The Lion and the Unicorn

In January of 1976 I met Dr. Seuss. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and he had come to the country to go trout fishing at Lake Taupo in the North Island. As the children’s book reviewer for Australia/New Zealand Bookworld (Schur 13), I was asked to interview this most celebrated of children’s authors. On his way back from fishing, he stopped in Wellington and kindly agreed to an interview which was recorded in his room at the James Cook Hotel.

Nattily dressed in a suit with a red bow tie, I was impressed that at first, Dr. Seuss interviewed me. I told him I was a new mother and my first child, Aaron, was just three months old. “Aaron Schur!” he exclaimed, “That reminds me of Aaron Burr.” On the Cat in the Hat book I had bought for him to autograph, he dedicated it to my son then drew a goofy picture of Aaron Burr and the baby, Aaron Schur. Sadly, this priceless gift was accidentally swept up years later in a pile of books that went to Goodwill.

Today, it seems, Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) is not so celebrated as he is censured. The estate of Dr. Seuss announced in 2023 that it will stop printing and marketing six of his books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” The books in question include Geisel’s very first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The book contains stereotypical racist drawings.

Recently the estate of Dr. Seuss announced that it will stop printing and marketing six of his books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” It is true that Geisel engaged in racial stereotypes, most infamously of the Japanese during World War II. And yet, he himself was upset by his earlier depictions and in later life spoke and wrote against racism and bigotry. [End Page 77]

Yet the stain remains.

Geisel’s stepdaughter and former bookstore owner, Leagrey Dimond, is in agreement with the decision of the Seuss estate but wants more. She wants the future editions to remove the illustrations, but she also wants written introductions added that explain the reason for their removal. In an interview for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dimond said, “He was a man of his times who moved with his times and transcended his times.” She maintains that the books should demonstrate how human beings can and do evolve in their lifetime (Bravo).

I sensed in my conversation with Dr. Seuss that he was quite aware of his own legacy and had, at the ready, a number of enhanced, ready-made anecdotes. I offer excerpts from my interview to provide a glimpse into this intriguing, legendary children’s book author.

The full secret of his childlike humor is hard to determine. Ultimately it must derive from a deeply intuitive grasp of the child’s perspective and free spirit.

(Maccann 694)

About Dr. Seuss there are many anecdotes and time-worn rumors. He is the hero of charming Cinderella stories told and retold in magazine articles of past decades. Indeed, the stories that he told about himself over the years are fascinating—though not always factually accurate, for he had a tendency to embellish. As Charles D. Cohen wrote in The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing but the Seuss, he “liked a good story—often more than he liked the truth.” Yet, there are few children’s librarians who don’t know that:

1. 1. Dr. Seuss was no doctor at all. He took the title as a pseudonym because he intended to reserve his own name (Theodor Seuss Geisel) for his more “serious writing” (Lathem 27).

2. 2. Dr. Seuss first became known as the genius creator of the cartoon “Quick Henry the Flit!” for Standard Oil (Cohen 110).

3. 3. The inspiration for his first picture book came from the rhythm of the ship’s engines as he sailed back from Europe. “Da da da da de dum de da de de da. And that is a story that no one can beat. And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street!”¹

4. 4. This book, which was reputedly turned down by more than twenty publishers before at last being published, met with enthusiastic reviews and the Dr. Seuss legend was born. [End Page 78]

When I met the legendary Dr. Seuss, I found him to be funny, polite and just a bit shy. I learned a lot about the way in which this highly successful children’s author had worked and thought.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel spent much of his childhood drawing pictures. The son of the superintendent of the Springfield park system, he was a frequent visitor to the town zoo. His sketches of funny animals could be found all over the house. Once his mother discovered such a drawing on an old roll of wallpaper in the attic. It had ears three yards long. Theodor called it his “wynnmph.”

Geisel’s unique talent for drawing lovable, blobby animals (“They are all people, sort of”) and creating a racy, rhythmical yarn was first revealed in The Cat in the Hat in 1956. The book was written in response to a challenge thrown out by the novelist John Hersey who wrote in Life magazine that American readers were suffering from the “See Dick run” mentality and that the whole American reading system should be handed over to Dr. Seuss. The success of The Cat in the Hat is proof that Dr. Seuss’s most important contribution to education was his use of the phonic method to teach reading instead of the long-popular “look say” approach. Basically, the phonic method works by presenting three or more familiar words that have the same initial, medial, or final letter. The teacher can call attention to the similarity and help the student fix the appropriate sound in mind in such a way as to enable him to recognize the same sounds in another word. Geisel explained,

I used the phonic approach as much as I could but unfortunately I was given a word list to work from so, of course, The Cat in the Hat is not completely phonic. When we began to throw away the word lists, the books became consciously phonic. Hop on Pop is completely phonic, for instance.

Although The Cat in the Hat has helped countless kids learn to read, Geisel said that it was never intended as a textbook:

In 1956 The Cat in the Hat was brought out as a reader and the school system wasn’t ready for it. It didn’t succeed. I was terrified of the schools because they kept telling me that only one word could be introduced at time but I actually never did that. The Random House very wisely said, “let’s try it on the public” and it sold like hell-fire. Then it gradually moved into the school system but never as a textbook! If we use our books as textbooks I think that would kill all the charm and pleasantry that’s in them.

Ironically, Theodor Seuss Geisel was the founding president and editor-in-chief of Beginning Books, a division of Random House that grew so rapidly that it now includes a very large school and library staff—hundreds of people who do nothing but sell books to schools and libraries. Geisel soon realized he was selling to schools and libraries as well as the commercial market—but his way: [End Page 79]

We’ve chucked the vocabularies in the wastebasket. We use phonetics and sometimes obscure words if it is clear from the picture what the word is. What we actually tell our writers is “Just write as simply as possible, basically narrowing it down so that it can be illustrated properly.” Then we chop it up a bit afterwards, take out all the circumlocutions. We found we couldn’t get any good writers to write to a word list.

In an age when teachers and educational writers were restricted by word lists, readability levels, and the vague and arbitrary “familiar” words, Dr. Seuss gave the child words that don’t exist, “unreal” words: words that live for only one story; words that are created for the mere purpose of producing a smile; words whose only aim is to trip the tongue or rhyme with another “real” word. Part of Geisel’s success lies in the fact that he was so nonacademic in his approach. If kids liked his books and could learn something, that was fine. But Geisel wanted kids to have fun in the process.

The use of his books as teaching tools has produced two interesting—and formerly unaccepted—concepts in education: children especially love big words and the words that they should be taught to read are not necessarily the ones that they write. This means that you do not have to know how to spell “Ham-ikka-Achum-ikka-Schnopps” to be able to decipher it. Geisel said his “three R’s” are “Rhyme, Rhythm, and Reason,” in direct contrast with what he calls the “three P’s” (Preaching, Preciousness, and Pomposity) that he saw in so much of juvenile reading material:

I try to treat the child as an equal and go on the assumption that a child can understand anything that is read to him if the writer takes care to state it clearly and simply enough. This means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words as we can get away with. Simple short sentences don’t always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short to keep it vital and alive. Virtually every page is a cliff-hanger. You’ve got to force them to turn it. I spend more time writing than the average children’s author. I’m very serious about what I do. I have as much responsibility to take time and work hard as Hemingway or O’Neill did. A paragraph in a children’s book is equal to a chapter in an adult’s.

Regarding content, Geisel was equally opinionated. When asked about violence he stated emphatically, “If we took it all out there’d be nothing to write about. We eat sheep; that’s a fact of life. I know some educators go overboard about this thing.” Geisel’s bête noir has been what he calls “Bunny Bunny Books”:

These are books that talk down to kids, insult their intelligence. I ran a summer school at the University of Utah one year. In a class, for a travesty, I wrote a book called Bunny Bunny Bunny Bunny Bunny. Ironically, what happened was that it inspired one of my students and he wrote a book with that title. It became a best seller! And I was trying to kill that Idea! I suppose there is a [End Page 80] place for those books but to me they’re ridiculous. I call them the great fuzzy mysterious literature of the young.

Geisel understood that kids are not sentimental but that they do respond to tenderness, to pathos. If a measure of the quality of a picture book is that it communicates to the child that he is not alone, then Dr. Seuss’ chatty, cozy style, through which he addresses the reader directly, is a fine example of this standard. His heroes are always the little guys, the ones who are laughed at, taken advantage of, misunderstood. Whether the “little guy” is purposefully symbolic (such as the “Who” in Horton Hears a Who, a microscopic creature that can be heard only by elephants and is defended by Horton the elephant whose maxim is “a person’s a person no matter how small”) or is Horton himself in Horton Hatches an Egg, the message is the same: goodness, patience, and devotion win in the end. Indeed, Geisel insisted that it is impossible to tell a story without a moral: “Either the good guys win or the bad guys win.” A method always lurks beneath his madness. The silliness sugarcoats the reality: “If I have a moral I get it in but sideways and all fantasy is an extension of reality. All my books are based on realism as opposed to whimsy, the land of sugar plums which is based on nothing.”

