Reviews were generally positive, though never effusive. “Though Seuss-funny, this is not quite as chuckle-rousing as previous works of this ingenius [sic] author-artist,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer,67 while the Hartford Courant recognized that the plot was “derived from, and not as good as, If I Ran the Zoo.”68 For the most part, however, reviewers seemed glad to have Dr. Seuss back after having had no Dr. Seuss book for nearly three years. In a rollicking review in The New York Times, Pogo creator Walt Kelly applauded “the fertility rampant in the brain of Dr. Seuss” and cheekily advised parents to “buy the children a television set . . . to divert their attention” while they tiptoed off to the den to have the book all to themselves.69 One of Geisel’s favorite reviews, however, appeared in Junior Reviewers, where a seven-year-old critic suggested that “[a]ll ages would like it, from six to forty-four—that’s how old my mother is.”70
Scrambled Eggs Super! wasn’t destined to be the blockbuster that Geisel hoped for and needed—but as he left Phyllis Jackson that late summer afternoon, he was more deliberately considering his next book. His last several books had featured some new characters—Thidwick, Peter T. Hooper, Gerald McGrew—and a few old ones, such as Marco and Bartholomew Cubbins. But he hadn’t yet revisited the character who stood—or sat, rather—at the center of one of his bestselling books, the character that editor Louise Bonino had urged him to return to time and again, and who hadn’t been seen in a Dr. Seuss book in nearly fifteen years: Horton the elephant.
Geisel returned to La Jolla and began writing and sketching, and within a few weeks had the rough outline of a story he was calling Horton Hears ’Em!, in which Horton discovers a microscopic civilization of creatures called Whos living in a speck of dust. Geisel was taking particular care with the way the book sounded. Scrambled Eggs Super! had been somewhat overwritten, with too many Seussian names and long sentences that could become tongue twisters for parents reading the book aloud. So he and Helen would carefully read the draft pages, crossing out words, substituting others, and reading them out loud to each other for a sense of their sound and ease of readability. For instance, where Ted had written “earsplitting hullabaloo,” Helen recommended striking the adjective in favor of a “Seuss onomatopoeic word.” Ted came back with “howling mad hullabaloo” instead, which was much better and would stay in the final version.
As always, when he was at work on a book, Ted would sit at his desk all day, sketching, writing, filling trash cans with crumpled art, and wearing pencils to the nub. Other times, when stuck for an idea, he would lean back in his chair, feet up on the desk, and look out the windows at the Pacific or toward the country club far down the hill. “[Working] is rough in a vacation community where everybody’s down on the beach or out fishing or playing golf,”71 said Ted. It was probably why he tended to get more done at night, when it was quieter and the beaches were dark. It was then that Ted got his second wind, sitting at his desk late into the night, drinking one cup of coffee after another and chain-smoking—habits that “drove Helen crazy,” said Peggy, “she worried so about them.”72 Ted would finally drag himself to bed around two in the morning, sleep until nine or ten A.M., then head back to the desk again.
