Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Geisel wrote and drew throughout the winter of 1936 and into early 1937, filling one trash can after another with discarded yellow pages and crumpled-up drawings. “Six months later, I found I had a book on my hands,” he said. “So, what to do with it?”6 As a freelancer, Geisel had no literary agent to shop his book around New York on his behalf; if he wanted his book in the hands of publishers, he was going to have to do it himself. So Ted hit the streets, lugging around his book—now called A Story That No One Can Beat—as he visited the offices of New York publishers. Other times, he mailed his original art to editors, waiting anxiously for weeks for a response, and—if the response was negative—hoping his art would be returned to him none the worse for wear.

  To his increasing distress, the responses were all negative. Geisel would later recall being rejected by twenty-seven publishers, though that number would vary with the telling, ranging from as low as twenty to as high as forty-three. Regardless, no one was biting. While editors knew the Dr. Seuss name, it wasn’t enough to overcome some initial skepticism. Some editors expressed concern that A Story That No One Can Beat had no real moral lesson for children—that the narrator, as a result of choosing not to share his tall tale with his father, had suffered no consequences. (“What’s wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at?” Ted groused.)7 Others argued that he should leave the rhyming verse to Mother Goose. Mostly, said Geisel, “[t]he main reason they all gave was there was nothing similar on the market, so of course it wouldn’t sell.”8

  In the late spring of 1937, Geisel decided he was done with it. After one last rejection, he was walking up Madison Avenue toward his apartment on East 96th Street, with his book tucked under one arm, determined “to burn it in the incinerator” when he got home. The walk back uptown would lead to one of the luckiest breaks of his career. “I’m a great believer in accidents,” Geisel said later. “Everybody gets into things accidentally.”9 As he reached the 400 block of Madison Avenue, he ran into Marshall “Mike” McClintock—a fellow Dartmouth man, Class of 1926—who asked him what he was carrying.

  “That’s a book no one will publish,” Geisel told him. “I’m lugging it home to burn.”10

  McClintock told Geisel he’d just started a job as the juvenile book editor for Vanguard Press—housed in the very building they were standing in front of at 424 Madison Avenue—and asked Geisel if he’d like to come inside to show his book to Vanguard president James Henle. “So we went inside,” reported Geisel, “. . . and he took me to the president of Vanguard Press.” Henle, a former labor reporter for the New York World, was a publishing crusader unafraid to embrace one of Vanguard’s founding philosophies of publishing “unpublishable” books. While that sometimes meant gambling on controversial, socially relevant books like James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, it also meant taking a chance on books like Geisel’s that didn’t look like anything else on the market.

  Henle turned Geisel over to editor Evelyn Shrifte, who agreed to formally acquire A Story That Can’t Be Beat. According to Geisel, the entire meeting, from first hello to the signing of contracts, had taken only twenty minutes. Whether that was another of his dramatic embellishments is uncertain; what mattered was that a chance encounter with Mike McClintock on Madison Avenue had led to Geisel getting his first book published. “That’s one of the reasons I believe in luck,” Geisel said later. “If I’d been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I would be in the dry-cleaning business today!”11

  Even with the book in the hands of Henle and Shrifte, there was still a little work to be done. In general, said Shrifte, Henle’s editorial approach was laissez-faire, offering lots of advice, but keeping his hands mostly off of it. And for the most part, Henle did leave his author alone, though he did ask Geisel to come up with a “snappier” title than A Story That Can’t Be Beat, finally accepting Geisel’s revised title, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Geisel also made one minor change in the text, naming the narrator after Mike McClintock’s eight-year-old son, Marco. On the book’s first page, he would dedicate Mulberry Street to Mike’s wife, Helene McClintock, “Mother of the One and Original Marco.”12

