“But my dear girl,” Marie said breathlessly to her daughter, “why, I don’t even know his name!”
Ted went for his wallet and admitted he “fumbled” for a moment before dramatically brandishing a small piece of cardboard.
“Madam,” he said with a small bow, “my card.”26
It was hard to tell if Marie was pleased with the news. Ted noted that the three of them watched the rest of the opera in silence. Afterward, they stopped in a nearby restaurant and sat down at a table to drink lemonades—Marie’s drink of choice—and Ted noted somewhat acidly that Helen and her mother spent the evening engaged in side conversations about “the ‘little ones to come’ and that sort of rot.” When Marie finally turned her attention to Ted, she urged him to return to the United States as quickly as possible to look for a job. But Ted waved off her recommendation and informed her he was all but certain he’d be teaching in Vienna—where, at least at that moment, he was considering going to study nineteenth-century German drama—or pursuing “a newspaper job, also abroad.”27 Later Ted drove Helen and a still-skeptical Marie Palmer back to her hotel, with Marie jangling in the motorcycle’s sidecar as they bounced over cobblestone roads. “She hasn’t thought the same of me since,” Ted confessed to Whit.28 It would take some time for Ted to earn his mother-in-law’s endorsement.
As Easter break ended, Geisel dreaded abandoning Paris for Oxford. “When I look back from the Continent, and remember English tradition, I have shooting pains in my buttock,” he wrote.29 “I really think I have had enough University study. I like to come and go as I please in my reading,” he told Campbell.30 “I have said ‘to hell with the whole of English literature’—and I am now reading for ideas—wherever they may be found.”31 He had abandoned his idea of studying German drama in Vienna—but for a moment, he was very nearly persuaded by the scholar Émile Legouis, an authority on Jonathan Swift, into pursuing a PhD with him at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Geisel was skeptical from the start—“I discovered that one had to speak French, and I couldn’t”32—but visited Legouis at his home in Paris “to find out exactly what he wanted me to do.” Legouis told the young man that he had a premier assignment, explaining that there was a very brief period in Swift’s career—between the ages of sixteen and a half and seventeen—in which it appeared Swift had never written a thing. Legouis, recalled Geisel, had challenged him to “devote two years to finding out whether he had written anything. If he had,” Geisel further explained, “I could analyze what he wrote as my D.Phil. thesis. Unfortunately, if he hadn’t written anything, I wouldn’t get my doctorate.”33 Geisel stood up and walked out and—as he related the story nearly fifty years later—“I threw in my doctoral towel and took the next freighter to Corsica.”34
Helen, however, completed her master’s degree at Oxford. Much to her disappointment, she would be with Ted in France when degrees were formally bestowed. While Ted could be dismissive of formal education, Helen never was—and she was unhappy that her graduating record had been designated as Class III, little better than a 2.0 GPA. Her teachers had clearly noticed that Ted had distracted her. “Missed classes . . . engaged to American,” wrote one tutor. Helen found it embarrassing. “I should have done better,” she admitted to one of her Oxford tutors. “It is as bad to disillusion others as to disillusion oneself.”35 Helen’s devotion to Ted, often at the expense of her own ambition or happiness, would be characteristic of their lifelong relationship.
* * *
• • • •
In June 1926, Ted’s parents and his sister, Marnie, joined him in England, their first stop on an extended trip through Europe as a family. His parents may have viewed his engagement to Helen as rash, but—unlike Ted’s experience with Marie Palmer—Helen quickly made a good impression on the Geisels. She would remain behind in Oxford for a few weeks before meeting her mother and the Geisels in Paris. The Geisels, meanwhile, traveled through England, Paris, and Switzerland—“about which I am mad,” wrote Ted—before making a trip to Bavaria to visit relatives in Mühlhausen, the birthplace of Ted’s Großvater. For Ted, it was not the happy experience his father likely hoped it would be.
