Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  For the Essolube campaign, Geisel created a series of creatures called Moto-Monsters that preyed on cars and could be thwarted by the use of Esso’s motor oil: the monkey-like Karbo-nockus, the catlike Moto-raspus, or the Zero-doccus, a gigantic, fuzzy snow creature that targeted automobiles in freezing temperatures. “Foil the Karbo-nockus!” would never become the same pop culture phenomenon as “Quick, Henry! The Flit!” However, Ted’s Essolube campaign would be even more omnipresent than the Flit cartoons, showing up not only in newspapers but also in brochures, on subways, on gas station walls, and even in jigsaw puzzles. “It wasn’t the greatest pay,” said Ted, “but it covered my overhead so I could experiment with my drawings.”68

  The Essolube work did indeed cover the Geisels’ overhead; with the earnings from the Karbo-nockus, Ted and Helen were able to move again, this time to a fourteenth-floor apartment at 1160 Park Avenue, about two blocks south of their apartment on East 96th Street—and a much more prestigious address. While Ted would joke that “we moved when we discovered we could live just as cheaply on Park Avenue,”69 there was no denying that the Geisels had officially arrived. The dinner parties and evening drinking sessions would start again—and now that Prohibition had been repealed, there was no more need for speakeasies. Drinking was legal again.

  Also arriving at 1160 Park Avenue was a housewarming gift from Ted’s father, a gigantic stone slab encasing a fossilized dinosaur footprint. The gift was partly a joke and partly a tangible metaphor for T. R. Geisel’s own competitive nature. In this case, the competition had sprung from a dinner Ted had arranged with him, his father, and Cyril Aschenbach, T. R. Geisel’s favorite Dartmouth football player. T.R. had wanted to talk football with the former team captain, but Aschenbach, a collector of rare antiques, had only wanted to discuss sconces and other recent acquisitions. T.R. had been visibly annoyed, and at the end of the evening warned his son, “I’m going to send you an antique that will shut Cyril Gaffey Aschenbach up forever.” The dinosaur print had been extracted from a shale pit near Holyoke, and T.R. had ordered it delivered to his son. Ted loved it—“My father, as you see, had an unusual sense of humor”—and would keep it with him, moving it from place to place, for the rest of his life. “Half of the people I show it to think I’ve made it myself,” he said later, laughing.70

  Ted enjoyed playing the role of man-about-town from his Park Avenue apartment, and in May 1934, when The Dartmouth sent a young reporter named Bob Warren to New York to write a profile of the former Jacko editor whose name was now on billboards across the country, Ted couldn’t resist playfully yanking the young man’s chain. When Warren showed up in the late afternoon, Geisel made a point of answering the door in his pajamas, hair standing on end, looking “as if he had just climbed out of bed.” In his most world-weary tone, he told Warren, “I get to bed around three in the morning and about ten someone calls and says, ‘We need that stuff right away. Can you hurry it up?’ It’s a bad life.” As he lit a cigarette and sat down for the interview, Ted casually asked Warren, “Truth or fiction?” Warren, who understood and appreciated exactly what Ted was up to, gave an answer worthy of Dr. Seuss himself: “A little bit of both ought to do quite well,” the young man replied.

  The resulting interview was a good-natured mess, more fiction than truth, with Geisel ping-ponging from one subject to another, changing subjects in the middle of answers or ignoring some questions altogether. Geisel talked about visiting angry llamas in Peru (that one was partly true, as he and Helen had recently visited South America), studying animals in Africa, and being disappointed to discover there were no longer any Dalmatian dogs in Dalmatia. The session did, however, result in one perhaps unintentionally beautiful nugget of wisdom: “I’ve discovered one thing, and that is that God has turned out more ridiculous creatures than I have.”71 The interview did much to convey the reputation Geisel was cultivating as a whimsical and well-traveled devil-may-care genius, knocking off clever cartoons and advertisements as easily as he knocked back cocktails. After publication of the interview in The Dartmouth, Geisel was so pleased with the piece that he happily began providing his alma mater with original art to use in its annual fundraising literature, while Jacko—finally lifting Dean Laycock’s 1925 injunction on his work—would publish some of Ted’s new cartoons.

