Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Today you are you! That is truer than true!

  There is no one alive who is you-er than you!50

  Ted had dedicated the book to “my good friends, The Children of San Diego County.” And he was genuinely fond of the children in his neighborhood, even if at times he found them slightly exasperating. The Geisels’ doorbell at the Tower was regularly rung by young fans who had made the trek up Mount Soledad to say hello to Dr. Seuss, often waking him up on mornings when he was trying to sleep late. He also worried that once he staggered downstairs, children who expected Dr. Seuss to “be wearing a hat” and baggy clown pants would be disappointed by the bleary-eyed, slightly disheveled, but otherwise normal-looking man who answered the door.51

  It wasn’t only children who knocked on the front door of the Tower. Summertime, in particular, brought tourists—“white trash,” muttered Helen52—some harmless, who merely came to gawk, but also a fair share of what Helen called “the crackpots, would-be authors, PTA’s, and visiting friends of sub-cousins, aunts-in-law.”53 And for those who saw Dr. Seuss as their Patron Saint of Literacy, the Tower became something of a mecca for well-intended librarians and reading teachers. “It sometimes seems to me that half the teachers and librarians in America come to La Jolla for their holidays,” said Ted.54

  Interruptions notwithstanding, however, Ted and Helen loved their lives at the Tower. The home seemed to be in a constant state of improvement now, as new rooms were added—it would eventually be expanded to nine rooms, including a huge mirrored dining room—and all completed in an elegant Spanish style, with a pink stucco exterior and a rust-red tiled roof. There were outdoor pavilions and shady sitting areas dotted with flowering bushes and trees, and Ted and Helen still enjoyed having morning coffee and evening cocktails as they sat by the swimming pool, where Helen still swam for therapy most mornings.

  While Ted loved gardening, his real passion was rock gardening, hunting for interesting rocks on the hillside, then positioning them dramatically around the yard, lining paths or making borders around the succulents he had planted in the rich California soil. “That’s what I do,” said Ted. “I have a rock garden. And then I get tired of looking at the rocks in one arrangement, and so I move them.”55 The showcase of his collection, however, was the fossilized dinosaur footprint his father had given him decades ago, and which he had hauled from New York and now had displayed prominently in his garden. “Ted has no extravagances,” said Helen. “I can’t think of anything he likes except cigarettes and rocks.”56

  One probably needed to define extravagances, however. Even a mostly clear-eyed profile of Ted and Helen in The New Yorker—written by one of the magazine’s most distinguished contributors, E. J. Kahn—tried to explain with a mostly straight face how the Geisels lived in “relative austerity” by noting that they “have only one car, only one maid—part-time, at that—and only one swimming pool.”57 Still, Ted ended up enjoying the four days he had spent being interviewed by Kahn and was relatively pleased with the lengthy profile—at least at first. Typically, he would later complain that the piece had been “butchered . . . They took out all the funny stuff.”58

  At age fifty-five, Ted was as trim as ever; he still looked good in a suit, though his preferred attire for lounging around the house was comfortable trousers and colorful shirts. His hair—always messy, and still parted in the middle—had grown streaked with gray, and the lines at the corners of his eyes were more pronounced, due in no small part to his habit of squinting over his pages as he drew and colored them. While he still relied on glasses to correct his sight, he often could be found hunched over his desk with his glasses pushed up just above his eyebrows, looking like another set of eyes on his forehead. Helen, meanwhile, who would turn sixty-one that fall, seemed mostly recovered from her earlier hospitalizations. Only a very slight slur in her speech gave any indication she had ever had a stroke, for she remained mentally as sharp as ever.

