Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Smith quickly dismissed exhaustion as the cause of Helen’s condition, but was more cautious in landing on a definitive diagnosis. “Neuritis acute, Landy type?” Smith wrote with some uncertainty, even putting a question mark on his own scrawled diagnosis—then added more conclusively: “Guillain-Barré syndrome,” a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks its own nerves, resulting in paralysis.2 Smith brought in neurologist Ralph Barris for a consultation, and Helen was whisked to San Diego County Hospital, less than twenty minutes to the south. By the time Helen arrived in San Diego, she was unable to breathe on her own and was placed in an iron lung, still commonly used in 1954 to treat respiratory problems caused by polio. (The polio vaccine, which was being developed by the Geisels’ La Jolla neighbor Jonas Salk, wouldn’t be widely available for another year.)

  Helen’s condition slowly deteriorated until she was entirely paralyzed from the neck down. Incarcerated in the iron lung, where she was only able to see her surroundings reflected in the round mirror mounted over her head, she grew increasingly disoriented and confused, failing to recognize Ted or her doctors, and became convinced she had been imprisoned because she and Ted had lost all their money. Eventually she lost her ability to speak altogether. Distraught, Ted set up a system of mirrors so Helen could see their Irish setter reflected in the overhead mirror, somehow hoping if she saw their dog, she would understand the Geisels weren’t despondent. But the outlook remained bleak, and for the first few days Ted refused to return home to the Tower, spending nearly every waking hour at the hospital, running errands for the nurses to keep his mind occupied.

  Somehow he remembered to contact Dartmouth to inform them of Helen’s illness and apologized that he would be unable to pick up his honorary doctorate. (The college assured him the award could wait until 1955, if he so chose.) It was a wonder Ted was able to function at all; for the past three decades, Helen had taken care of all the details, from the checkbook to the shopping to the mailing of packages. Even as Helen’s condition stabilized, Ted remained “frantic and frightened,” said Elin Vanderlip. “Helen had always shielded him from the real world.”3 He tried working during the day—he had pages of the alphabet book On Beyond Zebra! pinned to the corkboard in his Tower office—but understandably found he couldn’t focus and spent his days instead with the Vanderlips at the Villa Narcissa.

  Helen’s condition began to improve somewhat in late June. She was learning to swallow on her own again—Ted would lower Popsicles into her mouth in encouragement—and could make sounds, though nothing resembling speech. On July 4, she was removed from the iron lung for brief water exercises, and Barris recommended she be moved 130 miles north to the Rehabilitation Center of Santa Monica to begin four months of therapy. Ted was relieved, though cautious in his optimism, writing to editor Louise Bonino that “there is a very good chance that she [Helen] will walk again.”4

  Still not quite certain how to manage, Ted called his niece Peggy Owens, now living with her husband in Virginia, and asked for help moving Helen to Santa Monica. On July 9, as Ted rode in an ambulance with Helen, bound for the rehabilitation clinic, Peggy followed in the Geisels’ car, crammed with suitcases, Ted’s drawing board and art supplies, and assorted personal items to make Helen’s stay at the California Rehabilitation Center more comfortable. Ted, meanwhile, checked into the Ocean Palms Hotel, where he set up an office and spent each morning going through the mail with Peggy, paying bills, and stacking up personal letters to read aloud to Helen.

  It was here, in his rooms at the Ocean Palms, that Ted would receive his first copies of Horton Hears a Who!, scheduled for publication in August. He wasn’t happy with them; under his hyper-discerning eye, the books had been bound in such a way that it looked as if the text was running slightly downhill off each page. “Not griping or complaining, mind you!” he told Bonino. “Just still on my impossible hunt for ultimate ultimates.”5 After this first note, however, Ted would offer few comments; his focus was elsewhere—for Helen had begun to make a rapid recovery.

