Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  While the name McElligot smacks of Seussian imagination, Geisel claimed he had lifted the name from a real person: Henry William McElligot, whose name appeared on the safety inspection certificate hanging in every New York City elevator. “I read his name every day for seven years,” said Ted, “and it finally came out as a title of a book.”13 For the story, Geisel had stayed with the rhyming verse he’d used in Mulberry Street, helping the reader maintain the rhythm through a careful use of italics to indicate stressed words or syllables—a tactic he would deploy more and more.

  The art for McElligot’s Pool is some of Ted’s most whimsical and beautiful, drawn with strong black lines with a careful gray wash—and every other full-page spread is in stunning full color, reminiscent of Ted’s watercolor paintings. The production department at Random House had delivered on Cerf’s promise to make a spectacular-looking book, though at a cost; its $2.50 cover price was significantly higher than many kids’ books published at the same time. Surprisingly, Geisel was unhappy with the overall look of it; he thought the book suffered from a “modulation of tones.” After publication of McElligot’s Pool, Geisel would abandon its unique coloring scheme for good, giving the book a look unlike any other book in the Dr. Seuss library before or since.

  The reviews were kind—and reviewers were glad to have Dr. Seuss back. “In the seven years since his last book . . . a whole new audience has been born and growing for Dr. Seuss’s comic genius,” said The New York Times, “and with McElligot’s Pool he snares them, every one.”14 McElligot’s Pool also earned Dr. Seuss his first Caldecott Honor, awarded by the nation’s librarians for exceptional books for children.

  Ted warmly dedicated McElligot’s Pool to his father, reminding T. R. Geisel of the unsuccessful fishing trip he and his son had taken four decades earlier, stopping off at Deegel’s fish hatchery on their way home, where they “caught the biggest mess of trout you’ve ever seen—at $2 a pound.”15 It was a pleasant memory for T.R., who had recently gotten remarried and was making a new life for himself with his wife, Ruth, in the house on Fairfield.

  In December 1947, less than a month after the publication of McElligot’s Pool, RKO premiered Design for Death for the sole purpose of ensuring that it would be eligible for the upcoming Academy Awards. A month later, on January 22, 1948, the forty-eight-minute film opened for review. Geisel was nervous; he was unhappy with the way RKO was promoting the film, marketing it with garish posters featuring exploitative tag lines such as Military Gangsters Dupe Nation into War! Ted’s case of nerves turned out to be well founded; the critics were savage, with the esteemed Bosley Crowther at The New York Times railing against Design for Death as “a far from sensational factual film . . . Anyone going to see it expecting to be shocked or intrigued by staggering ‘revelations’ had better think again . . . the weakness with which it is put forth in a mélange of faked and factual pictures and in a ponderous narration does not render it very forceful.”16 It was almost enough to make Geisel regret having his longed-for on-screen writer’s credit.

  And yet, despite the blistering reviews, Design for Death managed to nab a nomination for Best Documentary Feature of 1947, competing with Journey into Medicine, a docudrama about treating diphtheria, and The World Is Rich, a British study of global starvation. On March 20, 1948, Ted and Helen drove into Los Angeles to attend the 20th Academy Awards ceremony at Shrine Auditorium and sat nervously as nineteen-year-old presenter Shirley Temple read the list of nominees for Best Documentary. Moments later, she announced the winner was Design for Death.

  Ted was astonished. Design for Death producer Sid Rogell leapt onstage to accept the Oscar—and while Ted applauded enthusiastically, film editor Elmo Williams could only seethe that he and Ted were merely “spectators in the audience.”17 But Ted was pleased; while the experience making Design for Death hadn’t been an enjoyable one, he could now say that a film with his name on it had won an Academy Award. Indeed, he would proudly note the Oscar on his official biography for decades.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Despite his Academy Award, Dr. Seuss was done with Hollywood.

