Becoming Dr. Seuss: The Making of an American Imagination

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habeeb and this is Our American Stories. And to search for the All American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. From Green Eggs and Ham to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, we’re all familiar with the work of Doctor Seuss, but the story of how we actually became the author we know and love is far from short and simple.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: Brian J.

00:00:35
Speaker 1: Jones, author of Becoming Doctor Seuss, is here with the full story.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: Of the man behind his pen name.

00:00:46
Speaker 3: Doctor Seuss was born Theodore Geisel, Theodore Seuss Geisel in fact in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is the son of a very successful brewing family. They’re German immigrants who his grandfather had come to the United States and set up a brewing company that was very successful. And so SEUs was around German brewers. Loved listening to his German ancestors, you know, his family members talking Germany. Would sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the conversation dowstairs. He loved the sound of that language.

00:01:19
Speaker 4: And how if you have a.

00:01:20
Speaker 3: German word and you want to qualify something, you just keep adding on to the word and it gets longer.

00:01:25
Speaker 4: And more interesting.

00:01:26
Speaker 3: At one point, he talks about going to school during World War One and having children chasing him and throwing coal at him, saying, kill the kaiser. They knew he was a German immigrant.

00:01:37
Speaker 4: That always sort of stayed with Sus a lot of his life.

00:01:40
Speaker 3: I think that’s where he gets sort of his you know, love for the underdog and for the oppressed. And I think a book like The Sneeches is probably sort of born out of that sheer feeling of being the outsider, of being the other that he experienced, even as a child when people threw coal at him for being German. His mother is Henrietta Seuss or Soys is actually the correct way of pronouncing the name Seyus is his mother’s maiden name.

00:02:02
Speaker 4: That’s where he gets the name Suss from.

00:02:04
Speaker 3: Sus always said that, you know, it rhymed with mother goose or somebody pointed that out to him, so he was always okay with people pronouncing it Sus. His mother, he often said, is the one who inspired his love of rhyme. She had worked in a bakery and she would, you know, chant little poems on the flavors of pie they had available that day, which always cracked him up. So Susan’s father inherited the brewing company right about the time that prohibition kicked in, and so Susan’s father never ended up running the company, and in fact, they were in danger of losing everything. SUS’s father then, of course ended up in a job as superintendent of parks for Springfield, which is a job he had most of his life after that. And Ted, as everybody always called sus as a kid, you know, grew up around the parks and going to the zoo there in Springfield, and he often joked about how, you know, his father would put him in the cages and let the animals chew on him and things like that, none of which happened.

00:02:55
Speaker 4: You know, Susan never lets the truth get in a way of a fantastic story.

00:03:00
Speaker 3: SU’s you know, had this sort of just this creative, regular kid’s life in Massachusetts at the turn of the century. It’s really interesting. Springfield is a really interesting town. It’s almost like this imaginative hub up there hit that part of New England, you know, like Milton Bradley is from there, and Nay Smith created basketball at the YMCA there in Springfield. I mean, it’s like all these weird little, you know, American industries and icons came out of there. I think I think Smith and Wesson came out of there. It’s just, you know, there’s all sorts of really fascinating people that were in and around Springfield. So Suss comes out of Dartmouth University as a fairly mediocre student, but manages to get a scholarship to go to Oxford. He told his father in fact that he had applied for our scholarship and won it, and that actually turned not to not be true. But his father had bragged all over town that his son was going to going to Oxford, So once he found out it wasn’t true, he paid to send to Sundogs it anyway. So sus is going to Oxford on his father’s dime at this point and quickly finds out he’d rather do anything but study English. He initially went to go be an English professor, quickly loses interest in it. But he meets a woman who would eventually become his wife, a woman and Helen, and she is sitting next to him in class one days. He’s doodling and says, you know somebody who draws the way you do should do that for a living, and so sus who ends up marrying Helen.

00:04:24
Speaker 4: Then they end up living together.

00:04:26
Speaker 3: Back in the United States, he sets up shop and this is in the sort of the Gilded Age of the United States, you know, the mid to late twenties, and he embarks on this very successful career. And it’s hard to believe now that you can set up a career doing something like this, but he’s very He has a very successful careach rejectory as.

00:04:41
Speaker 4: A cartoonist for the magazines.

00:04:43
Speaker 3: You know, it’s like almost like today’s New Yorker cartoons, but there’s you know, he’s doing cartoons for Liberty Magazine and Judge Magazine and all these all these magazines with these massive circulations, and Ernie’s living doing that. But he also manages to get an incredibly lucky fortuitous moment where he does this cartoon that has a night laying in bed. There’s a dragon sticking its head through the window and the knight says, another.

00:05:08
Speaker 4: Dragon, and here I just had the entire.

00:05:10
Speaker 3: Castle sprayed with flint. Flint was a bug repellent very popular in the era. Well, the woman who.

00:05:18
Speaker 4: Was married to the man who ran the ad campaign for Flint. I mean, this is none of those crazy stories.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: Saw that cartoon in the magazine, went to her husband and said, this is the greatest advertisement for Flint you could ever ask for.

00:05:29
Speaker 4: You need to hire this young man to be a Flit adman.

00:05:32
Speaker 3: So Suss ends up in advertising through this, and he’s a very successful ad man. He’s the Don Draper of you know, of nineteen twenty five. He ends up running the Flint campaign for I think something like seventeen years, just full page ads and color billboards, and it became sort of a running joke like you know, where’s the beef or something like that. You know, quick Henry the Flitt was the tagline, and it was used in songs and it was in punch like comedians would say, quick Henry the Flint would laugh.

00:06:00
Speaker 4: They all got the joke.

00:06:01
Speaker 3: So SU’s had this very successful careers and advertising man for years before he ever got into children’s books. What finally happened was he had done some illustrations for a book that was sort of like kids say the Darkness thing. It was like this book of kids saying funny things that were true, and then he would put the illustrations in it and Sue’s thought, you know, under my contract with Flitt, I have a non compete clause, so I can’t draw for.

00:06:28
Speaker 4: A book like this.

00:06:29
Speaker 3: But there was nothing in his contract that said he couldn’t do children’s books. So because there was a loophole in his contract, there was essentially money on the table still there.

00:06:40
Speaker 4: For children’s books.

00:06:41
Speaker 3: So Sue’s decides to write a children’s book purely basically because he had a clause in his contract that said he could or that didn’t say that he couldn’t. It wasn’t any great calling at least at that time, you know, to provide great books for kids, or because he felt some compelling urge to write them for kids. So he went ahead and started to write a children’s book. And that’s where the book and to think that I saw on Mulbray Street came from his work on children’s books for part of his career. Didn’t pay his bills. I know, children’s books was a side hustle for him for quite a long time.

00:07:14
Speaker 1: And we’re listening to author Brian J. Jones his book Becoming Doctor Seuss. Well, you need to pick it up, go to Amazon or the usual suspects to buy the book. When we return, the story of doctor SEUs continues here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.

00:07:56
Speaker 2: Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: And we’re back with our American Stories and with Brian J. Jones sharing the story of how Theodore at Geisel became Doctor Seuss.

00:08:19
Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:08:24
Speaker 3: So the first book that Seuss publishes when he realizes that his contract again with Flint, does not prohibit him from doing children’s books is He’s on a cruise with his wife Helen. He’s sitting in the bar, and two sits in bars a lot in the fact that you can never take the Brewers.

00:08:39
Speaker 4: Get completely out of the kid.

00:08:42
Speaker 3: He’s sitting in a bar on a boat in the middle of the ocean in kind of a storm, and he’s listening to the engines turning over in this regular rhythm, and he starts trying to come up with words to fit that rhythm. It’s essentially the rhythm of twas the Night before Christmas. I think it’s called something like canapestic tetrameter or something like that. But the engines are rolling in this very regular rhythm, and Sue starts trying to put together a poem, a really bouncing poem to fit that rhythm, and goes through several different iterations. But that’s the book that becomes. And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, following that rhythm of the boat engines. Sus writes and illustrates this book, and it’s, you know, and it’s a very fitting first book for Suss because it’s about a little boy who sees a man with a horse and a cart on Mulberry Street and starts turning minnows into wales, as he says in the book, telling bigger and bigger tales of what’s happening, and spinning this gigantic story and bringing in all these characters and then at the very end, when his father finally asks him what he saw, he says.

00:09:37
Speaker 4: I just saw a horse and carriage on Mulberry Street.

00:09:39
Speaker 2: You know.

00:09:40
Speaker 4: It goes back to the troof at that point.

00:09:41
Speaker 3: But it’s a fantastic story. It’s a great debut. But it’s one of those books that Su when he gets done with it, can’t find anybody who wants to publish it. But Sus walked it all over New York City. This is still he’s doing his advertising work and he’s hauling his manuscript around and as he’s walking down one of the streets to New York, he runs into a friend of his from Dartmouth who works for a publisher, and his friend says to him, what.

