March 3, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, from Green Eggs and Ham to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, we’re all familiar with the work of Dr. Seuss. But the story of how he actually became the author we know and love is far from short and simple. Brain Jay Jones, author of “Becoming Dr. Seuss,” is here with the full story of the man behind this pen name.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is Lee Habibe and this is our American Stories.
And to search for the 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 SEUs, but
the story of how he actually became the author we
(00:30):
know and love is far from short and simple. Brian J. Jones,
author of Becoming Doctor SEUs, is here with the full
story of the man behind his pen name. And we're
telling this story because on this day in history, in
nineteen oh four, Theodore Geisel aka Doctor SEUs was born.
(00:52):
Doctor SEUs was born Theodore Geisel, Theodor SEUs 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
(01:12):
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 listened to the conversation downstairs. He
loved the sound of that language. And how if you
have a German word and you want to qualify something,
you just keep adding onto the word and he gets
longer and more interesting. At one point, he talks about
(01:34):
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. That always sort
of stayed with SEUs a lot of his life. I
think that's where he gets sort of his 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
(01:56):
the other that he experienced even as a child when
people threw coal at him for being German. His mother
is Henrietta SEUs or Sois is actually the correct way
of pronouncing his name. Sois is his mother's maiden name.
That's where he gets the name Sous from. Sus always
said that you know it rhymed with mother goose, or
somebody pointed it out to him, so he was always
okay with people pronouncing it Sus. His mother, he often said,
(02:18):
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 that had
available that day, which always cracked him up. So Seus's
father inherited the brewing company right about the time that
prohibition kicked in, and so SUS's father never ended up
running the company and in fact they were in danger
(02:39):
of losing everything. SUS's father then, of course ended up
in a job as superintendent of parks for Springfield, which
is your 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,
(03:00):
none of which happened. You know, Susan never lets the
truth getting a way of a fantastic story. But sus
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 talent. It's
almost like this imaginative hub up there at that part
of New England, you know, like Milton Bradley is from there,
(03:22):
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 Sus comes out of
(03:44):
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 her scholarship
and won it, and that actually turned out to not
be true, but his father had all over town that
his son was going to going to Oxford. Soon once
he found out it wasn't true, he paid to send
(04:04):
the Sun to Oxford anyway. So SEUs 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
evisually become his wife, a woman in Helen, and she
is sitting at him in class one day as he's
doodling and says, you know, somebody who draws the way
(04:26):
you do should do that for a living. And so SEUs,
who ends up marrying Helen. Then they end up living together.
Back in the United States, he sets up shop and
this is in the sort of the guilded 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 has a very
successful career trajectory. He's a cartoonist for the magazines. You know,
(04:49):
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 lying in bed there's a
(05:10):
dragon sticking its head through the window, and the knight says,
another dragon, and here I just had the entire castle
sprayed with flint. Flint was a bug repellent very popular
in the era. Well, the woman who was married to
the man who ran the ad campaign for Flittz. I mean,
this is none of those crazy stories, saw that cartoon
(05:30):
in the magazine went to her husband and said, this
is the greatest advertisement for flitt you could ever ask.
Where you need to hire this young man to be
your flitt adman. So SEUs 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 Flit campaign for I think something like
seventeen years, just full page ads and color billboards, and
(05:54):
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 flitt and everyone would laugh. They
all got the joke. So Sus 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
(06:16):
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 a book
like this. But there was nothing in his contract that
(06:36):
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 for children's books. So sus 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,
(06:59):
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 it on Mulberry Street
came from his work on children's books for part of
his career, didn't pay his bills. Children's books was a
side hustle for him for quite a long time. And
(07:20):
we're listening to author Brian Jay Jones his book Becoming
Doctor Seuss. 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
(07:42):
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 cut
to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free
and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
learn more. And we're back with our American Stories and
(08:12):
with Brian J. Jones sharing the story of how Theodore
Geisel became Doctor SEUs. Let's pick up where we last
left off. So the first book that SEUs publishes when
he realizes that his contract again with Flitt, does not
prohibit him from doing children's books is He's on a
(08:34):
cruise with his wife Helen. He's sitting in the bar,
and two sits in bars a lot in fact that
you can never take the Brewer's kid completely out of
the kid. He's sitting in a bar on a boat
in the middle of the ocean and 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
(08:54):
twas a night before Christmas. I think it's called something
mecanopestic tetrameter or something like that. But the 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 end,
(09:15):
Sus writes, and Ni streates this book, and it's you know,
and it's it's a very fitting first book for Sus
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 asked
(09:35):
him what he saw, he says, I just saw a
horse and carriage on Mulberry Street. You know. It goes
back to the church of that boy. But it's a
fantastic story. It's a great debut. But it's one of
those books that Sus when he gets done with it,
can't find anybody who wants to publish it. But SU's
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 in
(09:57):
New York, he runs into a friend of his from
Dartmouth who works for a publisher, and his friend says
to him, what are you carrying around here? Ted, and
Sue says, well, I've got this kid's book that no
one will will publish. I was going to take it
home and burn it. And his friend says, you know,
come 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 SEUs gets
(10:18):
his book published through this connection with the dart with
friend of his. Sus 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 he had to
be in the right place at the right time. Had
met an old friend of him who shepherds that book
into publications. That's the beginning of his publishing with children's books.
