Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  The cat himself is drawn boldly and confidently—Geisel knew he had created a memorable character—with strong blacks and a minimal use of color, apart from the splash of red on his tie and the stripes on his hat. And he’s constantly in motion, carrying the reader from page to page—the book literally becomes a page-turner—with arms and legs bending like rubber hoses, and feet rarely touching the ground; Geisel seemed to always catch him in mid-leap, eyebrows arched, mouth in a wide smile. Even his hat is expressive, bending to reflect the cat’s mood or helpfully propping up a cake or a cup. “Ted’s animals are the sort you’d like to take home to meet the family,” said Helen.57

  As the book reaches its climax, Geisel has the Cat bring in two of his associates, the rambunctious Thing One and Thing Two—each with a shock of blue hair—who seem id incarnate, flying kites in the house and messily carrying on until even Geisel’s child narrator wearies of the antics. As the children’s mother comes walking up the sidewalk toward the front door, the kids capture Thing One and Thing Two with a net—and the cat, sensing the fun is over, despondently packs up his wares and leaves . . . until Ted, having fooled the reader with a fake-out ending, suddenly brings the cat back, sitting smartly behind the wheel of a vehicle with mechanical arms that quickly clean up the entire mess. “I always pick up all my playthings,” the cat says matter-of-factly, then scoots away—for good, this time—with a coy tip of his hat. “The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that the cat cleans everything up at the end,” Geisel said later, sounding only a little disappointed.58

  Geisel ends the book on a cliffhanger as the children’s mother walks into the house—only her leg is visible as she steps inside the door—and asks about their day. Ted leaves the question hanging in the air for his readers to decide:

  Should we tell her about it?

  Now, what SHOULD we do?

  Well . . .

  What would YOU do?

  If your mother asked YOU?59

  As Geisel bundled up his manuscript to send off to Commins, he knew he had something new and very different in his hands. This was a reading primer that not only had pedagogy—he had dutifully, if painfully, adhered closely to the word list, using fewer than 240 different words60—but also personality and punch. With its likable and somewhat subversive main character, galloping verse, and deliberate sense of humor, The Cat in the Hat was everything that Dick and Jane was not. “I think a youngster likes to read about someone who is bad for a change—then he realizes that he’s not the only one who gets into trouble, messes up the house when mother is away,” Geisel said in 1960. “The other thing that’s new in the Cat is humor. Kids respond to a little humor, to a crazy situation instead of that solemn old stuff, ‘See my dog, Spot. Run, Spot, run.’”61

  Proud as he was of it, he was also likely relieved to be done with it. “The Cat in the Hat was not my favorite at all,” Geisel said later. “It was a reading exercise. And it’s painful to write when you can’t use any adjectives and few nouns.”62 But Bennett Cerf was delighted with it. Cerf would always maintain that while Random House was home to many brilliant and talented authors, there was only one true genius among them: Theodor Geisel.

  * * *

  • • • •

  With The Cat in the Hat off his desk, Ted could return to his other Dr. Seuss book—now called How the Grinch Stole Christmas!—whose pages he had pinned up on the corkboard lining several walls of his studio. As he paced the studio, he would slide his hands into his back pockets, palms inward, and lean slightly forward as he slowly walked along the walls, squinting at the pages. At times he might lean in and make a slight adjustment to a drawing; other times he would unpin the entire page and move it to a different spot—or he might crumple it up and throw it away. “All the walls would just be plastered with rough tissue sketchings,” remembered Peggy Owens. “Sketches of what the story would be, what the layout would be, with the ideas for texts [and] crossed-out words as he refined over and over again, finding the right cadence and words to use in these stories.”63