00:10:04
Speaker 4: Are you carrying around here?

00:10:05
Speaker 3: Ted, and Sue says, well, I’ve got this kid’s book that no one will publish. I was going to take it home.

00:10:10
Speaker 4: And burn it.

00:10:11
Speaker 3: And his friend says, you know, come inside with me and let me take you up to the editor in charge of children’s books and let me see what we can do. And Sus gets his book published through this connection with the Dartmouth friend of his. Sue, so he said, later, had I’ve been walking down the other side of the street. I might be in dry cleaning today. So it was a very fortuitous moment in his life. And you have to be in the right place at the right time. In met an old friend of his who shepherds that book into publications. That’s the beginning of his publishing with children’s books, but he’s not doing them because he feels some great moral obligation to children to give them great books that they deserve. This happens later and Sue’s talked about that he almost has this epiphany at one point about it. So Sue had a brief career as an editorial cartoonist, you know, doing these cartoons of taking on America first and anti Semitism. He’s really progressive cartoons. And he ends up enlisting in the Army. He’s too I think he’s thirty nine years old. He’s a little too old, Like he’s not going to see any active active service, He’s not going to be on the front lines or anything. But they station him out in California near where he lived, and he is in the Signal Corps and his division is run by Commanding Officer Frank Capra, the director and Capra had recruited Suss. They knew from his work that he was a smart guy. Because of his ad work. They knew that he was great at message, that he could get a message through quickly and funny and succinctly, and that he could draw well. And so they put sus in charge of doing military training films. A lot of the soldiers at that time couldn’t read, so they really wanted to do some animated cartoons that would teach soldiers the basics. And I mean when I talk basics, it’s like how not to get killed basically, you know. And it’s like, this is how you protect yourself from malaria by you know, putting on your repellent and sleeping in your nets and lessons like that. So Suss creates this character with Kaepra called Private Snaffoo, and Snafu teaches soldiers how to be great soldiers by doing everything wrong. So you get to see Snafu reap the consequences of his actions the entire time in a very funny way. But Capra does two things that are really important in Susan’s career. First, Capra, as a film director, sits down with Seuss and goes through his scripts and says, I’m going to underline in blue everything in this script that advances your story. And when I give this back to you, if there’s no blue on your page, you have a problem because you don’t have a lot of time in these cartoons.

00:12:36
Speaker 4: You need to move.

00:12:37
Speaker 3: And so he taught SUS’s conciseness, which again informs the way he worked later on making every single word count, making sure every beat matters.

00:12:47
Speaker 4: That’s one of the big lessons that Capra teaches Sus.

00:12:50
Speaker 3: The other thing he does is capra and again this is a film director’s perspective that Sue s grabbed.

00:12:55
Speaker 4: Hold of and ran with for the rest of his life.

00:12:57
Speaker 3: Capra would storyboard everything and show you how to storyboard. And he does something really brilliant in that for the private Snafu cartoons, he recognizes a fellow crazy somebody who fits Sus like a glove in.

00:13:12
Speaker 4: A young animator at that time named Chuck Jones who’s.

00:13:14
Speaker 3: Over at Warner Brothers. Now, Jones is not in the military. He’s the civilian who’s paired up with Sus and they create these private Snapho cartoons together. And Chuck Jones, as we know, is the one who Any Bugs Money cartoon that you know and love, and remember Chuck Jones was behind as either a writer or director.

00:13:31
Speaker 4: You know, all the classes are Chuck Jokes.

00:13:33
Speaker 3: So Chuck is working with doctor Sustu, and he’s showing him the art of storyboarding, taking the story and breaking it down into basic components, pinning it up on the wall and staring at it and moving pages around to see where it works better. This is a practice that Seuss would use the rest of his life with his own books. He would put his pages up on the wall of his office and stare at them and realize, this doesn’t work here, this is funnier over here. So these are the skills he learns from Capra and from Chuck Jones that then informed the way he would do his art for the rest of his life. Later on, of course, he would be paired up again with Chuck Jones to do how the Grim Stole Christmas.

00:14:11
Speaker 4: And Jones was the perfect one to do that.

