* * *
• • • •
Away from the classroom, Ted, his host, and his fellow lecturers stayed in a sorority house on the University of Utah campus, where they spent most of their evenings around the pool, drinking and swimming. Wallace Stegner remembered Ted as “constantly gay and funny,” splashing merrily after Helen in the deep end of the pool, barking like a seal, and affectionately—and very publicly—referring to her by her pet name “Big Boy.” Ghiselin recalled Ted as “in fine fettle, energetic, prolific, accommodating, adaptive, always in action—though never ostentatiously.”27
After one of Ted’s first lectures, a Salt Lake City teacher named Libby Childs approached him. She shook his hand and asked if she and her husband could do anything to make his stay in the area more enjoyable. Ted told her that he had always wanted to swim in the Great Salt Lake—he loved the idea that a swimmer could float effortlessly on its surface—and Childs promised that she and her husband, Orlo, a geology professor, would take Ted and Helen to the lake over the weekend.
The Geisels and the Childs spent Sunday, July 10, swimming and floating on the Great Salt Lake, the beginning of what would be a lifelong friendship between the families. Ted was astounded by the Childs’s three-year-old son Brad, who could recite, word for word, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose from memory. “I don’t write for kids that young,” Ted said incredulously. “How does he do it?”28
Ted shouldn’t have been surprised; the three-year-old was proving one of the points Ted had driven home during his week of lectures. “Rhythmic prose . . . is almost essential in writing for the very young because they don’t have much vocabulary,” he had told his class. “[They] don’t know many words. So you have to convey much of your meaning by sounds and rhythms.” Brad could remember and recite Thidwick in the same way ancient storytellers could remember and repeat the Iliad or the Odyssey: through a bouncing, rhyming rhythm, and regular repeated phrases. It was a lesson Dr. Seuss wouldn’t forget.
* * *
• • • •
Geisel’s keynote address, which he had titled “Mrs. Mulvaney and the Billion-Dollar Bunny,” was one of the first in the ten-day conference, taking place on the evening of Thursday, July 7. Geisel had announced his lecture as “an illustrated speech,” in which he planned to draw on a gigantic chalkboard as he spoke, highlighting his salient points with some appropriately Seussian art. The morning of his talk, Ted let himself into the lecture hall in the University of Utah’s physical science building and very lightly drew in the outline of what he intended to draw in chalk on the forty-foot blackboard during his speech. According to Geisel, as he approached the science building on the evening of his lecture, he passed the janitor on his way out. “I just did a very nice thing for you, Doctor,” the man happily reported. “That blackboard was filthy. I washed it good and clean.” Geisel groaned. “With no guide to draw to,” he said later, “I got in trouble in the first five minutes—and soon ran out of blackboard and found myself drawing in the air.”
Despite the inauspicious start, Geisel was well prepared for his lecture—the purpose of which, he said, was to “explain, if humanly possible, the state of Juvenile Literature today.” And in his opinion, it wasn’t good. “I am of the opinion that the bad elements in children’s books today greatly outweigh the elements that are good,” he told his audience. Part of the problem, he explained was that there were too many Mrs. Mulvaneys writing books.
As Geisel explained it, Mrs. Mulvaney initially had only the very best of intentions, hoping to write a good book for children. But with no real talent and no real ideas, she casually knocks off a book she thinks kids will want to read—a book about a lollipop-carrying rabbit with a “sissy little pink and white bow necktie” called Bunny, Bunny, Bunny, Bunny, Bunny, Bunny, Bunny. It was a book kids hated, but which parents loved and snapped up so quickly that Mrs. Mulvaney’s publisher demands more and more sequels—one featuring a “cosmic bi-directional Atomic Death Ray”—while her husband begins churning out Bunny-related merchandise.