  Throughout July and August, Helen’s paralysis began to recede, and the feeling and sensation gradually returned in her neck, chest, arms, and legs. She was still unable to speak or feed herself—she would need physical therapy to learn to use her mouth, teeth, and tongue again—and she couldn’t sit up without assistance. However, she could now be moved to a wheelchair and positioned at the clinic’s windows, where she could see the lawn outside. As she and Ted sat looking out the window one afternoon, a flash of fur streaked across the grass.

  “Ruh . . . ruh . . . ruh-rabbit . . .” Helen said softly.

  Ted nearly wept with joy—and Helen’s condition would only continue to improve over the next few weeks. The physical therapy was tough—“just about as painful as the disease was,” said Ted6—but Helen seemed to improve through sheer force of will. “She’s a terrific patient and wonderfully cheerful,” Ted reported.7 “Two months ago, the doctors gave her up,” he wrote Bonino cheerily. “Today, she can actually do a little bit of walking! Not much, but enough so we know that she’s going to get out of here without any crutches.”8

  The news was just as good for Horton Hears a Who!, published to rave reviews in August 1954. “Horton the elephant is back in another of those hilarious . . . brews which only Dr. Seuss can compound,” wrote the Chicago Tribune,9 while the Minneapolis Star Tribune proclaimed, “Dr. Seuss has done it again . . . [Horton] is one of the best of the delightfully zany plots presented with a sure Seuss touch . . . don’t miss it.”10 Many reviewers, too, seemed to understand and appreciate that Dr. Seuss was intentionally delivering a moral message. “The moral is pointed—but fun,”11 wrote one reviewer, while another hailed Horton as “a rhymed lesson in the protection of minorities and their rights.”12

  Geisel was thrilled with the reception; he had worked perhaps harder on Horton to make every word, every drawing count. “I must confess I learned more about writing children’s books when I worked in Hollywood than anywhere else,” he later told The Saturday Evening Post. “For in films, everything is based on coordination between pictures and words.”13 With Horton, he probably thought he’d finally coordinated the two as well as he ever had—but once again, while Horton Hears a Who! sold well, it wasn’t on track to bring in the kind of annual income he had hoped for. And so Geisel would still continue to pick up advertising work, with his largest client being the Holly Sugar company, which was presently featuring Geisel’s “All It Needs Is . . .” campaign, showing Seussian giraffes, goats, and children making sour faces as they sampled unsweetened berries, garbage, and juice.

  By September, Helen’s condition had improved to the point that doctors informed Ted she could return home to La Jolla. However, because Helen was still largely confined to a wheelchair and unable to climb stairs, Ted chose to move her into a friend’s guesthouse, just down the hill from the Tower. Helen would now begin a regular series of daily exercises, starting with swimming at seven A.M., followed by walks in wet sand and working with weights to relearn balance and rebuild muscle strength. By October, Ted was writing to Evelyn Shrifte that he was certain Helen would be “almost entirely recuperated from the whole nightmare.”14

  Almost. While Helen would eventually recover from the nightmare, she would forever be plagued by a low-level pain in her legs and feet; she said it always felt as if her shoes were several sizes too small. When doctors recommended that she continue swimming every day as part of her continued therapy, Ted immediately had a swimming pool installed at the Tower. He dubbed it the Woman’s Home Companion Pool, claiming he’d paid for it using money he’d earned doing work for the magazine—which, while charming and amusing, was also most likely untrue. Such glibness aside, however, Ted had spent the summer and most of the autumn of 1954 giving his loving attention and devotion to Helen during her illness—and to his credit, had been self-aware enough to bring in much-needed assistance from Peggy, even as he largely sidelined hi
s work on On Beyond Zebra! Helen later referred to her husband at this time as “part man, part angel.”15

  * * *

  • • • •

  Dick and Jane weren’t getting the job done.