00:14:13
Speaker 3: And Sus was very skeptical about letting anybody adapt his work to the screen. But with Chuck Jones, he knew he had a good friend and an ally and that so Jones comes back into his story later on. But two really key relationships that Sus gets into in World War Two, Capra and Chuck Jones. In nineteen forty nine, after he’s come out of the Signal Corps, he’s still making a career in ads. He’s dabbled in Hollywood’s screen fixing and screenwriting. He doesn’t like it. It’s writing by Committee’s a little bit miserable, But he still really wants to do children’s books, and he’s just successful enough at it as a sort of second job that he’s actually asked to lead a writer’s workshop on writing children’s books for the University of Utah in nineteen forty nine. And it is a pivotal moment in children’s literature because Sus sits down and writes down by hand on paper what he thinks makes great writing for children. And he’s taking lessons that he’s learned from Capper. You can clearly see him processing and talking about you’ve got to make the words count, you have to keep the action moving forward. You will lose children. He was selling students in his class. You know, your biggest competitor right now is comic books. Whether you like comics or not, they are entertaining kids. And they are fast paced, and they are fun and they are colorful. That is your competition. That is who you are up against. That’s what you’ve got to remember when you’re writing for kids. And so what Sue’s really putting down on paper what children need to, you know, have their interests sustained, and how you don’t want to write down to them, and how you don’t want to be deliberately saccharin. You know, kids don’t kids don’t like being talked down to. Sus inherently gets this. If you’re trying to impress a kid, or you’re trying to write fancy for some kid, they will see right through.

00:16:06
Speaker 4: You would tell these.

00:16:07
Speaker 3: Students in his class that a child is the toughest audience you will ever write for because they will see you coming. You cannot fool a kid, so don’t try. Sus sort of having this. I don’t want to say eureka moment necessarily, but he’s sort of taken everything he’s learned from having written children’s books and having worked with Kapra, with Chuck Jones, and what’s funny and what makes things work and pacing of a book and understanding that that’s the key to keeping.

00:16:38
Speaker 4: A kid interested in reading again.

00:16:41
Speaker 3: It’s a really really important moment in not just SUS’s life, but in the history of writing for children.

00:16:49
Speaker 2: And you’re listening to Brian J.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: Jones telling the story of Doctor Seuss, his book but coming Doctor Seuss, Well, you’ve got to pick it up, go to Amazon or the usual suspects.

00:16:59
Speaker 2: At first book.

00:17:00
Speaker 1: Well, he gets the idea of the rhythm of his poetry by the rhythm of the cruise ship’s engine, and so much of what he does has to do with rhythm. And then, of course he joins the army, and by sheer happenstance, his boss is the great Frank Kapper, who, by the way, won Oscars for the Why We Fight series. Messaging and message mattered in World War Two. We were continually selling the American public on our need to stay in this fight and win. He also came across Chuck Jones while he was there too, And then he leaves the military, and that seminar about writing children’s books at the University of Utah changed everything for him.

00:17:36
Speaker 2: Don’t talk down to kids, keep the plot.

00:17:39
Speaker 1: Moving, and by the way, remember children of the toughest audience you will ever write for. And if you’ve ever performed for them, you know they’re even tougher when we come back more of the remarkable story of Doctor Seuss here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and to Brian J. Jones, and he’s sharing the story of how a man named Theodor Geisel became Doctor Seuss.

00:18:19
Speaker 2: Back to Brian with more of the story.

00:18:24
Speaker 3: So in nineteen fifty four in Life magazine, the novelist John Hersey is writing a piece about doing what we tend to do as a society.

00:18:34
Speaker 4: About every five years we write.

00:18:36
Speaker 3: These long agonized pieces about what’s wrong with kids today? You know, why aren’t they antered in reading? Why are theys sassing their parents? Who’s the blame for this? Well, you know at that time, whether it was comic books at one point, or today it’s video games or you know, the Internet or whatever. In nineteen fifty four, John Hersey said, well, one of the reasons kids don’t read, it’s not they can’t read, it’s that they don’t because books am and children are awful. Dick and Jane lead these lives of terrible desperation.

00:19:09
Speaker 4: The art is uninspiring. It’s a world that doesn’t exist for kids.

00:19:13
Speaker 3: Couldn’t they at least get doctor Seuss or Walt Disney or somebody to at least illustrate Dick and Jane to make it more interesting. Well, somebody who knows Seuss reads this article and goes to Seuss and doesn’t ask Seuss to illustrate Dick and Jane. What he does is he goes to SEUs and he says, I want you to write and draw me a children’s book, a book that they can’t put down. But the catch with this, and this is what makes Sus so important moving forward. The catch on this is because this is supposed to be a reading primer, as people say, it’s a book that can be used in the classroom. That means it has to have an educator approved reading list behind it.

