton Hears a Who! about equality (a person’s a person no matter how small); The Sneetches, about anti–Semitism; The Lorax, about despoiling the environment; The Butter Battle Book, about warfare; and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, about the commercialization of Christmas. All have become classics. Furthermore, as a body of work, their influence is enormous. Thanks to Dr. Seuss—and particularly to his first Beginner Book, The Cat in the Hat—American children’s literature was liberated from all that was simplistic, stuffy and dull.

The Seuss canon is a part of American culture. Green Eggs and Ham, for example, is a national treasure. Jesse Jackson once recited...