(10:39):
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 Sus talked about that,
almost says this epiphany at one point about it. So
Sus had a brief career as an editorial cartoonist, you know,
doing these cartoons of taking on America first and anti Semitism,
(10:59):
of these really aggressive 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. He's not going
to see any active active service. He's not going to
be on the front lines or anything. But they stationed
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
(11:24):
recruited sus 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.
(11:47):
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 sus reads this character with Capri
called Private Snaffoo, and Snaffoo teaches soldiers how to be
great soldiers by doing everything raw. So you get to
(12:08):
see Snafoo 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 sus and goes
through his scripts and says, I'm going to underline in
blue everything in this script that advances your story. And
(12:28):
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. You
need to move. And so he taught Sus conciseness, which
again informs the way he worked later on making every
single word count, making sure every beat matters. That's one
of the big lessons that Kapra teaches Sus. The other
(12:50):
thing he does is capra and again this is a
film director's perspective that Sue scrabbed hold of and rand
with for the rest of his life. Capra would storyboard
everything and show you how to storyboard. And he does
something really brilliant in that for the private Snaffoo cartoons,
he recognizes a fellow crazy somebody who fits Sus like
(13:11):
a glove in a young animator at that time named
Chuck Jones, who's 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 snapfoo 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.
You know, all the classes are Chuck Joes. So Chuck
(13:33):
is working with doctor Sustu, and he's showing him the
art of storyboarding, of 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 SEUs
would use the rest of his life with his own books.
He would put his pages up on the wall of
(13:54):
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 inform 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 Still Christmas, and Jones was the
perfect one to do that. And SEUs was very skeptical
(14:15):
about letting anybody adapt his work to the screen, But
with Chuck Jones he knew he had a good friend
in an ally in 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 been he's come out
of the Signal Corps, he's still making a career in ads.
(14:37):
He's dabbled in Hollywood screen fixing and screenwriting. He doesn't
like it. It's writing by committees, 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
(15:00):
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 Kapper.
You can clearly see him processing and talking about you've
got to make the words count, you have to keep
(15:20):
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
(15:41):
it's Sus 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
(16:02):
to write fancy for some kid, they will see right through.
He would tell these students in his class that a
child is the toughest audience you will ever write for
because they will see you comment. You cannot fool a kid,
so don't try. It's SEUs sort of having this I
don't want to say you'rreeka moment necessarily, but he's sort
(16:24):
of taken everything he's learned from having written children's books
and having worked with Kappa, 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 a kid
interested in reading. Again, it's a really really important moment
in not just Seus's life, but in the history of
(16:47):
writing for children. And you're listening to Brian Jay Jones
telling the story of Doctor SEUs, his book but coming
Doctor SEUs, Well, you've got to pick it up, go
to Amazon or the usual suspects. At first book. 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.
(17:08):
And then, of course he joins the army, and by
sheer happenstance, his boss is the great Frank Keeper, 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
(17:29):
the military, and that seminar about writing children's books at
the University of Utah changed everything for him. Don't talk
down to kids, keep the plot 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
(17:49):
remarkable story of doctor Seuss here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American Stories and to Brian J. Jones,
(18:12):
and he's sharing the story of how a man named
Theodore Geisel became Doctor Seuss. Back to Brian with more
of the story. 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 about every
(18:34):
five years we write these long agonized pieces about what's
wrong with kids today? You know, why aren't they you
just been reading? Why are they sassing their parents? Who's
to 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,
(18:56):
it's that they don't because books aimed that children are awful.
Dick and Jane lead these lives of terrible desperation. The
art is uninspiring. It's a world that doesn't exist for kids.
Couldn't they at least get doctor SEUs or Walt Disney
or somebody to at least illustrate Dick and Jane and
(19:19):
make it more interesting. Well, somebody who knows SEUs reads
this article and goes to Sus and doesn't ask Sus
to illustrate Dick and Jane. What he does is he
goes to Sus 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
(19:39):
this is what makes Sus so important moving forward. The
cats 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. It
has to have age appropriate words for a reading level,
(19:59):
and you cannot diverge from this list. If you want
to make a word plural, for example, and it's not
on the list as a plural, you can't use it.
So it's putting a straight jacket on before you even
start writing the book, at least as far as the
vocabulary goes. So Sus has given this list of vocabulary words.
I want to say, it's something around three hundred vocabulary words.
(20:19):
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
the 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.