  For the most part, writing the Grinch’s story had been relatively easy—this was a regular Dr. Seuss book, not a primer, so Geisel wasn’t hamstrung by a word list—and he had written much of the book in four quick months. But as he was nearing the climax of the story—the Grinch had finally successfully stolen all the trappings of Christmas from the Whos—Geisel was suddenly unsure how to end it. “The message of the book was that we are merchandising Christmas too much. But I found I could take it into very sloppy morality at the end,” Geisel recalled. “I tried Old Testamenty things, New Testamenty things. It was appalling how gooey I was getting.”64

  As always, Helen was a steady head and guiding influence, as well as one of the few people who could challenge Ted’s artistic instincts—especially if she thought they were wrong. One afternoon, Ted rushed excitedly out of his studio and into the living room, glasses still pushed up on his forehead, and shoved a handful of pages he’d been revising into Helen’s hands. “How do you like this?” he asked her.

  Helen scanned the pages, then scowled and shook her head. “No, this isn’t it,” she told him flatly, and turned the pages toward him to point out one particularly problematic sketch. “You’ve got the Papa Who too big,” she told him. “Now he looks like a bug.”

  Flummoxed, Ted went on the defensive. “Well, they are bugs,” he insisted.

  But Helen wouldn’t hear of it. “They are not bugs,” she told him sternly. “The Whos are just small people.”65 Ted retreated to his studio to try again.

  “I took a month on that last page,” Ted said later.66 “I’m really on the Grinch’s side. The Grinch is against the commercialization of Christmas, although he’s sort of a mean old so-and-so . . . I just couldn’t resolve it because I was cheering for this guy.”67 He still worried about ending the book on a preachy note, until eventually, “I finally decided to cut the moral out and just put a quick ending on it,” he explained later.68 “I showed the Grinch and the Whos together at the table, and made a pun of the Grinch carving the ‘roast beast.’”69 After struggling with what he estimated were “thousands”70 of overtly religious endings, Ted had gone instead for breaking bread together in the name of universal brotherhood—“without making any statement whatever,” he insisted.71

  As Ted was wrapping up work on How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Helen suffered a minor stroke. Doctors kept her at the Scripps clinic for three days, during which time she lost movement in her right side and suffered from slurred speech. The symptoms would clear relatively quickly and Helen would return home to the Tower to recover. Even as he worked to finish Grinch, Ted did his best to tend to Helen as well, but was concerned to find her still “foggy, with lapses of memory . . . and very depressed.”72 The Geisels had planned to take a vacation to Hawaii when Grinch was completed, and Ted now saw the trip as a much-needed opportunity to boost Helen’s spirits. He was determined to get her there as quickly as possible.

  Even still, it took several more weeks for Ted to finish his book, which he dedicated to Peggy’s infant son, Theodor “Teddy” Owens, named for his great-uncle. Ted mailed How The Grinch Stole Christmas! to Louise Bonino, along with a note reading, “Hope you like it. I’m sorta happy about the drawings.”73 There would be no public reading at the Random House offices with this one; instead, he and Helen left for Hawaii for what had become an essential vacation for both of them.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Dr. Seuss had a blockbuster on his hands.

  The April 19, 1957, press release from Random House hailed The Cat in the Hat as “the biggest event in children’s reading for centuries”74—and even for Bennett Cerf, who could be inclined to hyperbole in the name of a good story, this was no overstatement. On its release in March 1957, The Cat in the Hat was nothing short of a phenomenon. “Hooray for Dr. Seuss!” exclaimed the
Chicago Tribune75 as the book blew out of department stores, where clerks could barely keep it in stock. “It became successful almost overnight due to outraged parents who were upset that their kids weren’t learning how to read,” said Geisel.76 By some accounts, The Cat in the Hat was selling more than a thousand copies per day,77 on its way to selling 250,000 copies by Christmas of 1957, and more than a million copies within three years.

