The Seuss, the whole Seuss, and nothing but the Seuss

I taught my own children to read with Dr Seuss, and to this day my two daughters and I still read The Grinch together every Christmas Eve. They’re 21 and 22. They tell me they’ll read the same books to their children, and I imagine in years to come those children reading Seuss to their own sons and daughters long after I’m gone.

After I published my first novel, I began writing stories for my children, but I soon realised I’d never have the magic of Seuss - who’s been called the Milton, the Renoir, of children’s writing. So I began studying the life of Ted Geisel - I wanted to know what shaped this genius.

It’s a good time to tell his story: yesterday was Dr Seuss Day, when he’s celebrated around the world, and Thursday is World Book Day - an excuse for children to dress up as their favourite literary characters. Unsurprisingly, the Cat in the Hat is one of the most ubiquitous outfits.

Ted was a complex man, his soul could be as light as a child’s, yet his life - which charted the 20th century and took in many of its great themes such as war, wealth, race and changing social values - was often full of the pain of adulthood.

He was born into a wealthy immigrant German family in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, and named Theodore Seuss Geisel. It’s thought Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, set his anarchic cartoon in a fictional Springfield in homage to Seuss. From the very beginning, Ted’s life was a mix of word-play and imagination. The brewery his father owned - Kalmbach and Geisel - was known locally as ‘Come Back and Guzzle’, and his mother, from a family of bakers, sang weird nonsense songs to him about pies.

His father helped run the local zoo, and encouraged Ted to draw the animals he saw there. Ted’s pictures were strange caricatures - with too many knuckles, or spindly legs. His first character came from one of these ‘zoo drawings’ - a beast with ears nine foot long which he called a ‘wynnmph’.

His niece Peggy Owens - who was as close to Seuss as a daughter - said: ‘He never lost the ability to see things through the eyes of a child.’ That ability to retreat into a world of imagination became more important to Ted as he got older. When the First World War broke out, Ted found himself bullied by other children because of his German roots; and with the coming of prohibition in peace time, the family brewery was closed.

Ted was no great scholar but he excelled at English, and after school he went on to Dartmouth College. While there, he spent most of his time writing for the college’s magazine Jack-O-Lantern - which carried cartoons and comic stories. Classes forgotten, he’d be found in the morning, sleeping at his editorial desk. His niece Peggy said: ‘He simply never stopped playing hookey from the real world.’

A run-in with the law over a gin party during prohibition saw him banned from the magazine. But Ted got round the punishment by writing under a nom de plume: Seuss. Phyllis Cerf Wagner - the actress, socialite and writer who married Ted’s publisher Bennet Cerf, and was instrumental in the shaping of the Seuss legend - said: ‘He took his mother’s maiden name, Seuss, as he was saving Geisel for when he wrote the great American novel.’

For now, though, the dizzying heights of literature were to evade him. He went to Oxford University in the hope of becoming an English professor, but dropped out. He spent most of his time at Oxford doodling in his notebook - which brought him to the attention of a bright young American woman called Helen Palmer. Looking over his shoulder in a lecture, she saw one of his pictures - a flying cow - and told him he should become an illustrator. Not long after, they returned to America and married. Helen was less a muse and more a mentor - she encouraged and helped shape his work, and she brought order to his life.

Ted was no party animal - he was shy, nervous in public, and liked the company of close friends not big groups, though he did love a vodka on the rocks and plenty of cigarettes - however, the strictures of adulthood were not for him. Without Helen, it was said, he wouldn’t have been able to balance a chequebook.

Ted became a jobbing cartoonist and by now had added ‘Dr’ to his pen-name - an in-joke about the doctorate he’d failed to get at Oxford. His big break came by chance. In the 1920s, Flit was a popular brand of fly-spray. Ted drew a one-off cartoon for Judge magazine showing a medieval knight who can’t sleep because there’s a dragon in his bedroom. The punch line reads: ‘Darn it all, another dragon. And just after I sprayed the whole castle with Flit.’

He was hired on the spot to do all Flit’s ads. ‘This became one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history,’ one of his biographers, Janet Pascal, says. Financially comfortable, Ted now turned his attention towards his lifelong ambition: writing and illustrating children’s books.