Eventually, librarians—in Geisel’s scenario, the arbiters of good taste and quality books for children—demand the Mulvaneys stop “putting silly books into children’s hands for every good one a librarian can put there.” But Mrs. Mulvaney refuses, “sitting smug and pretty, in her vast and smelly empire,” said Geisel scornfully, “turning out stuff that’s harmful to children. And harmful to adults, because children become adults.” It was this detrimental effect of bad children’s literature on literature for grown-ups that was Geisel’s larger point:
I’m bringing Mrs. Mulvaney to your attention, because I believe that she’s not only threatening the quality of Juvenile Letters in this country today, but also threatening the quality of Adult Letters in the country tomorrow . . . She is dictating the literary standards that our children are going to follow when their legs grow longer.
Geisel urged parents in the audience to truly think about the reading materials they purchased for their children. “Just try to look at it from the child’s point of view,” he offered, and encouraged parents—and would-be writers of children’s books—to learn from the reading materials kids liked to read, training his fire on comic books in particular. Say what one might about the garish four-color superheroes, vampires, and gangsters, comic book writers and artists knew how to get children excited about reading.
“Writers must also learn from comic book creators that children must be treated as literary equals,” said Geisel, driving home the point he’d made to his students about not writing down to children. “They cannot be written down to or preached to.”29 Comic books, Geisel continued, operated under “a very intelligent rule . . . Namely, ‘No one will ever read your stuff if you’re a bombastic bore.’”
Geisel ended by encouraging good writers to learn the lessons of their competition. There was “a great deal of vigor,” for instance, to be found in comic books or well-intentioned but ultimately mindless adventure stories. “If you want to write good books for children, spend a little time studying the bad ones,” he said. “I’m not saying ape them . . . I’m saying ‘look them over.’” And then, he concluded “bring back some of that vigor. And you’ll find that the children will come back with you.”
Geisel was proud of the work he’d done for the Utah conference—and when he and Helen returned to La Jolla in mid-July, Ted enthusiastically sent a letter to Louise Bonino at Random House, proposing a book about writing for children, based on his classroom and lecture notes. Bonino sat on the proposal for a bit before skeptically sending it over to editor Saxe Commins for review. On August 9, Ted followed up with a short note, trying to prompt a response. “I’ve received invitations to give this same talk in half a dozen places from here to Chicago,” he told Bonino—likely a bluff, but the radio silence from New York was fraying his nerves. Finally, after another six weeks of silence, Ted could take no more. “Could you please wire . . . today whether you have any interest in lecture notes sent in July?” Ted asked in a telegram. “Am being crowded for decision on this property but will stall if you want this and other children’s workshop material developed further.”30
Bonino, who probably knew she had left Geisel to stew for too long—and who also likely knew Geisel was still bluffing about the demand for his material—wrote back immediately with a kind but firm no. The proposed project had been vetted by Bennett Cerf himself, she assured Geisel, and Cerf had shared her and Saxe Commins’s reticence about Dr. Seuss taking on what they viewed as essentially a how-to book. Curiously, they laid some of the blame at the feet of local librarians who might not stock such a book, speculating that they “would feel an author-artist of picture books could hardly qualify as an expert in the entire field of juvenile writing”—a shortsighted and slightly condescending dismissal.
Commins, to his credit, seemed concerned more about scope creep, as well as protecting what he saw as the Dr. Seuss brand—w
hich, in 1949, was based on only seven books. Such an academic project, Commins argued, “would interrupt you in the steady production of your marvelous children’s books [and bring] down on your head all kinds of criticism for doing a semi-formal book.” He also worried that what Geisel was proposing was akin to a magician explaining how he performed a trick. He was better off, said Commins, by not “explain[ing] method, when there is so much inspired madness in your work.”31
Geisel was understandably upset. As far as he was concerned, he was an expert in the field of juvenile writing, the opinions of the librarians be damned—and to have his own publisher back that outlook hurt him terribly. Geisel responded to Bonino with a tight-lipped letter, pitching a new project instead. “About the next book . . . (if you want a next book),” wrote Geisel darkly, “Would a story about the King’s Magicians [from Bartholomew Cubbins] be a good thing to do?”32 Bonino, trying to remain upbeat, encouraged Geisel to write a story using Horton instead. Geisel, dejected, would quite literally go back to the drawing board and start over.