  And yet even as a full partner in Beginner Books—with her own books to edit and her own authors to recruit—Helen remained deferential to Ted, still managing his finances and correspondence, and still checking on him during the days to see if his coffee needed refilling or if he was ready to break for cocktails at six. While Helen maintained her own work schedule, it was clearly Ted’s whose mattered the most—as far as Helen was concerned, Ted was working two jobs, one as president of Beginner Books and the other as Dr. Seuss. While one visiting journalist from Dartmouth called them “virtually inseparable,”59 Helen thought they often seemed perpetually out of sync. There were times, she admitted, when “it is quite difficult for me . . . because the very time I make no plans seems to be the times he wants to go out, and when I have a lot of people coming, he wants to work.”60

  At the moment, Ted’s work schedule was more demanding than usual as he worked to complete his next Beginner Book, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Every day, including weekends, Ted would get out of bed a little after nine, to be at his desk in the studio no later than ten. And there he would stay all day, seated at the desk in a high-backed swivel chair, even if no ideas were coming. He insisted on quiet while he worked—there would be no records, no radio, no background noise of any kind—but would permit himself short breaks to swim, move around the rocks in his rock garden, or take a walk. And as usual, when stuck, he would doodle aimlessly—still using the same drawing board he’d been using since he had set up shop in his father’s office in 1927—or would lie down on the sofa by the fireplace, where he would read mystery novels or biographies.

  He thought his best ideas came “on toward midnight” when he was “a bit tired,”61 though it helped, too, that neither the phone nor the doorbell rang at that time of night. He often said he would start a book “with a situation or a conflict and then write myself into an impossible position so there is no way of ending,” and then work his way toward finding the ending (“people who think about endings first come up with inferior products,” he groused).62 In the case of One Fish Two Fish, Ted had sweated over his word count for months, and thought he at last had a finished book pinned to the corkboard of his office—but then couldn’t stop messing with it. Helen assured him the book was a winner, maintaining that he should leave it alone. “Now, if I can just keep Ted from fussing with it and telling me that it is no good,” she wrote to Bennett Cerf with just a touch of impatience. “He gets me to the point where I don’t know what is or what isn’t, or was or wasn’t, or could be or would be or should be.”63

  Ted had reason to be anxious about One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. The book was an experiment of sorts—he was calling it a pre–Beginner Book—“a book based on an educational theory I have, but one that unfortunately I can’t define,” he said rather unhelpfully. His unnamed theory was that children would learn to recognize familiar words if the corresponding illustrations were placed as close to the words as possible—and thus, on the opening page of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, he had placed the text as close as he could to each of the named fish.

  Geisel was inconsistent in the execution of his own proximity theory as the book went on, at times dismissing the practice altogether in favor of increasingly sillier and tongue-twistier rhymes—but Geisel thought the rhymes, too, helped children learn to read. “Rhyming more or less makes kids pronounce words correctly,” he insisted. “For instance, if a youngster is sounding out the words, what a help when ‘sing’ is related to ‘ying’ and ‘thing.’”64 What Ted was doing with rhyme was actually closer in practice to the teaching of phonics, which had fallen out of favor with many educators, who still preferred the “look-say” approach to reading embraced by The Cat in the Hat. Lately, however, schools were beginning to pivot to a balance of both phonics and the look-say method, teaching reading by both the sight and the sound of the words. Without quite meaning to, Dr. Seuss had put himself at the forefront of the ever-evolving—and ever-contentious—efforts to improve student literacy.

>   It was yet another thing for Ted and Phyllis to fight about. One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish was a prototype of sorts for what Ted and Phyllis were informally calling “Beginning Beginner Books,” with an even more restrictive word list aimed at very early readers with limited vocabularies. “When we began Beginner Books, we found that The Cat in the Hat was at that time hard for first graders to read,” Ted recalled.65 And so Phyllis had pared the word list down from 361 to 182 very simple vocabulary words. One Fish Two Fish didn’t rely on the new word list—the word fish wasn’t even on it—but Ted was determined to put his theories about word proximity and rhyme to work in One Fish Two Fish and any other Beginning Beginner Books. Phyllis, however, remained a stickler about the word list.

  Christopher Cerf remembered hearing his mother and the Geisels argue about the placement of three words on a page. “Helen sided with Ted much more than not, but she was an independent thinker and sometimes took my mother’s side,” said Christopher. “Ted was incredibly rigorous about getting the books the way he wanted. [Phyllis] was incredibly brilliant about the discipline of vocabularies and the reading skills, stuff that became boring to Ted.”66 The arguing tested even the patience of the normally benevolent Bennett Cerf, who recalled bolting from the Thanksgiving dinner table in 1959, as Ted and Phyllis continued their increasingly louder argument over the main course.

  Days after the fractious Thanksgiving dinner, Ted and Helen hand-delivered One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to the Random House offices, where Ted once again read the book aloud to the editorial staff. He also brought with him the nubs of several well-worn crayons, which he pressed into the hands of production manager Ray Freiman, then loitered over Freiman’s shoulder until he matched the colors perfectly. Satisfied, the Geisels left New York for a monthlong vacation in Spain—but Ted fretted that in his absence, Phyllis might try to wrest control of Beginner Books away from him by rallying their authors to her side.

  * * *

  • • • •

  The Geisels returned from Spain in time to ring in 1960 at the Tower. For much of late 1959, even as he was finishing up One Fish Two Fish, Ted had been agonizing over another book pinned to his wall—a book he had taken on as the result of a friendly bet with Bennett Cerf himself. As the new year began, then, Ted was slowly feeling his way around with a narrative, trying to meet Cerf’s challenge head-on.

  Cerf knew Ted had struggled for nearly a year with The Cat in the Hat, trying to overcome the limitations of its restricted vocabulary. And, of course, now Beginner Books was preparing to launch a new line of books using an even more restricted word list of 182 words. Cerf understood that sticking with even 182 unique words was tough—but now the publisher issued a very specific challenge to Ted: could he write a book using only fifty unique words or fewer? It seemed impossible—and Cerf bet Ted fifty dollars he couldn’t do it.

  Ted would rise to meet Cerf’s challenge—and it was probably not entirely a coincidence that the central plot point of the resulting book was all about convincing someone to do something he didn’t really want to do.

  Green Eggs and Ham would be its own kind of misery for Ted to write, requiring him to create complicated charts, checklists, and multiple word counts as he struggled to keep track of exactly which and how many words he was using. He also imposed an additional restriction on himself by limiting his vocabulary to one-syllable words, with the exception of anywhere, which was composed of two short words early readers would know.

  The Tower office was a mess as Ted toiled over Green Eggs and Ham, discarding typewritten pages directly into the fireplace or letting half-drawn pages simply fall to the floor—or at times angrily crumpling them up and launching them toward the trash can, which he usually missed. He would stare at his typewritten pages over and over again, reading them aloud to check the scansion, crossing out words or syllables that disrupted the rhyme. Then he would pace the floor for a while, scanning his word list, and suddenly bang away furiously on his typewriter, rewriting the entire page again. Rhyming, too, was particularly tough with a fifty-word list. “The agony is terrific at times, and the attrition is horrible,” said Ted. “If you’re doing it in quatrains and get to the end of four lines and can’t make it work, then it’s like unraveling a sock. You take some of your best stuff and throw it away.”67 Sometimes when Ted was out of his office, Helen would retrieve some of the abandoned pages and place them back on his desk to see if they might meet with his approval on a second look. They usually didn’t.

  Ted worked on Green Eggs and Ham until early spring 1960, when he was finally ready to take the book to Random House for its unveiling. Helen was a bit uneasy about it—“If you do not like [the book],” she wrote nervously to Louise Bonino in March, “we will return to our swimming pool on the [next] plane.”68

  Ted was generally a nervous wreck on the days before he was due to leave La Jolla for New York to deliver a manuscript. He would carefully spread his completed pages out on the floor of the living room, then get down on his hands and knees and slowly crawl across the floor, staring at every drawing and agonizing over every word choice. At times, he would call on his neighbor from just down the hill, a spry seventy-five-year-old retired railroad executive named Bert L. Hupp, to ask for a second opinion. Hupp, too, would get down on his knees to stare at the pages, but wisely offered little more than moral support. Suitably bolstered, Ted would send Hupp on his way, then pack up his pages and spend the rest of the night staring out the windows in his office, unable to sleep.

