Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones

Author:Brian Jay Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

And SPAZZ is a letter I use to spell Spazzim

A beast who belongs to the Nazzim of Bazzim.

Handy for traveling. That’s why he has ’im.28

The book was published to nearly universal praise—delightful seemed to be the descriptor of choice.29 “Nobody could possibly have ideas in any way resembling those that occur to this talented man,” enthused The New York Times, adding that the Seussian letters and creatures in the book were “indescribable, but they are delightful, and it is difficult to imagine how we ever managed without them.”30

In the Boston Globe, a reviewer admitted he enjoyed On Beyond Zebra!—“[it] has a quality that all children, grownup ones as well as little ones, can enjoy”—but rakishly accused Dr. Seuss of alphabetical treason. “He’s worse than the Russians. They have 36 letters in their alphabet . . . Dr. Seuss wants to add 20 letters to our alphabet,” wrote the Globe’s reviewer. “Dr. Seuss should stop it; he’s going too far. He’s subversive.”31 Geisel gleefully agreed. “I’m subversive as hell!” he roared. “I’ve always had a mistrust of adults,” he said later. “And one reason I dropped out of Oxford and the Sorbonne was that I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much on nonessentials.”32

But it was the essentials, in fact, that were making him miserable at the moment—namely Spaulding’s list of acceptable vocabulary words for his reading primer, which he was finding creatively stifling. While Geisel’s stories of the agony of cracking the word-list limitations would, perhaps predictably, vary over the years, there’s little doubt that he was finding it nearly impossible to find a compelling story buried among the list’s 350 words. “All I needed, I figured, was to find a whale of an exciting subject which would make the average six-year-old want to read like crazy,” he said later. “[But] none of the old dull stuff: ‘Dick has a ball. Dick likes the ball. The ball is red, red, red, red.’”33 Instead, he was thinking up much more exciting subjects—like climbing Mount Everest, where, he suggested, it could be sixty degrees below zero. It was a “truly exciting” idea, he thought. However, as he scanned the word list, he discovered “you can’t use the word ‘scaling,’ you can’t use the word ‘peaks,’ you can’t use ‘Everest,’ you can’t use ‘sixty,’ and you can’t use ‘degrees.’”34

When stymied, Geisel would kick back in the chair at his desk and chain-smoke for hours as he stared absently out the window at the Pacific, waiting for inspiration. Other times, he would simply doodle, drawing one crazy creature after another to see if anything sparked an idea, or lay down on the sofa in his office and thumb through books and magazines. Copies of On Beyond Zebra! were still stacked on the coffee table, and Geisel thought for a moment he might write a story about a queen zebra. “I snuck a look at the word list,” he wrote later. “‘Queen’ and ‘zebra’ weren’t there.”35

It was, he said, an “impossible and ridiculous” task.

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