(20:40):
And I wanted to do something about scaling a mountain,
Well the word mountains not on the list, and scaling's
not on the list, and you know, it was it
was a real problem. 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 cat and hat. So Sus knew he had something
(21:01):
of a story or a character at least in a
Cat with a hat. And he takes another year from
there to actually finish the book and agonizes over every
single page doing this. But if you go through A
Cat on the Hat, you can see him working with
that word list. There's one page, for example, where the
(21:21):
cat stands on a ball, which is where on the list,
and starts juggling, and it's Suits downloading everything on that list.
He's juggling, Okay, Ray completely demand you know, a boat,
a car, He's juggling. It's like Sus taking everything on
that listening trying to get it on the page there.
So that book sells lights out. I mean that is
the moment that Suits can be a children's writer full
(21:43):
time because this book. Teachers love it because it's got
the educator a proved wordless. Parents love it because, unlike
most children's books, it's fun 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 gray, and it
ain't Dick and Jane. This is the big moment in
(22:04):
SUS's career when he truly becomes doctor Sus. So when
Captain Had comes out in the spring of 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 the word list. Sus had what he called his
big books that he was not inhibited by the word list.
(22:26):
But The Grinch, I think it's such a fascinating book
because Sue's 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.
(22:47):
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 guy in the Guy was in advertising. It was
very good at So I think there's a little bit
of Sus reckoning with himself in this story, which is
one of the reasons why I think he took it
so personally and could really sympathize with the Grinch and
the Grinch coming around. But it's a great example of
(23:09):
Sus really working on an ending. Because Sus didn't like
his books to be overtly preachy or message you. 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 common,
They're going to recognize immediate what you're up to you,
(23:29):
they're gonna fold up shop, and they're gonna walk away,
Like no kid wants to be preached too. 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?
He was trying to keep it from being a 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
(23:51):
roast beast at dinner, so it's it's more of a
family type ending than a Christmas e in in per
se But that was SEUs working really hard with an ending.
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
SEUs and his editor at Random House, Bennett Surf and
(24:12):
Bennett Surf loves to Cat in the Hat it I
mean the cat and had his printing money just doing great,
and Surf, who adores sues Bennett Surf often talked about
how there was only one real genius who worked for
him at Random House, and he says that was doctor SEUs,
a high praise because he was publishing Faulkter. I think
it's the time too, Bennett Surf says to doctor SEUs, Okay,
(24:32):
smart guy, Cat in 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. And Sue says, you're on. And
that book becomes green eggs and Ham. And look at
(24:53):
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 in ham? Would
you like him with the fox? Would you like him
in a box? I would not like them in with
the fox. I would not like him in a box.
It's just it's repetition using those same words over and
(25:15):
over in a really interesting way. SEUs 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 Surf didn't pay him
his fifty bucks either. But Green Eggs in Ham is
written on a bet to really hamstring SEUs with a
very narrow educator approved word list, and Sus kills it
(25:38):
with Green Eggs in Ham, which is still to this
day the best selling Doctor Sus book of all time.
And why not. 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 Sus does
with so little in that is brilliant keeps that book
(25:58):
moving again, that SEUs, that SEUs worrying about the plot,
propelling things word it's tormenting this poor guy in the
eating green eggs 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 a
green eggs and ham, which he ultimately does. It is
everything SEUs does well compressed down into that one single book,
(26:23):
and what a story you're hearing. 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.
(26:44):
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 best seller of
all time Green Eggs and ham Well, it was conceived
as a result of a bet. When we come back
(27:06):
more of this remarkable story of how Theodore Geisel became
Doctor SEUs here on our American Stories, and we're back
(27:37):
with our American stories and with Brian J. Jones sharing
the story of Theodore Geisel, a k a. Doctor SEUs.
Back to Brian with a final part of this story.
So SEUs is one of these creatives who took his
work very seriously. There's a great quote from his wife
(27:59):
Hallen that I think every writer can relate to, or
anybody who does anything creative. I think everybody too. 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. SEUs would often start books, realize
they were going nowhere, and then throw them at what
he called his bone pile. But Sus had this really
(28:22):
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
and work. And SEUs would you do the rough sketches
of his page, and he would type out the rhymes
(28:42):
and the narrative and blew 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 it.
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 cigarette and
his mouth and just stare at the pages on the
(29:02):
wall and 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
(29:22):
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 it would still scam properly.
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,
(29:44):
so it's just didn't like the way that looked, so
he would start over. He would rewrite the page. 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 Seus's
artistic style is definitely unique. SEUs often said that that
(30:05):
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. Of course, that's in
being modest, I think, but it's definitely an inimitable style,
and it is one of those styles that when you
see it, you immediately know Sus. You immediately know Sue's word.
You know, it's very subtle, but you know, if you
(30:27):
notice a lot of Seus's characters have eyelashes, for example,
it's one of these weird little touches you see that
makes it look SUSI 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 workplay again,
I think a lot of that came from listening to
his German relatives talking and just listening to the way
(30:48):
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 these long, drawn out, ridiculous looking words.
I think SEUs really got to kick out of that.
You know, Sus is so funny and a little frustrating
when throughout his life people would ask him, you know
(31:09):
where do you come up with? You know where'd you
come up with? Something like the lax, for example, is
a perfect example. He said, well, I drew him and
he was clearly a lax, the most unhelpful answer possible.
But you know, Sus didn't really have a hard time
come up with these crazy words. His made up names
sound organic, they sound like they're real words. They don't
(31:30):
sound like he's trying too hard. 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 over and over again. But Sus is really
really great and just coming up with a word like
grinch or sneeche or lax or something that sounds like
it already existed before Sus made it up. Seus's wife, Helen,
(31:56):
is one of the most important people in his story,
sort of the unsung heroes, although he in his lifetime.
In her lifetime, he sung her praises gave her plenty
of credit on it. She was a brilliant editor, a
brilliant writer in her own right. 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
(32:19):
is a tough place for a spouse to be at
at times. But Helena was the one person who could
be absolutely blunt with him, who didn't bother sitting around
and saying, yes, you're a brilliant everything you do is wonderful.
She's the one who there's a great moment in one
of the magazine interviewing that he does, for example, where
the journalist actually reports the moment when he's sitting by
the pool and Helena walks um and hands some pages
from I Think the Gridge and says, you're making the
(32:41):
who's look like bugs, and Sue says something like, well,
they are bugs, and she says, no, the who's are people.
She's just not going to have it with him, and
so he 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 and you know, helping keep on
(33:01):
course and tell him if things didn't work, and tell
him if she thought a rhyme was not quite right
or 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
(33:22):
out identifying talent, great at finding great writers and you
know who could turn in these amazing manuscripts that she
helped edit. So she was really really important to his
story in that regard on the professional side. On the
personal side, Helen couldn't have children, so doctor SEUs and
Helen never had any kids of their own. And as
SEUs always sit throughout his life, you have them all,
(33:43):
entertain them. It's rare when an artist gets to say
goodbye to their readers on their own terms, and SEUs
does that with Oh the Places You'll Go. SEUs knew
this was likely his last one. Is his health had
been declining. SEUs was a smoker his entire life, and
(34:04):
it gave him cancer of the tongue and then his jaw,
and he was in constant paying. His teeth were coming
loose at times. And so SEUs, by the time he's
working out O the Places Go, knows that this is
likely his last one and it's an opportunity for him
to say goodbye to his readers, which again not every
artist gets that opportunity. You can see Sus putting everything
(34:25):
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
wereving something from the nineteen twenties. He's got little black
cats that you should show up in his cartoons in there.
(34:45):
Before you ever created the cat, Madge could have little
cats reacting in some of his books. 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, and a lot of what people today
would call Easter eggs clues or a little little hat
tips to some of his earlier work, and it's Sue
sort of putting everything into this book as he's telling
his reader, you're amazing, You're going to succeed in life.
(35:09):
But it's him saying goodbye. It sells every graduation, and
you know, twice a year for spring graduation and fall graduation.
That book's constantly selling. Everybody gets promoted, they get that book.
But it was it was his valedictory message. It was
him telling everyone to give out, you're great, you're brilliant,
go have fun. And that was him turning the lines
out as he said that not every artist gets to
(35:30):
do that. I mean, what a great way for sus
to go out on a book that again became that
big and is really that beautiful, really a fantastic piece
of Susian word. So I think part of the reason
Sus as timeless is because all of his really great
books sort of speak to something eternal in all of
(35:51):
us and something we can all relate to. I mean,
every one of us in our life at some point
has been sitting inside on a rating day with nothing
to do, and just wish something interesting would happen, and
you know, and that's where the Cat and the 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
(36:11):
your head and wondering about the holiday and what is
this all about? And it's about more than just giving
people things. I mean, that's an internal question. There's so
much in Sus that just touches something inside all of us,
no matter where we are, where we're sitting, what part
of the world we're in. SUS's books don't look like
anything else. They don't look like they're taking place in
(36:32):
a certain time period. Even something like The Cat in
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 drama 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. Seus's books are fun.
Sus just feels like he's existing on his own plane
(36:53):
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 visited. And a terrific job on the
production and editing by Madison Derricott, and his special thanks
to Brian J. Jones, author of Becoming Doctor SEUs, Theodore
Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination. Go to
Amazon or the usual Suspects and buy this book. We
(37:16):
learned that his bride was a real unsung hero, a
brilliant editor and writer, one of the few people who
could be blunt with her husband this doesn't work, she
would say. She was Seus's first and best reader. We
learned from Helen that he's miserable when he's writing, but
more miserable when he's not. And then a story about
all the places you will go. I never knew this,
(37:39):
I never knew it was his farewell book, and he
did it in classic Seusian style. Go have fun, kids,
You're wonderful, goodbye? So simple? Was it the German language
and his love of it, his love of rhythm, his
love of drawing? Was it? Frank Keeper? Was it Chuck Jones?
Was it all of the above? And of course that
(38:00):
God given talent, that imagination. Well, you be the judge.
The story of Theodore Geisel, known as doctor Seuss, born
on this day in history in nineteen oh four. Here
on our American stories.
This is Lee Habibe and this is our American Stories.
And to search for the 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 SEUs, but
the story of how he actually became the author we
(00:30):
know and love is far from short and simple. Brian J. Jones,
author of Becoming Doctor SEUs, is here with the full
story of the man behind his pen name. And we're
telling this story because on this day in history, in
nineteen oh four, Theodore Geisel aka Doctor SEUs was born.
(00:52):
Doctor SEUs was born Theodore Geisel, Theodor SEUs 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
(01:12):
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 listened to the conversation downstairs. He
loved the sound of that language. And how if you
have a German word and you want to qualify something,
you just keep adding onto the word and he gets
longer and more interesting. At one point, he talks about
(01:34):
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. That always sort
of stayed with SEUs a lot of his life. I
think that's where he gets sort of his 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
(01:56):
the other that he experienced even as a child when
people threw coal at him for being German. His mother
is Henrietta SEUs or Sois is actually the correct way
of pronouncing his name. Sois is his mother's maiden name.
That's where he gets the name Sous from. Sus always
said that you know it rhymed with mother goose, or
somebody pointed it out to him, so he was always
okay with people pronouncing it Sus. His mother, he often said,
(02:18):
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 that had
available that day, which always cracked him up. So Seus's
father inherited the brewing company right about the time that
prohibition kicked in, and so SUS's father never ended up
running the company and in fact they were in danger
(02:39):
of losing everything. SUS's father then, of course ended up
in a job as superintendent of parks for Springfield, which
is your 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,
(03:00):
none of which happened. You know, Susan never lets the
truth getting a way of a fantastic story. But sus
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 talent. It's
almost like this imaginative hub up there at that part
of New England, you know, like Milton Bradley is from there,
(03:22):
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 Sus comes out of
(03:44):
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 her scholarship
and won it, and that actually turned out to not
be true, but his father had all over town that
his son was going to going to Oxford. Soon once
he found out it wasn't true, he paid to send
(04:04):
the Sun to Oxford anyway. So SEUs 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
evisually become his wife, a woman in Helen, and she
is sitting at him in class one day as he's
doodling and says, you know, somebody who draws the way
(04:26):
you do should do that for a living. And so SEUs,
who ends up marrying Helen. Then they end up living together.
Back in the United States, he sets up shop and
this is in the sort of the guilded 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 has a very
successful career trajectory. He's a cartoonist for the magazines. You know,
(04:49):
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 lying in bed there's a
(05:10):
dragon sticking its head through the window, and the knight says,
another dragon, and here I just had the entire castle
sprayed with flint. Flint was a bug repellent very popular
in the era. Well, the woman who was married to
the man who ran the ad campaign for Flittz. I mean,
this is none of those crazy stories, saw that cartoon
(05:30):
in the magazine went to her husband and said, this
is the greatest advertisement for flitt you could ever ask.
Where you need to hire this young man to be
your flitt adman. So SEUs 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 Flit campaign for I think something like
seventeen years, just full page ads and color billboards, and
(05:54):
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 flitt and everyone would laugh. They
all got the joke. So Sus 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
(06:16):
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 a book
like this. But there was nothing in his contract that
(06:36):
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 for children's books. So sus 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,
(06:59):
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 it on Mulberry Street
came from his work on children's books for part of
his career, didn't pay his bills. Children's books was a
side hustle for him for quite a long time. And
(07:20):
we're listening to author Brian Jay Jones his book Becoming
Doctor Seuss. 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
(07:42):
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 cut
to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free
and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
learn more. And we're back with our American Stories and
(08:12):
with Brian J. Jones sharing the story of how Theodore
Geisel became Doctor SEUs. Let's pick up where we last
left off. So the first book that SEUs publishes when
he realizes that his contract again with Flitt, does not
prohibit him from doing children's books is He's on a
(08:34):
cruise with his wife Helen. He's sitting in the bar,
and two sits in bars a lot in fact that
you can never take the Brewer's kid completely out of
the kid. He's sitting in a bar on a boat
in the middle of the ocean and 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
(08:54):
twas a night before Christmas. I think it's called something
mecanopestic tetrameter or something like that. But the 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 end,
(09:15):
Sus writes, and Ni streates this book, and it's you know,
and it's it's a very fitting first book for Sus
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 asked
(09:35):
him what he saw, he says, I just saw a
horse and carriage on Mulberry Street. You know. It goes
back to the church of that boy. But it's a
fantastic story. It's a great debut. But it's one of
those books that Sus when he gets done with it,
can't find anybody who wants to publish it. But SU's
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 in
(09:57):
New York, he runs into a friend of his from
Dartmouth who works for a publisher, and his friend says
to him, what are you carrying around here? Ted, and
Sue says, well, I've got this kid's book that no
one will will publish. I was going to take it
home and burn it. And his friend says, you know,
come 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 SEUs gets
(10:18):
his book published through this connection with the dart with
friend of his. Sus 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 he had to
be in the right place at the right time. Had
met an old friend of him who shepherds that book
into publications. That's the beginning of his publishing with children's books.