  In the summer of 1948, after living in the Hollywood area for five years, Ted and Helen packed up the house on Wonder View Drive and headed back to La Jolla. Ted was happy with the home they’d built in the hills of La Jolla—but he had to confess that after spending the summer of 1946 on the seaside terraces of Villa Narcissa, he was aching for an ocean view. He wanted a place “somewhere high up, overlooking everything,”18 and he and Helen began looking for a new piece of property on which they could build a new home. The Geisels consulted with local architect Tom Shepard, who told them there was no place in La Jolla “overlooking everything” except for an old observation tower high on Mount Soledad, “where the kids go to park.”19

  Ted and Helen drove out to Mount Soledad and trekked up the bushy slopes to the two-story tower, essentially two rooms stacked on top of each other, connected by a flight of stairs. The structure had been erected in the 1920s by area real estate salespeople who used it to point out local landmarks to potential buyers; now it was a neglected make-out spot, covered with graffiti and overgrown with flowering weeds and strewn with trash—Ted opened a supply closet and swore that five thousand beer cans spilled out. But the views were spectacular, with the Pacific visible on three sides, the town of La Jolla stretching away to the ocean eight hundred feet below, the city of San Diego sparkling to the south, and—on a clear day—Mexico visible on the southern horizon.

  The Geisels would take it, buying the tower as well as two acres surrounding it, to the surprise and slight distress of local residents, who assumed the tower was publicly owned and therefore off-limits for purchase. Plans were drawn up for a modest two-bedroom, two-bathroom home to be built surrounding the tower, with windows facing the water on all sides. With seed money from Helen’s trust fund, construction on their new home began on September 17, 1948—Helen’s fiftieth birthday.

  The new house wasn’t Ted’s only major undertaking. Even with his movie career on hold following the completion of Design for Death, Ted now had multiple projects on his drawing table. Five days before Helen’s birthday came the publication of Ted’s second book in less than twelve months, the amiable Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose. Like Horton the elephant before him, Thidwick is taken advantage of because of his own moral forthrightness—in this case, it’s his conviction that “a host, above all, must be nice to his guests”—leading a large group of animals to take up residence in his gigantic curling antlers. In the end, as his herd abandons him and a group of hunters closes in, Thidwick literally shrugs off his horns and rejoins his herd. Meanwhile the rude but unfortunate guests find themselves shot by hunters, then stuffed, mounted, and hung over the mantel of the Harvard Club—a bit of grisly comeuppance that Geisel relates with a gleeful, almost horrifying, relish:

  His old horns today are

  Where you knew they would be.

  His guests are still on them,

  All stuffed, as they should be.20

  The final page shows each “guest”—including a bear, a fox, a turtle, a bobcat, and several birds—mounted fully intact, all smiling pleasantly, with an X over each eye, the universal cartoon symbol—as every child seems to know intuitively—for dead. And yet, in the disarming style of Dr. Seuss, it seemed somehow to be all in good fun. Geisel left hand-wringing to the reviewers; he understood exactly what mattered to his young readers: “Thidwick had to be reunited with the herd,” Geisel said. “If he hadn’t been, the book would have been rejected by kids. Because they identify themselves with the moose.”

  His only real concern about the book’s climax seemed to revolve around his decision to have Thidwick’s rude guests mounted on the walls of the Harvard Club. This was not, as Geisel assured one interviewer, a dig at Dartmouth’s Ivy League rival. Rather, it “came out of the exigencies of the problem—I had to end the
damn book,” explained Ted.

  And I saw the best way to end it would be to put the animals on some wall somewhere . . . I had recently had lunch at the Harvard Club, which had about eight million animals—mostly shot by Teddy Roosevelt—hanging all over the walls. So it seemed to be a logical place . . . to have them end up. No animosity to the Harvard Club at all.21

  While reviewers tended to overlook the book’s ending, Ted’s art did draw its share of criticism. “Slightly confusing at first glance,” wrote one critic, while another thought the drawings were “difficult to see at first.”22 Partly the confusion may have been due to the necessary close-ups of Thidwick’s antlers, which practically fill some of the pages. Geisel had also reverted back to his more Spartan use of color, highlighting pages with a careful use of turquoise and rust tones. For readers who remembered the visual excitement of McElligot’s Pool, it was a bit of a letdown. “There are [no drawings] in full color, which is a pity,” wrote an unnamed reviewer in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, noting that “a certain sparkle and brilliance is missing.”23

  Most often, however, reviewers seemed more inclined to focus on the book’s bouncing readability than its art or its dark, somewhat vengeful, ending. “The author’s rollicking verse is perfectly suited to this comical tale,” enthused the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. “For little children, it is splendid, read-aloud nonsense.” Writing in The New York Times, Ellen Lewis Buell praised the book’s rhyming verses, “which march in double-quick time” and called it “as madly absurd as anything Dr. Seuss has done.”24

  Geisel was relieved at the happy reception for Thidwick. As Ted turned forty-five years old in March of 1949, he, too, was happy and healthy—the California sun was clearly good for him—with a full head of dark hair that still tended to stand on end. Short walks and afternoon swims remained his primary source of recreation; coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes were his only real vices. Long days sitting at the drawing board were starting to take their toll on his eyes, however, and Geisel had begun seeing an ophthalmologist. He would later blame his terrible driving habits on vision problems, though any passenger in the car with him would chalk his erratic driving up to inattentiveness; Geisel loved to talk more than he loved to drive.

  * * *

  • • • •

  In July 1949, Geisel was invited to teach and speak at a ten-day writer’s conference at the University of Utah. The invitation had come from Professor Brewster Ghiselin, a scholar and a poet who had founded the conference in 1947 as part of a course he offered called “The Creative Process.” As part of the conference, then, Geisel would be one of several writers expected to run writing workshops and give a keynote lecture for all attendees.

  Citing his Teddy Roosevelt story, Geisel almost always declined speaking events—but he was intrigued by Ghiselin’s offer. First of all, he’d be in good company; besides Ted, Ghiselin had invited the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, best known for his 1947 novel Bend Sinister (the controversial Lolita was still several years away); novelist Wallace Stegner, already revered for his semi-autobiographical The Big Rock Candy Mountain; Martha Foley, editor of the distinguished Best Short Stories annual; and poets William Carlos Williams and John Crowe Ransom. But more important, it was the first time he’d ever had an opportunity to really think about what made a good children’s story. What did he set out to do with his own books? Why did some books sell better than others? What was the writer’s responsibility to the reader? Geisel took the assignment seriously, rereading old children’s books and stories, reflecting on his own struggles and experience as a writer and artist for children, and handwrote lengthy lecture notes and class exercises. It would turn out to be one of the most important assignments Geisel had ever taken on—a turning point in his career as a writer and artist of children’s literature.

  Ted and Helen drove to Salt Lake City, and on the day after the Fourth of July in 1949, Ted began his ten-day residency as an instructor and lecturer. 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.” But that meant writing “stories they’ll like being entertained by. Stories they’ll like being educated by.”25

  As he shared his own experiences with the class over the ten days, Geisel urged his students not to be embarrassed about writing for children—to not feel they were “slumming.” It was a sentiment he had struggled with in his own work since his earliest days at Judge, where he often worried he was “dumb[ing] it down” for the lowest common denominator. It was easy to be slightly defensive about writing for beginning readers—but that was precisely the point of Ted’s weeklong workshop: writing for children was actually the hardest kind of writing. “One reason it’s more difficult,” Geisel explained, “[is] because it’s easier to fool adults with tricks.” Adults, he argued, could be dazzled by “linguistic acrobatics, verbal flights of fancy”—kids not so much. “A child isn’t deceived by patter of words,” he continued. “His mind is centered on what’s going on. He’ll see through your words and your style.”

