Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  It was partly an act—the swagger of a young man fancying himself as a swashbuckling, rebellious leader of the counterculture, staring down the elites and the prigs of the status quo. “As a sworn enemy of Culture,” wrote Ted, “Jacko from his grimy office viewed with displeasure the spread of Courtesy, Good Manners and Respect for Women.” It was also an extension of the “nagging wife and henpecked husband” cartoons Ted had read on the comics page, as well as the often jarring misogynistic humor that would later pervade the movie work of comedians like the Marx Brothers—who in 1924 were already honing their act on the New York City stage—and W. C. Fields. But that context still doesn’t make it any easier to read—and even Ted cringed as he reconsidered his work in Jacko five decades later. “You have to look at these things in the perspective of 50 years ago,” he said in 1976. “These things may have been considered funny then . . . but today I sort of wonder. The best I can say about the Jacko of this era is that they were doing just as badly on the [rival college humor magazines] Harvard Lampoon, the Yale Record, and the Columbia Jester.”35 Still, it’s a bad look for Ted—and it wouldn’t be the last time he’d be asked to reexamine the portrayal of women in his work.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Besides his perch atop the masthead of Jacko, Ted also was elected to the editorial staff of The Dartmouth, a position he likely accepted mostly so he could have an official excuse to goof around with Whit Campbell. The two enjoyed their roles as publishing magnates, sharing offices across the hall from each other on Publications Row, where they cheated each other at cards all night while waiting for Whit’s daily issue of The Dartmouth to go to press. Ted also relished the opportunity to leap in and help Whit out when “one of Whit’s news stories turned sour”; he thrived when the deadline clock was ticking. “We’d put our royal-straight flushes face down on the table, rewrite the story together, and then pick up our royal-straight flushes again, and raise each other as much as a quarter,” said Ted. “This did little to affect the history of journalism in America. But it did cement the strongest personal friendship I made at Dartmouth.”36

  Outside of their offices in Robinson Hall, Ted and Whit were regulars at the Dartmouth football games, bracing against the New Hampshire cold to cheer on their team at their newly completed Memorial Field facility. It was easy to be a fan; Dartmouth had gone 8–1 during Ted’s junior year, led by its tough-playing senior captain Cyril Aschenbach, the favorite player of Ted’s father. Now, in Ted’s senior year, they continued clobbering the competition, holding five teams scoreless during the season on their way to a 7–0–1 record. When Dartmouth took on archrival Harvard late in October 1924, Ted and Whit drove Whit’s 1914 Ford 130 miles to Cambridge to watch Dartmouth squeak out a 6–0 win.

  Afterwards, caught up in the fever, the rival editors put together a football game pitting the staffs of Jacko and The Dartmouth against each other. Reporting on the game, The Dartmouth—which won 13–7—noted that, “Geisel, playing a stellar game at left tackle, made a brilliant wrestle for the final play of the game. He dove for the fleet legs of Cliff Randall, quarterback for The Dartmouth, and found he had those of Sleepy Jones, his own art director.”37 Ted’s athletic prowess had clearly not improved in his four years of college.

  To his credit, Ted had hunkered down academically for his final year, loading up on the English courses he needed to complete his degree, including classes in Romantic and Modern English poetry, nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose, and—his favorite—seminars in writing and criticism, taught by the flamboyant professor David Lambuth. Lambuth was nothing short of a character; he drove a gigantic cream-colored Packard, which he steered across campus while wearing a matching jacket with a flaming red lining. As he lectured, he would slowly fill the classroom with cigar smoke—and Ted found him intriguing and exotic, even as he struggled somewhat with Lambuth’s seminar. “Ted was an average student,” recalled roommate Robert Sharp. “I wouldn’t say that he was studious—not enough to get into the Phi Beta Kappa—but his grades were always good.”38

  But it was still Jacko that mattered the most—and when Ted wasn’t writing snarky editorial copy, his cartoons were now featured regularly in Jacko. It was his drawing of the pumpkin-headed Jacko mascot that usually appeared at the top of each issue’s front page, and his art was used in everything from house ads to column filler. There were more weird animals showing up in his art as well. A November 1924 cartoon with the caption “Why is it when one sees animals like this one never has a gun along?” shows a winged goat—Ted loved drawing cows and goats—a two-legged elephant wearing dress shoes, and a doglike creature with three catlike animals stacked up on its back.

  Ted was signing his work as Ted LeSieg, T.G., Geisel, or just plain Ted—and sometimes his work appeared without any signature at all, perhaps because he was concerned that it might seem he was inserting his own cartoons simply because he was the magazine’s editor. One of his best Jacko jokes, in fact—a cartoon of a well-dressed young man eyeing two boys playing marbles, with the caption “Mr. John Keats sees the Elgin Marbles for the first time”—went completely unsigned. By March 1925, he was signing his work with completely new pseudonyms, often using his aliases to enhance the underlying joke, such as a drawing of an amorous, frolicking cow with the signature L. Burbank, after Luther Burbank, a botanist known for crossbreeding. Ted had apparently learned something in his botany class.39

  It was likely on the strength of his work in Jacko that Ted was voted Class Wit by his senior Dartmouth classmates. “He made a point of looking at the humorous side of things,” said Sharp, “and while it’s hard to say offhand how much other people enjoyed his witticisms, he certainly had a lot of friends and was good company.”40

  On the other hand, his fellow Casque & Gauntlet members would unanimously vote him Least Likely to Succeed. “He never seemed serious about anything,”41 said classmate Frederick Blodgett, though Kenneth Montgomery, another Casque member, thought that was all part of Ted’s charm. “He was not gregarious in the sense of hail-fellow-well-met; there was no sense of self-importance about him,” said Montgomery. “But when he walked into a room it was like a magician’s act . . . Everything became brighter, happier, funnier. And he didn’t try. Everything Ted did seemed to be a surprise, even to him.”42

  The fun would come to an end on Saturday, April 11, 1925.

  That evening—the night before Easter—Ted was hosting a party in his room at the Randall Club for a group of about ten friends, including Curtis Abel, the business manager of The Dartmouth. As the evening wore on, a pint of bootleg gin appeared—whether it was Ted’s, no one would ever say—and the party grew louder and more uproarious. As the evening reached its crescendo, Ted and Curtis Abel urinated onto the tin roof outside Ted’s window—a distinctive sound that caught the attention of “Pa” Randall, proprietor of the Randall Club, who angrily called the chief of police.

  Ted would always decry the entire affair as a bum rap. He would forever claim that no one at the party was drunk—“we had a pint of gin for ten people, so that proves nobody was really drinking,” he said—and would swear that he and Abel had merely discharged the contents of a seltzer bottle onto Randall’s roof. Pa Randall, he suggested, simply “hated merriment.”43 Regardless, Ted and his fellow partiers were hauled before Dean Craven Laycock, who put the entire crew on probation and ordered them each to write contrite letters to their parents. Ted’s father was mortified. “While I do not object to your taking a drink,” he wrote back to his son, “I do object to your taking one in Hanover, while in college, if the rules of the college do not permit it.” He urged Ted to quietly accept whatever punishment Dean Laycock might dole out. “Abide by the decision of the authorities . . . and . . . serve your full sentence conscientiously. While . . . you are soon to graduate, make an attempt in the next few weeks to eradicate this blot from your good record.”44

  Ted didn’t like it. “W
e were all put on probation for defying the laws of Prohibition, and especially on Easter Evening,” he groused. Likely because the party was in his room, the terms of Ted’s probation were even more severe than those of his classmates—and Laycock’s final added penalty hurt the most. Effective April 19, 1925—the day his probation went into effect—Ted would no longer be permitted to serve as editor of Jacko. While his name would remain at the top of the letterhead until a new editor was selected at the end of the month, Ted was prohibited from including any of his work in the final two issues of his senior year.

  Ted took it hard and personally. It was a generational bias, he insisted—those in charge just didn’t understand the young men of his era, raised during a world war and coming of age during Prohibition. Through no real fault of their own, he insisted, he and his classmates were considered a “slob generation.” “I came up through the Roaring Twenties, when everybody had a hip flask, went to football games and got drunk in the afternoons,” Ted said later. “Adults despised us. We were considered a lost generation of fools.”45 Whit Campbell, writing in the pages of The Dartmouth, was less inclined to give his own generation the benefit of the doubt. In an editorial titled “This Generation of Ours” that appeared two days before Ted’s drinking incident, Campbell and his editorial team were scathing in their assessment of themselves and their classmates:

  This generation of ours has lost humility. We do not recognize our own insignificance. We take the present as ours, instead of preparing for our heritage of the future. We assume the superman demeanor, to veil callow minds beneath.

  [. . .]

  This generation of ours is cowardly. We do not face life with courage, but try to escape. We flutter under the illusion of forgetting. We dodge the questions of life. We do not play square, because we are afraid to stake ourselves against life.

  In the midst of both this personal and generational existential crisis, the April issue of Jacko—which had gone to press a few days before Ted’s party at the Randall Club—arrived on newsstands across Hanover. Ted had several cartoons inside, all signed with brand-new pseudonyms. A large drawing of a couple leering at each other over the back of an equally lecherous-looking milk cow was signed L. Pasteur, the chemist responsible for the pasteurization of milk. A prison joke appeared with the signature Thos. Mott Osborne, a nod to the noted prison reformer of the same name, while a drawing accompanying an “Unpublished Adventure of Baron Munchausen” is signed D. G. Rossetti, after the British painter and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

  But by far the most noteworthy cartoon appeared on page 24 of the April issue, with the caption “Financial Note: Goat Milk Is Higher Than Ever.” Here Ted drew yet another of his goats—this one with curling antlers and a wide-eyed stare—standing on a mountaintop helpfully labeled “Alps,” with its back legs up on an outcropping, thus raising its udders that much higher. It’s a fairly decent joke—but more important is the pseudonymous signature in the cartoon’s bottom right corner: T. Seuss. It was the first time Ted had ever used his full middle name as part of his alias; ten pages later, under a cartoon of a couple riding side by side on horseback, the signature is simply Seuss.

  In the years and decades following Ted’s suspension from the pages of Jacko, Ted, and others, would perpetuate the myth that he had adopted several pseudonyms—most notably Seuss—as a way to escape Dean Laycock’s penalty on a technicality: if Ted Geisel wasn’t allowed to have work in Jacko, the reasoning went, then Seuss and others would. “To what extent this corny subterfuge fooled the dean, I never found out,” Ted said later. “But that’s how ‘Seuss’ first came to be used as my signature. The ‘Dr.’ was added later on.”46 It’s another one of Ted’s really good stories that’s also entirely untrue. Ted had been submitting cartoons to Jacko under various pseudonyms—Fish, L. Burbank, Thos. Mott Osborne, and even T. Seuss—before Laycock’s formal directive, not because of it.

  In fact, it appears that Ted’s real strategy to avoid the dean’s penalty was to publish his work in Jacko with no credit at all; the next issue would feature several uncredited short written pieces and at least one unsigned cartoon. It was only after learning of this particular workaround that the newly elected editor—C. H. Frankenberg, Class of 1926—was instructed not to permit any unsigned work into the final issue. Ted’s Jacko days were over. But Dr. Seuss—at least in his most primordial form—had been spawned in its pages.

  * * *

  • • • •

  On June 23, 1925, Ted graduated from Dartmouth, finishing his academic career with a 2.454 GPA, and ranked 133rd out of 387 students. Unlike many of his classmates, Ted wasn’t entirely certain what to do next. Whit Campbell had been accepted to Harvard Law School, on his way to what would be a long and successful career in corporate law, while roommate Robert Sharp was off to graduate school to study English, the beginning of a professorial track that would make him the chair of the English Department at Wheaton College. Unlike some of his classmates, Ted had no family business to return to and wasn’t sure his English degree would be good for much of anything, calling it “a mistake” that taught “the mechanics of getting water out of a well that may not exist.”47 With a shrug, then, he decided to head for graduate school to get his doctorate in English, with vague ambitions of becoming an English professor.

  But not just any graduate school. Back in February, Ted had decided to apply for the prestigious Campbell Fellowship in English Literature, which sent its recipient to England to study at Oxford University. As part of the application, Ted pried letters of support out of several professors—but the accolades didn’t exactly come thundering in. “I have little to say,” wrote Professor Hewette Joyce matter-of-factly. “He was a student of mine . . . and a rather good one, though by no means exceptional. He is bright and has a ready wit, is personally attractive and, I think, a hard worker, but more than that I cannot say.”48 Ben Pressey’s endorsement was more encouraging, if unenthusiastic. “I have great admiration for his cleverness, the quickness and shrewdness of his mind,” wrote Pressey. “He is not profound, but he makes the fullest possible use of the abilities he has, which are not inconsiderable.”49 Better was the letter he received from Maurice Sherman, editor of the Springfield Union, who still lived across the street from the Geisels. Ted, he wrote, “is in every sense a fine type of young man, industrious and alert, both mentally and physically . . . As to his personal character and sense of responsibility, I can speak in the highest terms.”50

  Ted informed his father of his plans to apply for the Campbell Fellowship, caging the information in vaguely optimistic language that convinced T.R. his son had already won the prize. According to Ted, his father ran across the street to inform Maurice Sherman of the good news—and Sherman, “being a staunch Dartmouth man,” announced the news in the Union the next day. Unfortunately, the current holder of the Campbell Fellowship had opted to remain at Oxford for another year and had been granted an extension—and thus Ted’s application, along with any others, was shelved. “So my father,” said Ted, “to save face with Maurice Sherman and others, had to dig up the money to send me to Oxford anyway”51—or as T.R. Geisel later explained, “I had to send him to Oxford just to keep the story accurate!”52

  Maurice Sherman was also kind enough to provide Ted with a bit of employment during his summer break, offering him the opportunity to exercise his newly earned English degree before leaving for Oxford. In this case, Sherman hired Ted to step in for vacationing contributor R.P.M., who regularly wrote a breezy column titled On the Firing Line. Ted’s professional debut was announced on July 6, 1925, as R.P.M. informed his readers he was leaving them “to the tender mercy of a substitute while we frolic through two weeks of vacation.”53

  Ted spent the next two weeks making pithy observations about politics, social mores, and national stories like the Scopes Trial, pitting William Jennings Bryan—whom Ted had already skewered in Jacko—against Clarence Darrow
in a legal battle over the teaching of evolution in public school. Some jokes landed better than others—one of the best described the football team at a “rigidly classical”54 university as calling its plays in Roman numerals—but in his first real appearance as a professional journalist, Ted comported himself well, providing reliably entertaining copy, delivered on time.

  With the return of R.P.M., however, Ted’s days at the Union were numbered; he would submit a final piece, a theater review, for publication on July 26. Then he began to pack his bags and readied himself for the trip to England and Oxford, where he was certain he’d acquire the advanced degree he needed to become an English professor. Dr. Geisel, he thought, had a good ring to it.

  CHAPTER 3

  STRANGE BEASTS

  1925–1926

  On Monday, August 24, 1925, Ted sailed from Boston on the ship Cedric, bound for Liverpool. His father had booked him into first class for the weeklong trip, and Ted was pleased to put down on the ship’s manifest that his final destination was “Lincoln College, Oxford.” On his arrival in Liverpool on August 31, Ted took the train 170 miles southeast to Oxford, then caught one of the black Morris Cowley taxicabs to the large wooden door marking the entrance to Lincoln College on Turl Street.

  Established in 1427, Lincoln was Oxford’s ninth oldest college, founded by Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, to train theology students in the skills needed to contest what he regarded as the heretical teachings of the philosopher and priest John Wycliffe—and by the time Geisel arrived in 1925, one of its most famous graduates was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. It was also one of the smaller and poorer of the Oxford colleges, with fewer children from well-to-do or titled English families—but that also meant that its stone buildings hadn’t been renovated or updated in decades or even centuries, giving Geisel a feeling he was stepping back in time to the eras of Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, or John Dryden. Even his room, No. 11, seemed appropriately medieval: a large square space in the rear of the college, with a stone fireplace and three windows overlooking adjacent Brasenose College. For a young man with ambitions of becoming a college English professor, it seemed an ideal atmosphere in which to immerse oneself.