Still, Ted wasn’t all work and no play. Embracing their new role as permanent residents of La Jolla, the Geisels began hosting small parties, often as entertainment for out-of-town guests like Bennett Cerf or Phyllis Jackson. These were good opportunities for Ted to get away from the drawing board and mingle with friends, many of whom were as colorful—and as colorfully named—as some of Ted’s own characters. There was attorney Colonel Sawyer, whose first name really was Colonel, as well as lawyer Frank Kockritz and the amiable blowhard Edward Longstreth, a favorite target for Ted’s practical jokes. Longstreth was an art collector who claimed to be an expert in abstract art—and Ted, detecting more than a whiff of bluster, couldn’t resist boasting that he collected the art of “the great Mexican modernist” Escarobus—an entirely fictional painter—and informed the clueless but intrigued Longstreth that he had a few valuable Escarobus paintings for sale. “My god,” said Longstreth, “I’d give anything to have an Escarobus!”73
And so Ted spent several days painting in what he considered a modern art style—slathering paint onto several canvases, then scraping it off, dragging wet bread across the surface, and rubbing a lead pencil sideways and slantways. “That experience made me suspect that a lot of modern art is malarkey,” said Ted. “If I can do it myself, it can’t be any good.”74 Ted then delivered one of the barely dry paintings to Longstreth, who gushed over the painting’s modernist qualities, paid Ted five hundred dollars, and asked if he had any more to sell. Exasperated—and not quite believing that Longstreth could be fooled this long—Helen finally stepped in to stop the transaction and made Ted return Longstreth’s five hundred dollars. “She spoils some of my best gags,” Ted lamented.75
Despite quashing his pranks, Helen remained Ted’s best and most devoted collaborator, keeping him on task, critiquing plot points and poetic scansion, and brewing copious amounts of coffee. The working title of the book had become Horton Hears a Who!, a title that reflected Helen’s constant advice as Ted revised draft after draft: “[the Whos] are small but important.”76 This was entirely the point. As Ted explained later, the story of Horton and the Whos had been inspired by his trip to Japan the year before. “Japan was just emerging,” said Ted, “the people were voting for the first time, running their own lives—and the theme was obvious: ‘A person’s a person no matter how small.’”77 It would become the mantra driving Horton’s narrative. Horton Hears a Who! was Ted offering an open hand of friendship to the Japanese. Through Horton, he was telling them they mattered and deserved to be taken care of in a postwar world.
While Geisel had previously written stories that could be read as having a message or moral, Horton Hears a Who! marked the first time he had deliberately written a book with an ethical point of view. But such stories, he thought, inherently came with certain risks. “If you have a burning message that you feel has to be told to children, maybe I guess you have to do it,” he had once told his Utah writing class. “But if you’re in this group . . . you’re not producing juvenile lit[erature]. You’re producing propaganda.”78
In his visits to Germany both before and during World War II, Geisel had seen firsthand the effects of propaganda on children, and its ability to powerfully and immediately shape their morals and worldview. If Dr. Seuss was going to engage in propaganda, Geisel was determined to make certain he was saying something he strongly believed in—and ideally saying it in such a way that readers might not realize they were on the receiving end of a moral or message. “My books don’t carry heavy morals,” he would say later. “The morals sneak in, as they do in all drama. Every story has got to have a winner, so I happen to make the good guys win.”79
Still, apart from the obvious message of Horton’s humanist mantra, there were other places in Horton where readers thought they spotted Geisel’s politics and point of view on clear display. Some of Horton’s key tormentors, for instance, were a group of monkeys called the Wickersham Brothers, named for the 1931 Wickersham Commission, which had been created by President Hoover in 1929 to study the enforcement of Prohibition laws. Later, after the black-bottomed bird steals Horton’s clover holding the speck of dust containing the Whos and drops it in a gigantic field of clover, the Mayor of Whoville describes the wreckage in his town in terms that led some readers to believe that Dr. Seuss was depicting Hiroshima immediately after the detonation of the atomic bomb, leaving behind little but blasted furniture and stopped clocks. Geisel would only quietly raise his eyebrows at such a suggestion, but he did admit to a bit of proselytizing on the importance of voting. “When the little [Who] boy stands up and yells ‘Yopp!’ and saves the whole place, that’s my statement about voting,” said Ted. “Everyone counts.”80 Geisel would later rightly point out that he knew a thing or two about effecti
ve propaganda: not only had he been in advertising—perhaps the ultimate propaganda machine—but his work for the Signal Corps had consisted almost solely of “propaganda and indoctrination films.” When Geisel was asked point-blank if he used those “propagandistic skills” in his books, his answer was straightforward and unapologetic: “Of course.”81