  Jacko wouldn’t be the only paper running new Dr. Seuss cartoons. In early 1935, Geisel had the opportunity to realize a longtime dream by producing a weekly color comic strip called Hejji for several of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. Hearst took the comics pages seriously—many of his papers printed thirty-two pages of comics in full color, and he permitted some comics to take up an entire page—and Geisel used the opportunity to create a surreal, gorgeously colorful strip, crammed with jokes and situations he would use again later. The vaguely Arabian-influenced strip follows the adventures of Hejji in the Land of Baako—a land where whales live in water-filled craters of volcanoes, located in a place at such a high altitude that only Baakonese eagles can carry other birds into its airspace. And yet, in the first strip—published April 7, 1935—Hejji enters Baako riding on the back of a camel, and is immediately captured. He’s then brought before the Mighty One—the turbaned, mustachioed leader of the kingdom—and Hejji and the Mighty One begin roaming the kingdom in a series of adventures that would run from week to week.

  Geisel’s art on Hejji is bright and clean—the self-aware crosshatching and shading are now gone—and very Seussian. It’s some of Geisel’s best work to date, with story elements and funny ideas that would show up in later work: a stack of turtles, an abandoned egg that needs to be sat upon, and Seussian castles with bent windows and intricate archways supported by struts. Geisel loved the comic strip format, both as an artist and as a reader. “At its best, the comic strip is an art form of such terrific wumpf! that I’d much rather spend any evening re-reading the beautifully insane sanities of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat than to sit myself down in some opera house or hear some smiling Irish tenor murdering Pagliacci,” he said later.72

  Unfortunately, Hejji would be canceled by Hearst after twelve weeks, ending on a cliffhanger just as Hejji and the Mighty One are about to be jumped by the masked Evil One. Geisel insisted that he had been fired from the strip—it made for a better story. “A telegram came from William Randolph Hearst saying, ‘Fire the last three people you hired,’” said Ted. “I was one of them, so that was the end of that career.” But “[i]t’s just as well,” Ted added. “I didn’t know where the story was going next.”73

  What he did know, he said later, was that “Flit was pouring out of my ears and beginning to itch me.”74 Fortunately, Standard Oil would assign him yet another unglamorous product, which he would once again promote with his usual fervor and flair. This time, the assignment came from executives at Essomarine—which manufactured oil for boat engines—who gave Geisel the task of providing the illustrations for a boating safety manual called Secrets of the Deep, or The Perfect Yachtsman. Geisel delivered a cover and several drawings, while Yachting magazine editor Bill Taylor—writing as “Old Captain Taylor”—provided the practical safety tips. The guide was full of good advice, but the art of Dr. Seuss, coupled with Taylor’s spry writing, made the manual so popular that Standard Oil asked Geisel to create a special campaign for the upcoming 1936 National Boat Show in New York.

  What Geisel created wasn’t quite an advertising campaign for a specific product; his idea rarely even mentioned engine oil. Instead, he created an exclusive club that promoted the Essomarine brand, in the same way that Walt Disney had created the first Mickey Mouse Clubs in 1930 to promote the Disney name, and not just individual Disney cartoons. Working with several representatives of Esso, Geisel proposed creating the Seuss Navy, which came with its own letters of introduction, registration cards, and membership certificates—all busily and beautifully illustrated by Ted, who created a certificate overflowing with sailors and sea monsters, and aff
ixed with the official seal, on which Ted had drawn a seal he would later name Nuzzlepuss. Every member of the Seuss Navy would have the rank of Admiral, except for Ted, who declared himself Admiral in Chief and Cartographer Plenipotentiary.

  Esso initially printed only a few certificates to distribute at the 1936 boat show, limiting enrollment to owners of boats with inboard motors, but also smartly providing certificates to several high-profile boat owners. “[Sailor Vincent] Astor and [bandleader] Guy Lombardo and a few other celebrities hung these things in their yachts,” recalled Ted. “And very soon everyone who had a putt-putt [boat] wanted to join the Seuss Navy.”75 What people really wanted were Ted’s certificates—and eventually anyone, even those without boats, could join the Seuss Navy.

