BECOMING DR. SEUSS

Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination

By Brian Jay Jones

At first, the subtitle of Brian Jay Jones’s new life of Dr. Seuss — “Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination” — seems ill chosen. Surely, the newly arriving reader thinks, it ought to be “Theodor Geisel and the Making of the American Imagination,” since few authors can have had more influence on the inner workings of the American mind than Geisel, who, in his guise as the good doctor of children’s books, reshaped everything from the beat of our doggerel to our notions of the ideal color of eggs and ham.

But only halfway through the book the subtitle seems shrewdly chosen, and more than borne out by the material. Geisel’s sensibility, it turns out, was far more absorbent, and far more pliable, than one would have imagined, turned in many different directions by the winds of his era, and changed again and again by his contact with a kind of all-star roster of mid-20th-century creative exemplars. Unlike most of the great children’s book authors and illustrators — Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter — Geisel was not in any way an obsessive or driven visionary, a prisoner of childhood locked in his own imagery or mythology. Instead, he worked (and could have easily stayed in) advertising, animation and political cartooning — to all of which he was, you soon get the sense, more naturally inclined than to what he called, cheerfully, “brat books.” (He never had children of his own, nor seems to have liked other people’s much. “I like children in the same way that I like people,” was his tactful but giveaway standard answer.) Geisel/Seuss, it turns out, made a shrewd though far from cynical decision to write to, though never down to, an audience of children at a moment when that audience was becoming a market — and though his own values and imagination shaped the books he made, his choice to make those kinds of books in the first place turns out in part to have been a response to the new market for them.

He was rooted in a place: There’s an actual Mulberry Street in Springfield, Mass., where Geisel grew up during the World War I era. His was a German-American family of a kind whose centrality to American experience would later get erased a bit by historical circumstance, but was an extremely strong cultural type — as celebrated by H. L. Mencken — for a long time. His father was a brewer, and Springfield, perhaps most significantly, a place where a culture of German and Yankee ingenuity was very much alive. (Basketball had been invented there in a lucky afternoon.) This spirit of cuckoo-clock engineering and enterprise was dominant for Geisel throughout his life — he was always ready for the new angle, the unexpected entrepreneurial approach to publishing, the sharp commercial play.

After good college years at Dartmouth, where his natural style as a hard-edge, fluid-lined cartoonist was already in place, he quickly got to New York, where, in the 1920s, he pursued a joyful life as a freelance cartoonist at a time when that was a real career. From there he made a natural leap into advertising, becoming responsible for the “Quick, Henry! The Flit!” insecticide campaign that older people still smile to remember, and then, eager to find a way out of mere ad-making, in 1941 went to the progressive newspaper PM as their chief editorial cartoonist, where he was bravely anti-Lindbergh and sadly anti-Japanese-American. (The war had ugly effects on Geisel’s view of Asians, as it did on so many. In addition to the early anti-Japanese-American cartoons, a later image of a “Chinaman” from “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” has been much condemned, and even eliminated, in its mural form, from the Seuss museum in Springfield. On the other hand, Jones establishes that the civilization of microscopic creatures called “Whos” in “Horton Hears a Who!” was inspired by a 1953 visit Geisel took to Japan and was his way of “offering an open hand of friendship to the Japanese. … telling them they mattered and deserved to be taken care of in a postwar world.”)