  Once it was officially in the hands of Shrifte and the production department at Vanguard, however, Geisel still couldn’t leave it alone. He was obsessed with the colors and the quality of the inks that would be used to mass-produce his art. “There was a great to-do with Ted about color samples,” said Shrifte. “He knew what he wanted.”13 It was a refrain that would be fairly leveled at Ted Geisel for the rest of his life. By the end of August, however, with Shrifte ready to send the book to print, Ted finally had to let it go. He and Helen retreated to Maine for a short vacation at Blue Jay Bay. On arrival at their hotel, Ted found a telegram from Shrifte waiting for him: EVERYTHING OKAY DON’T WORRY.14

  And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was published in September 1937, to only minimum fanfare. Vanguard worked hard to promote it, gambling on a full-page ad in Publishers Weekly, announcing the publishing debut of “the good Dr. Seuss.”15 And yet, even with the book taking up a full page in its own publication, Publishers Weekly refused to review it. Word of mouth seemed to help—and naturally, the book blew out of stores in Springfield, where residents swarmed Johnson’s Bookstore on Main Street the night before the book’s official release, banging on the store’s locked doors and windows, begging clerks to sell them copies.16

  The real breakthrough for Mulberry Street came in the pages of The New Yorker, where the esteemed writer and intellectual Clifton “Kip” Fadiman gave the book a brief but enthusiastic notice: “They say it’s for children,” wrote Fadiman, “but better get a copy for yourself and marvel at the good Dr. Seuss’s impossible pictures and the moral tale of the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but too well.”17 Geisel was beside himself with excitement. “If the great Kip Fadiman likes it,” he enthused, “I’ll have to do another.”18

  The New York Times also reviewed the book favorably, calling it “highly original and entertaining,” while The Atlantic called it “so completely spontaneous that the American child can take it to his heart on sight.” Ted’s old Dartmouth acquaintance Alexander Laing would review the book for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, writing his piece in spry though somewhat terrible rhyme, where he comically addressed the issue of the pronunciation of Ted’s famous pseudonym:

  You’re wrong as the deuce

  And shouldn’t rejoice

  If you’re calling him Seuss.

  He pronounces it Soice.19

  The one opinion Ted craved, however, he’d never get; Nettie Geisel had died nine years earlier. “My mother would have loved it,” Ted said later.20

  Despite Vanguard’s marketing efforts and the positive press, it would take a while before Mulberry Street would sell through its initial print run of 15,000 books. Geisel had worried, perhaps rightly, that Mulberry Street’s $1 cover price—“a lot of money” he said warily21—would be too expensive for Depression-era readers. Sales seemed to bear that out; by 1943, it had sold 31,600 copies—a respectable number to be sure, but one that would earn only about $3,500 in royalties over seven years.22 It was clear that he hadn’t yet found a new full-time profession. But even Geisel wasn’t sure he wanted to be seen solely as a writer of books for what he called “the Kiddie-Kar and Bubble Gum Set.” Writing for the children, he said, “was not a sign of going forward. This was a step down. A loss of face . . . literary slumming.” Most children’s books, he continued, “insulted the intelligence not only of the child, but also of the people who wrote them.”23

  And yet Geisel was on the leading edge of authors creating a new generation of respectable children’s books, moving away from generic books heavy on morality or steeped in fairy tales, and toward creator-driven stories centered on character and identified with an author’s particular artistic style or point of view. The year before Vanguard’s publication of Mulberry Street,
Viking Press had released The Story of Ferdinand, by writer Munro Leaf and artist Robert Lawson, a book with a likable, quirky main character and such strong crossover appeal—children and adults loved it—that it had raced to the top of the bestseller list, at one point outselling even Gone with the Wind. Two years after Mulberry Street came the first appearances of two iconic characters, in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline and H. A. Rey’s Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys, featuring Curious George. Kids’ books would get better and smarter—and Ted would consistently lead the way, inventing, revising, and reinventing them again over the next five decades, with the perpetually in print Mulberry Street as his calling card.