  And join they did, attracting more than 75,000 members in the first two years of the program.76 Esso was delighted—and so was Geisel, as every boat show presented another opportunity to throw a big Seuss Navy party where food was plentiful and booze flowed freely. “It was cheaper to give a party for a few thousand people, furnishing all the booze, than it was to advertise in full-page ads,” Geisel said. For the print ads, he would go on to create a series of sea creatures similar to his Moto-Monsters called Marine Muggs—like the Sludge Tarpon, a fish with a long pointed nose that took great joy in clogging boat engines—but the Moto-Monster ads would be secondary to the parties themselves, which received plenty of attention in the press, “and then they would have to explain it by talking about Essomarine,” said Ted.77

  As the campaign wore on, Ted would create short dramas to be performed at boat shows—or would show up at the Seuss Navy in full admiral costume, hamming it up for the party crowds and the cameras. “We used to get the Bayway refinery band to play for dances,” said Ted. “One night they played four notes and walked off the stand, just to attract press attention.”78 Things also became more and more elaborate; eventually Ted would lead all of his new Admirals in a ceremony swearing an oath of allegiance to Mother Neptune. “The Seuss Navy was a rather corny outfit,” Geisel said affectionately, but he was proud of it79—and for years, his official biography would include the Seuss Navy as one of the societies, clubs, and fraternal orders to which he belonged. Ted liked to claim that by the time World War II started, the Seuss Navy was one of the largest in the world. “We commissioned the whole Standard Oil fleet, and we also had . . . the Queen Mary and most of the ships of the U.S. lines.”80

  Geisel was enjoying his time with the Seuss Navy so much, in fact, that he began to dread returning to the relatively mundane Flit campaign. As he later explained, “I was on the [Flit] account for seventeen years, using exactly the same caption by drawing a different picture each time. Flit was my important account, and it was a seasonal product that sold during the summer, so I got all my work done in the first six months of the year.” But now, he said, “I was really wanting something more to do.”81 He was still playing with the animal trophies—Geisel would call them the Seuss System of Unorthodox Taxidermy—and there would be other side projects: cartoons for sports magazines and women’s fashion monthlies, and more jobs illustrating books, including Austin Ripley’s adult-oriented Mystery Puzzles, featuring a cover by Ted with a genuinely frightening knife-wielding killer, and an interior cartoon of an innocent-looking little boy carrying an axe in one hand and a man’s decapitated head in the other. But these were still work-for-hire jobs, generating no real ongoing income, and—worse for Ted—they just weren’t that much fun to do.

  He was, however, still intrigued by the idea of writing and illustrating children’s books. “I’d like to say I got into children’s books because I had a burning passion, a great message to bring to the youth of the world,” Geisel said later, “but it was because I was going nuts.”82 Four years earlier, he had abandoned the ABC book for good—even had the pages not been lost in the mail, there had been a lack of enthusiasm for the project by publishers. Now he was ready to try his hand again at another children’s book—but he had no idea what to write about. The inspiration wouldn’t come.

  As he would often do when stuck for ideas, Ted suggested taking an extended vacation, and he and Helen left for Europe in the summer of 1936. The two of them lounged for several weeks in the Bavarian Alps, taking long bus tours up into the mountains and drinking on open patios. Ted sketched the jagged mountain peaks, hoping for something, anything, to spark his imagination. But it was hard to be creative; war was in the air that summer, and as Ted traveled through the homeland of his Großvater, he was troubled by the oppressive Nazi presence and propaganda, and wary of Hitler as he watched him “Sieg Heil!” athletes at the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. On August 29, as Ted boarded the Swedish American steamship MS Kungsholm at the Swedish port of Gothenburg, his notebook was still empty. The vacation had been a creative disappointment.

  The trip back didn’t make things any easier. Bad weather rocked the Kungsholm as it slowly made the weeklong trip back across the Atlantic toward New York. The 1,575 passengers were largely confined to indoor activities; with the rough waters, no one was permitted to linger on deck. Passengers were invited to “dance to the lively tempo of a modern dance orchestra,” said the ship’s promotional literature, “or merely enjoy an adventure in cracked ice and tall glasses.”83 Geisel, perhaps predictably, chose the latter. As he sank back into one of the sofas in the first class lounge, vodka on the rocks in hand, he became aware of the sound of the ship’s engines thrumming in a distinctive, regular rhythm: bah-dah bum bah-dah bum bah-dah bum bah-dah bum . . . over and over again. It was inadvertent anapestic tetrameter—the same rhythm as Clement C. Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—and it was making Geisel crazy. “Finally Helen suggested I think up nonsense rhymes to be said to the rhythm of the damned engines,” said Ted, “just to get rid of it.”84