  William Spaulding and Houghton Mifflin, however, enjoyed very little of its success. Permitted by Cerf’s agreement to sell only the textbook version to schools, Spaulding—who had seen the potential of a popular primer—watched schools respond to The Cat in the Hat with a shrug. “There were a lot of Dick and Jane devotees, and my book was considered too fresh and irreverent,” said Geisel.78 “The textbook found no acceptance whatsoever in the school system. Just a few hundred were sold here and there. When you try to get rid of Dick and Jane, you’re in the middle of a revolution.”79

  Parents, however, were more than happy to join Dr. Seuss as fellow revolutionaries. Even if parents didn’t necessarily understand the pedagogy, it was easy to see the difference between the staid Dick and Jane and the rambunctious Cat in the Hat: kids wanted to read about the antics of the cat, just as Geisel had hoped. “[First graders] still want to laugh at something that’s ridiculous,”80 insisted Ted, and critics were inclined to agree. “Having only a first-grade mind, I can recommend this as irresistible,” wrote an enthusiastic reviewer in the Los Angeles Times.81 John Hersey, whose article in Life had rallied Ted into action, thought Dr. Seuss had answered the call perfectly; The Cat in the Hat, he said, was a “gift to the art of reading,” and proclaimed it “a harum-scarum masterpiece.”82 Similarly, Rudolf Flesch, who had piled onto Hersey’s criticism of Dick and Jane in Why Johnny Can’t Read, thought Dr. Seuss had performed nothing short of a miracle. “What exactly is it that makes this stuff [Seuss’s work] immortal?” Flesch asked admiringly. “There is something about it. A swing to the language, a deep understanding of the playful mind of a child, an undefinable [sic] something that makes Dr. Seuss a genius, pure and simple.”83

  Many critics, too, understood the importance of what Geisel had accomplished by writing an engaging primer. “[Dr. Seuss has] done it again, only differently this time,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “[The Cat in the Hat is] a book to rejoice seven- and eight-year-olds and make them look with distinct disfavor on the drab adventures of standard primer characters.”84 And for those who appreciated the pedagogy involved, Geisel was praised for working so diligently to keep Dr. Seuss’s vocabulary contained to the accepted word list. “Mr. Geisel put on his literary strait jacket [sic] with a purpose,” wrote The New York Times approvingly. “It’s a ‘reader,’ a school book, evidence of an attempt to pep up the pallid stuff too many first graders have been getting during lesson time.”85

  Using less than 250 unique words, Dr. Seuss had harpooned the Dick and Jane juggernaut that had dominated reading in elementary school classrooms since 1934. Ellen Goodman, writing in the Detroit Free Press, would later call The Cat in the Hat a “little volume of absurdity that worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane and Spot.” That was fine by Geisel. “It’s the book I’m proudest of,” he later said of The Cat in The Hat, “because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primers86 . . . I think I proved to a number of million kids that reading is not a disagreeable task. And without talking about teaching, I think I have helped kids laugh in schools as well as at home. That’s about enough, isn’t it?”87

  For most, it certainly would have been enough. But 1957 would be an extraordinary year for Ted Geisel and Dr. Seuss—for he would publish not just one bestseller with his name on it, but two.

  Perhaps appropriately, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! made its debut in Redbook—the same magazine where an earlier incarnation of the Grinch had made an appearance selling string in 1955. Plugged on the front cover as “a new book-length holiday classic for family reading,”88 Grinch was reproduced in its entirety—and in nearly full color—in the December 1957 issue, which went on sale in October. Several weeks later, on November 24, Random House published the book just in time for Christmas.

  Coming in as it did on the coattails of the bestselling The Cat in the Hat, most reviews of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! seemed to be simply yelps of delight that there was already another Dr. Seuss book published—the Chicago Tribune’s effusive “Praise be! There’s a fine new Dr. Seuss!”89 was typical—and this one just in time for the holidays. Reviewers tended to simply summarize the plot, then assure parents that they would have no problem giving the Grinch to their children because it was, after all, a book by Dr. Seuss—and “no one can talk to children like Dr. Seuss,” one reviewer said matter-of-factly.90

  The first print run for the Grinch was 50,000—a large run for a children’s book, but Cerf was rightly confident the book would sell quickly. Oddly, there were two other children’s Christmas books published in 1957 telling stories of Christmases that were nearly canceled: Ogden Nash’s The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t and Phyllis McGinley’s The Year Without a Santa Claus. Neither, however, could touch the Grinch; within days of its publication, it was clear Dr. Seuss had created an iconic Christmas classic.

