Don’t cancel Dr Seuss
He’s one of the good guys
Quick. If you hurry, you may still be able to order the six Dr Seuss books that are being dropped by the company that purports to look after the author’s legacy. Some are pricey, some in anthologies, some secondhand, but if you look up assorted retailers, you can still obtain And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (his first, based on his
hometown), If I Ran the Zoo, Mcelligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer.
So, what’s the problem with them? Dr Seuss Enterprises explains: “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong” and the company “represents and supports all communities and families”. I’m not sure what they mean, but in Dr Seuss’s works, the hairy and indeterminate creature community seems to have been covered extensively (The Lorax) as well as the community of small, put-upon boys (I Wish That I Had Duck Feet). But really, the notion that Dr Seuss was somehow reactionary is hard to square with the actual record of Theo Geisel (his real name) as a Democrat-supporting liberal who put his work at the service of the war effort and pilloried fascism.
The company says it made its decision after listening to “feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists”. No feedback from children, then – the only “audience” that matters. William Ellsworth Spaulding, Dr Seuss’s early editor, challenged him to “write a book that children can’t put down”. They couldn’t and didn’t put down The Cat in the Hat.i bet that included Joe Biden, who omitted Dr Seuss from Read Across America Day this week.
It is only because children enjoy the books with their inescapable rhythm (he based it on the noise made by ships’ engines) that they’ve lasted so long.
The culling of Dr Seuss’s output by his estate is symptomatic of the perversity and cowardice of the publishing industry. He’s not alone. Barbar is tricky nowadays, a poster elephant for colonialism: when a nice old lady adopts him, his first move is to buy European dress, including spats. Does it matter? No. It’s sublime graphic art and a genius character. Tintin is problematic, not just on account of the adventures in the Congo but the drawings of other nationalities.
Does it matter? No. Tintin is immortal.
If you really want, you can put weaselly disclaimers on the covers about the content reflecting the outlook of the time. Just don’t censor the books. Not HA Rey’s Curious George (a little monkey kidnapped from Africa by an explorer), not Roald Dahl’s Oompa Loompas, not Dr Doolittle.
The alternative is that children may be, and are, force fed the kind of diverse and inclusive books that will make them lose the will to live.
I see a lot of that as a children’s book reviewer. Yesterday I received a book about a little Chinese girl who notices that she looks different to her friends and decides this is beautiful; last week, I got a story about a little girl with two mums from the Puffin imprint, with an LGBT rainbow on the spine. Both are written with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
In 1954, Life magazine concluded that the reason children didn’t read books was that children’s books were boring. It was into this environment that Dr Seuss arrived. Children don’t need gatekeepers to police their reading; they need good books. And if they get a kick out of The Cat’s Quizzer, give it to them. read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion