There was thunderous applause as the doctoral hood was draped over Ted’s shoulders—and to his likely relief, he wasn’t being asked to give a lengthy speech; that honor would fall to Robert Frost, Dartmouth Class of 1896, who received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from Dickey that same rainy morning. Ted would always be proud of the honor; he finally had the doctorate he’d fumbled away during his year at Oxford. He said later that Dickey told him the degree “would make an honest man of me, and no longer would I have to masquerade under a phony doctorate.”27 He would also for the rest of his life announce with a straight face that the honorific meant he could now officially call himself “Dr. Dr. Seuss.”
While Dartmouth had honored Ted with a doctorate, that autumn, Ted would honor Helen as only he could: by dedicating a book to her. Published in September 1955, On Beyond Zebra! was the first book Ted had completed since Helen’s 1954 illness. On the book’s dedication page, he had drawn a smiling zebra, eyeing the reader warmly as it walks on its back legs. It carries a sign reading TO HELEN.
On Beyond Zebra! was a Dr. Seuss version of the traditional alphabet book, but “for people who don’t stop at Z.” It featured Ted at his loopiest, creative best, as he designed and named nineteen new letters of the alphabet, as well as creatures whose names could only be spelled using those letters. There was the letter called wum, for instance, needed to spell Wumbus, and one called flunn, required to write about the rabbitlike Flunnel.
Filled with the kind of whimsical, anatomically-impossible animals that had been staples of his work since Judge—there were hundred-legged cows, whales perched on mountaintops, even a mosquito-like creature that could have buzzed straight out of a Flit advertisement—On Beyond Zebra! also gallops along at a breakneck pace, with clever rhymes and some of Dr. Seuss’s most energetic verse since If I Ran the Zoo:
And SPAZZ is a letter I use to spell Spazzim
A beast who belongs to the Nazzim of Bazzim.
Handy for traveling. That’s why he has ’im.28
The book was published to nearly universal praise—delightful seemed to be the descriptor of choice.29 “Nobody could possibly have ideas in any way resembling those that occur to this talented man,” enthused The New York Times, adding that the Seussian letters and creatures in the book were “indescribable, but they are delightful, and it is difficult to imagine how we ever managed without them.”30
In the Boston Globe, a reviewer admitted he enjoyed On Beyond Zebra!—“[it] has a quality that all children, grownup ones as well as little ones, can enjoy”—but rakishly accused Dr. Seuss of alphabetical treason. “He’s worse than the Russians. They have 36 letters in their alphabet . . . Dr. Seuss wants to add 20 letters to our alphabet,” wrote the Globe’s reviewer. “Dr. Seuss should stop it; he’s going too far. He’s subversive.”31 Geisel gleefully agreed. “I’m subversive as hell!” he roared. “I’ve always had a mistrust of adults,” he said later. “And one reason I dropped out of Oxford and the Sorbonne was that I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much on nonessentials.”32
But it was the essentials, in fact, that were making him miserable at the moment—namely Spaulding’s list of acceptable vocabulary words for his reading primer, which he was finding creatively stifling. While Geisel’s stories of the agony of cracking the word-list limitations would, perhaps predictably, vary over the years, there’s little doubt that he was finding it nearly impossible to find a compelling story buried among the list’s 350 words. “All I needed, I figured, was to find a whale of an exciting subject which would make the average six-year-old want to read like crazy,” he said later. “[But] none of the old dull stuff: ‘Dick has a ball. Dick likes the ball. The ball is red, red, red, red.’”33 Instead, he was thinking up much more exciting subjects—like climbing Mount Everest, where, he suggested, it could be sixty degrees below zero. It was a “truly exciting” idea, he thought. However, as he scanned the word list, he discovered “you can’t use the word ‘scaling,’ you can’t use the word ‘peaks,’ you can’t use ‘Everest,’ you can’t use ‘sixty,’ and you can’t use ‘degrees.’”34
When stymied, Geisel would kick back in the chair at his desk and chain-smoke for hours as he stared absently out the window at the Pacific, waiting for inspiration. Other times, he would simply doodle, drawing one crazy creature after another to see if anything sparked an idea, or lay down on the sofa in his office and thumb through books and magazines. Copies of On Beyond Zebra! were still stacked on the coffee table, and Geisel thought for a moment he might write a story about a queen zebra. “I snuck a look at the word list,” he wrote later. “‘Queen’ and ‘zebra’ weren’t there.”35
It was, he said, an “impossible and ridiculous” task.36 But he would keep trying.