That fall, Ted and Helen moved into their newly completed home in La Jolla, high on a flowery hillside of Mount Soledad. Built in a Spanish style, the red-roofed, pink stucco house—two bedrooms, two bathrooms—wrapped itself around the restored observation tower, where Ted’s glass-enclosed office now occupied the tower’s top floor, with ocean views on three sides. Helen had stationery printed with their new address—7301 Encelia Drive—but mail would often arrive when addressed only to the affectionate nickname Helen had also bestowed on their new home: the Tower.
It took the locals some time to adjust to the Geisels’ presence on the hill. Some evenings, young couples would stride purposefully up Mount Soledad by moonlight, ready for a romantic rendezvous at the old observation tower, only to beat a hasty retreat back to La Jolla, red-faced, when greeted merrily by Geisel at the top of the hill. Geisel also quickly discovered that there was an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography named Hans Suess, PhD—which meant that any mail addressed to “Dr. Seuss” could end up either at the institute or in the mailbox at the Tower. Dr. Seuss and Dr. Suess would meet regularly for years to trade mail.
If there was any disappointment, it was with the studio he’d had prepared in the top room of the Tower. The view was spectacular, but there was no running water in the old part of the building, and the room had a tendency to get chilly in the evenings. So the upstairs studio was converted into a guest room, and Ted relocated to one of the downstairs rooms, with a similarly panoramic view, but with a working fireplace and running water. Here Ted set up his old ink-streaked desk, with the sloping drafting table in the middle, packed with cans and jars jammed with brushes, pencils, pens, and erasers. And always, at Ted’s right elbow, was the ever-present ashtray. Everything was good. “I think that La Jolla, at last, will become my basic roosting place,”33 Ted wrote.
* * *
• • • •
Geisel finished out 1949 with another book—he had managed a book per year since 1947—with the publication of a sequel of sorts to The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins called Bartholomew and the Oobleck. “I shall never cease to wonder at these figments of your inexhaustible brain,” Saxe Commins had written to Geisel admiringly.34 In this particular case, Geisel had been inspired by a real-life conversation he overheard between two Allied soldiers caught in a rainstorm during the Battle of the Bulge. “Rain, always rain!” complained one soldier. “Why can’t we have something different for a change?”35 Geisel had decided that King Derwin would make a similar wish and inadvertently inflict the gooey, sticky oobleck on the hapless citizens of the Kingdom of Didd.
For Geisel, the most difficult part of the story wasn’t the plot or its resolution—the oobleck recedes when the king apologizes for his errant wish—but deciding on the color of the oobleck itself. For months, Geisel had page after page of his book pinned to corkboard on the walls of his office—a habit he had picked up from Capra’s storyboarding sessions—and would stare at them, deep in thought, scratching out a word here and there, and puzzling over just what color oobleck was anyway. “[The] problem was to find something unusual . . . but something that wouldn’t be weird or unpleasant,” he told Louise Bonino. “Pinks are out. They suggest flesh too much. Purples seem morbid.”36 Fortunately, in the same letter, Geisel enclosed a sample of a color he was happy with. “I sort of like this green,” he said, and directed the coloring department to match it precisely, and then be sure to print the green on the pages first, before reproducing the black line art on top of it.
Bartholomew and the Oobleck was well reviewed and would be Dr. Seuss’s second Caldecott Honor book in three years. “Young Dr. Seuss fans will demand many re-readings of this lively, original tale,” wrote The Boston Globe, “and older Dr. Seuss fans won’t mind obliging.”37 “A delight for the youngsters,”38 declared another reviewer, while the Chicago Tribune enthused, “You’ll love it.”39
Ted dedicated Bartholomew and the Oobleck to Kelvin Vanderlip, the son of Kelvin and Elin Vanderlip, his hosts at the Villa Narcissa in the summer of 1946. At the end of 1949, as part of his Dartmouth Alumni biographical listing, Ted proudly wrote that “I publish children’s books and magazine stories for the offspring of my more fecund classmates.”40
What a difference three years had made. In 1946, Geisel had very nearly abandoned children’s books in favor of a new career writing and producing films. Now, after teaching the 1949 Utah writer’s workshop, he was proud to be Dr. Seuss again, writing and drawing books for children and young readers. More than ever, he was convinced that writing for children was meaningful work that deserved to be taken seriously. “If you really know it,” said Geisel, “you can do a lot of good.”41
It was, indeed, a good profession.
