Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Ted and Helen delivered The Sneetches and Other Stories to Random House in early 1961, then stayed in the Hotel Madison for six weeks to wait out renovations at the Tower, which was being expanded and remodeled. Helen made good use of the time away, as she was finishing up A Fish out of Water, her adaptation of Ted’s short story “Gustav the Goldfish,” with illustrations by P. D. Eastman. Ted, too, was doodling around ideas for another Big Book, this one about sleeping and snoring.

  The Tower would be renovated just in time for a visit from Geisel’s father—“ramrod-straight, silver-haired”19 T. R. Geisel—who had flown west from Massachusetts in a snit. Only a year earlier, in June 1960, the eighty-one-year-old T.R. had been feted in his hometown as the city’s oldest employee, having served the Springfield Parks system for fifty-one years, with “no plans to retire.”20 Now, a year later, he was refusing to take a physical exam to determine whether he was still fit to carry out his duties, and the stubborn T.R.—feeling pressure from his fellow commissioners—abruptly resigned and jetted off to La Jolla, to spend some time with Ted, Helen, and Peggy Owens, quietly stewing and licking his wounds. Ted could only shrug in silent sympathy; stubbornness was a well-known trait of the Geisel men.

  The Sneetches and Other Stories was published by Random House in August 1961 and was another immediate triumph. Printed using shades of yellow, red, and green, Sneetches contained some of Geisel’s loosest art and most daring uses of color. “What Was I Scared Of?” features every page soaked in blue-green, while “The Zax” takes place almost entirely against a desert of bright yellow. “Dr. Seuss hits the bullseye again,” read one typical review,21 while most also picked up on the message of the story, even as Geisel continued to deflect questions or assumptions about its moral. “Adults and children build their own moral into my books,” he protested. “You can’t really preach to youngsters, but in any creative writing you are trying to communicate some ideas.”22 Ted’s protestations aside, The Sneetches remains Dr. Seuss’s unambiguous statement on bigotry and racism—a reminder that we’re all the same on the inside, regardless of outward appearances, presented to children in terms even the most jaded grown-ups could understand. While the younger Dr. Seuss could sometimes be insensitive when it came to matters of race, the fifty-seven-year-old Ted Geisel was making it clear that Dr. Seuss had evolved.

  While “Big Books” like The Sneetches and Other Stories sold well, the Beginner Books were where Geisel was making his real money—the recent renovation of the Tower had been paid for largely with earnings from the imprint.

  At the same time, Grolier’s children’s book club announced an exclusive deal with Random House to sell Beginner Books through direct market sales. Initially, Grolier had proposed to carry books published by Beginner Books and rival publisher Harper, but Phyllis Cerf had rejected that offer, on the grounds that she didn’t want “anyone else’s children’s books riding on ours.”23 Grolier, eyeing a regular line of Dr. Seuss books, wisely agreed to Phyllis’s terms, and would begin offering Beginner Books by mail order in 1963—and the money would continue to come pouring in. The Geisels often joked that they would have to refer any financial questions to their lawyers, Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner and Fepp—a fictional law firm with a suitably Seussian name.

  Lately, too, Geisel had taken to “rescuing” faltering or rejected manuscripts, completely reworking them into something new—or, if a manuscript couldn’t be salvaged, Ted might tinker with one of his own abandoned manuscripts in the bone pile and turn it into a Beginner Book. “There are millions of figures—drawings, kids, clothes—which haunt me, because I can’t seem to do anything about them, dozens of ideas which have never jelled,” he said later. “Sometimes I can take chunks and drop them in somewhere, but the rest just float around waiting.”24 That had been the case with the Beginner Book Ten Apples Up On Top!, published in March 1961, with art by Roy McKie and a script by Geisel, but credited to one of Ted’s oldest pseudonyms: Theo. LeSieg.

  That October, Ted and Helen traveled to Europe to discuss the possibility of bringing Beginner Books to the United Kingdom. Geisel had hoped to include the Soviet Union in their trip, but to his disappointment, Bennett Cerf was unable to pull the right diplomatic strings. “The idea of Moscow with two feet of snow on the ground didn’t appeal to us,” Ted said dismissively.25 Instead, he and Helen spent most of their time in England, visiting classrooms of enthusiastic six-year-olds who shrieked with delight when Geisel jokingly informed them that Christopher Columbus was his uncle.

  But despite his fans among the six-year-olds, the British were decidedly lukewarm on Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat had already been rejected by British publishers for being “too vulgar for words” and many of his other titles puzzled the English as being too informal or too full of Americanisms. Still, UK publisher Billy Collins was optimistic, noting that Dr. Seuss books seemed to sell better among adults who were learning to read, and were being used inside prisons to encourage literacy in inmates. “An illiterate old convict would object to being handed a children’s book,” said publicist Michael Hyde, “but he’ll settle in with Dr. Seuss.”26

  Before wrapping up their English adventure, Ted and Helen visited Oxford, nostalgically dropping by the sites where they had met and fallen in love four decades earlier—including the boardinghouse where Helen had lived, with the bathroom window that wouldn’t close. Nearly forty years later, the window was still open.

  * * *

  • • • •

  While travel normally invigorated Geisel, he was feeling the stress of presiding over Beginner Books. The creative and editorial feuds with Phyllis Cerf over issues large and small—ranging from word lists to the selection of writers and artists to the final approval of manuscripts—were continuing, though Helen had successfully inserted herself between the two of them well enough to keep the flare-ups to a minimum. Helen had also managed to keep Ted distracted from business during much of the holidays, throwing an enormous Christmas party at the Tower for forty-six guests, where Ted paraded one partygoer after another into his studio to help him set up and play with the gigantic electric train set Helen had given him as a Christmas gift.

  By New Year’s Day 1962, however, he was feeling the pressure of completing his most recent Big Book—tentatively called The Sleep Book, and now in its third rewrite. After nearly a year of writing, drawing, erasing, and crumpling up page after page, he was still having a hard time landing on the narrative. Pounding hard on his Smith Corona typewriter, Geisel banged out the line:

  Sleep’s better than butter . . . I’d rather (be sleeping/have sleep) than—

  It petered out, a false start. Next, he filled pages with a few test rhymes:

  They are snoring in throats, boats, goats, notes, thousands of throats . . . The sweet sounding notes of goats snoring in boats.27

  That was enough to spark an idea—of a yawn that gets passed from one creature to another—and Geisel would continue with that plotline as he carried the pages with him to New York in April, where he met with the Cerfs to discuss an editorial change to Beginner Books that he was certain Phyllis would hate: the word list. “I hope we will expand [the list],” said Geisel as he floated the idea in the newspapers, and claimed an advisory board of teachers were supporting his efforts to widen the vocabulary list.”28 While that may have been true, the real impetus behind increasing the number of permissible words was Dr. Seuss himself, who had always found the word list creatively oppressive. But Phyllis wouldn’t budge. “She was coeditor,” said Bennett Cerf. “It soon developed that Phyllis was getting stronger and stronger and more opinionated as she waxed more successful.”29

  Geisel would remain in New York for several weeks, working on The Sleep Book in his hotel room, filling an ashtray with one stubbed-out cigarette after another or, when stuck, sprawling out on the bed to read Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Live and Let Die. He completed his book late in April and
delivered it to Random House where, as usual, he read it aloud in Cerf’s office. Lately, too, Geisel had set a policy of not signing a contract for any of his Big Books until the day the book was delivered. “He didn’t believe that authors should be paid for their work until the book had actually sold,” explained one of his later editors.30 It was likely, too, part of his effort to keep his annual tax burden down. Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner and Fepp would approve.