As Thanksgiving neared, Horton Hears a Who! was still on Ted’s drawing board, with no real ending yet in sight. Ted and Helen had scheduled a Christmas trip to Yosemite to attend the famous Bracebridge Dinner at the Ahwahnee Hotel—but now Helen canceled those plans to give Ted the breathing room he needed to complete Horton by early 1954. With his deadline clock ticking, Ted grew sour. “There was tenseness when he was finishing a book,” recalled Peggy. “There would be doom and gloom and ‘I’m never going to write anything, I’ve lost it, I just can’t do it.’ Then suddenly, when something would click, he’d walk out of his studio and the world would be wonderful.”82
Ted walked out of his studio in late January 1954 with Horton Hears a Who!, then tucked it under his arm, flying to New York with Helen to deliver the book personally to Bennett Cerf. They arrived in the middle of an ice storm that gripped the city for more than a week. On their first morning in town, the Geisels taxied over to the Random House offices in the Villard Mansion, a complex of Italianate brownstone mansions at Madison Avenue and 51st Street, and bounded up the stairs to Louise Bonino’s office. Bonino looked excitedly through Ted’s pages, then called in Cerf and editor Saxe Commins so Ted could read his manuscript to them out loud. Cerf, Commins, and Bonino laughed in all the right places and applauded enthusiastically at the ending—and Ted found he loved having the audience. From now on, Ted would personally deliver his books to Random House and read them aloud. Bonino had started a tradition that would, as the years went on, become a highly anticipated event.
Ted and Helen spent the rest of their week in New York visiting old friends, taking in meetings, and trying their best to enjoy the city that had once been so familiar to them. Ted was still nursing the dream of turning The Seven Lady Godivas into a Broadway musical and met with several like-minded funders and producers but left with no real commitments. He would keep trying.
His final obligation, before returning to the warmer climes of La Jolla, was to serve as the host of the NBC telecast called Excursion, to be broadcast live on Sunday, January 31. Geisel would lead a discussion about modern art—very much on his mind since the Escarobus prank—and while the show would give the appearance of a spontaneous conversation, Geisel had actually scripted the entire show in advance, filing it away as a “shooting script for TV Ford Foundation telecast attempting to explain something to teenagers of the country about Contemporary Art.”83 Ted made his way up to the NBC studios on the third floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, where he was warmly greeted by the former Dr. T. himself, actor Hans Conried, who was playing the role of “An Intellectual” in Geisel’s screenplay, alongside Burgess Meredith, playing “The Average Man.”
As part of his discussion on contemporary art, Geisel planned to show how the same animal could be interpreted differently in varying contemporary styles. He would do so by bringing a live horse into the studio, then have six art students from Cooper Union draw or paint the horse in distinctive modern styles. “I know very little about modern art,” Geisel told Burgess Meredith’s bewildered character. “That’s why I’m so interested in this experiment. I not only want you to learn something, but I want to learn something myself . . . When a modern artist paints a picture of horse, why doesn’t the horse look like a horse?”84
Since his Escarobus prank, Geisel seemed genuinely interested in figuring out the appeal of contemporary art—as he had remarked at that time, “If I can do it myself, it can’t be any good”85—and in his view, his first obligation was to take some of the pretense out of it. Thus, Geisel’s “Intellectual,” played with haughty joy by Conried, gets to spout a lot of Seussian faux intellectual doublespeak as he enthuses about a painting in the modern style:
You do not feel the spalatinous spiritual significance . . . ? The paradoxically inverted and unfettered manifestations? Your eyes do not see the hypnogogic declarations of the artists’ very soul as it struggles in linear combat against the staccato overtones of an antiquated hypothesis?
But then Geisel takes the air out of Conried’s analysis by permitting Meredith to get the last word: “This man is obviously a phony.”
Finally, as Geisel circled among the six students painting in various modern styles, he seemed to be explaining his own artistic style and creative decisions as well. Artists weren’t necessarily interested in “spittin’ images,” said the brat-book author who claimed his bizarre animals were an unsuccessful attempt to draw from life; instead, images were processed “in the brain . . . where the artistry takes place.” When another artist explained that he was working to capture the “tiredness of the horse,” Geisel’s response was an insight into his own unique artistic look. “To put over the point strongly, you did two things,” Geisel explained. “You threw away the parts of the horse you didn’t need; and the parts you needed, you exaggerated.”86 Geisel had never summed up the Seussian style so succinctly.
