by Alison Lurie
One of the most remarkable things about Tove Jansson is her sympathy for her most unlikable characters. In Moominvalley in November (1971), the last and most complex of the series, a Hemulen and a Fillyjonk move into the Moomin family’s deserted house while they are away on the island. The Hemulen tries to play the part of Moominpappa, with limited success, especially when he insists on teaching everyone to ski. The Fillyjonk, who doesn’t really like children, attempts to replace Moominmamma. Though Jansson makes fun of the Hemulen and the Fillyjonk, she also pities them and even seems to respect their clumsy efforts. By the end of the series, Jansson has gotten to the point where she can sympathize even with her most difficult and frightening creation. This is the Groke, a strange, large, dark, longhaired, mound-shaped creature with huge staring eyes that seems to represent depression and despair. The Groke is a kind of walking manifestation of Scandinavian gloom: everything the Groke touches dies, and the ground freezes wherever she sits. If she stays in one place for an hour, the earth becomes permanently barren. “You felt that she was terribly evil and would wait for ever,” Jansson says in one of the earlier books.17
But even the normally self-centered Sniff can sympathize with the Groke. “Think how lonely the Groke is because nobody likes her, and she hates everybody,” he says.18 At first the best anyone can do is get rid of her temporarily. But finally, in Moominpappa at Sea, it is Moomintroll himself who tames the Groke. He comes with a lantern every night to the beach where she sits freezing the sand and making “a thin sound, something like humming and whistling together. . . . after a while Moomintroll felt that it was inside his head, behind his eyes.”19 One night he sees the Groke dance, swaying “slowly and heavily from side to side, waving her skirts up and down until they looked like dry, wrinkled bat’s wings.”20 When she leaves afterward, the sand where she has sat is no longer frozen. Perhaps Tove Jansson is saying that we must become familiar with our darkest moods, and even encourage them to express themselves.
A final and very interesting Moominland character is Snufkin, one of the most human-looking figures in the books. He is a solitary fellow with an old green hat and a mouth organ who seems to represent the artist—perhaps Tove Jansson herself. Snufkin is Moomintroll’s best friend, but he is not always around. He goes south in the winter, and sometimes he prefers to be alone and think of tunes.
On his first appearance, in Comet in Moominland, Snufkin is an anonymous wanderer; but later he (like Tove Jansson) has become locally famous. In one story, “The Spring Tune,” his creative efforts are disrupted by the arrival of a fan, a small, fuzzy, wide-eyed creature called, perhaps not accidentally, “the creep.” “Just think of it,” the creep says. “I’ll be the creep who has sat by Snufkin’s camp-fire. I’ll never forget that.”21
When Snufkin, becoming impatient with the adulation, remarks, “You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much,” the creep does not hear him.
“I know you know everything,” the little creep prattled on, edging closer still. “I know you’ve seen everything. You’re right in everything you say, and I’ll always try to become as free as you are.”22
In the last story of the series, Snufkin, who has been searching for a new tune, is lying in his tent trying to fall asleep. But he cannot stop thinking about the other characters in the story.
Whatever he did, there they were in his tent, all the time, the Hemulen’s immobile eyes, and Fillyjonk lying weeping on her bed, and Toft who just kept quiet and stared at the ground, and old Grandpa Grumble all confused . . . they were everywhere, right inside his head.23
Some authors cannot forget their characters even after the book is finished. Perhaps this is how Tove Jansson came to feel in the years when she tried to turn to adult fiction, but found herself instead writing a final, brilliant Moominland tale.
DR. SEUSS COMES BACK
MORE than ten years after his death, Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to millions as Dr. Seuss, remains the most popular juvenile author in America. Almost everyone now under fifty was brought up on his books and cartoons, and even those who didn’t hear the stories read aloud probably saw them on TV or video, or met his fantastic characters at school. One of Seuss’s greatest gifts to children was the series of first-grade readers he wrote for Random House to replace the conventional “Dick and Jane” stories with their white middle-class suburban families, and dull suburban happenings. In The Cat in the Hat (1957) and Green Eggs and Ham (1960) Seuss managed to create wonderful, innovative, crazily comic tales with a minimum vocabulary. (The Cat in the Hat uses only 220 words.) These books, and their sequels, made learning fun for kids from every kind of background, and revolutionized the teaching of reading. Their inventive energy and their freedom from class and race norms made Dick and Jane look dull, prissy, limited, and totally outdated.
What made it all even more wonderful was that Dr. Seuss’s life was a classic American success story. As a child in Springfield, Massachusetts, he had the kind of luck most kids only dream of: his father was in charge of the local zoo. Theodor could visit it whenever he liked, and go everywhere behind the scenes. When he grew up he became a kind of zookeeper himself: the inventor and ringmaster of an ever-expanding menagerie of fantastic comic creatures: Sneeches and Lunks and Yooks and Zooks, the Lorax, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. One of his early books was even called If I Ran the Zoo (1950).
