Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Most of the mail, however, remained with Random House, where it was responded to with a copy of a signed form letter Ted had written and drawn, thanking the letter writer and explaining that Dr. Seuss’s mail delivery was slow because he lived on a mountaintop where mail could only be delivered by a Seussian beast called a Budget, pulling a cart driven by a Nudget. Most young correspondents were delighted just to receive a response, though a few regular writers grew impatient with the repeated response. “I want a letter from you,” insisted one young fan, “but not from the Budget and Nudget again.”98 Ted would eventually create several different signed form responses, hoping to soothe any hurt feelings.

  More and more now, Geisel found himself being asked to make appearances at bookstores or being pressed for his autograph. There were also regular requests for interviews, and Geisel was surprised to find there was enough interest in him to make him the subject of a lengthy article in The Saturday Evening Post—the very same magazine where he’d seen his first professional work published three decades earlier. Such pieces could usually make Geisel sound impish and whimsical, the perfect caricature of what readers expected of a children’s author. “The mind of Ted Geisel is so fanciful that he has never been able to completely subdue it,” gushed the Post piece; there would be little or no mention of Dr. Seuss’s regular drinking habits—dinner was still almost always preceded by cocktails—though Geisel’s chain smoking would usually be mentioned as a matter of course. Lately Ted had been trying to break the habit by sucking on a pipe stuffed with radish or strawberry seeds; when he felt the urge to smoke, he would water the seeds with an eyedropper. Eventually the seeds would sprout and Geisel would return to cigarettes again. He would get a great deal of mileage out of having himself photographed clamping down on a pipe with a sprout growing out of it.

  Bennett Cerf wasn’t the only one impressed by The Cat in the Hat; so, too, was his wife, Phyllis, a dynamic and talented former actress, newspaper writer, and advertising executive.99 One evening Phyllis came to her husband with an unconventional idea; she had been talking about The Cat in the Hat with Louise Bonino and both had come to appreciate that Geisel had created something new and entirely unique by writing an entertaining children’s primer. Phyllis suggested to her husband that Random House set up an imprint dedicated solely to publishing other children’s books just like it—books with a deliberate pedagogy, but also fun and entertaining so that kids would actually want to read them.

  Cerf was intrigued. While the publisher’s own tastes ran toward more traditional adult fare—“Ted and Babar were the only children’s books that Bennett wasn’t condescending about,” said one Random House editor100—the numbers couldn’t be ignored. With the sales of Cat in the Hat and the entire Dr. Seuss library exploding, Random House had suddenly found itself positioned as the largest publisher of juvenile books in the United States. It was an idea worth pursuing—and it didn’t hurt that Bennett Cerf adored Ted Geisel.

  Sometime in late 1957, then, during one of Ted’s regular trips to New York, Phyllis invited him to lunch at the upscale Quo Vadis restaurant on East 63rd Street. Over French food and fine wine, Phyllis explained to Ted that Cat in the Hat had opened up an enormous creative opportunity and a potentially lucrative market for quality children’s readers. She proposed creating a new imprint inside Random House—she and Bennett had already decided it would be called Beginner Books—that would use the list of approved vocabulary words, but would also ideally do what The Cat in the Hat had done so well: straddle the line between pedagogy and pleasure. Further, she envisioned launching the new imprint with four or five books, leading to ongoing regular releases every year. Cerf was committed, she told Ted, but the entire initiative depended on one thing: the involvement of Dr. Seuss. Phyllis promised him he could be president of the new imprint. All he had to do was say yes.

  Geisel was interested. Phyllis Cerf had teed the question up perfectly, appealing to both his ego and his sense of obligation to producing quality books for children. “Writing for adults doesn’t really interest me anymore,” he would say later. “I think I’ve found the form in writing for kids, with which I can say everything I have to say a little more distinctly than if I had to put it in adult prose.”101 As the head of an imprint, Geisel would have the opportunity to recruit and select writers and illustrators, and put them to work under his own rigorous standards to produce a line of books that he hoped would encourage better reading habits for an entire generation.