  Using several sheets of the Kungsholm’s stationery, Geisel began scribbling down nonrhyming snippets of ideas for a narrative:

  A stupid horse and wagon

  Horse and chariot

  Chariot pulled by a flying cat

  Flying cat pulling a Viking ship

  Viking ship sailing up a volcano

  Volcano blowing hearts, diamonds & clubs

  “Those are the first words I ever wrote in the field of writing for children,” Geisel said later. “I put them down in the bar of the MS Kungsholm, sometime during the summer of 1936. I wrote them for only one reason. I was trying to keep my mind off the storm that was going on.”85 Next, as if trying to finally reckon with the pulsing rhythm of the ship’s engines, Ted wrote a rhyming couplet:

  I saw a giant eight miles tall

  Who took the cards, 52 in all

  Stuck, he then began reciting silly words and phrases, bouncing them to the rhythms of the engines, trying to make one stick. And then, “out of nowhere,” as Geisel recalled, he suddenly had it:

  And this is a story that no one can beat

  I saw it all happen on Mulberry Street.86

  CHAPTER 5

  BRAT BOOKS

  1936–1940

  The MS Kungsholm docked in New York City on Tuesday, September 8, after ten days at sea. Geisel couldn’t get off the boat fast enough; since his evening in the lounge listening to the throb of the ship’s engines, he’d been playing with the same bouncing stanza over and over again:

  And this is a story that no one can beat

  I saw it all happen on Mulberry Street.1

  “When I finally got off the ship, this refrain kept going through my head,” he said. “I couldn’t shake it.”2 But the story he would tell at that pulsing, rollicking pace wouldn’t come quickly. Apart from his handwritten pages of random situations—“Flying cat pulling a Viking ship”—Geisel had no real idea what his story was or where it would go. In fact, he was probably not even certain he had the beginnings of a children’s book on his hands. In his work so far, Geisel had shown no real disposition for writing fo
r kids; children in his work tended to be the butts of jokes, taking the pie in the face rather than delivering it. In a 1928 Judge cartoon titled “Making Our Daughters Less Irritating,” Ted created a device—worthy of T. R. Geisel and Rube Goldberg—that removed the pout from a young woman by swinging down a mallet “and socko” smacking her in the mouth.3

  Geisel kept coming back to his handwritten list, which began with “A stupid horse and wagon,” and became progressively more fanciful as the list went on. As he hunched over the drawing table in his apartment, Ted wrote out more and more verses, printing in pencil on yellow sheets of paper, and read them aloud to Helen, asking for her opinion. Helen, as Ted would quickly discover, had an ear for clunky rhymes and a knack for character; while Ted would never shy from asking for opinions on his work, there were few whose opinions he valued more than Helen’s. With Helen both encouraging and editing him, Ted slaved over every word, every line, every beat, and every drawing. “I wrote the book to get it out,” Ted said later. “Self-psychoanalysis.”4

  If it was self-psychoanalysis, then there was a bit of regression going on—for Geisel would dig deep into his Springfield upbringing for inspiration, giving his book some of the look, feel, and emotion of his own childhood. Ted’s narrator would reflect his own fondness for exaggeration, his proclivity for “turning minnows into whales” in the name of “a story that no one can beat.” For his “stupid horse and wagon” that his young narrator eventually turns into a parade of elephants, airplanes, and motorcycle policemen, Ted was influenced by the look of the horse-drawn beer delivery wagons that had rolled out of the various Geisel brewing companies. And those motorcycles ridden by the police escort as the tale gets wilder? They closely resemble the famous Indian motorcycles manufactured in Springfield, all the way down to their red bodies and white-walled tires. The Mulberry Street of Ted’s book wasn’t literally the Mulberry Street of Springfield, of course—there can be no traffic jam at the intersection of Mulberry and Bliss, for example, because in Springfield, those two streets never cross each another.5 Instead, Ted had distilled his own gut and memories through the filter of imagination to turn a very real place into something larger and more magical than itself. Like the setting of any good children’s story, Mulberry Street exists on an atlas of infinite imagination.