(10:39):
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 Sus talked about that,
almost says this epiphany at one point about it. So
Sus had a brief career as an editorial cartoonist, you know,
doing these cartoons of taking on America first and anti Semitism,
(10:59):
of these really aggressive 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. He's not going
to see any active active service. He's not going to
be on the front lines or anything. But they stationed
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
(11:24):
recruited sus 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.
(11:47):
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 sus reads this character with Capri
called Private Snaffoo, and Snaffoo teaches soldiers how to be
great soldiers by doing everything raw. So you get to
(12:08):
see Snafoo 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 sus and goes
through his scripts and says, I'm going to underline in
blue everything in this script that advances your story. And
(12:28):
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. You
need to move. And so he taught Sus conciseness, which
again informs the way he worked later on making every
single word count, making sure every beat matters. That's one
of the big lessons that Kapra teaches Sus. The other
(12:50):
thing he does is capra and again this is a
film director's perspective that Sue scrabbed hold of and rand
with for the rest of his life. Capra would storyboard
everything and show you how to storyboard. And he does
something really brilliant in that for the private Snaffoo cartoons,
he recognizes a fellow crazy somebody who fits Sus like
(13:11):
a glove in a young animator at that time named
Chuck Jones, who's 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 snapfoo 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.
You know, all the classes are Chuck Joes. So Chuck
(13:33):
is working with doctor Sustu, and he's showing him the
art of storyboarding, of 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 SEUs
would use the rest of his life with his own books.
He would put his pages up on the wall of
(13:54):
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 inform 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 Still Christmas, and Jones was the
perfect one to do that. And SEUs was very skeptical
(14:15):
about letting anybody adapt his work to the screen, But
with Chuck Jones he knew he had a good friend
in an ally in 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 been he's come out
of the Signal Corps, he's still making a career in ads.
(14:37):
He's dabbled in Hollywood screen fixing and screenwriting. He doesn't
like it. It's writing by committees, 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
(15:00):
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 Kapper.
You can clearly see him processing and talking about you've
got to make the words count, you have to keep
(15:20):
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
(15:41):
it's Sus 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
(16:02):
to write fancy for some kid, they will see right through.
He would tell these students in his class that a
child is the toughest audience you will ever write for
because they will see you comment. You cannot fool a kid,
so don't try. It's SEUs sort of having this I
don't want to say you'rreeka moment necessarily, but he's sort
(16:24):
of taken everything he's learned from having written children's books
and having worked with Kappa, 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 a kid
interested in reading. Again, it's a really really important moment
in not just Seus's life, but in the history of
(16:47):
writing for children. And you're listening to Brian Jay Jones
telling the story of Doctor SEUs, his book but coming
Doctor SEUs, Well, you've got to pick it up, go
to Amazon or the usual suspects. At first book. 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.
(17:08):
And then, of course he joins the army, and by
sheer happenstance, his boss is the great Frank Keeper, 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
(17:29):
the military, and that seminar about writing children's books at
the University of Utah changed everything for him. Don't talk
down to kids, keep the plot 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
(17:49):
remarkable story of doctor Seuss here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American Stories and to Brian J. Jones,
(18:12):
and he's sharing the story of how a man named
Theodore Geisel became Doctor Seuss. Back to Brian with more
of the story. 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 about every
(18:34):
five years we write these long agonized pieces about what's
wrong with kids today? You know, why aren't they you
just been reading? Why are they sassing their parents? Who's
to 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,
(18:56):
it's that they don't because books aimed that children are awful.
Dick and Jane lead these lives of terrible desperation. The
art is uninspiring. It's a world that doesn't exist for kids.
Couldn't they at least get doctor SEUs or Walt Disney
or somebody to at least illustrate Dick and Jane and
(19:19):
make it more interesting. Well, somebody who knows SEUs reads
this article and goes to Sus and doesn't ask Sus
to illustrate Dick and Jane. What he does is he
goes to Sus 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
(19:39):
this is what makes Sus so important moving forward. The
cats 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. It
has to have age appropriate words for a reading level,
(19:59):
and you cannot diverge from this list. If you want
to make a word plural, for example, and it's not
on the list as a plural, you can't use it.
So it's putting a straight jacket on before you even
start writing the book, at least as far as the
vocabulary goes. So Sus has given this list of vocabulary words.
I want to say, it's something around three hundred vocabulary words.
(20:19):
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
the 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.
(20:40):
And I wanted to do something about scaling a mountain,
Well the word mountains not on the list, and scaling's
not on the list, and you know, it was it
was a real problem. 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 cat and hat. So Sus knew he had something
(21:01):
of a story or a character at least in a
Cat with a hat. And he takes another year from
there to actually finish the book and agonizes over every
single page doing this. But if you go through A
Cat on the Hat, you can see him working with
that word list. There's one page, for example, where the
(21:21):
cat stands on a ball, which is where on the list,
and starts juggling, and it's Suits downloading everything on that list.