Much of the humor that is basic to any Seuss book is also a strong response to the world as it exists. Horton Hatches an Egg is a sideways poke at the greedy entrepreneur as well as the irresponsible parent. Yertle the Turtle was consciously written as a parody of Hitler. Many see in Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? a disguised Richard Nixon hero. The silly and the serious, the real and the imaginary aspects of his tales reinforce each other. Beatrix Potter praised And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street! for “the natural truthful simplicity of the untruthfulness” (Morgan 84). Nina Bawden, the acclaimed English novelist and children’s book author, explained in The Hornbook Magazine how the encompassing imagination that allows the child to appreciate this duality: “For the child, a thing is true and not true. A child can hold these two ideas in his head side by side without any conflict at all, which is something we forget how to do when we grow older” (17).

Geisel presents unknown, nonexistent words, ideas, and animals. Yet children recognize them, laugh at them, accept them. Children see the order behind his fantasy, what Geisel calls “logical insanity,” which means that, if an animal has two heads, he must have two toothbrushes.

All of the Dr. Seuss books show the influence of his many years as a cartoonist. Things happen rapidly and riotously. The pace has been described as somewhere between hightail and hurtle. The illustrations of blobby animal-things have the bright color and dynamism of the comic strip: “Nothing ever really looks like what it’s supposed to be. Kids like my drawings because I draw like a kid.” He admitted he doesn’t know where he got his ideas: [End Page 81]

I wish I knew! I think all different ways. Sometimes I noodle around with pictures. I draw an animal, then he’ll get into a war with another animal and it works. Sometimes I’ll start with what I think is a happy rhyme or phrase. It all works backwards.

He recalled that the character of Horton sprang from one doodle being placed on top of another. He said to himself, “Now that’s a hell of a situation. An elephant up in a tree. What’s he doing there?” Much later he figured it out: “Of course! He’s hatching an egg!”

This folkloric spontaneity was coupled with disciplined editing, for Geisel was a perfectionist. Working long hours, he sometimes wrote thousands of words that went straight into the wastebasket. He asserted that the perfect coordination he achieved between text and picture was what he learned from Hollywood, but that it was his film experience during the war (US Army Signal Corps and Information and Education Division) that most helped his writing:

When I was in the army and writing film scripts, I wrote one that I showed to my colonel, Frank Capra. He lined just a few sentences in red and said to me, “Now that’s your story.” That’s the main thing I learned, what to keep out. When I get going writing a story, I write thousands of words, laundry lists, everything… just to keep ideas flowing, then I prune it. It’s what you don’t put in a book that makes it good.

The fine honing that Geisel loved to give his books was not possible in his films. Although he had received an Academy Award and two Peabody Awards for his television cartoons (Cohen 279, 356), he remained dissatisfied with the television process:

It’s a terrible medium. To translate ideas you have to enlarge them. What’s nerve-wracking is that you can’t control 25,000 pictures involved in a half-hour show. You only have a certain amount of money so you only get a certain amount of quality, and if you don’t get that quality, you can’t have those pictures redrawn. Sometimes I’m lucky. I get things I like very much. Sometimes I don’t.

In striving for perfection, over the decades he had to change with the times. By the 1980s, he saw that the child was quite different from the child for whom he wrote five decades earlier:

I think I’m writing a little more sophisticated now. It’s hard to tell because I do five or six different kinds of books. But I think your kid today, Oh Lord, he knows more geography, knows more history, knows more current events than when I started writing in 1937. I have to treat the kids as more of an adult now.

An interesting idea from a man who once defined adults as “obsolete children” (Pace).

Theodor Geisel didn’t read other children’s writers for he declared he didn’t want to discover trends and lead his company toward those trends. And he didn’t feel that by becoming famous he had lost his freedom as a writer but [End Page 82] he did as an editor—as a matter of economics: “I have to steer things so they’re not antimarket.”

The other thing that he never did was to test any of his ideas on either adults or kids. He preferred to rely solely on his own judgement: “I never try my books out with kids because, if a kid likes you, he’ll say he likes it, if he doesn’t like you, he’ll say it stinks.” Nevertheless, he did get feedback—truckloads of it in the form of fan mail—jam-smudged, printed letters from his most ardent admirers, the five- to ten-year-olds. From one fan: “Dr. Seuss, you have an imagination with a long tail!” For this child, among so many others, Dr. Seuss was not only an author who, as he himself admitted, drew like a kid, but one who thought like a kid—unfettered, original, and developing.