Seuss began as a cartoonist and advertising artist; his “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” drawings showing a citizen attacked by giant insects, half-comic and half-threatening, were strikingly original and widely reproduced. In 1941–42 he also drew more than four hundred political cartoons for the short-lived New York liberal newspaper PM, full of the strange birds and beasts for which he would later be famous. But Seuss’s first children’s book, the brilliant And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), was rejected by at least twenty-seven publishers; editors complained that it contained “no moral or message” and would not help in “transforming children into good citizens.”1 The book was finally taken on by an old college friend, Marshall McClintock, who had just become the juvenile editor of Vanguard Press.2
Though publishers may be slow, readers—especially children—are usually quick to recognize genius. Mulberry Street was a hit, and so were all its successors. Though Seuss died in 1991, most of his books are still in print, and they have been translated into dozens of languages.
Why didn’t editors see at once what a winner Seuss would be? Partly because of his artistic style, which was unabashedly cartoonlike and exaggerated in an era when children’s book illustration was supposed to be pretty and realistic. Perhaps even more because of the content of his stories, especially their encouragement of wild invention and, even worse, the suggestion that it might be politic to conceal one’s fantasy life from parents. Children in the 1930s and 1940s were supposed to be learning about the real world, not wasting their time on fantasies and daydreams, and they were encouraged to tell their parents everything.
Marco, the hero of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, is warned by his father at the start of the book to “stop telling such outlandish tales” about what he sees on the way home from school. Yet the very next day Marco’s imagination turns a horse and wagon, by gradual stages, into a full-blown parade with elephants, giraffes, a brass band, and a plane showering colored confetti—all portrayed by Seuss with immense verve and enthusiasm. Marco arrives home in a state of euphoria:
I swung ’round the corner
And dashed through the gate,
I ran up the steps
And I felt simply GREAT!
FOR I HAD A STORY THAT NO ONE COULD BEAT!
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street!
Then he is quizzed by his father about what he has seen. His reply is evasive:
“Nothing,” I said, growing red as a beet,
“But a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street.”
The message that it is sometimes, perhap
s always, best to conceal one’s inner imaginative life from adults reappears in The Cat in the Hat (1957). Here “Sally and I,” two children alone and bored on a rainy day, are visited by the eponymous Cat. He proceeds to totally wreck their house, causing first excitement and then panic. (What will their mother say when she gets home?) Finally he puts everything back in place. The kids—and not only those in the story, but those who read it—have vicariously given full scope to their destructive impulses without guilt or consequences. When their mother returns and asks what they’ve been doing, there is a strong suggestion that they might not level with her:
Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do? Well . . .
What would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?
In both these tales the children whose imagination transforms the world are abashed or secretive when confronted with possible adult disapproval. More often, however, Seuss lets fancy run free without equivocation or apology. A whole series of books from McElligot’s Pool (1947) through On Beyond Zebra! (1955) and If I Ran the Circus (1956) celebrates the wildest flights of fancy. They usually begin in familiar surroundings, then move into an invented world where the scenery recalls the exotic landscapes of Krazy Kat comics. There, just as Seuss’s Elephant-Bird. Tufted Gustard, and Spotted Atrocious defy natural history, so his buildings and roads and mountains defy gravity. As the critic Philip Nel has pointed out, one effect of this kind of semisurreal nonsense is to suggest to children that the limited physical and linguistic world constructed by adults is not the only possible one.3 Seuss, as is well known, often thought of himself as a child, and once remarked, “I’ve always had a mistrust of adults.”4
Though these stories are full of euphoric vitality, there is occasionally something unsatisfying about them. Seuss’s verbal inventions can become as shaky and overblown as the structures in his drawings. At the end of many of his books the elaborate language often does collapse. There is an abrupt return to simple diction, and a simple, realistic final illustration implicitly declares that Seuss’s protagonist was only fantasizing.
Innovative as he was, Seuss can also be seen as squarely in the tradition of American popular humor. His strenuous and constant energy, his delight in invention and nonsense recall the boasts and exaggerations of the nineteenth-century tall tale, with its reports of strange animals like the Snipe and the Side-Winder. Seuss brought this manner and these materials up to date for a generation raised on film and TV cartoons. And, though most of the time he addresses himself almost exclusively to children, he includes occasional jokes for adults. In If I Ran the Zoo (1950), for instance, the hero plans to bring a Seersucker back alive; he will also “go down to the Wilds of Nantucket/And capture a family of Lunks in a bucket.” According to the illustrations, the Seersucker is a foolish, shaggy, flower-eating animal with what looks like a red bow tie, while Lunks are pale, big-eyed creatures with blond topknots, captured with the help of beach buggies.