Ted’s grandfather had a brother named Robert, now seventy-five years old and still living in Mühlhausen with his wife. Ted was surprised to learn that, at about the time T.A. had immigrated to Springfield, Robert and his wife had also moved to the United States, “starting along the well-known road of prosperity,” wrote Ted, but then returned to Germany at the urging of Robert’s homesick wife. Instead of the successful life Ted’s grandfather had built back in America, Robert Geisel still worked eight hours a day in a forge, subsisting on a diet of “sour blackbread and beer.” Ted pitied the “lean and grey old man” before him, and was dismayed to learn that a “misanthropic wife who found no joy in American life” had denied Robert the same opportunities for achievement as his more successful brother.
Their final night in town, Ted’s father hosted a dinner for more than thirty members of the extended family—and Ted, as he ate and chatted with his own relatives, thought he had “never had such a pathetic experience.” His cousins, all “intense and bright” were “mostly illiterate . . . stuck for the rest of their lives in the Black Forest—all suffering from the false step Robert made in returning to Germany.”36 It made Ted appreciate his grandfather’s achievements, and his own life, all the more—and he pitied his cousins for what he saw as their missed opportunities. “When I think of the distance these folks could have gone—had they stayed in America,” he wrote to Whit Campbell. “But oh hell.”37
Later, the Geisels drove to the little town of Kleinschwarzenbach—a tiny hamlet of farmers living in thatched-roof cottages—to visit relatives from the Seuss side of the family. Ted found the experience “far more pathetic than that at my Father’s relations,” though for different reasons. Once again, T. R. Geisel hosted a large dinner; while Ted was amused that sixty-seven people showed up “claiming to belong to the clan of Seuss,” the gathering itself depressed him. “There were tears to go with the beer,” he wrote in a letter to Whit, and told how he had wept as one relative after another showed him photographs of family members killed in the war—“cousins who had been called [into service] and went,” Ted wrote sadly. Ted took his twenty-four-year-old cousin Alvin for his first ride in a car, and the young man was struck almost speechless by the amazing new technology. “He showed a tremendous desire to go to America,” Ted wrote. And yet, he told Whit sadly, “no one in his family will ever leave the farm—unless, perhaps, they are called to serve in another war.”38
It all made Ted profoundly sad—and a little angry. “Some day,” he told Campbell, “I shall endow two fellowships. One will take men from [Alvin’s village] and ship them around to the different capitals for two years travel and tutorial.” The other, he explained, would be given to the statesmen and politicians who send young men to war and consign their parents to lives of quiet oppression. “This fellowship will entitle them to spend six months in a thatched-roof shack . . . to examine a few of the war memorials, look through the family albums, and sit down on a rock to watch the peasants digging turnips to pay the national debt.”39
Ted had his own debts to contend with as well. He informed Whit that he planned to spend some time in Vienna late in the fall, which might burn through his grandfather’s money faster than perhaps he intended, but he wasn’t about to slow down. He admitted that he was reading more, was becoming more interested in history and European politics and “unfortunately, too many things.” Still, he told Campbell he had come to accept that “I shall never teach school—so I decided to quit and come to the continent where people, if less ‘cultured’ are a bit more intense—and less insular.” He signed off with what was becoming his regular signature: Seuss.40
Returning to Paris with his parents, the Geisels were reunited with Helen, who’d been vacationing with her mother in Dinard since early summer.
On one of their final evenings together before the Geisels returned to the United States, Ted and Helen took his parents out to the Folies-Bergère, the cabaret music hall, to see the singer Maurice Chevalier. True to its reputation, the evening featured not just Chevalier but “gorgeous girls and jiggling breasts”—and T. R. Geisel promptly stood up and announced they were all returning to the hotel, since “there’s nothing here but tits and music.”
“So, you don’t like music?” Ted asked.
T.R. was not amused. The Geisels returned immediately to their hotel, depositing Helen at her boardinghouse en route. With Nettie tearfully settled into bed, T.R. poured his son a stiff drink, then whirled around on him purposefully. “If you’re going to make pronouncements like that, wait until we are man-to-man.”41 Suitably admonished, Ted would watch his mouth—and never again would he and his father speak of it.