  In 1954, author John Hersey, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for his novel A Bell for Adano, decided he’d had enough of Dick and Jane, the reading primer familiar to countless generations of school-age children. As chairman of the Citizens’ School Study Council of Fairfield, Connecticut, Hersey and his council had spent a year studying their students’ academic achievement, with a laser focus on reading—and they weren’t encouraged by what they’d seen. “Parents have cried in dismay that their children could not read out loud, could not spell, could not write,” Hersey reported in an article for Life magazine. One of the biggest problems, as he saw it, was with the uninspiring, ineffective Dick and Jane reading primers that educators had been putting in the hands of millions of schoolchildren every day since the 1930s. “Children understandably prefer lurid comic books and television shows to insipid, goody-goody school readers,” wrote Hersey. “Is not revulsion against namby-pamby school readers perhaps a reason why they like lurid comic books so much?”16

  In truth, it wasn’t just Dick and Jane; school readers had always been rather insipid, if well-intended, fare. Up until the early eighteenth century, most children’s books didn’t bother with teaching reading, but focused instead on religious and moral lessons—stories read to children for their ethical well-being, rather than stories that encouraged them to read for themselves. Things began to change in the 1740s, with books like Thomas Boreman’s Gigantick Histories and T. Cooper’s The Child’s New Play-Thing, which featured alphabets, as well as songs and fables targeted specifically at children.

  Then came John Newbery. The first real champion of children’s literature, the English printer Newbery published his first children’s reader in 1744, an alphabet book with short rhymes called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Unlike the authors of earlier primers, Newbery thought learning could be entertaining—at least a little—and his use of fifty-eight woodcut illustrations over Little Pretty Pocket-Book’s ninety pages made the book popular with both children and parents. It would go through twelve printings by 1767. In his lifetime, Newbery would design, produce, market, and sell more than thirty books for children, writing some under his own name and others under names like Abraham Aesop or Tom Telescope. Like Theodor Geisel, John Newbery loved a good pseudonym.

  Newbery was one of the first publishers to take children’s need for good books seriously; his influence can still be seen today in the medal bearing his name, awarded annually since 1922 by the American Library Association for the year’s “most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.”17 And yet, while in his lifetime Newbery would publish spelling, alphabet, and riddle books populated with characters like Willy the lamb or Jouler the dog, he didn’t want children having too much fun; his books were ultimately meant to produce good and upright citizens. As one eighteenth-century writer tut-tutted, the obligation of children’s books was “to restrain a lively imagination.”18

  Children’s primers, unfortunately, never got much more exciting—which is partly why Hersey trained his fire on the turgid Dick and Jane readers. The brainchild of an Indiana elementary school teacher named Zerna A. Sharp, the Dick and Jane primers were a well-meaning effort to encourage children to read by giving them illustrated stories and situations revolving around children just like them. “There’s nothing these book children could do that [real children] couldn’t remember having done themselves,” Sharp insisted. “[Dick and Jane] made reading easy for them and encouraged them to read more.”19 Hersey, however, was having none of it, railing against Dick and Jane primers for their “insipid illustrations depicting the slicked-up lives of other children.”20 Real children, Hersey contended, wanted nothing to do with Dick and Jane and their lives of quiet desperation.

  Dick and Jane didn’t rely on phonics to teach reading—a pedagogical choice educators were beginning to decry—but relied instead on the “whole word” or “look-say” approach, in which young readers could learn new words by associating them with accompanying pictures and illustrations. Hersey didn’t necessarily object to the look-say pedagogy but argued that if primers were going to rely on pictures to help a child visualize words, it was cruel to subject children to the “uniform, bland, idealized and terribly literal” pictures found in a typical primer. “Why should they not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate?” Hersey asked rhetorically—then answered his own question by suggesting that perhaps what was needed were “drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators: [John] Tenniel, Howard Pyle, ‘Dr. Seuss,’ [and] Walt Disney.”21

