Oh, The Places He Took Us: Why I Love Dr. Seuss.

One bright and sunny winter’s day when I was a young and callow grad student studying Russian literature at the University in Pittsburgh and still believed I’d get a job one day, I ran into a Russian friend of mine taking a walk with his young daughter along Forbes Ave. I think she was four at the time. We stopped to chat, and I complimented Vadim on his daughter’s English (they’d only been in the States for a couple of months at that point).

“Well, there’s a problem,” Vadim said. “She’s in daycare right now, and she’s learning her English from Dr. Seuss.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

“Do you like snow?” the little sylph interrupted her daddy to ask.

“I do,” he answered.

“Well, here you go,” she said, smearing a fistful on his jacket.

“Do you want some in your face?” he asked, bending over and picking up a handful.

The little girl took a step back and howled, “I do not want it any place!”  

I think it took me the better part of 45 minutes to recover from the mixture of hilarity and awe this exchange occasioned.

One of my greatest heroes—shamefully unrepresented on the masthead above—is the immortal Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known, of course, as Dr. Seuss. I, like about a zillion other American kids, grew up on his books (and his TV specials, brilliantly given sound and motion by Chuck Jones, the genius animator behind Looney Tunes). But we did more than just read him. We traveled with him. Each Dr. Seuss book was a doorway into Seuss’s own world.  

Even though Seuss peppers his text with references to real places (one of his characters, clad in a slicker, runs off to Palm Springs to avoid the Midwinter Jicker) and some of his language and allusions are unmistakably mid-century American, I have this theory that Seuss’s books, with the exception of his first, “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” all take place in a different world: the world that young Marco, the narrator of “Mulberry Street,” imagined.

Seuss's world is one in which the bizarre is the norm and where the mundane would seem jarring and out of place. It's a strange, loopy, colorful, surreal place of physically-impossible architecture, nonexistent (yet perfectly logical) flora and fauna, and dazzling wordplay (much of it created with his own words) that seemed perfectly natural when I was a kid, and stuns me by its genius today as I read it to my own kids. Dr. Seuss had, arguably, the richest internal life of any of our American writers or artists, and his ability to make it accessible and comprehensible to generations of readers indicates a rare sort of genius.

Having opened that window in “Mulberry Street,” Seuss leaped through it and never looked back. And he took his readers with him.

The audacity of the man’s accomplishment is stunning. Lots of other storytellers have been content to mine the same mythological veins that have informed our storytelling for millennia—C.S. Lewis didn’t invent fauns, or lions, or the idea of traveling to other realities. Lewis Carroll didn’t make up playing cards or caterpillars. But Seuss made up his own mythology. Ex nihilo. Out of the whole cloth. And he isn't part of a tradition, either. There are no influences, no precursors, to Dr. Seuss, either to his style of drawing or his writing style in children's literature. His art resembles that of the first generation of comic strip creators--he's closer in tone to George Herriman of "Krazy Kat" or Elzie Segar of "Popeye" than he is to any other illustrators, and perhaps newspaper cartoons are where one should search for Seuss's roots--he was a cartoonist for Judge, Puck, and other humor publications before he went into advertising (his first career), and he once considered a regular strip called Hejji before giving up the idea.

He's also the first children's book writer for whom the illustrations are an essential--indeed, indispensable--part of the story. They aren't there merely to support the copy--they're a part of it. That seamless melding of words and pictures speaks more to comic strips than it does to traditional illustrated literature.

He is, sometimes, fatuously compared to Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but had neither of those gentlemen ever been born, there still would have been a Seuss. He didn't need them, and he isn't indebted to them. While Carroll and Lear were clever, no doubt, neither of them wrote, or could have written, what is in my humble opinion the most perfect poetic passage in the English language:

          I had terrible trouble in staying alive. 
         Then I saw an old pipe that said "Vent Number Five."
         I didn't have time to find out what that meant, 
         But the vent had a hole. 
        And the hole's where I went. 

*     *     *

He was clever enough to make his work educational (another towering accomplishment, to make a world of the sheerest, merriest whimsy educational. Had he been a chef, I have no doubt he would have somehow made Twinkies good for you). “Green Eggs and Ham”, which was written (on a hundred dollar bet) using only 50 words, got him into educational publishing. He pretty much started Beginner Books, an imprint of Random House, on his own. The fact that it was educational, and explicitly marketed as such, served as excellent camouflage. It obscured the deeply subversive nature of his work.

Subversive? Dr. Seuss? A kiddie books writer? You better believe it.

Geisel himself wasn’t exactly the kind of person that most American parents of the period—or now—would want teaching their kids. Politically, he was a flaming liberal, radical to the core. A dedicated anti-Fascist who drew reams of political cartoons for the wartime liberal magazine PM¸ he accused home-grown conservatives and isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and Gerald L.K. Smith of treason, lacerating them as viciously as he went after Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Later on, he lent the text of "Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Leave Now" to his friend Art Buchwald, who reproduced the entire book in his column, replacing "Marvin K. Mooney" with "Richard M. Nixon," after the Watergate break-in had made the headlines.

His politics came out explicitly in later books like The Sneetches, The Lorax, and The Butter Battle Book. They espouse dangerously anti-Establishment sentiments, and it was noticed. They were banned from any number of school libraries, which puts Seuss in good company. But by the time those books—about racial prejudice, corporate destruction of the environment, and the idiocy of the arms race—appeared, he was already too well-established, too beloved an American icon, to ignore or marginalize.