  If Phyllis wanted him, there were two conditions he wanted met. First, he wanted the ability to continue to produce Dr. Seuss books that weren’t under the Beginner Books imprint or its limitations—that meant that while The Cat in the Hat would bear the Beginner Books imprint, a book like How the Grinch Stole Christmas! wouldn’t. Second, he wanted Helen to join the effort as an equal partner and editor—a move Ted had proposed largely to ensure that he could outvote Phyllis two to one on any matters that required consensus. As the meal ended, Ted and Phyllis shook hands. They had a deal.

  It was the beginning of a productive and unbearably terrible relationship.

  PART III

  OH, THE THINKS YOU CAN THINK UP IF ONLY YOU TRY

  CHAPTER 11

  BEGINNER BOOKS

  1958–1960

  I’d say that the most useful of [my] books is The Cat in the Hat,” Geisel told The New York Times in 1962. “That had a different purpose—to help reading—and it goes back to my old ambition to be an educator.”1 Such noble ambitions aside, there was no denying that The Cat in the Hat was also a publishing powerhouse—and the savvy Phyllis Cerf had cannily seen that there was money to be made in producing reading primers that children actually wanted to read.

  Geisel had responded to Phyllis’s offer to go into business together with excited skepticism. The deal had been sealed on a conditional handshake that would permit him to continue to produce his own books independently of their new venture, and—perhaps more critically—brought in Helen as a full partner, giving him, in the event of a conflict, a potential tie-breaking vote. Phyllis—who knew her new Beginner Books imprint needed Dr. Seuss more than it needed her—willingly signed off on Geisel’s conditions; as far as she could tell, both she and Geisel had high demands, high expectations, and mutually big plans for their new imprint. Disagreements, she thought, would be minimal.

  “We want to publish books that take up where textbooks leave off,” Phyllis excitedly told Publishers Weekly as she and Ted officially launched Beginner Books in June 1958.2 Their bold new idea—an entire line of accessible primers!—was met with some skepticism from teachers and parents alike. The Cat in the Hat was one thing. Could Beginner Books continue to produce similarly fun, easy-to-read books year after year, even with the steady hand of Dr. Seuss at the helm? It remained to be seen—and even Dr. Seuss himself wasn’t certain. “When we started Beginner Books we had no idea what we were doing,” Geisel admitted later. “It was really an ‘empty’ mind.”3

  The first order of business, then, was to formally establish the imprint as an independent corporation, with Ted serving as president, Phyllis as its chief executive, and Helen as an equal but untitled partner. While Random House would serve as the distributor for all Beginner Books, the imprint remained otherwise free from oversight or influence of its publisher—or at least mostly. Random House would still provide the initial loan of $200,000 that Beginner Books needed to start recruiting, and then paying for, the stable of writers and artists that would be needed to produce a steady stream of books. The money would also be used to fund a hundred shares of Beginner Books stock, valued at thirty dollars per share, to be divided among the partners.

  All Beginner Books would go through the imprint’s editorial board, comprised solely of Ted, Helen, and Phyllis, with mostly Phyllis and Ted empowered to decide what got published and what didn’t. As president, as well as the only one of the three partners with a bestseller to his name,
Ted tended to believe his editorial opinion mattered the most—and Ted did have strong views on the creative philosophy of Beginner Books that would come to define their look and feel.

  As always, he dismissed the “Bunny Bunny books . . . sugar plums, treacle, whimsy.”4 Kids of the late 1950s, Ted explained in The New York Times, had been brought up on television, where they could visit exciting places like the Old West or outer space with the twist of a dial. “Practically every book that [a child] is able to read is far beneath his intellectual capacity,” Geisel wrote sadly. “At age six, [a child] has seen more of life than his great-grandfather had seen when he died at the age of 90.”5 The biggest sin a Beginner Book author could commit, then, was that of condescending to children. “Most people who write children’s books try to write for the child,” said Ted. “I write for myself. Anyone who fills a page with, ‘Run, John, run. See, Mary, see,’ is insulting the intelligence of the youngster. I wouldn’t treat a kid that way!”6