Parents as well as children seem to be addressed in One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960) in which two kids find a very large uncomfortable-looking tusked sea monster. They exult:
Look what we found
in the park
in the dark.
We will take him home.
We will call him Clark.
He will live at our house.
He will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this?
We don’t know.
Seuss is not only in favor of the free-ranging imagination; in many of his books there is a strong liberal, even antiestablishment moral. Some critics have even seen The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958) as a satire of Cold War paranoia, in which the Cat, with the help of an A–Z series of smaller cats, spreads bright-pink paint all over the house in a mockery of the current fear of Communist takeover. The narrator and his sister, Sally, become more and more anxious about this, but finally when Little Cat Z raises his hat, releasing something called Voom (perhaps a benign version of the atomic bomb), the pinko/red menace is magically removed.5
In other books by Seuss, as in the classic folktale, pride and prejudice are ridiculed, and autocratic rule is overturned. In Yertle the Turtle (1958) Mack, who is bottom turtle on the live totem pole that elevates King Yertle, objects to the system:
I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom, we, too, should have rights. . . .
Besides, we need food. We are starving!
So he burps and upsets the whole stack, turning Yertle into King of the Mud. In Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949) another overreaching ruler, dissatisfied with the monotony of the weather, commands his magicians to cause something more interesting than rain or snow to fall from the sky. He gets a sticky, smelly substance that, though it appears as green, is clearly excrement (“You’re sitting in oobleck up to your chin.”) It does not disappear until the king admits that the whole thing was his own fault.
In Horton Hatches the Egg (1940) and Horton Hears a Who (1954) a charitable and self-sacrificing elephant protects the rights of the unborn and of small nations and obscure individuals in spite of the ridicule and scorn of his friends, because “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” There are limits to charity in Seuss, however. Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose (1948) allows his horns to become the refuge of an overwhelming number of visiting animals and bugs, repeating wearily, “A host, above all, must be nice to his guests.” Luckily, just when he reaches the limits of his endurance and is being pursued by hunters, his antlers fall off and he escapes. His guests end up stuffed and mounted on the wall of the Harvard Club, “as they should be.” It is perhaps stretching a point to suggest that the book conveys an anti-immigration message, but perhaps not.
For years Seuss’s tales were hailed by experts as a wonderful way to teach children not only reading but moral values as well. Meanwhile, however, a couple of them ran into opposition. In 1989 logging companies in Northern California went after The Lorax (1971). In this story a greedy Once-ler and his relatives move into an area of natural beauty and proceed to chop down all the colorful Truffula Trees in order to manufacture Thneeds, which resemble unattractive hairy pink underwear. Soon the sky is choked with smog and the water with something called Gluppity-Glup. Though Seuss said the book was about conservation in general, the loggers saw it as blatant propaganda and agitated to have it banned from the local school’s required reading list. “Our kids are being brainwashed. We’ve got to stop this crap right now!” shouted their ad in the local paper, taking much the same belligerent antienvironmental tone as the Once-ler himself does when criticized:
I yelled at the Lorax, “Now Listen here, Dad!
All you do is yap-yap and say ‘Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!’
Well, I have my rights, sir, and I’m telling you
I intend to go on doing just what I do!
And for your information, you Lorax, I’m figgering
on biggering
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING,
turning MORE Truffula Trees into Thneeds
which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!”
The Butter Battle Book (1984), a fable about the arms race, also provoked unfavorable comment. Like Swift’s tale of the Big- and Little-Endians who went to war over how to open an egg, it begins with a meaningless difference in domestic habits. Two groups of awkward-looking flightless birds, the Yooks and the Zooks, live side by side. The Yooks eat their bread butter-side up, the Zooksprefer it butter-side down. They become more and more suspicious of each other, and finally a member of the Zook Border Patrol with the rather Slavic-sounding name of Vanltch fires his slingshot. Escalation begins: more and more complicated weapons are developed by the Boys in the Back Room (“TOPEST, SECRETEST, BRAIN NEST!” says the sign on their door), until both sides possess the means of total destruction. Unlike most of Seuss’s books, this one doesn’t end reassuringly, but with the child n
arrator asking anxiously: “Who’s going to drop it? / Will you . . . ? Or will he . . . ?” The New York Times Book Review considered the story “too close to contemporary international reality for comfort,” while The New Republic, somewhat missing the point, complained that the issues between our real-life Zooks and Yooks were more important than methods of buttering bread.
Other, perhaps more relevant criticisms might be made today of Seuss’s work. For one thing, there is the almost total lack of female protagonists; indeed, many of his stories have no female characters at all. You’re Only Old Once! (1986), a cheerfully rueful tale about the medical woes of a senior citizen, which was on The New York Times best-seller list for months, is no exception. It contains one female receptionist (only her arm is visible) and one female nurse, plus a male patient, a male orderly, twenty-one male doctors and technicians, and one male fish.