  Instead, Geisel encouraged his young writers to concentrate on the substance of the story they were telling. “Great style is great artistry,” he admitted, “but without a story, great style is spinach,” discarded by kids in the same way unwanted food is pushed off the dinner plate. Taking a page from Capra, he encouraged his students to carefully go through their stories with a blue pencil and “underline every sentence that advances the plot. None others. If your blue line pattern is irregular, scattered, too far between, you’re writing too much spinach,” he said. “Get back on your story line . . . You’re serving meat, not salad.”

  Pacing also mattered. Kids in 1949—not yet raised on the new invention of television—were devouring exciting, fast-paced comic books by the millions each month; writers of children’s books foot-dragged their plots at their own peril. “At the start, when you’re setting up your character and situations, you can go like a train starting: CHOO . . . CHOO . . . CHOO,” Geisel explained. “But as you go on: choochoochoochoochoochoo.” He encouraged them to cross out unnecessary words and ideas in their stories, “and stay on that track, going fast and faster.”

  He also detailed what he saw as a child’s “Seven Needs”—a need for security, a need to belong, a need to love and be loved, a need to achieve, a need to know, a need for aesthetic satisfaction, and a need for change—and stressed that not every story needed to cover all seven, “but no juvenile author can ever hope to get to first base unless he can answer one of those needs.” He urged his class to embrace in particular a child’s need to love and be loved. “Too many writers are embarrassed by what they think is a sticky, sloppy emotion,” Geisel lectured. “Afraid of tenderness, they take to cleverness. And children find such writing cold. They want affection—and if you don’t give it to ’em in your writing, they’re going to find it elsewhere.” And yet he also cautioned his aspiring writers not to stick too closely to templates or algorithms. “[You] can’t write by rule,” said Geisel. “I can’t give you a formula.” When writing, he said, “make your own mistakes. Make ’em your own way.”

  For his class assignments, Geisel asked his students to write several stories over several days—about pieces of wood, or a boy and a worm—writing in verse, if they could, but thinking mainly about story construction. Once their stories were completed, he asked them to critique each other, “from the brutally frank point of view of a child.” He’d also devised a series of questions for students to ask themselves while writing their stories—the most crucial of which was probably the one he had written in all capit
al letters and underlined three times in his notes: “AM I WRITING DOWN TO CHILDREN?”

  “Am I doing a namby-pamby ‘Climb up on my knee, kiddie-widdies’?” he asked his class rhetorically. “Or am I saying, ‘Look here, bub—you and I are citizens in this world together; let’s talk about [things] man to man.” For Ted—and Dr. Seuss—the answer was always clear: children were to be talked to directly, as absolute equals, with no pandering or condescension. “[Kids] know it if you begin to condescend or write down to them,” he explained later. “That’s been the trouble with children’s books and elementary textbooks for years . . . [and] the kids don’t like it. Why should they? The old tellers of fantastic fairy tales, Grimm and Andersen, never talked down to their audiences.”26 It was a way of writing for children that Geisel seemed to realize almost intuitively—and it would set the work of Dr. Seuss apart from the vast bulk of children’s books for more than a generation.

  Several students asked him what to do when their stories bogged down. “If it’s a matter of a word or a phrase, don’t stop,” said Ted. “Go right on. Fill in the missing word with dum dum or blah blah or anything at all. If you stop and start searching through the dictionary, you’ll get sidetracked.” If the plot was beginning to wander or get convoluted, however, Geisel’s advice was to stop altogether and consider starting over. “Your trouble probably isn’t in the [words in the] paragraph you’re working on,” he told them.

  One of the writers who had likely learned the most from Geisel’s classroom lectures was Geisel himself. The lessons he taught his students were the lessons he had learned through experience—through trial and error, through writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing. Thinking about teaching other writers, writing out his lesson plans, had forced him to come to terms with his own creative choices, his own career path. And he had come to understand that what he did was not just hard work, but meaningful work. It was work that could change lives—and work that had to be taken seriously. Writing stories that entertained and educated kids, he had finally decided, was a “good profession.”