  While Geisel had struggled to make the ending to his story as nonreligious as possible, he was amused to find parents, critics, and religious leaders hail the book for its moral and ethical point of view. “Ministers are reading a lot of religion into it,” Geisel said, practically rolling his eyes. “Ha! You can fill a vessel up with whatever you want to.”91 He often joked that he was being called the greatest moralizer since Elsie Dinsmore—a stridently moral character in a series of stridently moral books published in the late nineteenth century—but agreed that there was probably a lesson or two that could be learned in the pages of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! “Children have a strong ethical sense anyway,” he said. “They want to see virtue rewarded and arrogance or meanness punished . . . If the Grinch steals Christmas . . . he has to bring it back in the end.”92

  But beyond the obvious right-versus-wrong morality of returning something that had been stolen, the real moral message behind How the Grinch Stole Christmas! could probably be found in its stance on the commercialization of Christmas—and more broadly, on the misplaced desire to equate happiness at the holidays with the acquisition of material things. If, as he said, Geisel had truly written the Grinch’s story to “see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I’d lost,” then he’d perhaps found it in one of Grinch’s most memorable tercets:

  Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.

  Maybe Christmas, he thought . . . doesn’t come from a store.

  Maybe Christmas, perhaps . . . means a little bit more!93

  The Grinch and Geisel appear to have had a mutual epiphany about the holiday; it was no wonder Ted confessed to be “kind of rooting” for the Grinch and even felt slightly protective of him.94 Later, when two little boys from Ridgefield, New Jersey, named David and Bob Grinch wrote to Dr. Seuss complaining that they were picked on every Christmas because of their last name, Geisel immediately wrote back defending the Grinch. “I disagree with your friends who ‘harass’ you,” Ted responded. “Can’t they understand that the Grinch in my story is the Hero of Christmas? Sure . . . he starts out as a villain, but it’s not how you start out that counts. It’s what you are at the finish.”95

  Asked later which of his two superstar characters he’d rather have as a dinner guest, Ted didn’t hesitate in his answer. “Kids like [the Cat in the Hat] because he’s against law and order. The fact that he cleans up at the end is just an easy out; he really prefers a mess. So I wouldn’t like to have him here—I’d rather visit him in his house,” said Geisel. “[But] the Grinch? Personally, I like him.”96

  At age fifty-three, Geisel finally had his blockbuster. In 1957 alone, The
Cat in the Hat, with a cover price of $1.95, earned more than $2 million in sales—a pace exceeded only by the year’s bestselling novel, Grace Metalious’s scandalous Peyton Place.97 As Ted’s agent, Phyllis Jackson, had predicted over their lunch several years earlier, all it took was one big book; the spectacular success of The Cat in Hat would be the rising tide that floated all other previously published Dr. Seuss books. Horton Hatches the Egg, for example, which had struggled to sell 5,801 copies in 1940, would sell 27,463 copies in 1958—and then go on to sell 200,000 more over just the next few years.

  While Dr. Seuss had been something of a brand name before—after all, he had published thirteen books between 1937 and 1956—the two books published in 1957 would catapult Dr. Seuss from the status of merely beloved writer to that of national icon. Fan mail poured into the Random House offices so fast that the mailroom stopped counting individual letters and weighed the daily influx instead, eventually reporting that Dr. Seuss had received 9,267 pounds of mail for the year. Random House would forward any letters from teachers, librarians, or sick children to the Geisels in La Jolla, where Helen would personally answer every letter and sign them, charmingly, as “Mrs. Dr. Seuss.”