New York Review of Books Review

IN DECEMBER 1960, The New Yorker ran a profile of a man whose public appearances attracted crowds that would "cause a western television hero to sway in the saddle with envy" : Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, the author of riotous, catchy children's books like "The Cat in the Hat" that had lately been flooding the nation's bookstores and libraries. In the article, the 56-year-old Dr. Seuss himself revealed his formula - "logical insanity" - while the president of Random House, Bennett Cerf, was said to have called Geisel "the only genius on his list," which included, The New Yorker reminded its readers, William Faulkner. At the time that profile appeared, the pages of a nearly finished picture book called "What Pet Should I Get?" were probably sitting in Dr. Seuss' files at his home in La Jolla, Calif. It was never released in Geisel's lifetime, but now, more than two decades after his death in 1991, "What Pet Should I Get?" is being published. It's happy news - first, because the book is, if not top-flight Seuss, a very good example of his particular genius for distilling both the spirit of his times and the timeless mind-set of children. With its galloping anapests, cockamamie creatures and kids off on an everyday adventure that turns hallucinogenic, this late arrival will slip easily into the collection that changed how Americans learn to read - Dr. Seuss books like "Green Eggs and Ham," which mowed down the teacher-approved, intellectually inert Dick-and-Jane drivel that sucked the life out of early education in the 1950s. (They may as well all have been titled "Bunny, Bunny, Bunny," as Geisel wrote in "How Orlo Got His Book," a 1957 satirical piece published in the Book Review, in which he tried to wake Americans up to the urgent need to approach children's reading in a new way.) "What Pet Should I Get?" will remind us, delightfully, that Dr. Seuss, over half a century ago, made learning to read an adventure, a club children would actually want to belong to. And, not least, he made reading aloud something parents, too, could reliably enjoy. But let's also welcome this book as another piece of evidence that we're still in shouting distance of a time, pre-Twitter, pre-Google Maps Street View, when there was some mystery around literary creation, a sense of something ultimately unknowable about authors and their daily lives, their habits, their intentions. Why did Geisel just about finish "What Pet Should I Get?" and then not publish it? His widow, Audrey - who was not married to him at the time - has said that he must have simply forgotten about it in the flurry of projects. It's true that the window in which the book was almost certainly written, the years leading up to 1960, was packed with activity for Geisel, both creative and, increasingly, commercial. He and his first wife, Helen, were busy starting a new Random House imprint for children called Beginner Books (author guidelines included a list of preferred vocabulary and a ban on anything "cute"), which by 1960 was earning more than a million dollars a year. He was also working with a plastics company to manufacture a series of snap-together animals called the Dr. Seuss Zoo. But still: I'm not buying that he - and Helen, who was intimately involved in all his work - simply forgot about it. I think there's a more interesting story here. First, though, the book itself: It features a round-faced brother and sister - his close-cropped hair is bristly on top, she has a long, wispy ponytail - who enter a pet store excited about the prospect of taking a new animal home. "Dad said we could get one./ Dad said he would pay," the boy exclaims. Inside, they confront a head-spinning lineup of choices. Also, they don't have much time - their mother has told them to be home by noon. A few pages into their predicament and again toward the end, the words MAKE UP YOUR MIND charge across the top of a two-page spread, each held aloft by a different invented Seussian creature - floppy-limbed, scruffy-coated, oddly proportioned, jubilantly weird. On one of those pages, the boy sums up the book's central point in a deceptively innocent lament: "Oh, boy! It is something to make a mind up!" That sentiment was written many years before the psychologist Barry Schwartz's 2004 book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" nailed the soul-exhaustion of late-capitalist culture and its frantically proliferating menus of options. But it will feel as fresh in 2015 as it would have in 1960, when that New Yorker profile ran 23 pages, many of them one skinny column of text flanked by ads - I counted 11 for perfumes alone. Casaque, Madame Rochas, Réplique, Shalimar, Tabu. ... Mon Dieu, it is something to make a mind up! Our two little consumer-heroes would have been born, a quick calculation suggests, in the early Baby Boom years of healthy parental bank accounts that gave children access to the expanding options of American life. At the moment the book came into being, a pet store would have offered a fertile setting for the mild existential angst that underlies any Dr. Seuss book: What pet should they get? At first the children face the easy binary of dog and cat. But, not unlike some mid-20th-century New Yorker reader alerted to the possibility that there might be a better perfume out there, the siblings quickly realize that their pet options are