  With the book delivered, Ted and Helen headed briefly for Las Vegas—“ugly” was Helen’s blunt assessment31—then spent part of June with the Cerfs at their vacation house in Mount Kisco, New York. Ted brought with him a few manuscripts he was considering for publication in the coming year—including books by P. D. Eastman and Roy McKie—which provided yet another opportunity for him and Phyllis to argue. “They began fighting with each other over every book,” Bennett Cerf recalled. “Phyllis is a perfectionist. So is Ted. Neither would compromise . . . When [the Geisels] flew east, they would come up to Mount Kisco for the weekend; and I’d just clear out because they would argue all day over a page because they cared so desperately.”32

  One book they could both agree on, however, was the Berenstains’ debut book, The Big Honey Hunt, which would be published that fall to enthusiastic reviews. Prior to its release, the Geisels had summoned the Berenstains to New York for a leisurely lunch at the Park Lane Hotel to discuss the couple’s follow-up book. Ted ordered a Bullshot—a heady elixir of beef bouillon and vodka—and Helen ordered white wine, while the Berenstains, who admitted they usually felt like rubes in the big city, ordered Gibsons—martinis served with a small onion instead of an olive, “to demonstrate our sophistication.”33 Over dessert, the Berenstains enthusiastically pitched another Beginner Book featuring their bear family, but Geisel immediately quashed the idea, arguing there were too many books on the market with bears in them. “A series would be a millstone around your necks,” he contended—a curious argument coming from the artist who, as a young man, had regularly pitched one series after another to editors at Liberty and The New Yorker.

  The Berenstains were “shocked, stunned, catatonic,”34 but went back to Pennsylvania to regroup and eventually submitted to Geisel a new story featuring a clueless penguin at the South Pole. When the Berenstains returned to New York after the successful release of The Big Honey Hunt, they found the pages of their penguin story already pinned to the walls of Geisel’s Beginner Books office—but as he reviewed the pages with them, Ted seemed suddenly struck by a new idea: The Big Honey Hunt, said Geisel, was such a big hit that the Berenstains should probably think about dropping the penguin story and following up instead with another book featuring their bears.

  Jan Berenstain never blinked. “Yeah, sure,” she replied without a hint of exasperation. “I think we could do that.”35

  The Berenstains would follow The Big Honey Hunt with the equally successful The Bike Lesson in 1964—and were shocked when they saw the bright magenta cover announcing that their new book was Another Adventure of the Berenstain Bears. “We didn’t quite get it,” the Berenstains admitted—but Geisel, ever the advertising man, explained that he was turning them into their own brand. “You know, your bears are a vaudeville troupe, like Murgatroyd’s Mules and Dugan’s Dogs,” he told them.36 And rather than continuing to credit them as “Stanley and Janice Berenstain”—a bit of a mouthful—Geisel had shortened their credit on The Bike Lesson to “Stan and Jan Berenstain.” “Hey, that’s what you call each other,” he told them. “Besides, it rhymes.”37

  Autumn of 1962 would also see the publication of the Big Book that Geisel had been working on for more than a year, Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. It would be the first of his books to incorporate the name Dr. Seuss as part of the title, a clear indication of the growing value of the Dr. Seuss brand. Geisel had turned his initial single plot note—that of a yawn spreading from creature to creature—into a magnum opus of sleeping animals of every size and shape, who snore, talk, walk, dream, roll hoops, and carry candles in their sleep. The Sleep Book is crammed with some of the wildest creatures Geisel would ever create, like a Collapsible Frink, the Curious Crandalls, a Chippendale Mupp, and the Foona-Lagoona Baboona. Inevitably, Geisel would be asked how he came up with such unusual creatures. “I have a special dictionary which gives me most of them,” he told Life magazine coyly, “and I just look up the spellings.”38

  It had been twenty-five years since the first Dr. Seuss book had been published in 1937—an anniversary that didn’t go unnoticed, despite Geisel’s best efforts to keep his head down. As part of the anniversary, his books were publicly rediscussed, reexamined, and reappreciated, which sent sales of nearly every Dr. Seuss book soaring during 1962. Even Vanguard, which still owned the rights to Mulberry Street and Bartholomew Cubbins, rode the coattails of Dr. Seuss’s twenty-fifth anniversary, with Mulberry Street finally selling more than 100,000 total copies after twenty-five years in print. Geisel also saw his own life story told and retold in quickly written newspaper tributes, with several mistakenly reporting that he had taken the pen name of Dr. Seuss because he had studied medicine at Oxford. “No matter what I say, all these clippings keep repeating the same old lies,” said Geisel, “which unfortunately I usually started.”39