And yet Ted wrapped things up with disinterest. “I think it’s important for everyone out there to know that you young modern artists can draw things just exactly like they look . . . if you want to,” Ted said. “But if you don’t want to . . . that’s okay with me.” Burgess Meredith’s closing statement, as written by Ted, was equally irresolute. “I don’t understand everything they’ve told us,” said Meredith, “but if we have succeeded in interesting you even a little . . . then perhaps we have done what we started out to do.”87
* * *
• • • •
On March 2, 1954, at home in California, Ted Geisel turned fifty years old. Helen threw a birthday party that grew so loud and raucous that she claimed even their Irish setter had “a complete and permanent hangover” the next morning.88 Looking back over his last half century, Ted was generally pleased. He and Helen were living a good life in their handpicked location in La Jolla, still enjoyed each other’s company after nearly twenty-seven years of marriage, and were well liked in the community. There had been some bumps professionally—The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. would remain an embarrassment for decades and had convinced him to abandon screenwriting for good—but all in all, he was having a respectable, successful career. He was one of the best-known children’s authors working, and remained hopeful he was only a book or two away from being able to write children’s books full time.
Until then, he was still taking the rare advertising gig—he would shortly be at work on billboards for Holly Sugar—and was continuing to plug away at other side projects he thought had potential, like the Seven Lady Godivas musical and a somewhat dirty modern fable he was writing with Kelvin Vanderlip called Whither California? that Helen finally scuttled for being “tasteless and not funny.”89 Still, it was all enough to impress his alma mater—and in early spring of 1954, Ted was delighted to learn that Dartmouth planned to bestow an honorary doctorate on him at the college’s commencement ceremony in May.
Several weeks before leaving for Dartmouth, Ted and Helen attended a dinner party hosted by their friend, Nikolai Sokoloff, the esteemed Russian musician and conductor who had retired to La Jolla with his wife, Ruth. Helen was active with the Sokoloffs in the La Jolla Music Society, and she and Ruth often hosted fundraising dinners to raise money for a new concert hall at the La Jolla museum, or in this case, to celebrate the beginning of the summer concert season. At the end of the successful evening, Helen stood to leave, then winced slightly and complained of pain in her feet and ankles. Another party guest, Dr. Francis M. Smith, who was a physician at the Scripps Metabolic Clinic, asked Helen if she wanted him to examine her. But Helen demurred, slightly embarrassed, and refused to let Smith take a closer look, though she conceded she would let Ted driv
e them home—a sure sign that Helen was feeling seriously ill, as Ted’s driving was famously terrible.
Ted got them safely home to the Tower, then helped Helen into bed with a heating pad, which she cranked up to high and draped across her feet and lower legs. But things were no better by morning, as the pain had spread up Helen’s legs and lower back. The following evening, a distraught Ted parked their car awkwardly in front of the Scripps Clinic and helped Helen out of the passenger seat. She leaned heavily on him as he helped her hobble up the short flight of steps and into the clinic. Things had gotten much worse. The numbness had spread to her arms, hands, and face, and she was unable to swallow on her own.
A few days later, Helen Geisel would be completely immobile, paralyzed from the neck down.
CHAPTER 10
A LITERARY STRAITJACKET
1954–1957
Helen’s prognosis was devastating—“touch and go,” the doctors at San Diego County Hospital told Ted gently.1 Only hours earlier, Ted had helped Helen through the door of the Scripps Metabolic Clinic, where Dr. Francis Smith—the same physician who had asked to attend to Helen at the Sokoloff party the day before—was brought in to examine her. Helen was weak, barely able to stand, and was having difficulty speaking or even focusing on questions. As Smith continued his examination, Helen grew panicked and hysterical—and Ted, fearing the worst, wasn’t much better, growing increasingly more despondent with each passing minute.
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