  Still, with longevity comes reexamination and scrutiny—and as one generation after another continued to read Mulberry Street, so, too, would some of its blemishes, cracks, and outright biases come to be exposed. In the mid-1970s, Ted and Mulberry Street would draw the fire of the nascent women’s movement for Marco’s—and Ted’s—dismissiveness of the female point of view. Early on in Mulberry Street, as Marco’s tale gets taller, he rejects including in his story something as commonplace as a reindeer pulling a sleigh, arguing that anyone, “even Jane,” could come up with something so obvious.24

  Confronted in 1977 with Marco’s dismissal of Jane, Geisel, at age seventy-two, seemed slightly exasperated at being taken to task over words he had written at age thirty-three. “Suddenly, after all these years, I’m deluged with protests over that one line,” he told The Saturday Evening Post. “They say that line will cause boys to grow up feeling superior to their sisters. They demanded I change the line.” Geisel was sympathetic to the argument and said he knew the request was “well-intentioned.” But he also insisted that it was nothing personal—that Marco was merely expressing the same sort of sibling rivalry that had beset brothers and sisters, including him and Marnie, for eons. “The boy in my story did feel that way about his sister,” he explained, “and I wasn’t about to change a word.”25

  Equally as problematic was his use of a derisive term for Asians in Mulberry Street’s final two-page spread, where Ted had drawn a massive parade of characters, which included, as originally written, “A Chinaman who eats with sticks.” The accompanying drawing reflected the stereotypical 1930s portrayal of Asians, depicting a man with a conical straw hat, chopsticks, and slanted slits for eyes. For most of his life, Geisel would never quite see the problem with this sort of cartoon portrayal. As he saw it, he was working within the established norms of the era—just as, in the same book, he had drawn a rajah with pointed slippers, a jeweled turban, and a thick upturned mustache, a look straight out of films like the 1938 Raymond Massey movie The Drum. For Geisel, it made the character immediately identifiable as a rajah, in the same way that all of Geisel’s elected officials tended to wear striped trousers, tailcoats, and top hats. Seventy years on, however, the stereotypes typically haven’t aged well, and remain a grating point of contention with many modern readers.

  In 1937, however, the only real controversies surrounding Mulberry Street involved Geisel’s unwillingness to personally promote it. Asked to speak about his book at the New York Public Library—Anne Carroll Moore, the children’s librarian, was a fervent fan—Geisel made it as far as the front steps of the majestic building before losing his nerve and going home. Another time, Vanguard arranged for him to make a public appearance at a small college in Westchester County—an engagement he tried to squirm out of before Helen told him not to be rude. On the morning of his speech, Ted left the apartment on time, then never showed up at the venue. A panicked Helen called Shrifte, then friends, then family. Finally, expecting the worst, she called area hospitals, looking to see if Ted had been in an accident. As Helen sat anxiously by the phone into the evening, Ted finally showed up back at their apartment and sheepishly admitted he’d been hiding out at Grand Central Station all day. He had never even gotten on the train to Westchester.26

  * * *

  • • • •

  With Mulberry Street proving slow to earn out, Geisel would have to continue to earn the bulk of his income through his advertising work. While Essomarine motor oil would remain his largest client—and the Seuss Navy would continue to take up much of his time—Geisel was having fun with some of his new accounts. He had picked up Schaefer Beer, doing his first work for an alcoholic beverage since the end of Prohibition. For one of the Schaefer ads, he managed to incorporate another of his hobbies, showing a taxidermied goat’s head thirstily eyeing a tray of frothing beer glasses. He would also create an unconventional campaign for Hankey Bannister whisky, sculpting a Hankey Bird—a Scottish black bird in a kilt, vest, and tam, explained Ted, “developed after years of painstaking cross-breeding in the Seuss Laboratories”27—that could be attached to the whisky bottle with a spring clip. Customers would end up buying the whisky just so they could keep the sculpted bird.