CHAPTER 9
A PERSON’S A PERSON
1950–1954
There were no nerds until Dr. Seuss.
That’s not to say there weren’t always individuals on the fringes—the awkward, the outcasts, or the single-minded experts in a particular field—but until Dr. Seuss came along, they weren’t called nerds. Because until Dr. Seuss came along, the word didn’t exist at all.
In early 1950, Geisel was at work on the first book he would write and complete in the Tower, a rollicking, rhyming romp called If I Ran the Zoo. In a story with a structure similar to Mulberry Street or McElligot’s Pool—in which the narrator is inspired by a normally benign setting into dreaming up increasingly bizarre creatures and situations—young Gerald McGrew imagines the changes he’d make if given the opportunity to take over the local zoo. Gerald quickly moves through eight-legged lions and elephant-cats and on to more fantastic animals from remote corners of the globe, like the fluffy Bustard bird, the rhubarb-loving Obsk, and the long-legged insect Thwerll. Eventually he travels to far-off Ka-Troo, from which Gerald brings back
. . . an It-Kutch . . . a Preep . . . and a Proo
A Nerkle . . . a Nerd . . . and a Seersucker, too!1
This was the first time the word nerd ever appeared in print. In Geisel’s 1950 story, a nerd was simply a grouchy-looking creature—essentially the Grinch with muttonchops and (weirdly) wearing a black T-shirt. Within a year, Newsweek would be writing about the evolution of regional slang in the United States, noting that nerd was slowly taking over for drip or square.2 Within a decade, it would be on its way toward entering the vernacular, eventually evolving from a derogatory term to one proudly embraced by—well, nerds everywhere.
If I Ran the Zoo was a tour de force of Seussian creatures and Seussian names. Geisel was often asked if it was difficult coming up with names like Joats, Lunks, Chuggs, or the Tufted Mazurka. “I have to say rather disappointingly that it’s not hard at all,” he explained.3 “Making up words is the simplest thing in the world. For instance, you draw something and look at it and it’s an obsk. There’s no doubt about it. It can’t be anything else.”4 As
for those Seussian animals, the art is some of the most playful of the Dr. Seuss oeuvre, sprawling across the pages in alternating highlights of red and yellow, then red and blue. In the months leading up to the release of If I Ran the Zoo, Geisel was repeatedly asked, “Why do you draw animals the way you do?” Geisel’s casual explanation would become one of his go-to answers when asked to explain the unexplainable. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he’d say—then take a slow drag on a cigarette for a dramatic pause and exhale before continuing. “That’s the way animals look to me and I just draw them.”5
That’s not to say Geisel still doesn’t have some problematic pages. As Gerald dreams of hunting for a Flustard in the land of Zomba-ma-Tant, he describes natives with “eyes at a slant.” While the natives resemble bald Chinese men wearing wide sleeves and sandals, it could be argued that Geisel is merely drawing residents of the fictional Zomba-ma-Tant—especially as their facial features mirror the giant catlike Flustard they’re carrying in a cage on their heads. But Geisel has a similar problem with his pygmies from the island of Yerka—though here, too, he’s careful to give them features similar to the Tufted Mazurka they’re transporting, with matching tufted hairstyles, circular designs on their stomachs, and skirts that somewhat resemble the plumage of the bird. Still, Geisel couldn’t quite shake relying on easy caricatures of exotic people, whether he intended them to be fictional or not.
Becoming Dr. Seuss Page 23