* * *
• • • •
In their tower up on Mount Soledad, the Geisels—and especially Ted—were considered something of La Jolla luminaries, actively recruited by politicians and community leaders to fill seats on local boards, community groups, councils, and advisory committees. Ted would accept some, refuse others. In 1956, he was persuaded by the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego to permit them to display some of his original art—an exhibit he was convinced no one would attend until he showed up on opening night and was smothered by more than four hundred children and their parents who cornered him for more than an hour, waving books and scraps of paper for him to autograph.
Ted also agreed to serve as a trustee for the San Diego Fine Arts Museum—the beginning of a long and friendly relationship—and accepted a position as a member of the fledgling town council, which had been created in 1950 to serve as the community’s liaison with the city of San Diego on issues related to matters such as zoning, traffic, and pollution. It was a noble endeavor, to be sure, but one that would end up costing him—for in 1956, as the council deliberated whether to outlaw billboards in the La Jolla community, Ted was asked to write and illustrate an appropriately Seussian pamphlet explaining why billboards were eyesores.
Geisel quickly put together an eight-page booklet called Signs of Civilization! featuring two competing cavemen, Guss and Zaxx—owners of Guss’s Guss-ma-Tuss and Zaxx’s Zaxx-ma-Taxx—who make larger and more elaborate carved stone billboards as they strive to promote their businesses and one-up each other. Guss and Zaxx overbuild in a frenzy, uglifying their community and eventually driving down their Stone Age property values, forcing even the dinosaurs to move out. Ted’s tale ended with an appeal to his local businessmen’s sense of community pride even as it landed on a groaner of a final couplet:
Which is why our businessmen never shall
Allow such to happen in La Jolla, Cal.
Unfortunately, Geisel had either forgotten—or didn’t care—that two different companies, Holly Sugar and Standard Oil, presently had his art sprawled across billboards in various locations around the country. Standard Oil never blinked, but executives at Holly Sugar were unamused; Geisel’s contract with Holly Sugar was terminated, his work replaced by that of artist Bill Tara.
Meanwhile, even as he drew Holly Sugar’s fire for his pamphlet for the town council, he was putting the finishing touches on another book he had on his drawing table, If I Ran the Circus, the story of a boy named Morris McGurk, who fantasizes about establishing an increasingly larger and more fantastic circus in a vacant lot behind Sneelock’s Store. It was intentionally derivative of If I Ran the Zoo, but that was entirely the point: Bennett Cerf had asked Geisel for another book with a similar setup, and Ted had obliged, all the way down to the final page, in which the narrator, and the reader, are jolted back to the reality of the untouched vacant lot.
That wasn’t to say If I Ran the Circus didn’t have its charms. While it was heavier on text than some of the more recent Dr. Seuss books—it was perhaps his densest since Scrambled Eggs Super!—Geisel made the most of his verses, giving his enjambed lines the cadence of a circus r
ingmaster or carnival barker:
When you see what goes on, you’ll say no other circus is
Half the great circus the Circus McGurkus is.37
Ted dedicated If I Ran the Circus to his father—the second Dr. Seuss book T. R. Geisel would have devoted to him—with the inscription carried across the page on balloons reading, “This book is for my Dad, Big Ted of Springfield, the finest man I’ll ever know.”38 There were other little touches of Springfield in the book as well. The names McGurk and Sneelock were taken from a hometown store clerk named John McGurk and a mailman named August Schneelock. “He never forgot anything that he ever saw or did,” said Peggy Owens. “It all went into a memory bank and then popped up later on.”39
Geisel completed If I Ran the Circus in time to have it in bookstores by Christmas 1956, where it was quickly snapped up by parents delighted to have the annual Dr. Seuss book to give as gifts. “One wonders how these books can come out year after year with such a high standard of verse, story, and pictures, but they do,” mused one reviewer. “We hope that they will continue to do so.”40 Geisel was happy with the book’s reception—and yet, even as readers purchased his own book, the overt commercialism and materialism of the Christmas season was beginning to rub him the wrong way. “Frankly, I was annoyed at what was happening at Christmas,” he said later.41 As he stood before the mirror brushing his teeth on the morning of December 26, he caught sight of a face scowling back at him. “It was Seuss!” Geisel exclaimed. “So, I wrote a story . . . to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I’d lost.”42
They were themes Ted had griped publicly about before. As far back as 1924, he’d complained in an issue of Jacko that “on Christmas morning, everyone feels disappointed.” He’d also written mockingly of commercialism; in a 32-line illustrated poem he’d written for Redbook in 1955, Ted told the story of a con man who uses a hyperbolic hard sell to persuade a sunbathing Hoobub to buy a worthless piece of string by convincing him the string is even better than the sun:
THIS PIECE OF GREEN STRING IS COLOSSAL! IMMENSE!
AND, TO YOU . . .
WELL, I’LL SELL IT FOR 98 CENTS!43
That oily con man’s name? The Grinch.
It wasn’t the first time Geisel had used the word. In 1953, in Scrambled Eggs Super!, one of the birds from which Peter T. Hooper considers pilfering eggs is the “Beagle-Beaked Bald Headed Grinch,” a paunchy bird with a perpetual scowl. When the term next appeared in Redbook two years later, however, the Grinch looked more catlike, with whiskers and a tuft of fur on the top of his head—and his behavior, while not quite what readers would come to call Grinch-like, at least leaned toward the slightly slippery.
In the days after Christmas 1956, then, Geisel would try to get his complicated feelings on Christmas and commercialism into the character of the Grinch—and for someone who still made a living partly by creating advertising, this was an existential crisis, akin to questioning one’s faith. “I did this nasty, anti-Christmas character that was really myself,” Ted said later44—though the more he doodled the character, the more he thought the Grinch looked “a little like Bennett Cerf.”45
* * *
• • • •
Geisel had been staring at Spaulding’s word list for the better part of a year, still looking for something to jump-start his imagination. But the words still weren’t coming. Some afternoons, when Helen came into his studio to check on him, she would find Ted lying on the couch, moaning or even thrashing about, as if he were trying to physically force an idea into his head.
Sitting for interviews in early 1956, Ted often casually hinted that he was at work on three “supplementary textbooks, for the first, second, and third grades.” Most of that was untrue; he was barely at work on one. Spaulding would likely have been heartened at the way Ted passionately explained the objective of his textbooks, which was “to make their first experience in reading pleasurable, not difficult.”46 Unfortunately the noble motivation wasn’t making the writing any easier. “It took me a year of my getting mad as blazes and throwing the thing across the room,” he said later.47 Stuck, he decided to make another quick pass through the list.
“I finally gave it one more chance,” recalled Geisel, “and said, ‘If I find two words that rhyme and make sense to me, that’s the title.’”48 But even that approach didn’t quite work out as he hoped; a tall ball wasn’t all that encouraging as the subject for a children’s story, and other words that seemed promising for characters, such as daddy, didn’t rhyme with anything else on the list. “I was forbidden to use any words beyond [the list],” Geisel said in exasperation. “I almost threw the job up.”49
He went back and read the list one more time, slowly and more deliberately—and then suddenly, there it was: his story in two rhyming one-syllable words.
Cat.
Hat.
“And like a genius,” Geisel modestly explained later, “I said, ‘That’s the name.’”50
The Cat in the Hat it would be—so Geisel next went to work trying to figure out what the cat would look like and how he would act. Cats had been appearing in Dr. Seuss cartoons as far back as Jacko, though they were usually smaller, more realistic-looking cats, often black, who reacted to events with wide eyes and amused smiles. To turn a cat into a main character, however, Geisel needed one that could walk around on two legs, had hands that could pick things up, and a more expressive face. As Ted doodled and wrote, his cat would be shaped and inspired in part by two other cartoon cats he knew well, and which he had admired since childhood.
