Biography of the Cat in the Hat

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, dr seuss, theodor geisel

When I was a very early reader, among numbers of "Little Golden Books" and other "early readers," two others stand out in my memory, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and McElligot's Pool, by Dr. Seuss. I read them again and again. Later, when we obtained more books by Dr. Seuss, I gave them the same treatment. I find ten books by Dr. Seuss on the shelf, though one is a newer reprint of McElligot's Pool so that my old, much-bedraggled copy doesn't get worn to nothing.

Fast-forward a lifetime: When our son was in high school, a decade after adding much wear and tear to my old books and his newer ones, his school put on Seussical, the Musical. He was lucky to be in a high school that doesn't just have a drama club, but also engages in one full-blown musical production yearly, for which they recruit younger siblings and a few parents to assist. For a special performance, they invited a local operatic Bass to sing the Grinch's, which he did with great delight (and ours also!).

The first thing I learned while reading Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, by Brian Jay Jones, is that "Seuss" is pronounced "soice", to rhyme with "voice"! Well, that may be the way Ted Geisel pronounced it as part of his name. As his pen name, however, millions (maybe over a billion!) of us know him as "Doctor Soose", and that's the way it will continue.

I had a tendency to feel a little sad, reading of the life of Ted Geisel. He literally agonized over every word and every picture of his books. He had a hard time when younger getting his work placed with publishers, of magazines or books alike, that would pay him more than a pittance, if they would pay him at all. He didn't achieve financial comfort until he was in his fifties. But I realized that he was doing what he loved, and that, agony and all, he'd have created his fantastical characters and animals whether they made him wealthy or not, or even paid the bills.

Indeed, for decades he paid the bills with advertising illustrations; he coined the phrase "Quick, Henry! The Flit!" (Flit was a bug spray brand he promoted with ads like the one shown here; image courtesy of the UCSD Mandevill Special Collections Library).

This is from 1927. These ads, with their humorous animals and fantastical creatures (the mosquito in particular) show where he honed his craft during the long years when his books didn't yet sell all that well. It took America a while to get used to him.

Get used to him we did! In the 1950's and early 1960's, a good year might see sales of one of his books approaching 10,000 copies. By the 1970's a new Dr. Seuss book might sell millions of copies in just a few years.

An aside I kinda regret: Biographer Jones dwells much too much in early chapters on the "failure" of Ted Geisel to meet the "sensitivity" standards of this generation. He bemoans an apparent bias against women; he repeats—a few too many times—a description of Japanese as caricatured by Geisel during World War II, as slit-eyed dwarves; and he has several other such quibbles. He could have made his point much more effectively with a glancing notice, and just gone on. This stuff detracts from the book. Furthermore, it is dramatically unfair to judge the actions of someone in the 1930's or 1950's by the standards of the 1990's or 2010's. How will our great-grandchildren of the 2060's look back at us, and our comparatively "primitive" behavior? And further-furthermore, today's "standards" are procrustean and overly censorious. I predict they will be the subject of future ridicule!

Considering that millions of words have already been written about Ted Geisel, and possibly about this biography, I think it best simply to say that, knowing his purported faults (heavy smoker, persistent social drinker), I loved the genius that was Dr. Seuss, and I still do. He had an imagination like no other. Younger writers of children's books who tried to emulate his style, and whom he frequently mentored, sometimes produced marvelous books of their own, but had to find their own voice to truly excel. His best-loved character, the Cat in the Hat, was his alter ego: impish, sly, subversive, and messy, but willing to clean things up once the fun was done. The Cat is his fitting companion in this statue at the Geisel Memorial Library on the campus of UCSD, La Jolla, in the town he made his home.