He's juggling, Okay, Ray completely demand you know, a boat,
a car, He's juggling. It's like Sus taking everything on
that listening trying to get it on the page there.
So that book sells lights out. I mean that is
the moment that Suits can be a children's writer full
(21:43):
time because this book. Teachers love it because it's got
the educator a proved wordless. Parents love it because, unlike
most children's books, it's fun 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 gray, and it
ain't Dick and Jane. This is the big moment in
(22:04):
SUS's career when he truly becomes doctor Sus. So when
Captain Had comes out in the spring of 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 the word list. Sus had what he called his
big books that he was not inhibited by the word list.
(22:26):
But The Grinch, I think it's such a fascinating book
because Sue's 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.
(22:47):
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 guy in the Guy was in advertising. It was
very good at So I think there's a little bit
of Sus reckoning with himself in this story, which is
one of the reasons why I think he took it
so personally and could really sympathize with the Grinch and
the Grinch coming around. But it's a great example of
(23:09):
Sus really working on an ending. Because Sus didn't like
his books to be overtly preachy or message you. 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 common,
They're going to recognize immediate what you're up to you,
(23:29):
they're gonna fold up shop, and they're gonna walk away,
Like no kid wants to be preached too. 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?
He was trying to keep it from being a 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
(23:51):
roast beast at dinner, so it's it's more of a
family type ending than a Christmas e in in per
se But that was SEUs working really hard with an ending.
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
SEUs and his editor at Random House, Bennett Surf and
(24:12):
Bennett Surf loves to Cat in the Hat it I
mean the cat and had his printing money just doing great,
and Surf, who adores sues Bennett Surf often talked about
how there was only one real genius who worked for
him at Random House, and he says that was doctor SEUs,
a high praise because he was publishing Faulkter. I think
it's the time too, Bennett Surf says to doctor SEUs, Okay,
(24:32):
smart guy, Cat in 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. And Sue says, you're on. And
that book becomes green eggs and Ham. And look at
(24:53):
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 in ham? Would
you like him with the fox? Would you like him
in a box? I would not like them in with
the fox. I would not like him in a box.
It's just it's repetition using those same words over and
(25:15):
over in a really interesting way. SEUs 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 Surf didn't pay him
his fifty bucks either. But Green Eggs in Ham is
written on a bet to really hamstring SEUs with a
very narrow educator approved word list, and Sus kills it
(25:38):
with Green Eggs in Ham, which is still to this
day the best selling Doctor Sus book of all time.
And why not. 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 Sus does
with so little in that is brilliant keeps that book
(25:58):
moving again, that SEUs, that SEUs worrying about the plot,
propelling things word it's tormenting this poor guy in the
eating green eggs 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 a
green eggs and ham, which he ultimately does. It is
everything SEUs does well compressed down into that one single book,
(26:23):
and what a story you're hearing. 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.
(26:44):
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 best seller of
all time Green Eggs and ham Well, it was conceived
as a result of a bet. When we come back
(27:06):
more of this remarkable story of how Theodore Geisel became
Doctor SEUs here on our American Stories, and we're back
(27:37):
with our American stories and with Brian J. Jones sharing
the story of Theodore Geisel, a k a. Doctor SEUs.
Back to Brian with a final part of this story.
So SEUs is one of these creatives who took his
work very seriously. There's a great quote from his wife
(27:59):
Hallen that I think every writer can relate to, or
anybody who does anything creative. I think everybody too. 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. SEUs would often start books, realize
they were going nowhere, and then throw them at what
he called his bone pile. But Sus had this really
(28:22):
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
and work. And SEUs would you do the rough sketches
of his page, and he would type out the rhymes
(28:42):
and the narrative and blew 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 it.
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 cigarette and
his mouth and just stare at the pages on the
(29:02):
wall and 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
(29:22):
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 it would still scam properly.
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,
(29:44):
so it's just didn't like the way that looked, so
he would start over. He would rewrite the page. 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 Seus's
artistic style is definitely unique. SEUs often said that that
(30:05):
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. Of course, that's in
being modest, I think, but it's definitely an inimitable style,
and it is one of those styles that when you
see it, you immediately know Sus. You immediately know Sue's word.
You know, it's very subtle, but you know, if you
(30:27):
notice a lot of Seus's characters have eyelashes, for example,
it's one of these weird little touches you see that
makes it look SUSI 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 workplay again,
I think a lot of that came from listening to
his German relatives talking and just listening to the way
(30:48):
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 these long, drawn out, ridiculous looking words.
I think SEUs really got to kick out of that.
You know, Sus is so funny and a little frustrating
when throughout his life people would ask him, you know
(31:09):
where do you come up with? You know where'd you
come up with? Something like the lax, for example, is
a perfect example. He said, well, I drew him and
he was clearly a lax, the most unhelpful answer possible.
But you know, Sus didn't really have a hard time
come up with these crazy words. His made up names
sound organic, they sound like they're real words. They don't
(31:30):
sound like he's trying too hard. 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 over and over again. But Sus is really
really great and just coming up with a word like
grinch or sneeche or lax or something that sounds like
it already existed before Sus made it up. Seus's wife, Helen,
(31:56):
is one of the most important people in his story,
sort of the unsung heroes, although he in his lifetime.
In her lifetime, he sung her praises gave her plenty
of credit on it. She was a brilliant editor, a
brilliant writer in her own right. 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
(32:19):
is a tough place for a spouse to be at
at times. But Helena was the one person who could
be absolutely blunt with him, who didn't bother sitting around
and saying, yes, you're a brilliant everything you do is wonderful.
She's the one who there's a great moment in one
of the magazine interviewing that he does, for example, where
the journalist actually reports the moment when he's sitting by
the pool and Helena walks um and hands some pages
from I Think the Gridge and says, you're making the
(32:41):
who's look like bugs, and Sue says something like, well,
they are bugs, and she says, no, the who's are people.
She's just not going to have it with him, and
so he 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 and you know, helping keep on
(33:01):
course and tell him if things didn't work, and tell
him if she thought a rhyme was not quite right
or 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
(33:22):
out identifying talent, great at finding great writers and you
know who could turn in these amazing manuscripts that she
helped edit. So she was really really important to his
story in that regard on the professional side. On the
personal side, Helen couldn't have children, so doctor SEUs and
Helen never had any kids of their own. And as
SEUs always sit throughout his life, you have them all,
(33:43):
entertain them. It's rare when an artist gets to say
goodbye to their readers on their own terms, and SEUs
does that with Oh the Places You'll Go. SEUs knew
this was likely his last one. Is his health had
been declining. SEUs was a smoker his entire life, and
(34:04):
it gave him cancer of the tongue and then his jaw,
and he was in constant paying. His teeth were coming
loose at times. And so SEUs, by the time he's
working out O the Places Go, knows that this is
likely his last one and it's an opportunity for him
to say goodbye to his readers, which again not every
artist gets that opportunity. You can see Sus putting everything
(34:25):
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
wereving something from the nineteen twenties. He's got little black
cats that you should show up in his cartoons in there.
(34:45):
Before you ever created the cat, Madge could have little
cats reacting in some of his books. 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, and a lot of what people today
would call Easter eggs clues or a little little hat
tips to some of his earlier work, and it's Sue
sort of putting everything into this book as he's telling
his reader, you're amazing, You're going to succeed in life.
(35:09):
But it's him saying goodbye. It sells every graduation, and
you know, twice a year for spring graduation and fall graduation.
That book's constantly selling. Everybody gets promoted, they get that book.
But it was it was his valedictory message. It was
him telling everyone to give out, you're great, you're brilliant,
go have fun. And that was him turning the lines
out as he said that not every artist gets to
(35:30):
do that. I mean, what a great way for sus
to go out on a book that again became that
big and is really that beautiful, really a fantastic piece
of Susian word. So I think part of the reason
Sus as timeless is because all of his really great
books sort of speak to something eternal in all of
(35:51):
us and something we can all relate to. I mean,
every one of us in our life at some point
has been sitting inside on a rating day with nothing
to do, and just wish something interesting would happen, and
you know, and that's where the Cat and the 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
(36:11):
your head and wondering about the holiday and what is
this all about? And it's about more than just giving
people things. I mean, that's an internal question. There's so
much in Sus that just touches something inside all of us,
no matter where we are, where we're sitting, what part
of the world we're in. SUS's books don't look like
anything else. They don't look like they're taking place in
(36:32):
a certain time period. Even something like The Cat in
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 drama 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. Seus's books are fun.
Sus just feels like he's existing on his own plane
(36:53):
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 visited. And a terrific job on the
production and editing by Madison Derricott, and his special thanks
to Brian J. Jones, author of Becoming Doctor SEUs, Theodore
Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination. Go to
Amazon or the usual Suspects and buy this book. We
(37:16):
learned that his bride was a real unsung hero, a
brilliant editor and writer, one of the few people who
could be blunt with her husband this doesn't work, she
would say. She was Seus's first and best reader. We
learned from Helen that he's miserable when he's writing, but
more miserable when he's not. And then a story about
all the places you will go. I never knew this,
(37:39):
I never knew it was his farewell book, and he
did it in classic Seusian style. Go have fun, kids,
You're wonderful, goodbye? So simple? Was it the German language
and his love of it, his love of rhythm, his
love of drawing? Was it? Frank Keeper? Was it Chuck Jones?
Was it all of the above? And of course that
(38:00):
God given talent, that imagination. Well, you be the judge.
The story of Theodore Geisel, known as doctor Seuss, born
on this day in history in nineteen oh four. Here
on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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