00:19:56
Speaker 4: It has to have.

00:19:57
Speaker 3: Age appropriate words for a reading level, and you can not diverge from this list. If you want to make a word plural, for example, and it’s not on the list as a plural.

00:20:07
Speaker 4: You can’t use it.

00:20:08
Speaker 3: So it’s putting a straight jacket on before you even start writing the book, at least as far as your vocabulary goes. So Seuss has given this list of vocabulary where it don’t want to say it’s something around three.

00:20:18
Speaker 4: Hundred vocabulary words.

00:20:19
Speaker 3: And again it says, you cannot deviate from this list, but come up with a story using only these words. Well, Sus looks at this list and stares at this list for a year at least, and can’t come up with a story. You know, at one point he says something like, you know, what if I want to do a story about a queen tiger, Well, the word queen wasn’t on the list, and the word tiger isn’t on the list.

00:20:40
Speaker 4: And I wanted to do something.

00:20:41
Speaker 3: About scaling a mountain, Well the word mountain’s not on the list, and scaling is not on the list.

00:20:45
Speaker 4: And you know, it was a real problem.

00:20:48
Speaker 3: And so Sus always said later that he went through the list until he found words that rhymed, and two of the first words that rhymed were.

00:20:55
Speaker 4: Cat and hat.

00:20:58
Speaker 3: So Sus knew he and add something of a story or a character at least in a Cat with a hat.

00:21:05
Speaker 4: And he takes another year from there to actually finish the.

00:21:10
Speaker 3: Book, and agonizes over every single page doing this. But if you go through Cat on the Hat, you can see him working with that word list. There’s one page, for example, where the cat stands on a ball, which is where on the list, and starts juggling, and Sue’s downloading everything on that list. He’s juggling, okayake, a rake, a plate, demand, you know, a boat, a car, He’s juggling. It’s like Sue’s taking everything on that listing trying to get it on the page there. So that book sells lights out. I mean, that is the moment that Sue’s can be a children’s writer full time because this book. Teachers love it because it’s got the educator proof wordless. Parents love it because, unlike most children’s books, it’s fun.

00:21:51
Speaker 4: For adults to read. And kids love it because they don’t even realize that they’re learning their vocabulary words with it. It’s a fun book to read. It rhymes, the pictures are it’s great, and it ain’t Dick and Jane. This is the big moment in.

00:22:04
Speaker 3: Susan’s career when he truly becomes doctor sus So Captin Had comes out in the spring with nineteen fifty seven. The Grinch comes out in the fall of nineteen fifty seven, So you talk about hitting twice in one year. Now, The Grinch is not one of those books that’s written with a word list. Sue’s had what he called his big books that he was not inhibited by the word list.

00:22:26
Speaker 4: But The Grinch, I think is such a fascinating book because Sus often sent throughout his life that his favorite character was the Grinch. In fact, his car the license plate of his car that he drove in California said Grinch on the license plate. What I love about The Grinch is that, you know, remember, part of the message behind the Grinch is that Christmas doesn’t come from a store.

00:22:47
Speaker 3: And I love that this book was written by somebody who spent the first part of his career probably telling you that Christmas did come from the store. I mean, the the guy was in advertising was very good at it.

00:22:58
Speaker 4: So I think there’s a little bit of.

00:22:59
Speaker 3: Su He was reckoning with himself in this story, which is one of the reasons why I think he took it so personally. It could really sympathize with the Grinch and the Grinch coming around. But it’s a great example of Seuss really working on an ending. Because Seuss didn’t like his books to be overtly preachy or messaging, he often said, you know again, consistent with what he said in the nineteen forty nine lectures. If you’re trying to be preachy again, kids are going to see you coming. They’re going to recognize immediate what you’re up to you. They’re going to fold up shop, they’re going to walk away, like no kid wants.

00:23:32
Speaker 4: To be preached too.

00:23:33
Speaker 3: So when he got to the end of The Grinch and was trying to figure out what happens after the Grinch has kind of redeemed himself, what do you end it with?

00:23:40
Speaker 4: He was trying to keep it from being a.

00:23:41
Speaker 3: Little too religious if he could, and which is why it ultimately ends with sort of the Brotherhood of Man where you see you know and the cartoon they do it brilliantly when the star comes up, but he’s serving the roast beast at dinner, so it’s it’s more of a family type ending than than a Christmasy ending, per se.

