Boys And Girls Forever Page 11

  The typical Seuss hero is a small boy or a male animal; when little girls appear, they play silent secondary roles. The most memorable female in his entire oeuvre is the despicable Mayzie, the lazy bird who callously traps Horton into sitting on her egg so that she can fly off to Palm Beach. Another unattractive bird, Gertrude McFuzz in Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (1958), is vain, envious, greedy, stupid, and fashion-mad. She gorges on magic berries to increase the size of her tail, and ends up unable to walk.

  Seuss’s little girls, unlike his boys, are not encouraged to expand their imaginations very far. In “The Gunk That Got Thunk,” one of the tales in I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! (1969), this is made clear. The narrator relates how his little sister customarily used her “Thinker-Upper” to “think up friendly little things / With smiles and fuzzy fur.” One day, however, she got bored: she speeded up the process and created a giant Gunk:

  He was greenish.

  Not too cleanish.

  And he sort of had bad breath.

  She tries to unthink him, but fails; meanwhile the Gunk gets on the phone and runs up a three-hundred-dollar long-distance bill describing recipes. Finally he is unthunk with the help of the narrator, who then gives his sister

  Quite a talking-to

  About her Thinker-Upper.

  NOW . . .

  She only

  Thinks up fuzzy things

  In the evening after supper.

  The suggestion is that females must not be ambitious even in imagination. They have weak minds; their alter egos are greedy and extravagant and spend too much time on the phone.

  The only book by Seuss with a female protagonist, Daisy-Head Mayzie, was based on a never-produced film-animation script found among his papers after his death. It was published in 1995 with uneven Seuss-type verses and Seuss-type illustrations, some apparently by an anonymous collaborator. Many of the drawings seem to be copies of illustrations from other Seuss books. (The Cat in the Hat, who is not mentioned in the story, appears on several pages.) Plump, blond, pink-frocked Mayzie is an essentially passive and frightened character, more victim than heroine—a sort of juvenile Marilyn Monroe.

  After a flower sprouts on the top of her head, Mayzie loses her anonymity. Her doctor wants to make her the subject of a research grant; the mayor mentions her in speeches; eventually she becomes a dazed celebrity, used by her agent and by cynical politicians. She is famous not for what she can do or create, like the hero of If I Ran the Zoo, but for the way she looks.6

  Mayzie goes on TV and inspires commercial spin-offs:

  Daisy-Head burgers,

  And Daisy-Head drinks,

  Daisy-Head stockings,

  And Daisy-Head sinks.

  But Mayzie is not happy with her money and fame; instead, like some real-life celebrities, she becomes obsessed with the idea that nobody loves her. To find out for sure she begins picking the petals off her daisy, and they come up with a positive answer. Mayzie returns, daisy-less and happy, to her family and friends and school. Now and then, though “practically never,” the flower briefly—and apparently harmlessly—reappears.

  Seuss’s most popular recent book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990), which by July 2001 had been on The New York Times best-seller list for 207 weeks, also has a male hero. But in other ways the story was a departure for him. “The theme is limitless horizons and hope,” Seuss, then eighty-six years old, told an interviewer; and the blurb describes the book as a “joyous ode to personal fulfillment.” But what it really reads like is the yuppie dream—or nightmare—of the 1990s in cartoon form.

  At the beginning of the story the standard Seuss boy hero appears in what looks like the cartoon version of a large, clean, modern city (featureless yellow buildings, wide streets, tidy plots of grass). But under this city, as any urbanite might expect, are unpleasant, dangerous things—in this case, long-necked green monsters who put their heads out of manholes. Seeing them, Seuss’s hero, “too smart to go down any not-so-good street,” heads “straight out of town.”

  At first everything goes well; he acquires an escort of four purple (Republican?) elephants and rises in the world, joining “the high fliers / who soar to high heights.” The narrative is encouraging:

  You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.

  Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.

  Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

  In the accompanying illustration Seuss’s hero is carried by a pink and yellow balloon high over fields and mountains; his competitors, in less colorful balloons, lag behind at a lower altitude.

  Then comes the first disaster: the balloon is snagged by a dead tree and deflated. The boy’s “gang” doesn’t stop for him—as presumably he wouldn’t for them—and he finds himself first in a Lurch and then in a Slump, the latter portrayed as a dismal rocky seminighttime landscape with giant blue slugs draped about in a Dali-like manner. Doggedly, he goes on and comes to a city full of arches and domes that looks rather Near Eastern,

  . . . where the streets are not marked.

  Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.

  Turning aside (in the light of the current political situation, an excellent choice), he continues “down long wiggled roads” toward what Seuss calls The Waiting Place. Here the sky is inky black, and many discouraged-looking people and creatures are standing around:

  . . . waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

  or a pot to boil, or a Better Break.