The first was the title character from George Herriman’s influential comic strip Krazy Kat, which ran in newspapers across the country from 1913 until Herriman’s death in 1944. Geisel loved the look and feel of the strip—he had praised Herriman’s strip for its “beautifully insane sanities”—and Geisel’s cat would channel Krazy’s physical appearance, all the way down to a red bow tie. Personality-wise, however, Krazy was passive and unsophisticated; for Geisel’s cat, he’d look to a more aggressive cartoon feline for inspiration: Felix the Cat, the animated creation of cartoonists Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer. At one point, Felix had been the most famous animated cartoon character in the world—until pushed aside by Mickey Mouse—and Geisel had even used the pseudonym Felix in the pages of Jacko in May 1924. Felix was self-assured and adventurous—though at times awkward or inept—and Geisel’s cat would walk and act with a similar swagger and confidence.
As Geisel continued to refine and develop the character over the next few months, the cat began to take on a strong and distinctive personality of his own—so much so that Ted would later feel the need to define, and defend, his cat’s highly independent persona. “He is NOT a smart ass,” Geisel wrote. “He is NOT loud. He NEVER yells. He NEVER shows off in a bragging manner. He is glib, suave, well-educated.”51
More than anything, Geisel’s cat was a charming and enigmatic force of nature. As Geisel’s young narrator (unnamed in the book, though he would later be given the name Conrad) and his sister, Sally, sit inside on a rainy day with nothing to do, the Cat in the Hat suddenly enters their house—he doesn’t knock or wait to be invited inside; his presence is marked only by a loud BUMP!—and announces matter-of-factly that he’s arrived to provide “lots of good fun that is funny!” But the children’s pet fish, standing in for the rule of law as well as parents everywhere, stridently advises the cat to leave, since the children are home alone. “My version of Cotton Mather,” Geisel lamented.52
“I remember thinking I might be able to dash off The Cat in the Hat in two or three weeks,” Geisel said later. “Actually, it took over a year.” Now that he had a main character, finding things for that character to do within the confines of the word list was like putting his cat in a straitjacket. “You try telling a pretty complicated story using less than two hundred and fifty words!” he said with a laugh, then cautioned, “No, d
on’t, unless you’re willing to write and rewrite.”53
And rewrite he did, over and over, with the full support, aid, and encouragement of editor Saxe Commins at Random House. “He was the kind of editor I loved,” Geisel said warmly. “He would never tell you anything that you did wrong. He’d make you think, and you’d come around to your own conclusion. He’d spend an hour talking about three or four lines. He made me defend myself, telling me that what I’d said on page 7 should have been on page 3. We had almost abstract discussions of the logical order of a story.” Commins, who had edited William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis, took The Cat in the Hat as seriously as he did, say, Faulkner’s A Fable, which would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1955. And Commins validated Geisel’s firm belief that writing for children was as hard, if not harder, than writing for adults. “He helped me realize that a paragraph in a children’s book is equal to a chapter in an adult book,” said Geisel. “He convinced me that I had as much responsibility to take as much time and work as hard as [writers for adults] did.”54
As Geisel slowly wrote and rewrote The Cat in the Hat throughout much of 1956, he figured out a few tricks to help him work around the limitations of his word list. At times, he would repeat words or phrases, which could not only make rhymes a bit easier, but also gave his verses a distinct and regular rhythm that helped young readers learn words through look-say repetition:
Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me NOW!
It is fun to have fun
But you have to know how.
“Kids don’t know the words,” Geisel explained later. “But we catch them with the rhythm.”55
At another point in the narrative, Geisel places the cat on top of a ball where he balances various objects—books, cake, a rake, milk in a dish, a cup, a toy ship—which permitted Geisel to cleverly use as many of the words on his list as he could over the span of four pages. “If you drop charm, all you have is a dictionary,”56 he cautioned, but there was little chance of Geisel’s cat being charmless. Catchy rhymes aside, The Cat in the Hat features some of Geisel’s finest art; there’s not a squiggle or line wasted, backgrounds are minimal, and anything mentioned in the text is reflected in the accompanying art—consistent with the “look-say” pedagogy—all the way down to a small toy man standing on the stern of a toy ship balanced on the cat’s fingertip. The time Geisel put into drawing and redrawing each page clearly shows.
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