Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Unfortunately, it didn’t take Ted long to realize he was in over his head. As a mediocre student who had struggled to attain a C in a general English seminar at Dartmouth, a deep drill into Germanic philology at Oxford—even if taught by the brilliant new professor J.R.R. Tolkien—was bound to be a struggle.1 He quickly sought out tutoring, and was paired with seventy-two-year-old Alexander Carlyle, the nephew of the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle. “I was surprised to see him alive. He was surprised to see me in any form,” Geisel said later. “He was the oldest man I’ve ever seen riding a bicycle. I was the only man he’d ever seen who never should have come to Oxford.”2 Still, Geisel respected Carlyle’s brilliance and dutifully wrote essay after essay for the aged scholar as part of his studies, reading them aloud for Carlyle to critique. “He realized I was getting stultified in English schools,” said Ted. “I was bogged down with old High German and Gothic and stuff of that sort, in which I have no interest whatsoever—and I don’t think anybody really should.”3

  Unlike many of his classmates, Geisel wasn’t the kind to lounge in the grassy quad discussing the poetry of Wordsworth—such conversations, he thought, were pretentious and slightly silly. Nor did he sit in the Junior Common Room sipping tea while thumbing through the pages of the erotic French magazine La Vie Parisienne, which students had cheekily subscribed to, using Lincoln College as its delivery address. Instead, he preferred getting outside the walls of the college to have tea and anchovy toast at Fuller’s tea shop, or to browse for hours either in Blackwell’s bookstore or the reading rooms at the iconic Radcliffe Camera library in the middle of campus.

  “My big problem at Oxford,” Geisel said later, “was who to talk to.”4 Making friends could be tough. Although he was a graduate student, because he was in his first year at Oxford, he was consigned to sitting in the dining hall with the first-year students, most of them four years younger than him. Geisel looked instead for other Americans, eyeing the Rhodes Scholars—considered by the English to be the good Americans—for a sympathetic face. He finally found one in a graduate student from the University of Cincinnati named Joseph Sagmaster, a distinguished-looking young man with a prim mustache who shared his interests in newspapers and writing. Ted also attached himself to a fellow Dartmouth graduate, Donald Bartlett, who was a year older and attending nearby Exeter College.

  Among his British classmates, Geisel tended to gravitate toward those who could transcend the traditionally stiff upper lip. He was already giving the English a wide berth anyway; he had quickly run afoul of Lincoln College’s rector, the humorless John Arthur Ruskin Munro, who had invited Geisel—as he did all new students—for a personal meeting in his lodgings at No. 15. Ted knocked on the rector’s door, and was informed Munro and his wife were at tea and was turned away. Mildly annoyed, Geisel returned several days later and was this time ushered into Munro’s quarters, where the rector spent their entire conversation asking Geisel about his participation in English sports like rugby or cricket. Ted, never the athlete, could only confess to playing tennis with Bartlett, a response that did little to endear him to Munro. Geisel was, however, especially fond of a young Englishwoman he refers to in his correspondence only as Mirabel, an undergraduate who shared his affinity for practical jokes and horseplay. When a classmate of theirs got his hands on a movie camera, Ted and Mirabel took every opportunity to leap in front of it, hamming it up. During the spring boat races for Eights Week, the two of them donned fezzes and “staged a love affair”5 at the river’s edge, vamping in front of classmates and professors—including an unamused Munro, “who took the thing,” said Geisel, “as an American insult against English respectability.”6 From here on, Munro would routinely and intentionally ignore Ted.

  There were times, too, when Geisel really did seem determined to be equally as unforgiving of his English hosts. When he was invited to a social event in St. James’s Square in London, hosted by the glamorous American-born viscountess Nancy Astor, Geisel turned down the invitation because the viscountess had addressed his invitation to “T.S. Giesel.” “Misspelled,” Ted wrote haughtily across the top of the card, “that’s why I turned her down, the lout!”7 Perhaps Geisel had an even more personal reason for turning down the viscountess: Astor was well known for spurning alcohol and had introduced legislation in Parliament to restrict its sale to minors. Ted would always have a policy of prohibition against prohibitionists.

  Despite Carlyle’s best efforts, Geisel’s academic performance wasn’t improving—and even Geisel confessed his interest in most of his English literature classes was flagging. “I started to draw pictures on my notes as that was practically the only thing that could keep me from going crazy,” he admitted later. “They were merely the ideal wanderings of a mind numbed by too many semi-colons.”8 Indeed, the loose-leaf notebook Ted had taken with him to Oxford for recording notes offers a revealing and fascinating look into Ted’s state of mind during his year at Oxford.

  At first Geisel was clearly trying to perform his obligations as a student, taking relatively careful notes that fill most of the page, with only a few small doodles scribbled in the margins or used to highlight a particular word or phrase. On one page, the title “Bacon’s Essays” is written on drapery; on another, notes on poetry in the Bible are decorated by two non-biblical figures, one of which is a gentleman in a top coat and top hat, peering off the page, a cigar clenched in his teeth. Several pages later, birds begin to show up, marching in the corner of the page—one carries a sign that reads BARTLETT—and gliding on the water. A section of notes on Sir Walter Raleigh features a drawing of Raleigh himself, with a thick mustache and beard, glaring fixedly back at the reader.

  As the days pass, figures begin to take more prominence, pushing Geisel’s minimal notes off the page, his handwriting crabbed and nearly unreadable. A page on the works of John Dryden features Geisel’s carefully shaded self-portrait—labeled “Self Portrayte” in mock Middle English—drawn in profile, his eyebrows dark and nose comically long (the first effort, just above it, is darkly scribbled out). Notes on Keats are filled with dogs in various positions—sitting, prancing, up on two legs—while notes on the Romantics are surrounded by various figures, heads in profile, busts, and a drawing of Joan of Arc.

  Even Shakespeare couldn’t hold Geisel’s interest for long, as a man in a tall hat and waistcoat is crammed in next to his notes on Comedy of Errors, while another page on the Bard is taken up almost entirely by a gigantic unshaven figure in a vest, leaning up against the right side of the page, a cigar smoldering in one hand. A brief page of notes on Alexander Pope features a drawing of the poet in a pope hat, with “by special appointment” scribbled beneath him. Another page on the poet Thomas Shadwell is filled with knights, dogs, and what seems to be a flying cow, though Ted helpfully labeled it Flying Ibex. “I think this demonstrates that I wasn’t very interested in the subtle niceties of English literature,” said Geisel. “As you go through the notebook, there’s a growing incidence of flying cows and strange beasts. And finally, at the last page of the notebook there are no notes on English literature at all. There are just strange beasts.”9

  In fact the flying cow and strange beasts were what caught the eye of a young woman seated next to him in a lecture, who watched closely as Geisel did everything in class but take notes. “You’re not very interested in the lecture,” she told him plainly—then leaned in and pointed at one of his drawings. “I think that’s a very good flying cow,” she said. Geisel was intrigued and mentioned the encounter to Sagmaster, who informed him that the young woman was a Wellesley College graduate from Brooklyn named Helen Palmer—and if Geisel wanted, Sagmaster would be more than happy to make a more formal introduction.

  Helen Marion Palmer was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 23, 1898, which made her nearly six years older than Ted. As a child, Helen had contracted polio—a condition she recovered from, but which would leave her with what she referred to as a “lopsid
ed smile.”10 When Helen was eleven, her father, a successful ophthalmologist, died of a heart attack, leaving her in the care of her headstrong mother, Marie, who suddenly had to raise Helen and her thirteen-year-old brother Robert as a single parent in a little apartment on Brooklyn’s Ocean Avenue. In 1916, at age eighteen, Helen began attending Adelphi College, then transferred to Wellesley College just outside Boston after her freshman year. After graduating with honors in 1920, Helen returned to Brooklyn and spent the next three years teaching English at Girls High School—but she longed to try for her master’s degree at Oxford, a dream her mother not only encouraged but in which she also intended to fully participate. When Helen left for England to attend the Society of Oxford Home-Students (now St. Anne’s College) in 1924, Marie went with her, and the two of them now shared quarters on Woodstock Road.