  For the energetic, ever-striving young American, this is a fate worse than death, and it is vigorously rejected:

  NO!

  That’s not for you!

  Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying.

  You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.

  Seuss’s hero is next seen riding on another purple elephant in a procession of elephants, on his way to further solitary triumphs.

  Oh, the places you’ll go. There is fun to be done!

  There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. . . .

  Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be,

  With the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

  In the accompanying picture some kind of fantasy football or lacrosse is being played—our hero kicking off from the back of his elephant, the other contestants on foot. But almost immediately this success is undercut:

  Except when they don’t.

  Because, sometimes, they won’t.

  I’m afraid that some times

  you’ll play lonely games too.

  Games you can’t win

  ’cause you’ll play against you.

  Clearly, the most dangerous enemy of the celebrity is his own doubt and self-dislike. The illustration shows a totally insecure-looking fantasy version of a Hollywood hillside mansion, where the hero is shooting baskets alone. Seuss assumes, no doubt quite properly, that in any career devoted to success, competition, and fame, “Alone will be something / you’ll be quite a lot,” and that often “you won’t want to go on.”

  But his hero, of course, does go on, meeting a number of comical and/or frightening monsters. Seuss predicts

  You’ll get mixed up

  With many strange birds as you go.

  The strange birds, who all look alike, are shown against another totally black background, some marching upward to the right with smiles, others plodding downward to the left with depressed expressions. The message here seems to be that it is a mistake to commit oneself to any organization; instead one must

  Step with care and great tact

  and remember that Life’s

  a Great Balancing Act.

  This is followed by the happy climax, in which Seuss’s hero is even more triumphant than before:

  And will you succeed?

  Yes! You will, indeed!

  (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

  KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

  This promise i
s depicted literally in the illustration: if we choose to take it that way, we might assume that Seuss’s kid has become a property developer, like so many California celebrities.

  In one or two of Seuss’s earlier books, similar dreams of money and fame occur. Gerald McGrew, for instance, imagines that

  The whole world will say, Young McGrew’s made his mark.

  He’s built a zoo better than Noah’s whole Ark! . . .

  “Wow!” They’ll all cheer,

  “What this zoo must be worth!”

  This was written in 1950, when Seuss’s own imaginary zoo had just begun to make his fortune. Later on, life wholly imitated art: his wild inventions, like those of his boy heroes—and, of course, in the end they are the same thing—made him fantastically rich and famous. It is difficult to estimate what Seuss’s own zoo must be worth now; according to his publishers in 1990, more than two hundred million copies of his books had been sold worldwide, and many of them have been animated for television or adapted for the stage.

  Gerald McGrew and Seuss’s other early heroes were content simply to fantasize success. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! has a different moral. Now happiness no longer lies in exercising one’s imagination, achieving independence from tyrants, or helping weaker creatures as Horton does. It is equated with wealth, fame, and getting ahead of others. Moreover, anything less than absolute success is seen as failure—a well-known American delusion, and a very destructive one. There are also no personal relationships here except that of competition. Unlike most of Seuss’s earlier protagonists, the hero has no friends and no family.

  Who is buying this book, and why? Apparently it is a very popular college-graduation gift, and also often given to people who are changing jobs or careers. It is a pep talk, and meets the same need that is satisfied by those stiffly smiling financial experts who declare on television that any glitch in America’s prosperity is a Gunk that will soon be unthunk, to be followed—On Beyond Zebra!—by even greater success.

  HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES

  BEHIND many of the greatest and most joyful children’s fantasies move the shadows of real and often unhappy events in their authors’ lives. Many of Beatrix Potter’s animals escape from claustrophobic domestic environments like that of her own respectably repressive Victorian parents. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, like Barrie himself, never attains maturity, and must borrow or steal other people’s children for his playmates. And E. B. White, who as both a child and an adult was described as resembling a mouse, made the hero of Stuart Little a mouse born into a human family.

  Salman Rushdie’s remarkable children’s book belongs in this company. The only difference is that the experiences that lie behind Haroun and the Sea of Stories are nearly as fantastic as anything in the tale. Before the fact, who could have believed that a world-famous spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Khoumeni, would publicly exhort his millions of followers to murder a novelist in another country, and promise them eternal salvation should they succeed?

  On the surface, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a lively, wonderfully inventive comic tale with an updated Arabian Nights background and a happy ending. But it was begun at a time when Rushdie was hiding under police protection and in near despair about his own writing. As he told James Fenton:

  To attempt a work of fiction after what had happened to me wasn’t easy. There were many times in the months after this began that I said to myself that I no longer wished to be a writer. I felt that everything I had put into the act of being a writer had failed. . . . [If] the whole planet thinks of you as a complete bastard, you wonder what it’s about, what it was for, and why do it.1

  What made Rushdie start writing again was a promise he had made to his son, Zafar (“Triumph” in Arabic), that when he had finished The Satanic Verses he would write a book that children could read.

  . . . then all this happened, and I was unable to do anything for him . . . there was this nine-year-old boy suddenly deprived of his father, and I thought there’s only one promise to him that I can keep . . . it was the thing that brought me back to writing.2

  The book is dedicated with an acrostic poem to his son, and its young protagonist, Haroun, is clearly based on him.

  Haroun and the Sea of Stories follows the classic folktale pattern in which a young hero travels to strange lands to lift a spell on his native country or cure a parent of a fatal ailment. In the course of the story he is often aided by supernatural companions and confronts and defeats a wicked magician.

  The hero of Rushdie’s tale is the son of the famous storyteller Rashid (a near anagram of “Rushdie”) Kalifa (“Caliph”), who is known to his neighbors as the “Ocean of Notions.” Rashid is able, like Orpheus, to command the fascinated attention not only of men and women and children, but also of birds and beasts. But “luck has a way of running out without the slightest warning.”3 One day Rashid’s wife leaves him for a thin, whiny neighbor who hates stories; Rashid loses his gift and can only croak, “Ark, ark, ark.”4

  This affliction of speech, central to the book, is paralleled by the affliction of the country, which is called Alifbay (“alphabet” in Hindustani). Most of the names in the book derive from this language, and a convenient glossary is provided at the end. It is worth checking this out, for as Rashid tells his son, “All names mean something.” At the start of the book Haroun and his father live in “a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish.”5

  Though it is unfortunate to have a name with dark connotations, it is even worse to have no name at all. Here, sorrow causes one to forget one’s name and lose the ability to speak; and no wonder, considering the recent life of its author. Under how many false and forgettable names, in how many sad cities, I wonder, has Rushdie had to conceal himself since the publication of his much-praised and much-condemned novel The Satanic Verses?

  The villain responsible for Rashid’s affliction is the sinister tyrant of the dark land of Chup (“Silence”), Khattam-Shud, whose name means “completely finished” or “over and done with.” He is “the Arch-Enemy of all stories, even of Language itself.”6 In appearance, however, he is not fearsome: he is “a skinny, scrawny, measly, weaselly, sniveling clerical type.”7 Khattam-Shud’s fanatical followers have sworn a vow of silence, and are working round the clock to poison the Sea of Stories. Their country is not only dark and soundless, but freezing cold: “a place of shadows, of books that wear padlocks and tongues torn out.”8

  “But why do you hate stories so much?” Haroun asks when he finally confronts the tyrant. “Stories are fun.”

  “The world, however, is not for Fun. . . . The world is for Controlling,” replies Khattam-Shud, who though he will allow no one else to speak, talks continually in a “dull, inflexionless voice.” “And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all.”9

  Though there is darkness and silence at the center of Chup, most of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is full of a comic energy and lively verbal invention that recall L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Rushdie himself has acknowledged his debt to Baum. In a pamphlet on The Wizard of Oz published by the British Film Institute, he writes:

  When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me. Many years later, I began to devise the yarn that eventually became Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and felt strongly that if I could strike the right note it should be possible to write the tale in such a way as to make it of interest to “children from seven to seventy.”10

  In the course of his travels Haroun acquires three fantastical companions who, like Dorothy’s, represent the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms: IFF the Water Genie, who is semihuman; Mali, a “Floating Gardener First Class,” made of seaweed; and Mr. Butt, a bus driver who later turns into Butt the Hoopoe, a mechanical bird with telepathic abilities.11 Haroun visits several odd, self-contained communities like those in the Oz books: in Moody Land
, for example, the climate is affected by the mental and emotional state of the inhabitants rather than vice versa. The book also contains a brave and enterprising girl character who disguises herself as a boy in order to join the Library army. “You think it’s easy for a girl to get a job like this?” she asks Haroun. “Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?”12 Female readers will regret that this young feminist plays such a small part in the story, and even more that she goes by the ugly name of Blabbermouth.

  There are other echoes from earlier children’s classics. Rushdie’s puns and anagrams, and his exuberant wordplay, suggest both Alice in Wonderland and Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollboth.13 The army (or “Library”) of the good land of Gup (“Gossip” or “Nonsense”) is composed of Pages in thin uniforms covered with writing, who are organized into Chapters and Volumes; its general is called Kitab (“Book” in Hindustani). Their love of free speech gives them an advantage over the silent soldiers of Chup whose “habits of secrecy had made them suspicious and distrustful of one another.”14