Dr. Seuss
(Theodor S. Geisel, 1904-1991)
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts,
and attended Dartmouth College (1922-25), where he edited the college humor
magazine, the Jack-o-Lantern. At Dartmouth, in trouble with
the dean, he began to use his middle name, Seuss, as a nom-de-plume.
After college, he went to Oxford University but dropped out without receiving
his Ph.D.; to assuage his father, he added "Dr." to his pen name (Stofflet
17).
After leaving Oxford, Dr. Seuss returned to
New York in 1927, where he began writing cartoons for humor magazines such
as Judge, creating characters and themes that recur in his later
children's books. He also worked in advertising, including among
his clients Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Flit insecticide, which
insured him enough income to marry Helen Palmer, an Oxford classmate, in
1927.
Dr. Seuss first conceived of writing for children
in 1931 while illustrating adult humor books, Boners and More
Boners. He worked for a flat fee, but the books made a great
deal for the publisher; Bader suggests this may be a possible motive for
writing his own books, to get a greater share of the income generated;
also, she notes that children's books were one of the few side activities
allowed under his Flit! advertising contract (302). In 1936,
he created some of the images and the initial rhymes for his first children's
book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (publ. 1937)
to keep his mind off an approaching storm while crossing the Atlantic (Stofflet
29). The manuscript was rejected by 28 publishers before it was finally
accepted.
In the 1940s, he began to make editorial cartoons
for syndication; we can see hints of his later political commentary in
children's books such as The Lorax (on the environment) and The
Butter Battle Book (on nuclear proliferation) in these editorials.
Sometimes the political comment was disguised, as when he wrote Marvin
K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? (1972); when challenged by political
humorist Art Buchwald as to why he never wrote "political" books, Dr. Seuss
showed the political nature of the book by crossing out "Marvin K. Mooney"
and replacing it with "Richard M. Nixon." The book was veiled commentary
on Nixon's presidency (Stofflet 55).
In 1943, he was drafted and assigned to the animation
unit of the army's film production company; a live film he wrote on this
assignment won an Oscar for best short documentary when it was released
for general audiences in 1945. Dr. Seuss also wrote, but did not
draw, Gerald McBoing-Boing, a pioneering animated cartoon from the
UPA studio; this film also won an Oscar in 1951.
In 1957 he wrote The Cat in the Hat
after reading an article calling for a more attractive alternative to the
dull basal readers then available; the success of this book led to sequels
and caused Random House to begin a whole division, "Beginner Books," headed
by Dr. Seuss (Stofflet 45). In this role, he published additional
books which he wrote but did not illustrate; these appeared under the name,
"Theo. Le Sieg" ("Geisel" spelled backwards) (Gough 183).
In 1984, Dr. Seuss received a Pulitzer Prize for
The
Lorax.
On Beyond Zebra!
The alphabet book is a well defined genre of
children's picture book that, despite its apparently narrow scope, allows
considerable variation in terms of style and content. According to
George Bodmer, today's society, which has lost faith in the didacticism
that spawned alphabet books, a new genre of "anti-alphabet books" has developed
which both entertains children and subverts traditional ideas of the alphabet
book (115).
Besides On Beyond Zebra!, Dr. Seuss
wrote one "ordinary" alphabet book (Dr. Seuss's ABC) and another "anti-alphabet"
book in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, with its progression of smaller
and smaller, alphabetically identified cats, ending with "Voom" beyond
Z. However, On Beyond Zebra! is his "greatest anti-alphabet";
through its fanciful extension of the alphabet, Dr. Seuss questions the
arbitrariness of the alphabet (Bodmer 116).
The opening text suggests a conventional alphabet
book -- with the character's alliterative name (Conrad Cornelius o'Donald
o'Dell) and a routine list of words for the letters (Ape, Bear, Camel,
Hare). The picture shows Conrad boxed in: situated in a corner, the
chair back separating him from the speaker and from the rest of the room,
and the alphabet squeezed into one section of the blackboard. His
alphabet, however, suggests the possibility of breaking out of the box,
in the large, bold "Z," which extends out toward the room. In the
next opening, Conrad again appears constrained, pushed into the far left
portion of the picture, while the right-hand page contains text but is
mostly blank -- perhaps suggesting the potential for the child to inscribe
his/her own alphabet into the unfilled space?
Contrast this to the way in which the last, unnamed
letter of the book expands to fill all available blackboard space, and
also how the pictures of imaginary beasts fill the spreads on which they
appear. Conrad, too, is liberated from his box as he draws the final,
beautiful letter -- no longer in a corner of the room, he has also climbed
from the seat to the back of his chair, thus surmounting the barrier that
has held him in. (Bodmer notes that the grandiose letter of the end of
the book suggests that the possibilities are not yet exhausted, that even
the new "alphabet" presented here is insufficient: "This letter will give
rise to another animal with the sound in its name, which will give rise
to another letter, and so on." (116))
On the third opening of the book, Conrad remains
in his boxed-in position, but the narrator is in the large open space to
the right, and creates his first letter (Yuzz) in bold red, contrasting
to the plain black-and-white of Conrad's letters (as the narrator's shirt
color contrasts to the washed-out pink of Conrad's). The new letters
enable the narrator to see things anew:
Seuss's trademark fuzzy animals and weird shapes begin with the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz. As in Sendak's In the Night Kitchen, it appears that a border has been crossed between the ordinary world and the fantastic or imaginative world; in this case, the vehicle for the transition is the ability to imagine new alphabet letters.In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
Consequently, unable to arrive at a compromise, they surge back and forth across the sidewalk in the air. Their particular quandary seems to come once again from the arbitrary nature of language -- i.e., the interchangeability of "here" and "there" (which I made the subject of my own poem, "Here and There," in 1995).They're afraid to stay THERE. They're afraid to stay HERE.
They think THERE is too Far. They think HERE is too NEAR.
There's a real handy letter.
What's handy about it. . .?
You just can't spell Humpf-Humpf-a-Dumpfer without it.
Well, of course you can - Seuss has just done so! Even as the
narrator insists on the necessity of new letters to deal with the new reality,
the written text contradicts the assertion of necessity.
The role of language in bringing about the reality
it supposedly describes accounts for most people's lack of familiarity
with the extended alphabet, as the narrator explains "SNEE is for Sneedle."
The Sneedle is a particularly unpleasant insect, a super-mosquito that
is extremely difficult to kill, "Which is awfully hard work. So it's
easy to see/Why most people stop at the Z. But not me!"
It is inevitable that an "anti-alphabet" should
deal with other questions of language, and the Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs,
soft and flabby crosses between an octopus and a manatee, suggest an onomatopoeic
origin of language -- that is, their name (and their letter) sound like
they appear.
Sources: Arakelian, Paul G., "Minnows into
Whales: Integration Across Scales in the Early Styles of Dr. Seuss," Children's
Literature Association Quarterly (CLAQ) 18, 1 (Spring 1993) 18-22;
Bader, Barbara, American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within,
New
York: Macmillan, 1976; Bodmer, George, "The Post-Modern Alphabet: Extending
the Limits of the Contemporary Alphabet Book, from Seuss to Gorey,"
CLAQ
14, 3 (Fall 1989) 115-17; Gough, John, "The Unsung Dr. Seuss: Theo.
Le Sieg," CLAQ 11, 4 (Winter 1986-87) 183-86; Ingalls, Zoë,
"The Cat in the Hat, The Butter Battle Book, and other Soupçons
of Seuss!" Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 July 1993, B4-B5;
Stofflet, Mary, Seuss from Then to Now: A Catalogue of the Retrospective
Exhibition Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, New York: Random
House, 1986.
Other Internet Resources for Studying Dr. Seuss:
Page produced July 28, 1998