00:23:57
Speaker 4: But that was Seus’s working really hard with an ending.

00:24:00
Speaker 3: One of my favorite stories about one of his later books is Green Eggs and Ham, because Green Eggs and Ham comes about as a result of a bet between Seuss and his editor at Random House, Bennett Surf and Bennett Surf loves to Kat and the Hat, and I mean the Kat and Hat is printing money, just doing great. And Serf, who adores Sue’s Bennet Surf often talked about how there was only one real genius who worked for him at Random House, and he says that was doctor Seuss, a high praise because he was publishing fauld a time too. Bennetts Surr says to doctor Seuss, okay, smart guy, Kat and the Hat used about two hundred unique words from your word list. I’ll bet you fifty bucks you can’t write a book that uses less than fifty of those words.

00:24:46
Speaker 4: And Sue says, you’re on.

00:24:49
Speaker 3: And that book becomes green eggs and Ham. And look at the way green eggs and ham is put together. It is repetition. You don’t even realize that the vocabulary is so limited because you are just constantly seeing the same words over and over again in different orders. I am, Sam, Sam, I am. Do you like green eggs and ham? Would you like him with the fox? Would you like him in a box? I would not like them with a fox. I would not like him in a box. It’s just it’s repetition using those same words over and over in a really interesting way. Seuss gets it in under the Wire. I think he’s got forty eight unique words in that book ultimately when he does it, And he later on said that Bennett Szif didn’t pay him his fifty bucks either. But Green Eggs and Ham is written on a bet to really hamstring Seuss with a very narrow educator approved word list, and Sus kills it with Green Eggs and Ham, which is still to this day the best selling Doctor Seus’s book of all time.

00:25:43
Speaker 4: And why not.

00:25:44
Speaker 3: It’s punchy, it’s fun again educator approved word list, but you don’t even realize that you’re only seeing less than fifty unique words, because what Seuss does with so little in that is brilliant keeps that book moving again. That’s Seus’s that Seus’s worrying about the plot propelling things for it. It’s tormenting this poor guy into eating readingggs and ham. That is what’s driving that plot forward. And as a student, as a reader, as a kid, you can’t turn those pages fast enough to see if they’re going to get him to try green eggs and a half, which he ultimately does. It is everything Seuss does well compressed down into that one single book, and what a.

00:26:23
Speaker 2: Story you’re hearing.

00:26:25
Speaker 1: He’s first challenged to write a book kids can’t put down, but limited to three hundred educator approved words. And from that constriction came creativity that happens all the time, folks. The less we have to choose from, sometimes the better we choose. And of course he finds these two words cat and hat. He’s looking for a rhyme, and the rest is history. Then comes the Grinch, and then comes the biggest challenge of all. His pal at his publishing company says, let’s see if he can do it in fifty words rather than three hundred. And of course, the bestseller of all time Green Eggs and ham Well, it was conceived as a result of a bet. When we come back more of this remarkable story of how Theodore Geisel became Doctor Seuss. Here on our American Stories, and we’re back with our American stories and with Brian J. Jones sharing the story of Theodore Gueisel aka Doctor Seuss. Back to Brian with a final part of this story.

00:27:51
Speaker 3: So Seuss is one of these creatives who took his work very seriously. There’s a great quote from his wife Helen, I think every writer can relate.

00:28:01
Speaker 4: To, or anybody he does anything creative I think relate to.

00:28:04
Speaker 3: And she often said, he’s miserable when he’s writing a book, and even more miserable when he’s not. There’s nothing casual in a Sue’s book. Sus would often start books, realized they were going nowhere.

00:28:18
Speaker 4: And then throw them at what he called his bone pile. But Sus had this really.

00:28:22
Speaker 3: Tough work ethic, sat down at the desk every single morning and sat there all day, whether anything happened or not. Some days, you know, the ideas came and the workflow. At other days nothing happened. But he was going to sit in that office every single day of his life work and Sus would, you know, do the rough sketches of his page, and he would type out the rhymes and the narrative and glue it to the page and put it up on the wall, and then he would stand back and stare at it. And people told me who knew him, would tell these great stories about how he always had a cigarette burning, and he would put his hands in his back pockets with his palms in and he would lean way forward with that cigaret in his mouth and just stare at the pages on the wall. He would step back and then he would walk over and he would move a page, and he wouldn’t even say anything. Sus would sweat the way everything rhyme to make sure it scanned perfectly. And you didn’t have to read a word weird, like you didn’t have to put the stress if you had a three syllable word, you didn’t have to put the stress in the wrong place to make the rhyme scheme work. That he didn’t want you, you know, taking a word like refrigerator and having to say refrigerator to make the rhyme work. He wanted it to be you know, you would say the word refrigerator and it would still scan proper. So Sus was very fussy about the way the words themselves worked. Now, having said that, even if the rhyme scanned perfectly, if Sus stepped back and one of those lines on the page was significantly longer than the other, Sus just didn’t like the.

00:29:45
Speaker 4: Way that looked, so he would start over. He would rewrite the page.

00:29:50
Speaker 3: But that’s the way he worked on these books, and sometimes it could take months and sometimes years to get it until he was perfectly happy with the book. So SUS’s artistic style is definitely unique. Sus often said that that was him trying to draw realistically and it all came out wrong. I mean, he basically says he’s doing the best he can with what he’s got, and that’s what comes out at the other end. Now, of course that’s him big modest I think, but it’s definitely an inimitable style, and it is one of those styles that when you.

00:30:21
Speaker 4: See it, you immediately know seuss. You immediately know Sue’s word.

00:30:25
Speaker 3: You know it’s very subtle, but you know, you notice a lot of Susan’s characters have eyelashes for example, it’s one of these weird little touches you see that makes it look Soussi him. So his artistic style is him, as he always said, just doing the best he could with the way he knew how to draw. But that love of language and that real fun sense of wordplay. Again, I think a lot of that came from listening to his German relatives talking and just listening to the way those German words came tumbling out and how funny they could be. And again, if you wanted to make a German word, make it explain something even more, You didn’t add words to a sentence. You just added more letters to a word, and you got these long, drawn out, ridiculous looking words. I think Suss really got a kick out of that. You know, Sus is so funny and a little frustrating when throughout his life people would ask him, you know, where do you come up with?

00:31:10
Speaker 4: You know where’d you come up with? Something like the loras, for example, is a perfect example.

00:31:14
Speaker 3: He said, well, I drew him and he was clearly a lorax, the most unhelpful answer possible. But you know, Seuss didn’t really have a hard time coming up with these crazy words. His made up names.

00:31:28
Speaker 4: Sound organic, They sound like they’re real words. They don’t sound like he’s trying too hard.

00:31:33
Speaker 3: I don’t know where he gets that ability from, And again it could come from that love of language, of listening to German words qualifying themselves.

00:31:39
Speaker 4: Over and over again.

00:31:41
Speaker 3: But Sus is really really great at just coming up with a word like grinch or sneech or loraxe or something that sounds like it already.

00:31:51
Speaker 4: Existed before Sus made it up.

00:31:55
Speaker 3: SUS’s wife, Helen, is one of the most important people in history, sort of the unsung here, although he in his lifetime, in her lifetime, he sung her praises gave her plenty of credit on it.

00:32:05
Speaker 4: She was a brilliant editor, a brilliant writer in her own right.

00:32:10
Speaker 3: She was one of the few people who could read his work in its rough form and walk back to him and just hold it in his face and say this doesn’t work, which is a tough place for a spouse to be at at times, but Helen was the one person who could be absolutely blunt with him, who didn’t bother sitting around and saying, yes, you’re brilliant.

00:32:28
Speaker 4: Everything you do is wonderful. She’s the one who there’s a great moment in one of.

00:32:31
Speaker 3: The magazine interview that he does, for example, where the journalist actually reports the moment when he’s sitting by the pool and Helen walks out and hands some pages from I Think the Grinch and says, you’re making the who’s look like bugs, and Sue says something like, well they are bugs, and she says, no, the Who’s are people.

00:32:49
Speaker 4: She says, not going to have it with him, and so he.

00:32:52
Speaker 3: Might complain about it, but he goes back and fixes it, So she was the one, you know, his first and best reader. She was the one who would go through it, you know, helping keep on course and tell him if things didn’t work, and tell him that if she thought a rhyme was not quite right, or if a drawing looked weird, and he took her word seriously. Whatever she said he took to heart. So she was one of his really important you know, in his career, one of his really important first editors. And Helen, again, like SEUs, was a great recruiter, was great at going on identifying talent, great at finding great writers and you know who could turn in these amazing manuscripts that she helped edit.

00:33:29
Speaker 4: So she was really really important.