  In a brief self-penned biography Geisel submitted to the Dartmouth alumni magazine in March 1938, he hinted at a number of unrealized projects that may or may not have been in the works. “A sheaf of poems, musical comedy scripts, articles, etc. give evidence to the fact that Ted, one of these days, will characteristically break into a new field,” he wrote in a third-person profile. “His ambition is to write, and his next venture might well be in movie scenarios.” He also mentioned a new favorite hobby: “mummy-digging in South America.”28

  Lately, he had picked up an actual new hobby: collecting hats. “Why, he must have several hundred,” Marnie admitted to one journalist years later. The hats—nearly a hundred of them, including fire hats, a feathered admiral’s cap, and a particularly ornate Czech army helmet—were stored in his office closet, just close enough to the dining room that he could run in during parties to grab a handful for an impromptu bit of performing for guests. Recently, however, he had gone to them for another bit of motivation—for hats would play a key role in a new children’s book he was working on for Vanguard.

  The plot was partly inspired by a bit of real-life resentment. Geisel recalled that he’d been riding in a train, “and there was a fellow sitting ahead of me, who I didn’t like.” While Geisel didn’t know who the man was, he couldn’t take his eyes off of his “real ridiculous Wall Street broker’s hat.” There was something about the man that rubbed him the wrong way. “Very stuffy,” said Geisel, “and I just began playing around with the idea of what his reaction would be if I took his hat off and threw it out the window. And I said, ‘He’d probably just grow another one and ignore me.’”29

  From there, the idea evolved into a story about a little boy named Bartholomew Cubbins, who offends a snooty king when he can’t deferentially remove his hat because another one automatically materializes in its place. As Geisel was plotting his story, the number of hats troubling Bartholomew kept increasing, going from 48 to 135 and finally to 500. Geisel opted to write his new book in straight narrative prose, as opposed to the rhyming verse of Mulberry Street. Further, he had decided to make his story more like a fairy tale, plumbing old stories for characters and motifs. “I knew nothing about children’s books,” he admitted later. “Traditional fairy tales were still in order. I thought perhaps that was the thing to do.”30

  That didn’t mean it was going to be any easier to write, however; in fact, there were times it made things even harder. Working within the fairy-tale setting provided Geisel with almost too much territory, too many different directions in which to take his story, too many characters and settings to play with. “I began to think of appurtenances around the castle, and one of them would be a bowman, and then it occurred to me there would also be an executioner,” he said. “And I said, ‘We’ve gotta get a little bastard of a crown prince in here.’ And I would draw and semi-write that sequence up. Then I would . . . see how they fit. I’m not a consecutive writer.”31

  Geisel had adopted a regular work routine, sitting down at his desk in the second bedroom of their apartment at more or less the same time eve
ry morning—usually around nine A.M.—and working all day. If he needed a break, he would take a short walk or play a bit of handball or squash, then return home to work late into the evening, a cigarette constantly burning in his ashtray. Hanging on one wall of his office was the paper rifle target of his father’s. “To remind me of perfection,” said Ted—a standard, he said, he feared he would never attain.32 At the end of the evening, he would finish off with a nightcap, usually a straight vodka, then go to bed to start the whole process over again the next morning.

  By the summer of 1938, it was finished—or at least it was ready to go to Evelyn Shrifte for final edits and production. As in the case of Mulberry Street, Geisel still couldn’t leave it alone, fussing over the colors and scribbling his comments all over the mocked-up pages. Geisel was meticulous about the layout, penciling in the precise spacing he expected between the margins and the text, then phoning Shrifte in her office to make sure his directions had been followed or giving her yet another correction to the text.

  The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was published in the fall of 1938—and it sold slowly. The reviews were still good—The New York Times thought it “a lovely bit of tomfoolery”—but like Mulberry Street, its price tag probably kept it out of reach of some readers; Vanguard had priced it at $1.50 because of its higher page count. Alexander Laing, always one of Geisel’s favorite reviewers, once again reviewed Ted’s book for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. While always enthusiastic—maybe even overly so—Laing was particularly prescient as he speculated on Geisel’s creative future: “Dr. Seuss . . . has given strong evidences that his several other occupations, madly fascinating as they are, may have been only the preludes to a discovery of his proper vocation,” wrote Laing. “I do not see what is to prevent him from becoming the Grimm of our times.”33