  It’s unlikely Ted read Hersey’s article in Life on its publication in May 1954—but someone else did: William Spaulding, head of the education division for Houghton Mifflin publishing. Spaulding, who in early 1955 was quickly climbing the ranks at Houghton Mifflin—he would be its president within two years—was at heart a crusader who believed children’s books could be both educational and entertaining. Spaulding also knew that Dick and Jane were becoming obsolete—and if Hersey’s 1954 Life article had been the first sign of the primer’s stagnation, author Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 criticism of the American education system, Why Johnny Can’t Read, made Dick and Jane not only irrelevant, but practically the enemy, dismissed by Flesch as “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, [and] tasteless.”22

  With both Hersey and Flesch rallying to the cause, then, Spaulding decided the time was right to rethink Dick and Jane. And as Hersey had suggested in Life, Spaulding thought he should ask Dr. Seuss for help. In early 1955, Spaulding phoned Geisel and invited him to Boston for a conversation. Geisel was glad to take the call—he and Spaulding had run across each other during the war—and happy to meet with Spaulding, who, as the son of a Yale dean of education, was smart and serious about books for children. As he and Geisel began their first conversation in Spaulding’s office, it was clear both men understood the importance of writing books that not only helped aspiring young readers learn to read but would also be the kinds of books they wanted to read.

  The two continued the conversation over dinner and drinks, with Geisel growing more and more animated as he shared with Spaulding his views on the challenges of writing for young readers. Geisel agreed that children’s reading primers were terrible—but so, too, were most kids’ books. Things hadn’t really changed since his 1947 Utah lectures: children’s books were still competing for attention with television and comic books—and as far as Geisel could tell, books were losing. Too many books either talked down to children or dealt with mundane, cutesy subjects of little interest to kids—the Bunny, Bunny, Bunny Books as Ted always derisively called them. What was really needed, he told Spaulding, was a book aimed at a specific group of young readers—namely, those who had mastered some of the basics, but remained uninterested in reading. Spaulding got it immediately. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” he demanded excitedly.23

  But there was a catch. The vocabulary for children’s primers was strictly limited to a certain number of “accepted” words for readers at each grade level. For first graders, primers were limited to about 300 words; for third graders it was around 1,000, and for sixth graders, 4,000. To write a book for first graders, then, Geisel would be restricted to a word list of 350 words or less—and the preferred number, Spaulding told him, was closer to 225. Could Geisel write a story first graders couldn’t put down using 225 words or less? Geisel left Boston without making any promises, but told Spaulding he would take the word list home and “play with it.”24

  He also told Spaulding he’d need to check with Bennett Cerf, to see if he could accept an assignment from a rival publisher. The savvy Cerf signed off on Spaulding�
�s offer, imposing only one real condition: whatever Geisel came up with, Spaulding and Houghton Mifflin could publish the textbook version that was sold to schools, but Random House would be permitted to publish the trade edition that would be for sale in bookstores. While he had no way of knowing it at the time, it would be one of the best deals Cerf ever made.

  * * *

  • • • •

  On Sunday, June 12, 1955, it was pouring rain in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth’s 186th graduation ceremony, scheduled to take place on the lawn outside the Baker Library, would have to be moved indoors. Ted and Helen—along with countless academics, honored guests, and 566 Dartmouth graduates—were funneled into the campus gymnasium, where Ted took his place onstage, alongside the poet Robert Frost and Congressman Joseph Martin Jr., the minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.25 Today Dartmouth would at last bestow on Ted the honorary doctorate he’d postponed since the previous May.

  “Creator and fancier of fanciful beasts,” began Dartmouth president John S. Dickey as Ted rose proudly and a little nervously. “You have single-handedly stood as St. George between a generation of exhausted parents and the demon dragon of unexhausted children on a rainy day . . . [and] behind the fun, there has been intelligence, kindness, and a feel for humankind,” Dickey continued. “You have stood these many years in the academic shadow of your learned friend Dr. Seuss,” he added, “and because we are sure the time has come when the good doctor would want you to walk by his side as a full equal—and because your College delights to acknowledge the distinction of a loyal son—Dartmouth confers on you her Doctorate of Humane Letters.”26