00:33:32
Speaker 3: To his story in that regard on the professional side of it. On the personal side, Helen couldn’t have children, so doctor Seuss and Helen never had any kids of their own. And as Sus always set throughout his life, you have them all, entertain them. It’s rare when an artist gets to say goodbye to their readers on their own terms, and Suss does that with Oh the Places You’ll Go. Sus knew this was likely his last one, is his health had been declining Sus was a smoker his entire life, and it gave him cancer of the tongue and then his jaw, and he was in constant pain. His teeth were coming lucid times. And so Sus, by the time he’s working out other places.

00:34:14
Speaker 4: Knows that this is likely his last one and it’s an opportunity.

00:34:17
Speaker 3: For him to say goodbye to his readers, which again not every artist gets that opportunity. You can see Sus putting everything he’s got into that book. There are pages, there are big spreads inside that book where you’ve got characters that look like they stepped out of Judge magazine from nineteen twenty five. There’s men, you know, with boulder hats off who look out of time and out of place, and look something from the nineteen twenties.

00:34:42
Speaker 4: He’s got little black cats that you should show up, and his cartoons in there. Before you ever created the cat and matting. We got little cats reacting in some of his books.

00:34:50
Speaker 3: You know, there’s little homages to some of his other books going on in some of these other pages. There’s just there’s a lot going on in a lot of what people today would call easter eggs clues or little little hat tips to some of his earlier work, and it’s Sue’s sort of putting everything into this book as he’s.

00:35:05
Speaker 4: Telling his reader, you’re amazing, You’re going to succeed in life. But it’s him saying goodbye.

00:35:12
Speaker 3: It sells every graduation, it’s, you know, twice a year for a spring graduation and fall graduation. That book’s constantly selling. Everybody gets promoted, they get that book. But it was Sue’s, it was his valedictory message. It was him telling everyone to give bye. You’re great, you’re brilliant, go have fun. And that was him turning the lights out as he said that not every artist gets to do that. I mean, what a great way for Sue to go out on a book that again became that big and is really that beautiful, really a fantastic piece of Sussian work. So I think part of the reason SEUs is timeless is because all of his really great books sort of speak to something eternal in all.

00:35:51
Speaker 4: Of us and something we can all relate to.

00:35:53
Speaker 3: I mean, every one of us in our life at some point has been sitting inside on a rainy day with nothing to do, and just wishing something interesting would happen. And you know, and that’s that’s where the Cat and Hat comes or he comes in on the rainy day and causes chaos which he cleans up. As Sus always points out, there’s something eternal about that. There’s something eternal about scratching your head and wondering about the holiday and what is this all about? And this about more than just giving people things. I mean, that’s an internal question. There’s so much in Sus that just touches something.

00:36:21
Speaker 4: Inside all of us, no matter where we are, where we’re sitting, what part of the world we’re in.

00:36:27
Speaker 3: Susa’s books don’t look like anything else. They don’t look like they’re taking place in a certain time period. Even something like The Cat and the Hat that was written in the fifties and actually has you know, human children in it. There’s something about the way it’s dram that doesn’t look like it’s nineteen fifty seven, you know. I mean, there’s something still timeless in that artistic style that he’s got.

00:36:49
Speaker 4: SUS’s books are fun.

00:36:50
Speaker 3: Sus just feels like he’s existing on his own plane the entire time. It’s like the Susian universe, you know, it’s got his own rules that you seem to get inherently when you visit.

00:37:01
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production and editing by Madison Dericott. And a special thanks to Brian J. Jones, author of Becoming Doctor Seuss, Theodore Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination. Go to Amazon or the usual Suspects and buy this book. We learned that his bride was a real unsung hero, a brilliant editor and writer, and one of the few people who could be blunt with her husband this doesn’t work, she would say.

00:37:27
Speaker 2: She was Seuss’s first and best reader.

00:37:30
Speaker 1: We learned from Helen that he’s miserable when he’s writing, but more miserable when he’s not. And then that story about all of the Places you Will Go. I never knew this, I never knew it was his farewell book, and he did it in classic Seussian style.

00:37:45
Speaker 2: Go have fun, kids, You’re wonderful, goodbye? So simple?

00:37:50
Speaker 1: Was it the German language and his love of it, his love of rhythm, his love of drawing? Was it Frank Capper? Was it Chuck Jones? Was it all of the above?

00:37:59
Speaker 2: And of course that god given talent, that imagination. Well, you be the judge.

00:38:04
Speaker 1: The story of Theodore Geisel, known as doctor Seuss. Here on our American stories