  For the debut of Green Eggs and Ham, Bonino initially invited Random House staff to gather in her office at eleven on April 19, 1960. But Bennett Cerf was going to be out of the office that day and canceled the in-house reading in favor of a small dinner party—to the likely relief of some Random House employees, who enjoyed the readings, but sometimes groused about “the tensions [Dr. Seuss] leaves in his meticulous wake.”69 Indeed, all office operations would come to a halt during Ted’s readings; even the Random House switchboard operators usually showed up, jamming into Bonino’s office and leaving ringing phones unanswered.

  This time, as Cerf had asked, Ted read Green Eggs and Ham aloud at the dinner party, where it was met with enthusiastic applause. As was typical, however, Ted was worried the audience hadn’t laughed hard enough in certain places and went back to his hotel room that evening to fuss over his pages, debating whether he needed to rewrite them. He would also micromanage the production department, injecting himself into decisions about paper quality and overall color palettes. “From a genius, you tolerate a little bit more,” one Random House employee commented.70 But for Ted, no decision was ever truly final. After The Cat in the Hat Comes Back had sold more than 100,000 copies, Ted informed Cerf that a single line on the book’s cover was too dark and asked that a new jacket be printed. Cerf could only do as Ted asked.

  “You don’t tell Joe DiMaggio how to hit the ball,” he said.71

  * * *

  • • • •

  Nineteen sixty would be another blockbuster year for Dr. Seuss, with the publication of two enormously successful books: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish in April and Green Eggs and Ham in August.

  As Geisel had hoped, many critics recognized One Fish Two Fish as successfully balancing the “look-say” and phonics pedagogies, and it had been released “with the advance endorsement of some top educational consultants who praise its use of rhymes to teach both the sound and the recognition of words.”72 The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine—which had made a point of reviewing every Dr. Seuss book since Mulberry Street—noted that its regular rhythm and repeated words and sounds encouraged young readers as well. “Repetition, at any level, is a basic method of teaching,” wrote the Dartmouth reviewer. “Dr. Seuss applies this with such skill that it is not obvious or boring.”73

  The New York Times appreciated that Dr. Seuss had come up with yet another highly entertaining reading primer, “[s]im
ple enough in vocabulary to encourage the pre-schooler . . . if he can just stop laughing long enough to take advantage of the opportunity.”74 And in the same vein as The Cat in the Hat, Geisel had created yet another crossover hit that appealed to both children and their parents, with one reviewer noting that “[One Fish Two Fish] should improve the children’s physical condition, too, since they will probably have to forcefully wrest this latest book from the hands of their hysterical parents.”75

  But One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish was a minnow when compared with the whale that was Green Eggs and Ham—still the bestselling Dr. Seuss book of all time, with total sales over sixty years still climbing well past eight million copies. The story of Sam-I-Am, trying to convince someone to eat green eggs and ham, would be analyzed for hidden meanings and metaphors—but for Geisel, it was only ever about one thing. “The only meaning was that Bennett Cerf, my publisher, bet me fifty bucks I couldn’t write a book using only fifty words,” he said. “I did it to show I could.”76 He would also claim, only slightly in jest, that Cerf had never paid him the fifty dollars.

  “The good doctor has scored another triumph,” proclaimed The New York Times.77 The fact that Dr. Seuss had told the story of Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty unique words was reported in nearly every review of the book with breathless awe.78 “The biggest news is . . . a good—and frequently hilarious—story is told in from 50 to 100 different words,” wrote the Chicago Tribune.79 The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine could only agree that “[i]n spite of the vocabulary limitation, Dr. Seuss gets surprising variety into his arrangements, and the swing of the verse is catchy.”80 (Dartmouth students would later joke that the title referred to the breakfast served in the cafeteria of his alma mater.) Perhaps one of the most thoughtful—and prescient—reviews came from the Poughkeepsie Journal. “A vocabulary of only fifty words,” wrote the Journal reviewer, “but they will be long remembered.”81