* * *
• • • •
With the departure of the Geisels for home, Helen returned to her mother for a tour of Italy, leaving Ted alone in Paris for the fall. He walked the streets slowly and deliberately now, lounging away the afternoons in coffeehouses, museums, and bookstores, taking “futile French lessons,” gazing blankly at art, and people-watching over one café au lait after another. At Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company bookshop, he bought a blue-bound copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was still banned in the United States, and did his very best to read it. “James Joyce irritated me,” Ted said later. “I thought he could have made more sense if he’d wanted to.”42
He became a regular at the crowded La Closerie des Lilas—a popular watering hole and salon for literary American expatriates—where he often spotted Ernest Hemingway seated at a table, writing and smoking a pipe. “He always wore a turtleneck sweater and accumulated saucers,” Geisel recalled.43 “What he was writing I never knew. I was scared to walk over and ask him, lest he ask me what I was writing. I was a twenty-two-year-old kid writing knock-kneed limericks about goats and geese and other stuff that I couldn’t sell. He was probably writing A Farewell to Arms.”44
Another evening, while prowling the Boulevard Saint-Michel with Don Bartlett and another Oxford friend, Geisel spotted the American novelist Theodore Dreiser—Geisel said he recognized him “by his surly face and blubberous mouth”—walking with the anarchist Emma Goldman (“the fat Jewish lady”), who’d been deported from the United States for her vocal political views in 1919. The friends followed them to a café in the Sorbonne and sat close enough to eavesdrop on the conversation. Ted was unimpressed. While Dreiser was currently basking in the success of his novel An American Tragedy and Goldman was always a controversial personality, Ted found their conversation mundane. “Never before have I sat in on such rapid fire stuff,” he wrote to Whit Campbell, practically rolling his eyes on the page. As a joke, the young men bribed a bellhop into presenting Dreiser with a pair of blue suspenders and pretending they were a gift from the French Academy. Goldman, who understood French, laughed out loud; Dreiser, who spoke no French, could only gape and repeatedly ask, “What? WHAT?” Ted shook his head in annoyance. “Dreiser is one of these ponderous chaps,” he told Whit. “He will puzzle over it for years and then write another book.”45
Not every excursion was literary in nature. He returned to the Folies-Bergère to catch the new revue La Folie du Jour, featuring the African American entertainer Josephine Baker, who danced, strutted, made faces, and flirted with rowdy audience members, while wearing nothing more than a skirt made of bananas—“which serve to vivify, rather than to conceal, her Alabama vulva,” Ted told Whit in a coarsely worded letter.46 Geisel may have hooted along with the crowd—as he told Campbell, “I always go [to Folies-Bergère] to release imprisoned sex instincts”—but he was also concerned that the bare-breasted, hip-shaking performance by this “American Nigger,” as he crudely put it, was giving his countrymen a bad name. “Unfortunately, the Europeans are all the more convinced of the crassness of the U.S.A. by this,” he told Campbell, “—and it adds just one more proof to their claim that we are jazz and money mad.” As he told Whit later, “one is close to ashamed—ashamed of what the U.S.A. seems to stand for. The States are damn unpopular at the present moment. In France, [Americans] breeze about ruthlessly while the French are going hungry.”47 But that still wasn’t going to stop Geisel from leering at Baker as she twirled and danced the Charleston naked, breaking hearts and putting on a show that became an international sensation. Ernest Hemingway, too, was a big fan.
Still, he promised Campbell he was trying to do some serious work. “I have started a complete study of the modern German drama,” he reported. “I hope to correlate it up with the modern English and American literary movements (and later with the Russian) and see what kind of theses I can do. Then, for diversion I am taking a course in Goethe and reading a bit of 18th Century English.” His enthusiasm lasted three days; he spent more time and effort growing and grooming what he called “a convincing moustache.”48
He reunited with Helen in Italy, where she was still vacationing with her mother—and scandalized Marie Palmer and her “retrograde tendencies” by taking Helen with him to look at Michelangelo’s statue of the naked David. His future mother-in-law had “fainted dead away,” he told Campbell. “All art,” he told his friend impishly, “should wear jock straps.” He watched and listened to the dictator Benito Mussolini warily, reading his speeches in the newspaper and seeing his face papered on nearly every surface. “I cannot write what I think on the subject,” he wrote to Campbell. “Intellectually, I am considered a dangerous radical.” Still, he wasn’t sure whom he mistrusted more: Mussolini, or an unnamed Harvard man he had recently met at a party in Florence. “He is an ass,” declared Ted. “He will buy his way into an ambassadorship before he is 35.”49
Having abandoned his studies of German drama and the writings of Goethe—and looking for his next project—Geisel began writing what he hoped would become the next Great American Novel. (“Who hasn’t?” he asked fifty years later.)50 It, too, quickly became a mess. “I was heavily influenced at that time by [novelist and photographer] Carl Van Vechten, who often lapsed into Italian during the course of his books,” said Ted later.51 “There’s a chapter in [my novel] with people conversing in Italian. I don’t know any Italian. I don’t know how that got in there.”52
Still, he managed to complete a massive first draft—Ted once claimed it ran for two volumes—“and when it wouldn’t sell,” he said years later, “I condensed it into one volume. When that didn’t sell, I boiled it down into a long short story. Next I cut it to a short, short story. Finally I sold it as a two-line gag. Now I can’t even remember the gag.”53
Around Christmas of 1926, Helen returned to the United States, heading for her mother’s home in New Jersey while she looked for a teaching job. Ted remained in Italy for another six weeks, moving slowly through Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Palermo, where, he admitted, he wasn’t doing much of anything. Eventually, even sleeping late and shopping all day became tiresome—and on Sunday, February 13, 1927, Ted boarded a ship at Palermo bound for New York.
His year at Oxford had been a bust, and his plans for a teaching career had dissolved with his unattained doctorate. His future was uncertain, and his prospects for employment were cloudy at best.
Helen, however, typically thought she knew exactly what Ted should do. “Ted’s notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals,” she said. “So I set to work diverting him. Here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should earn a living doing that.”54
CHAPTER 4
THE FLIT
1927–1936
In the spring of 1927, after nearly six years away from Springfield, Ted Geisel was living back under his parents’ roof again—and he wasn’t happy about it. “I am sick and tired of being a Springfield boy,” he grumbled.1 Since returning home from Europe in late February, he and Helen had lived apart; with her master’s
degree in English, Helen had quickly landed a teaching job at a private school for girls in Orange, New Jersey—but she and Ted were engaged, not married, which meant no living together. With no job, no teaching certificate, and few prospects, Ted really had little choice but to return to Springfield, bunking in his old second-floor bedroom and setting up his drawing board and a typewriter at his father’s desk in the little office just off the master bedroom. At age twenty-three, he certainly didn’t want to be there.
With Helen’s encouragement, he was determined to make it as an illustrator—and that meant pounding out endless letters to book and magazine publishers in New York; sending around samples of his work, some of which might be returned, most of which might not; and endlessly pitching one idea after another. Very early on, Ted was sending letters and cartoons to Alexander K. Laing, a poet, writer, and fellow Dartmouth man who also happened to be a contributor to The New Yorker. Geisel very smartly proposed to Laing an ongoing series of cartoons—a successful series meant being paid for several cartoons, as opposed to just one—featuring something he was calling a Hippocrass, a creature with a long neck, a dog-like face, wings on its back, and two legs ending in boxing gloves. (While Hippocrass was a perfectly Seussian-sounding name, it was a classic reference that perhaps only a third-generation brewer would know, as hippocras actually refers to an ancient Greek spiced wine.) As envisioned by Geisel, the Hippocrass was a kind of mascot for drinkers everywhere, first shown locked up on Ellis Island, where Jimmy Walker, the anti-Prohibition mayor of New York, sympathetically frees him. From there, Geisel drew Hippocrass frolicking in the city, doing interviews, getting drunk, and being lectured by a stern-looking President Calvin Coolidge, who wears a sombrero with a swastika on it. As was true of his father, there would never be anything subtle about Ted’s views on the prohibitionists.
Becoming Dr. Seuss Page 8