BIOGRAPHY: Theodor Seuss Geiselby Donald E Pease Oxford University Press 178pp £12.99
THEODOR GEISEL, aka Dr Seuss, published his first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937. In the story a strict father seeks to prohibit his son Marco's lively imagination by advising him to report only on what he can see on his way to and from school. But Marco cannot help inventing vivid scenarios based on the everyday street scenes, and he narrates to the reader an elaborate fantasy involving exotic animals and vehicles. At the end of the story he tells his father that he saw "nothing . . . but a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street".
Marco’s vision mimics that of his author: an imaginative upturning of the order of things that exceeds the prohibitions of censors and is only meaningful and pleasurable to those with comparable imaginations. It was the expression of this vision that made Geisel the leading children’s author of his generation and, as his biographer Donald Pease attests, “the baby boomers’ poet laureate”.
Geisel grew up in a German community in Springfield, Massachusetts, scion of a wealthy brewing family. The compounded traumas of this childhood were the humiliation he experienced when subjected to anti-German feeling in the early years of the first World War and his family’s loss of their fortune with the onset of Prohibition in 1919. Pease reads the significance of these traumas through Geisel’s later writings, in particular And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which he argues is an “origin story”, a displaced primal scene that animates Geisel’s adult discontent with many modes of authority and prohibition.
For much of his young life Geisel responded to these traumas by retreating behind masks and developing his talents in satire and caricature. At Dartmouth College in the early 1920s he was punished for a prank by having the editorship of the college’s humour magazine taken from him and being ordered not to write for it again. He obeyed the letter of this injunction but forwarded cartoons to the magazine under pseudonyms, including Seuss, his mother’s maiden name. This use of the matronymic both recalls the earlier traumas and licenses his creativity.
During the 1930s Geisel became a successful humorist, writing regularly for such magazines as the New Yorkerand Judge. With the onset of the second World War he began to rethink his art and career. His abhorrence of Nazism, complexly entwined with the traumas of his Springfield childhood, radicalised Geisel as a satirist and pro-war activist. He provided many cartoons for the Popular Front newspaper PM, often skewering German authoritarianism.
Geisel’s wartime experience heightened his understanding of the role of art as a social and political force. In the immediate postwar years, though, as the boomer generation exploded and the cold war heated up, he began to perceive children rather than adults as the desired audience for social and political lessons. He argued that books for children “have a greater potential for good, or evil, than any other form of literature on earth. They realize that the new generations must grow up to be more intelligent than ours”.
Geisel gained a sense of creative freedom working from this insight. What he tried to do, he said, was use implausible facts to create a plausible world – plausible, that is, from a child’s point of view. He called his method “logical insanity”.
This logical insanity is a dramatic feature of The Cat in the Hat, published in 1957. The book's origin lies in part in Geisel's frustration with the dull Dick and Jane readers that were common in American schools. He carefully crafted the book based on his study of a child's ability to correlate words, sounds and images. Pease provides an astute reading of the result, arguing that the Cat "oversees the transition from seeing to reading by implanting the desire to learn how to participate in the process whereby he does what he is saying". In short "the cat might be described as the activity of reading personified".
The Cat in the Hatbecame the cornerstone of the Dr Seuss publishing empire. Aided by his wife, Helen, Geisel produced books that transformed the reading and imagination of American children. More than 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide, and they have been adopted within educational curricula in many countries.
Many of these books portray a liberal imagination, illustrating the affective landscapes of baby-boomer cold-war America. They often turn on the relationship between individuals and communities, inscribing a humanitarianism that was prominent in American intellectual and popular cultures in this period. Pease identifies moral and political messages present in Geisel’s work (and also racism in his early material) but never reduces the texts to such content, alive to the play of language and humour that was and remains the subversive force of the work.
One imagines Pease has walked a tricky line in this regard, wary of shrouding the imaginative texts in critical interpretations, and one senses a restraint that is also a respect for the mysterious relationship between sense and nonsense. This is an excellent primer for all readers of Dr Seuss. It respects Geisel's vision as it is aligned with that of children – a vision aptly articulated by the child narrator of On Beyond Zebra!: "In the places I go there are things that I see / That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z."
Liam Kennedy is professor of American studies and director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin
