The Real Story of Horton the Elephant

When Dr. Seuss was asked about the genesis of his 1940 picture book, Horton Hatches the Egg, he usually told some variation on the story quoted here at Mental Floss:

I was in my New York studio one day, sketching on transparent tracing paper, and I had the window open. The wind simply took a picture of an elephant that I’d drawn and put it on top of another sheet of paper that had a tree on it. All I had to do was to figure out what the elephant was doing in that tree.

Charles D. Cohen’s “visual biography” of Seuss is titled The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss in part, I suspect, because it seeks to get to the truth behind such anecdotes.

When it comes to Horton Hatches the Egg, Cohen shows that:

• Seuss had drawn a whale up a tree for Judge magazine in 1927, a dachshund hatching a stork’s egg for Life in 1929, and a walrus hatching eggs in a tree for Judge in 1931.
  
• He had drawn elephants with wings for Life in 1930 and a book called Spelling Bees in 1937.
  
• He had drawn an elephant sitting on an egg for Life in 1934.

And in 1938 Judge published a one-page “Dr. Seuss Fable” titled “Matilda, the Elephant with a Mother Complex,” about a childless elephant who sits patiently on a chickadee egg, enduring the scorn of her fellow animals, until it hatches. Matilda didn’t go up a tree to do so, but clearly Horton Hatches the Egg had been gestating in Dr. Seuss’s mind for years rather than being inspired by a fortuitous breeze.

The really significant changes are that all those previous cartoons and stories had been for adult audiences, and almost all presented the odd mammal as misguided rather than heroic. The egg-sitting walrus was part of “The Truly-Dumb Animal Shoppe”; the first winged elephants were the product of delirium tremens; the elephant from 1934 cracked the egg’s shell.

As for Matilda, she managed to hatch the chickadee, but it took one look at her, “cried out in terror,…and flapped off frantically.” The moral of that story is: “Don’t go around hatching other folks’ eggs.” That, of course, is quite a different outcome from Horton’s pride at hatching an elephant-bird.

When Dr. Seuss went back to that idea as a recently-hatched children’s-book author, he was able to embrace the nonsense of the image of an elephant in a nest in a tree and create an ending that adults might know is unreal but which rewards Horton. For young readers, Dr. Seuss took his old elephant who defied convention and made him heroic rather than pathetic.

The Seuss, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Seuss analyzes other oft-told aspects of Dr. Seuss’s life as well, such as when and why he adopted pseudonyms and the critical response to The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It’s worth a look.

WikiLeaks in Whoville

“How WikiLeaks Stole Christmas!” from Ward Sutton and the Boston Globe.

A little less topical: Sutton’s comics-form review of Mark Twain’s autobiography 3.0 and other books.

Saving the Biggest Adventures for Later

Steve Shreve’s The Adventures of Benny is an early reader that contains five stories, each liberally illustrated in cartoon style.

Those five stories contain Bigfoot, a mummy with a curse, pirates, a giant squid, an under-bed monster, a ghost, monkeys, snakes live and cooked, a treasure map, smelly socks, wedgies, boogers, and farts.

Four of the five stories include a toilet. Four mention underwear. Four include the word “butt,” “fanny,” or “poop.”

One notable thing that The Adventures of Benny doesn’t have at all: females.

Some booksellers have labeled this book a “graphic novel” because of Shreve’s art style and because that’s now a hot label. But Shreve doesn’t use comics techniques. The art and text in The Adventures of Benny interact exactly like Dr. Seuss’s easy readers fifty years ago.

This One Was That One or That One Was This One

People know that Dr. Seuss viewed Yertle the Turtle as a metaphor for Hitler (who'd been dead for a decade before the book appeared). The Lorax is a heavy-handed environmental fable. Horton the elephant and Bartholomew Cubbins are heroes, each in his own way, and the Cat in the Hat a figure of misrule. But the Dr. Seuss story that has long struck me as holding the most lessons for the real world is “The Sneetches.”

Some of the story's morals are pretty clear: caste systems are powerful but ultimately pointless, fashion is merely a way to enforce caste systems, and we're all the same under our furry (or is it feathery?) skins.

But underneath those unimpeachable bromides is a more useful and frightening message: A salesman like Sylvester McMonkey McBean will sell you anything. His sales pitch for one product will contradict his sales pitch for another. He'll sell you product A to solve one problem, and then product B to solve a problem created by product A. Despite his patter, McBean doesn't care about you; he cares about the sale.

For a long time, my favorite example of this behavior in the real world came from the telephone companies. They sold us telephone directories, and then they sold us unlisted numbers. They sold us caller ID, and they sold us caller-ID blocking.

The mortgage-industry meltdown has brought even better examples. Executives from companies that plugged subprime mortgages to homeowners who couldn't afford them are now making money by promising to help clean up the messes those loans produced.

In the Wall Street Journal:

The number of former mortgage lenders and brokers finding ways to make a living from the foreclosure crisis continues to mount.

Andrew "Drew" Gissinger III, formerly an executive managing director of Countrywide Financial Corp., has formed a firm in San Diego to act as a broker for banks selling foreclosed homes.

In the New York Times:

From the ninth floor of a downtown office building on Wilshire Boulevard, Jack Soussana delivered staggering numbers of mortgages to homeowners during the real estate boom, amassing a fortune.

By Mr. Soussana’s own account, his customers fared less happily. He specialized in the exotic mortgages that have proved most prone to sliding into foreclosure, leaving many now scrambling to save their homes.

Yet the dangers assailing Mr. Soussana’s clients have yielded fresh business for him: Late last year, he and his team — ensconced in the same office where they used to broker mortgages — began working for a loan modification company. For fees reaching $3,495, with most of the money collected upfront, they promised to negotiate with lenders to lower payments on the now-delinquent mortgages they and their counterparts had sprinkled liberally across Southern California.

“We just changed the script and changed the product we were selling,” said Mr. Soussana...

The Times article reports that Soussana's company is now being sued by the FTC for false claims.

In “The Sneetches,” McBean departs with all the sneetches' money, convinced that the creatures will never learn anything.

Stinky: Another Kind of Easy Reader?

Among the ALA's honorees this week was Eleanor Davis's Stinky, named a Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Honor Book. That award, named after Dr. Seuss, recognizes "the most distinguished American book for beginning readers." Usually such books have simple prose with standard punctuation, so as not to overburden young kids learning to read on their own.

Stinky is a notable honoree in that it was created in comics format, rather than as a traditional picture book or easy-reader. There's no narrative voice. And compared to prose stories, the comics form asks beginning readers to learn and apply a different manner of reading.

Look at this sample page from Toon Books. Its text includes several items that rarely appear in standard prose, especially in books with very basic, simple text for beginning readers:

• Oversized, capitalized, and boldfaced letters for emphasis.
• Different balloon outlines to convey speech, thought, shouts, and whispers.
• Sound effects, such as the boy's whistling and chomping.
• Punctuation marks conveying emotion on their own, unconnected to words.
  

These visual symbols comprise a system of comics punctuation that overlaps the standard prose system, but has its own tools and rules.

Stinky's comics style also requires readers to understand that, for example, the multiple images of Stinky in the right middle panel are all the same character at different moments.

Stinky can work because those "showing the invisible" techniques are standard in many comics, familiar to kids and their adults from newspaper or magazine cartoons. Nevertheless, this easy-reader challenges kids to learn a different way of reading.

Is Our Children Reading E-books?

The Los Angeles Times is one of a number of news outlets reporting how the sales of electronic books grew by a large percentage in 2008. Of course, sales had been so low that nearly any market penetration would have produced a large percentage rise. But between the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle, and other devices, the format seems to have caught on.

Some people fret predictably that this new technology will change reading habits (of course it will) in fundamental ways (not really). Good fiction makes readers so mentally involved in the fictional world that they stop noticing their real surroundings--including whether they're turning pages, clicking a button, or listening to a recorded voice.

In the LA Times article, the opening case study (shown above, photo by Stefano Paltera) is an eight-year-old named Skye Vaughn-Perling, who likes Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who in both printed and digital forms. Well, with a name like Skye Vaughn-Perling, he'd have to like Dr. Seuss, wouldn't he?

I always seem to feel rhymy toward the end of the calendar year, so I found myself summing up the LA Times article this way:

Skye Vaughn-Perling isn't heeding
Questions swirling over reading.
He has seen both printed matter
And a screen--so which is better?
Skye seems glad for either version
Since what matters is immersion.
What he looks for, he's surmised,
Can come in books or digitized.

I feel unseemly pride in the internal rhymes.

Unreliable

Lisa Von Drasek began her NYTBR review of Knucklehead, a new memoir about boys behaving badly, this way:

I have been a fan of Jon Scieszka (rhymes with Fresca) since “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by A. Wolf was published 20 years ago. Can you name another book that introduces the unreliable narrator to second graders?

Well, yes.

• Let's start with Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937). At the end the young narrator acknowledges that he got carried away. It was a plain horse and wagon after all.
• In Ellen Raskin's Nothing Ever Happens on My Block (1966), the narrator's complaints about living in a boring neighborhood are undercut by the illustrations of lots happening behind his back.
• And frankly I don't trust Rawli Davis, the narrator of Helen Palmer's Do You Know What I'm Going to Do Next Saturday? (1963), even if it's too early to say for sure he won't do all the stuff he describes, and even if there are photographs to back him up. And it looks like the little kid he's bragging to feels the same way.

Plotting for a Curious Monkey

Sometime in the early 1960s, Children's Hospital in Boston approached Margret and H. A. Rey about telling a story of their beloved character Curious George going to a hospital. George had already spent some time in a hospital in Curious George Takes a Job, when he dropped from a fire escape and broke his leg. The Children's Hospital staff hoped that children might feel less anxiety about going to the hospital themselves if they'd seen their favorite curious monkey survive the experience.

Now that's not a plot or a story; it's a mission. Likewise, the title Curious George Goes to the Hospital is simply a premise (and "high concept") for a story, but not a story itself. The Reys had to create a compelling plot for their character.

The big challenge of building a plot around a hospital visit is that strong plots are usually fueled by the protagonist's desire and steered by the protagonist's actions. But very few people desire to go to a hospital. Hospital patients have limited power to affect what happens to them. They need help from other people, such as doctors; that's why they're in the hospital.

So what plot did the Reys come up with? For a workshop at the recent SCBWI New England conference, I used Curious George Goes to the Hospital as a lab monkey for my idea of an "in response to..." synopsis. This is a tool for summarizing and thus analyzing a plot that foregrounds the protagonist's (and antagonists') actions and thus the cause-and-effect connections between events. Here's the result:

George is a very curious monkey. In response to seeing a big box on the man with the yellow hat's desk, George eats one of the colorful things inside. As a result of George having eaten a piece of a wooden jigsaw puzzle, he and the man in the yellow hat can’t finish the puzzle. In an additional response, George feels sick.

In response to George’s illness, the man in the yellow hat calls a doctor and takes him to the hospital. In response to an X-ray, doctors spot the puzzle piece and recommend an operation, so a nurse puts George in a ward with a sad girl named Betsy and a boy named Steve with a bandaged leg and a wheelchair.

In response to the surgery, George feels better, so he eats ice cream, puts on a puppet show in the playroom, and takes a spin on a record player. In response to George wearing himself out, an attendant puts him back in bed.

The next day, Steve is taking his first steps as part of his rehabilitation. In response to seeing Steve’s empty wheelchair, George gets curious and rides it out into the hall. In response to gravity, the chair rolls down a ramp, smashes into two lunch carts, and launches George into the arms of the visiting mayor. In response to this mess, George feels ashamed and sad.

In response to seeing the same mess, Betsy laughs for the first time since she entered the hospital and kisses George. In response to hearing Betsy laugh, the hospital director forgives George. In response to the man in the yellow hat coming to take George home, a nurse gives them a small box. Inside they find the puzzle piece, and in response George and the man finish the puzzle.

This synopsis reads terribly, of course. But it does the job of highlighting what episodes in the book are crucial to the plot, what George does, and how events tie together. And that's all an "in response to..." synopsis is supposed to do.

The synopsis shows that George goes to the hospital not because he wants to, but nevertheless as a consequence of one of his actions. The synopsis also shows that the plot doesn't turn on George's operation, but rather on an event he instigates: his wheelchair ride. George and his readers can't anticipate the storyline's big turn--Betsy's laughter, and the hospital staff's pleasure--but the Reys set up that moment earlier and fit it into the plot's cause-and-effect structure.

This synopsis also shows that some emotional moments in the book, such as George screaming when he sees the anesthetic needle, are mere blips in the plot. I suspect that needle episode was always part of the plan for the book, but it's supported by the storyline rather than supporting the plot. If the story were to show George running away when he saw the needle, his response would have been an important turning-point in the plot, but it wouldn't have served the book's mission.

I also tried this tool on some Dr. Seuss narratives: Horton Hatches the Egg and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Both of those stories' plots, it showed, depend on the protagonist doing the same thing over and over in response to increasingly difficult pressures until he is vindicated. So their "in response to..." synopses are even more repetitive. Plot twists were not Dr. Seuss's thing.

Rhythm, Rhymes, and Gzonks

Though we remember Dr. Seuss for his narrative books, such as Horton Hears a Who and The Cat in the Hat, he also wrote a number of plotless picture books that relied on the sheer power of accumulating nonsense. These include If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, and the venerable And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

In the latter category, my favorite was probably On Beyond Zebra!, which took the normal form of an alphabet book but discussed letters no other author had used. (Other alphabet books I recall vividly from childhood were those by Richard Scarry, P. L. Travers, and H. A. and Margaret Rey.)

Tony DiTerlizzi plays similar tricks with the alphabet book form in G Is for One Gzonk! Each letter of the alphabet introduces a creature not found anywhere else, such as the eponymous gzonk. The pages show of DiTerlizzi's creature-creating talent, honed from illustrating Magic cards and co-creating the Spiderwick series.

The young bespectacled stand-in for the author-illustrator vows to make his alphabet different by not pointing out anything else on the page that begins with the crucial letter. Though he can't resist ponting out what he's not pointing out. And then some Woos, who resemble hovering water balloons with numbers attached, keep invading the pages, trying to turn the alphabet book into a number book. Their contributions to the text appear in a different color and type style from the narrator's.

With all the arguments and twists, G is for Gzonk! requires 80 pages to get through twenty-six letters of the alphabet and one number. That's an unusually large investment for a picture-book publisher, reflecting DiTerlizzi's success with Spiderwick and The Spider and the Fly.

Unfortunately, the book's rhyming text is just as irregular as its alphabet, and less intentionally. As I always say about stories in verse, rhyme is easy; rhythm is hard. Here are the book's first two stanzas, with the naturally emphasized syllables in capital letters:

HelLO! And WELcome TO my BOOK!
A BOOK THOUGHT up by ME.
I am the AUTHor and ARTist
(as SOON you'll PLAINly SEE)

of this ALphaBET of CREACHlings!
A TWENty-six-LETter menAGerIE!
But I MUST conFESS,
as you MAY have GUESSED,
it WON'T teach you A b C.

The lines never settle into a steady rhythm, iambic or otherwise. Compare the bumpy patterns above to "and to THINK that I SAW it on MULberry STREET." The most solidly metrical lines, such as "(as soon you'll plainly see)," add little to the text's meaning.

Dr. Seuss's nonsense texts showed his mastery of language, but I fear Gzonk's verse, like the Woos, show language overwhelming the author.

This Is Not a Good Game

Fuse #8's link to the "Dylan Hears a Who" website prompted me to listen to Dr. Seuss's text of The Cat in the Hat again, just in time for Random House's extensive marketing campaign for the book’s fiftieth anniversary.

What a subversive book that is! Politeness (e.g., shaking hands with strangers) gets kids in trouble. At the end the narrator asks readers whether they would keep a visit from the title character secret from their mothers.

Remember how ten years ago the giant Cat in the Hat balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade knocked a lamppost onto spectator Kathleen Caronna, injuring her badly? (Ms. Caronna seems to have recovered as well as can be expected, only to have a small plane crash into her empty bedroom last year. She may be one of those people, like Rulon Gardner, that things happen to.)

Now who could have seen that parade-balloon accident coming? Well, the fish, for one. And any six-year-old who'd read the book. The Cat in the Hat is not nice. He is not simply Supergrover with a taller hat. He's a figure of misrule and chaos. As well as, of course, a beloved symbol of literacy in America.