Personally, he was hardly an exemplar for the rosy-cheeked and well-scrubbed children of Middle America, either. He was a chainsmoker, consumed copious amounts of vodka, was gleefully profane, and, in one of the darker episodes of his life, an adulterer and wife-stealer (his first wife, Helen Palmer, committed suicide after finding out about his long-running affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, who became his second wife). In his early days as a young and successful Madison Avenue adman, he was a carouser, a practical joker, and more than a tad ribald, a quality demonstrated by the earliest poem of his which survives: 

           

            Mrs. Van Bleck

            Of the Newport Van Blecks

            Is so goddamn rich

            She has gold-plated sex.

            Whereas Miggles and Mitzi

            And Blitzie and Sue

            Have the commonplace kind

            And it just has to do.

Not someone who can be trusted to be a good influence on the kiddies. Matter of fact, I suspect he was at least partly responsible for the social unrest of the 60’s. 

Consider what children’s literature looked like before Seuss—Dick and Jane dutifully doing their homework, helping Mother set the table, going to church, putting their clothes away, learning to be good citizens. Dick assiduously studied his math and science so we could beat the Rooskies into space—Jane was in training to be a good little mommy just like her mommy. Children’s literature was “moralistic” in the worst possible way, the way George W. Bush, who is responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis is considered “moral” for no better reason than because he didn’t screw around on Laura. Kids' books were insipid, dictatorial, and preached conformity. There was a norm, you better comply with it, and it was all for the good of God and country and good solid American values.

And then came the Cat in the Hat in 1957. Under the guise of “this is good for you because it’s teaching you to read with simple sight-words,” Seuss unleashed his own demons of whimsy and contempt for societal mores upon a whole generation of tender young American readers. The Cat, this capricious Spirit of Anarchy, with his disdain for property rights and good manners--his impossible three-looped bow tie is itself an affront to both sartorial conformity and physics--bursts into the children’s house while Mother is away, and proceeds to destroy it over the protests of the fish, who’s obviously a big fan of Dick and Jane--the Superego to the Cat's unbridled Id. 

The Cat turned children’s literature on its ear. Suddenly, instead of putting toys away and making beds, the protagonist is turning the entire house upside down, smashing this, juggling that, turning loose evil little equally-destructive minions, and throwing order, propriety, and social niceties out the window. Dick and Jane's center couldn't hold. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.    

Sure, the Cat eventually puts everything back in order at the end. But the message is clear: do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it. And authority, in the form of that goddamned goody two-shoes fish, is there to be questioned, flouted, mocked, and stuffed in a box.

Dr. Seuss. He also liked bow ties. 

This was revolutionary. And by the time that generation of readers who’d grown up on Dr. Seuss hit college, they were deeply disenchanted with the status quo, and ascribed to a different, deeper morality than the "be a good citizen" variant practiced by Dick and Jane. It was a moral code according to which treating black people, or gay people, or women, as second class citizens, or bombing people in their own country, or raping the environment in the name of profit, is immoral. It was the the morality of Seuss's antifascist wartime cartoons, and that of  "The Sneetches," "The Lorax," and "The Butter Battle Book." It was a generation of young people who, perhaps unconsciously influenced by Seuss, rejected the reality imposed by their parents’ generation and instead created their own. 

And eventually, after some fits and starts and setbacks and Kent State, America began the process of becoming a much nicer and more civilized place.

I don’t think it’s too much to ascribe to Seuss the same kind of influence that Bob Dylan had. Seuss plowed the fields on which Dylan planted the seeds. I just don’t know if “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” would have taken root if the Cat hadn’t already tilled the soil.

*     *     *

Dr. Seuss is irreplaceable, and his work is irreplicable. There is no school of Seuss, no Seussian movement, no disciples, or at least none worthy of carrying his mantle. He's one of a kind. No other creator of children's literature even begins to come close to him. In the history of children's literature, Seuss stands alone. Much as I've been unable to identify any influences, I've been unable to identify any worthy successors.

After his death, his characters, images, and name were all licensed--criminally, in my view--by his second wife, Audrey Stone Dimond Geisel, of whom I am not a fan. The result has been ghastly. None of these posthumous properties--the books like “Cooking With the Cat” and “There’s No Place Like Space”, Seussical The Musical, Seuss Landing at the Universal Studios theme park, the Grinch and Cat movies with Jim Carrey and Mike Myers, or his website--has the ethos of the originals. They’re all pale and transparent imitations. They may look, fleetingly, Seussian—but they’re soulless, inauthentic, and more than mildly irritating to those of us who grew up on the real thing. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I can’t define Seussian, but I know it when I see it.” Those ain’t it.

These later Seussian properties are bowdlerized, whitewashed, made safe for society. The original sense of mischief, that gleefully subversive spirit, is gone. They lack danger and unpredictability. They’re tame, which is the antithesis of the Seussian spirit. Ted Geisel's world was scary. There are vugs lurking under the rug. There's a lunatic destroying the house. There are skritzes and skrinks and green-headed Quilligan quails lurking behind every rock, poozers snarling in Pompelmoose Pass, Grinches plotting in the mountains, and Once-lers cutting down all the Truffula trees and making the Bar-ba-loots sick.

Dr. Seuss, in a word, was dangerous, and the world he created was a dangerous world. But our world is dangerous, too. Every kid knows that. Danger is the flip side of wonder. And it’s that danger, that wildness, that unpredictability, that makes his world so much more real, authentic, and ultimately satisfying to us than the world of his predecessors, the creators of Dick and Jane, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Nurse Nancy, or any of his successors who've failed to live up to the standards he set.