  Playing the role of matchmaker, Sagmaster invited both Helen and Ted to his rooms for an informal dinner of anchovy toast. “You never saw a better case of love at first sight,” Sagmaster recalled. “They completely ignored the host, talked together for hours, left together, had dinner together, and spent as much time together during term as the Oxford rules allowed.”11

  They were an attractive couple; Helen, at five foot three, was nine inches shorter than Ted, but carried herself in such a confident manner that most swore she was taller. Her shoulder-length brown hair was usually carefully coiffed—though often hidden under a hat—in marked contrast to Ted’s hair, which, when left on its own, often stood on end and looked as if he’d just woken up. Both smiled easily, particularly when engaged in conversation with each other—and if anything, the smile that Helen always called lopsided was even broader than Ted’s. Sagmaster would later say that bringing Helen and Ted together was “the happiest inspiration I’ve ever had.”12 Indeed, the two of them were immediately inseparable; in late October, when Helen’s mother returned to the United States, Helen immediately moved into Frewin Cottage, a charming apartment with a bathroom window that wouldn’t close, only a few minutes’ walk from Ted’s room at Lincoln College.

  But Ted and Helen’s interest in each other went deeper than purely physical attraction. Ted might acknowledge that Helen had “a certain grace,”13 but he also liked that she was smart—and not just in a “well read in the classics” sort of way, though she was certainly that. Talking with Helen about books, said Ted, he was “horrified . . . to find that while I loved Swift, Defoe, Shaw and Beerbohm, I knew absolutely nothing about literature.”14 Helen was also passionate and opinionated, with a strong sense of how things should be—and Ted liked that, too. “Helen brought me to the realization that I wasn’t soundly grounded in any subject,” said Ted, “[and] that I had merely been playing writer and scholar.”15 What Helen saw in Ted, then, was both talent and potential—both of which, as far as she was concerned, were being wasted on English literature. “You’re crazy to be a professor,” she told Ted flatly. “What you really want to do is draw.”16

  And so Ted Geisel would draw, paying only middling attention to his studies. Almost in spite of himself, he took an interest in the works of John Milton, and began illustrating “great hunk[s]” of Paradise Lost—especially the places, said Geisel, where “Milton’s sense of humor failed him.”17 Thus Milton’s line “Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even / On a sunbeam” became a cartoon of a cherubic Uriel sliding down a wide sunbeam, an oil can in his hand to help “lessen the friction on his coccyx.”18 Geisel bundled this drawing together, along with several others of Adam and Eve, and took them over to Blackwell’s, the famed bookstore and publisher in Broad Street, to see if there would be any interest in hiring him to illustrate the entirety of Paradise Lost.

  There wasn’t. “I was thrown out,” Geisel recalled.19

  * * *

  • • • •

  Ted and Helen would be apart only briefly, during the 1925 Christmas break when Helen joined her family in the United States while Ted roamed through France with Sagmaster, Bartlett, and another friend. When Helen returned in 1926, she moved into a cottage at 14 Ship Street, just around the corner from the main entrance of Lincoln College—and it was here that Geisel would spend most of his remaining months at Oxford, doodling in his notebooks, reading the assigned text only when the mood struck him, and taking side trips into the countryside with Helen.

  To that end, Geisel decided the day trips would be easier and a little more fun if he had a motorcycle. Unfortunately, Oxford’s policies prevented first-year students from owning or even driving motorcycles—an impasse that was resolved when Helen reminded him that while he might be in his first year, she was in her second. The two of them pooled their money and bought a motorcycle with a sidecar and rumble seat. And lest anyone see him rumbling around Oxford on the motorcycle and report this violation of the rules to the sobersided rector Munro, Geisel always disguised himself as a poultry delivery boy, dangling plucked ducks from the handlebars or visibly stuffed into the saddlebags.

  By early April, Geisel had made a decision—or as far as he was concerned, a decision had been made for him by an Oxford don whom he called “Sir Oliver Onions,” actually Professor Charles Talbut Onions, a Shakespearean scholar and one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. “That was the man who really drove me out of Oxford,” recalled Geisel. Onions, an obsessive lexicographer, could devote hours to Shakespearean punctuation, and Geisel had been driven nearly mad by a two-hour lecture on the nuances of punctuation in various versions of King Lear. “He had dug up all of the old folios, as far back as he could go,” said Geisel. “Some had more semicolons than commas. Some had more commas than periods. Some had no punctuation at all. For the first hour and a half, he talked about the first two pages in King Lear . . . It got unbelievable. I got up, went back to my room, and started packing.”20

  While Geisel would stay for the remainder of the semester, he was ready to be done with academia. “I decided that if I stayed and got my degree, I’d be equipped to teach other people about semicolons and commas,” he said sardonically.21 He later admitted that he had been “lazy of mind” during his year at Oxford. “I’m afraid I went through another freshman stage of utter astonishment and mental prostration at the stupendous amount of learning that I had never suspected to exist,” he wrote to Whit Campbell. “[I] have managed to reconcile myself to man’s limitations—and am all through trying to ‘know life whole.’”22

  His professors didn’t try to talk him out of it. Carlyle, his tutor, “very correctly told me I was ignorant,” recalled Geisel, and encouraged him instead to “just travel around Europe with a bundle of high school history books and visit the places I was reading about—go to the museums and look at pictures and read as I went.”23 An extended trip to Europe would take place at the end of the semester—but first, he decided, it was time to propose marriage to Helen.

  His proposal ended up being spectacularly impromptu—and typical of Geisel, the story would change with the telling over time.

  In the first version, Ted and Helen were driving home from an evening party on their motorcycle—Ted driving, Helen in the sidecar—when Ted took a turn too quickly and spun the bike into a ditch, spilling both of them into the mud. As they sat in the ditch, unhurt but spluttering, Ted suddenly asked Helen to marry him. In a later version of the proposal story, Ted claimed he’d proposed to Helen while they were still speeding around on the motorcycle, with Ted shouting his proposal loudly over the noise of the motor—and Ted wrecked the bike in a ditch when Helen told him yes. Whichever version of events is true—if any—by the spring of 1926, Ted Geisel and Helen Palmer were officially engaged.

  “The engagement is not, I must say, one of my annual Spring announcements,” he wrote sassily to Whit Campbell. He had apparently notified his family of his engagement, but told Campbell that he was “disappointed in not getting the report of my family’s reaction.”24 As for informing Helen’s mother, Marie, of their pending nuptials, Ted and
Helen intended to take their motorcycle to France during their extended Easter break and meet Marie in Paris. Here in Paris, Ted told Campbell, he and Helen “broke the news to her in a dazzling fashion.”25

  They had gotten off to a bad start. On their first night together in town, Ted took Helen and her mother to dinner, where Marie “took no serious notice” of Ted and informed him in no uncertain terms that she equated drinking alcohol with “feeding the devil.” The conversation ground to a halt. Things seemed to improve the next night when Ted and Helen escorted her mother to an opera—but without understanding any French, Ted could see that his future mother-in-law quickly “began to get unhappy.” At intermission, then, Ted and Helen left their seats to each take a stiff drink to steel their nerves, then returned to Marie, where Helen tried to steer the conversation toward their announcement.

  “Mother,” said Helen, “what do you think of this”—and here she gestured toward Ted—“as a husband?”

  Marie’s mouth hung open in disbelief as she fanned herself frantically with her program. Finally she gathered herself.