  Still, the anniversary gave him another opportunity to pontificate earnestly about the importance of good books for children and, more crucial, the responsibility of children’s authors to take their jobs seriously. “I think that writers of children’s books should work themselves harder than they do,” Geisel told Publishers Weekly. “They should be sure that everything is right. Too many of them just turn in their first drafts.”40 He continued to blanch at the suggestion that all it took to write a book for children was a bit of imagination and a dash of good intentions; writing a kids’ book, he argued, was precision work. “To get a sixty-page book, I may easily write a thousand pages before I’m satisfied,” said Geisel. “The story has to develop clearly and logically with a valid problem and a valid solution. The characters, no matter how weird, have to be vivid and believable and consistent. Then I have to get illustrations that fit the text and don’t destroy the mood. The whole effect has to be just right.”41

  Helen, who understood Ted better than most, thought she knew exactly how and why Dr. Seuss did what he did. “[Ted is] a man who isn’t happy while he’s working on a book,” said Helen, “and even less happy when he isn’t.”42

  * * *

  • • • •

  Nineteen sixty-three would be both a productive and a tumultuous year for Geisel and Beginner Books. Following the publication of Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book in late 1962, Geisel would sideline his Big Books for the next three years to focus exclusively on Beginner Books, starting with Hop on Pop and Dr. Seuss’s ABC, both of which would be published within six months of each other in 1963.

  Geisel snuck a bit of bawdiness into an early draft of Hop on Pop, just to see, he said, “if Bennett is reading my stuff”:43

  When I read, I am smart.

  I always cut whole words apart.

  Con Stan Tin O Ple, Tim Buk Too

  Con Tra Cep Tive, Kan Ga Roo.44

  While it was likely editor Louise Bonino who caught the offending phrase, it was Bennett Cerf who made the call to the Tower to tell Geisel in mock serious tones, “You can’t put words like contraceptive in a kid’s reader.”45 Cerf had passed the test; the quatrain with the offending word would be entirely rewritten.

  Mostly, however, Geisel was growing increasingly tired of the restrictive word list. While he’d never discard it altogether, his own word list was becoming more flexible, and he was more inclined to break some of his own rules about so-called emergency words. In Hop on Pop, for example, Geisel used both sister and brother—neither of which were on the list—and rhymed the word night, which was on the list, with fight, which wasn’t. But part of the purpose of Hop on Pop was to familiarize new readers with words thr
ough a combination of phonics and “a new visual method of showing sounds and letter patterns”46—a pedagogy similar to the “proximity” approach Geisel hadn’t quite been able to pull off in books like One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. To this end, then, Hop on Pop used inch-tall text for its key words, and aligned night and fight, for instance, in such a way that young readers could easily see that the two words were made using the -ight sound.

  Most reviewers immediately recognized that Hop on Pop was a new kind of Dr. Seuss book—and with its large type, it certainly didn’t look like any of the other books. One of the punchier reviews, and one that likely delighted Geisel, not only praised his book, but also took a shot at the kind of turgid reading primers he loathed. “Hop on Pop has a ‘controlled’ vocabulary but it is bright and amusing, with Seuss’ wacky creatures,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “whereas ‘Run, Sally, run,’ etc. is practically an insult to a child’s intelligence.”47 Geisel couldn’t have asked for a better review if he’d written it himself.

  Geisel’s other Beginner Book for 1963 was Dr. Seuss’s ABC. Geisel may have seen the book partly as his opportunity to finally complete an alphabet book, since the one he’d illustrated more than two decades earlier had failed to sell and then had mysteriously gone missing in the mail. And once again, just as he’d done with Hop on Pop, Geisel couldn’t resist checking to see if Cerf and his editing team were paying attention, inserting as his entry for the letter X the following four lines: