Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 348

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination," by Brian Jay Jones.

Like his father and grandfather before him, the boy was named Theodor, with the middle name Seuss—pronounced Soyce, in proper German fashion—affixed as a recognition of his mother’s side of the family.

Nettie, too, would directly influence Ted’s ear for the beat and intonation of words. As she put her son to bed each evening, Nettie would chant a refrain she had often sung behind the counter at the Seuss bakery to inform patrons of the day’s pie flavors: “Apple, mince, lemon . . . peach, apricot, pineapple . . . blueberry, coconut, custard and SQUASH!”—at which point she would playfully squash a giggling Ted down into his mattress. Ted later credited his mother “for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it.”

Geisel would usually overstate the restrictive nature of his contract with Standard Oil—outside work was permitted, within reason—but he did have to be careful. The exclusive nature of his contract with Standard Oil, he explained, “forbade me from doing an awful lot of stuff.” Writing and illustrating children’s books, however, wasn’t a forbidden activity. “I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children,” Geisel said later. In truth, “I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my Standard Oil contract.”

To his increasing distress, the responses were all negative. Geisel would later recall being rejected by twenty-seven publishers, though that number would vary with the telling, ranging from as low as twenty to as high as forty-three. Regardless, no one was biting. While editors knew the Dr. Seuss name, it wasn’t enough to overcome some initial skepticism. Some editors expressed concern that A Story That No One Can Beat had no real moral lesson for children—that the narrator, as a result of choosing not to share his tall tale with his father, had suffered no consequences. (“What’s wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at?” Ted groused.)7 Others argued that he should leave the rhyming verse to Mother Goose. Mostly, said Geisel, “[t]he main reason they all gave was there was nothing similar on the market, so of course it wouldn’t sell.”

Unable to have any real children, then, Ted and Helen created a fictional one: Chrysanthemum-Pearl, born at about the time of Helen’s surgery (hence her age was given as eighty-nine months, or a little more than seven years, in 1938), and a precocious child whom the Geisels could good-naturedly discuss at dinner parties when the conversation turned to children. Friends were in on the ploy—though as far as they knew, Ted and Helen had simply chosen to remain childless and had made up Chrysanthemum-Pearl for some genial competitive fun. And thus, any time a friend told a story about one of their children, Ted—in a tactic worthy of Mulberry Street’s Marco—would one-up the tale with a story of the miraculous feats of Chrysanthemum-Pearl, who could, for example, “whip up the most delicious oyster stew with chocolate frosting.”36 Everyone would laugh, and the conversation would usually move on to a different subject. In fact, Ted and Helen talked for years about Chrysanthemum-Pearl in such convincing terms that, for a while at least, their niece Peggy thought she was real. Even she wouldn’t know the full story behind Chrysanthemum-Pearl for decades.

On February 13, PM ran a Dr. Seuss cartoon with the caption “Waiting for the Signal from Home,” depicting a long line of Japanese Americans—shown stretching along the entire Pacific coast—queuing up to receive bricks of TNT from a building labeled “Hon. Fifth Column.” From the stereotypical portrayal of the Japanese—each one is drawn exactly alike, in bowler hats and black jackets, eyes represented by small slits—to its underlying distrust of his fellow citizens, it’s one of the lowest moments in Dr. Seuss’s career. Further, it’s a shockingly tone-deaf message coming from Ted Geisel, who had experienced bigotry by association during World War I when he was pelted with coal and mocked for no other reason than a shared heritage with the enemy. By his own experience, he should have known better.

In his first class, Ted set out to help his students decide what kind of writers they wanted to be. They could be “torchbearers,” he told them, intentionally writing to deliver a moral or message, or they could be “Mrs. Mulvaneys,” Ted’s most derisive category, reserved for those who wrote kids’ books simply for the money, without regard for the content. He hoped, however, they were in a third category of “writers who want to make a profession of writing stories that children will like.”

The Lorax was a success, too, as a piece of propaganda. The Keep America Beautiful campaign would present Geisel with a special award for his environmental improvement efforts.16 A decade later, the United Nations would distribute the book in several languages to reinforce a conservation message globally, and the environmental group Global Tomorrow Coalition would seek permission to name its highest award after the Lorax—a request Geisel granted. (He wouldn’t always be so generous when he felt his message was being misconstrued or misappropriated. When Horton’s humanist mantra, “A person’s a person, no matter how small!” showed up on the letterhead of a pro-life organization, Geisel’s attorneys slapped the organization with a cease-and-desist order.)