  Phyllis Cerf, for the most part, seemed happy to acquiesce to Ted’s philosophic views of the imprint. The real strength of Beginner Books, she thought, was in their pedagogic rigor—that is, how closely they adhered to the approved word list. And Phyllis took the word list very seriously, poring through countless reading primers to compile a list of words that showed up on every list. Eventually, Beginner Books would provide its authors with an alphabetical listing of 361 accepted words—“words which appear in the leading first grade textbooks, and which young readers have learned by sight”—and authors were encouraged to tell their stories using 200 unique words or less. Authors were given other explicit restrictions as well:

  No “ed,” “ing,” or “er” endings except those specifically listed can be used in a Beginner Book. Plurals are allowed, if they can be made by adding only an “s.” Only the listed contractions can be used. NO POSSESSIVES ARE ALLOWED.7

  Included within the list of 361 words were 74 words marked with an asterisk—words like another, maybe, and surprised—which were words that did not appear in every primer Phyllis had consulted. Authors were advised to use these words only “with care and in strong context.” Finally, Beginner Books authors were permitted to use up to twenty “emergency words”—words that didn’t appear on the list at all and had to be “absolutely necessary to the story,” like names for characters.

  Ted knew from experience that the word list could be a challenge. “The writer gets his first ghastly shock when he learns about a diabolical little thing known as ‘The List,’” Ted wrote. “School book publishing houses all have little lists. Lists of words that kids can be expected to read, at various states in their progress through the elementary grades.”8 While Ted had sweated the use of the word list while working on Cat in the Hat, he was now publicly assuring would-be authors that it had all come naturally to him, “because I had a 17-year career as an advertising copy writer in which I used only four words.”9

  The Beginner Books editorial team threw a wide net in its search for authors to write and illustrate their five debut titles, to be published concurrently—and with great fanfare—in the autumn of 1958. Ted approached his old Dartmouth pal Mike McClintock—the former Vanguard editor whose chance encounter with Ted in 1937 led to the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street—as well as P. D. Eastman, who had helped bring Gerald McBoing-Boing to UPA but hadn’t yet written a children’s book. Phyllis recruited several established children’s authors, including Marion Holland, who had written books for Knopf like Billy Had a System, and who was also a strict grammarian—just the sort of pedant Phyllis admired.

  And of course it was a given that the imprint would also kick off with a brand-new book by Dr. Seuss. While he was never expressly told to do so, the unspoken expectation was that, with The Cat in the Hat still selling 2,500 copies a week nearly a year after its publication, Ted would write a sequel to his bestseller. And so Ted had grudgingly started work on The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, with the Cat returning to cause more chaos on a winter day, creating a pink bathtub ring that transfers from one surface to another until it ends up tinting the snow. It wasn’t one of Ted’s more remarkable efforts, but for the moment, he was more interested in his role as president of Beginner Books than his role as an author.

  Already Phyllis Cerf wasn’t making things easy for him. “She is a woman who loves combat,” remembered Phyllis’s son Christopher, “and Ted was so much the other way.”10 Right away she and Ted bickered over P. D. Eastman’s rookie effort, an innocuous book called Sam and the Firefly. It was bad enough that Eastman had used the word firefly, which wasn’t on the word list—but both fire and fly were, so it might be argued that firefly could scrape by on a technicality. Ted’s real heartburn, however, was with Sam, who was an owl—a word that also wasn’t on the word list, but Eastman had cleverly opted to simply write around it, referring to his main character only as Sam, and never as an owl. But for Ted, this created an unresolvable conflict between the text and the artwork: it wasn’t right, he argued, to have a drawing of an owl without ever identifying it to readers by that term—especially when it was the main character. “It’s not easy to write Beginner Books,” Ted explained patiently, “and we have trouble finding people who can write and illustrate them to the satisfaction of the editors.”11

  Phyllis was satisfied with Eastman’s book and was pushing for its acceptance and publication. But with Helen in Ted’s corner, the Geisels could overrule Phyllis—just as Ted had intended. “Ted and I don’t think [the books] are awful good, but they’re as good as we can make them,” Helen said.12 Frustrated, Phyllis eventually pulled rank on the Geisels and pled Eastman’s case to a respected third party, senior Random House editor Donald Klopfer, who all but ordered the Geisels to accept Sam and the Firefly and call a truce with Phyllis. “There is no question about whether we should publish [the book],” Klopfer wrote Helen in late 1958:

  This has developed into a moral question . . . [Beginner Books has] given our word [to Eastman] and to me this is inviolable . . . You use the words “honest,” “straightforward” and “integrity” in your letter. God knows that must apply to the people who are running it or it won’t percolate down to the books themselves. Helen, I beg of you . . . agree—even though you hate the book.13

  Chastised, the Geisels and Phyllis would enter into an uneasy détente and Eastman’s book would become one of the first five titles published by Beginner Books in late 1958—along with Ted’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, McClintock’s A Fly Went By, Holland’s A Big Ball of String, and Benjamin Elkin and Katherine Evans’s The Big Jump and Other Stories.

  It was not a harmonious start for the new partners. Publicly, however, Ted was all smiles, diligently promoting the new imprint and writing a thoughtful piece for Book Chat magazine equating literacy with civic responsibility. Good books made for good citizens, he explained—and he and the Beginner Books team were doing their best to give young readers “stuff that is more interesting to read.”14 Reviewers tended to agree that the first five Beginner Books were doing just that. “Parents whose children are just beginning to read can hardly go wrong with any of them,” wrote one enthusiastic critic.15 While The Cat in the Hat Comes Back tended to draw the most attention and praise, critics also acknowledged the general quality of the other four titles, each “with varying appeal, but all excellent for beginners.”16

  That included Sam and the Firefly.

  * * *

  • • • •

  When Ted wasn’t serving as president of Beginner Books, he could still be Dr. Seuss, writing and drawing his own books, independent of the Beginner Books imprint. Ted would come to call these his “Big Books,” due mainly to their physical size—about 11 by 8 inches, compared to the Beginner Books, which were roughly 9 by 7 inches—which permitted him to really cover the page with art from one edge of the page to the other. Better yet, he was also free of the restrictions of the Beginner Books
word list—though the project he had pinned to his corkboard in the early weeks of 1958 would cause him headaches for the use of a single, controversial word: burp.

  Yertle the Turtle began strictly as a doodling exercise—a common enough way for Ted to try to spawn an idea. “[My books] always start as a doodle,” he said later. “I may doodle a couple of animals; if they bite each other, it’s going to be a good book.”17 In this particular case, the animals didn’t bite; they simply stacked one on top of another, as Ted drew one turtle—and he was never sure why he had started with a turtle—then drew another and another until he had a stack of them. As he had done years earlier, when he had Horton the elephant up in a tree, he had to determine what the story now was—who was the turtle at the top?

  Channeling the language of his days at PM, Geisel decided the top turtle must be “a little domineering guy who pushes people around”18—and then suddenly realized the domineering turtle had to be Adolf Hitler. “I couldn’t draw Hitler as a turtle,” Geisel said later, though for a moment, he considered drawing Yertle with the familiar Hitler mustache before deciding “it was gilding the lily a bit.”19 Instead, “I drew him as King What-ever-his-name-was, King of the Pond. He wanted to be king as far as he could see,” explained Geisel. “So he kept piling them up. He conquered Central Europe and France, and there it was. Then I had this great pileup, and I said, ‘How do you get rid of this impostor?’”20

  It was a question Geisel couldn’t answer for some time. Typically, he paced his office, absently smoking one cigarette after another, or threw himself down on the couch, one arm across his face, covering his eyes, as he moaned his way through his predicament. “I think writing is the worst job that anyone ever got into,” Helen wrote sympathetically.21 But Ted had found his ending. What brought down despots? Ted decided it was “the voice of the people.” More specifically, “I said, ‘Well, I’ll just simply have the guy on the bottom burp.’”22 Never was the precarious foundation on which fascists build made so successfully literal than when Mack, the turtle at the bottom of the turtle pile, burped loudly, sending the stack of turtles tumbling and plunging Yertle the Turtle into the mud.