Ted was infamous in his family for exaggeration - he was always embellishing the truth (like the time he said he’d been chewed by a lion on a trip to his father’s zoo, or the fib he told about winning a scholarship to Oxford). His first big success was more than a little autobiographical. The book ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street’ (Mulberry Street was a road in Ted’s home town) tells the story of a child out for a walk who imagines a fantastical adventure. A suburban afternoon becomes filled with make-believe giraffes, magicians, police - and a man with a ten foot beard.

Initially, publishers turned the book down - it didn’t have a moral, they said - but finally it was bought and in 1937 became a critical hit. Beatrix Potter was a fan, saying she adored ‘the truthful simplicity of the untruthfulness’.

Publicly, Ted’s life was on the up, but privately there was much sadness. His mother died before seeing his success, and his beloved sister Marnie drifted into alcoholism and died whilst estranged from Ted. He and his wife also learned they couldn’t have children. Ted would later invent an imaginary child ‘Chrysanthemum-Pearl’ and heartbreakingly dedicate a book to her. His friend and biographer Judith Morgan said: ‘Part of his protection was to not allow himself to spend his life in grief, and perhaps that’s why he found such joy in doing the outrageous books he did.’

His next successful book, Horton Hatches The Egg, added the morality that Mulberry Street was seen to lack. It tells the story of an elephant, Horton, who finds an egg, abandoned by its mother, and sits on it in the hope of hatching it, in the face of threats and even the risk of being shot. ‘Shoot if you must,’ says Horton, ‘I won’t run away. I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant is faithful, 100 per cent.’

It was a smash hit. Ted’s editor, Michael Frith, said: ‘In the hands of a gifted preacher there’s nothing more powerful than a great lesson.’

Horton appeared in 1940. As war loomed, it would be seven years before Ted wrote another book. ‘While Paris was being occupied by the clanking tanks of the Nazis,’ Ted said, ‘I could no longer keep my mind on drawing pictures of Horton the elephant.’

Too old to fight, Ted enlisted and became a captain in one of the most remarkable propaganda outfits ever - the US army’s First Motion Picture Unit. He worked with Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny), Chuck Jones (creator of Loony Tunes), and Frank Capra (director of It’s A Wonderful Life) churning out films like Private Snafu - army slang for ‘Situation Normal: All F****d Up’ - to boost the war effort.

After the war, there was a social panic over the effect of TV on children’s literacy. Ted was challenged by his publisher to write a story for children learning to read using just 225 simple words. The limitations were tortuous but after a year’s labour The Cat in the Hat was born - the story of a trickster cat who causes havoc in the lives of two young children.

The book has been poured over by literary scholars. It’s been subjected to Freudian analysis (is the Cat our wild subconscious?) and to racial interpretations (was the Cat a black jazz musician?). To most, it simply captures the anarchy of childhood. Janet Schulman, an editor who worked closely with Ted, said: ‘He allowed a child’s imagination to guide him.’

Ted was now re-writing the rules of how children learned to read. With Green Eggs and Ham, he reduced the number of words in the book to just 50 - making it a perfect primer - and was hailed as the saviour of children’s literacy, replacing stale Peter and Jane with the crazy Fox in Socks.

Now the most important children’s author in the world, Ted’s stories became more political. The Sneetches savages American racism; The Butter Battle Book mocks the Cold War; The Lorax is an environmentalist fable. His politics often upset conservative America.

In 1967, after struggling with ill health, and depression over Ted’s affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, a friend of the family, Helen took her own life. Ted married Audrey less than a year later.

Ted’s last book is one of his most loved - Oh, the Places You’ll Go. It’s Ted’s joyous take on life - his valediction to readers young and old. His agent, Jed Mattes, said it was ‘like a wise grandfather sitting down and talking to a younger generation’.

In his last days, Ted, too unwell to make it to his bedroom, slept in his studio. He died in 1991, just a few feet from his drawing board. After his death, the students of his old college, Dartmouth, recited his works for a full day, as a mark of respect to a man who had single-handedly shaped their childhood, and the collective childhood of us all.