much more numerous - worryingly so. There's not just dog and cat but kitten and puppy, and bird and fish. There are monkeys. There's even, yes, a bunny to consider, though Dr. Seuss (pointedly) uses the proper name of his old nursery-book nemesis: '"Look over there!' / said my sister Kay. / 'We can go home / With a rabbit today!"' Then the real problems start: What other amazing animals, unknown to the children, may exist? "I might find a new one," the brother imagines, "a fast kind of thing / who would fly round my head / in a ring on a string!" Fun, yes, but wouldn't that also be asking for trouble? He reels himself back in. "Our house is so small," he admits. "This thing on a string / would bump, bump into the wall!" Their mother - who, along with their father, remains offstage, as in virtually any story in which a child's imagination must take flight - "would not like that at all." She'd probably prefer "a tall pet that fits in a space that is small." This glorious fantasy creature has spindly, spiraling ostrich legs, big hairy paws and a supersized head plume, and we see it both standing like a friendly tower above the grinning boy and compactly folded under a desk, like some ingeniously designed piece of apartment furniture. The father, for his part, comes off as a downer too. The brother decides Dad might enjoy a gigantic, furry creature called a Yent, but a Yent would need a tent, and "how do I know / he would pay for a tent?" What about taking home "one of each kind of pet"? Forget it - "Dad would be mad." Just when deliberations appear to be breaking down, reason drifts in like a breeze from an open window. "If we do not choose, / we will end up with NONE," the children realize. The story ends with the brother buckling down and choosing, apparently without regret: "I picked one out fast, and then that was that." There is a wonderful final image that will inevitably get children chattering: We see the brother and sister leaving the store with a basket, but we can't tell what kind of creature is inside - all we see are two eager, round eyes. WHY, THEN, DID Geisel leave this one in the drawer? The answer, I think, lies in the book "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish," one of Dr. Seuss' most popular, published in 1960 and featuring the same pair of siblings. (Fun fact: The brother also appears in the art Geisel provided for his 1957 Book Review piece, which suggests he began "What Pet Should I Get?" shortly before or after that, using the character he had been developing.) And while Cathy Goldsmith, who was his art director toward the end of his life, places "What Pet" sometime between 1958 and 1962, I think it was finished before "One Fish" was published in 1960. Reading "What Pet" and "One Fish" together, it seems to me "What Pet" was a kind of warm-up for the more freewheeling and imaginatively rich - the slightly more classically Seussian - book. "One Fish" has no plot, just a collection of escalating riffs on a brother and sister's life with a parade of hilarious, useful and entertaining imaginary creatures. It's as if Geisel took the Yent and the "tall pet that fits in a space that is small" in "What Pet Should I Get?" and ran with them. He picked them up, grabbed the children, and ran right out of the depressingly mundane commercial world of the pet store, far away from all the nagging worries of Mother and Dad and making the right choice. Finding himself, in late middle age, inundated by all the new demands of his own success, he ran - my theory goes - away from the pressurized world of money and responsibility and back into the joyfully liberated territory of "One Fish Two Fish." Hello, Gack! "At our house/we play out back," the narrator declares. "We play a game/called Ring the Gack." It's a book that exists outside of time, and you wish it would never end. When it does, we get the massive, comforting Zeep, with its long sinuous tail and delicately pointed hooves: "And now / good night. / It is time to sleep. / So we will sleep / with our pet Zeep." Geisel was known to be extremely self-critical, and while his books go down so easy that they risk seeming merely tossed off, his process was laborious. Each book went through many drafts; he once said he produced over a thousand pages in order to end up with 64. He would regularly dispatch any work that didn't meet his standards. But he didn't throw away "What Pet Should I Get?" When it was discovered in 2013, in a box that Audrey Geisel had set aside after his death, it was in the final stages of preparation, with words typed on small squares of paper and taped in place on the artwork. To get that far with it, he must have thought it was a fine piece of work. But he didn't publish it, either. He didn't get on a plane to New York and personally march "What Pet Should I Get?" into Bennett Cerf's office, as was his custom with each finished manuscript. Instead, I think, he did something like this: He looked over the book, and he talked it over with Helen; he thought about how much fun he had had with all its crazy creatures, and he started playing around with another book that would let the sister and brother off the hook - let them forget about their pressing pet store errand and instead hang out all day long in the commerce-free, parent-free world of "One Fish." What he chose to do then with "What Pet" was not to choose. When you find yourself caught in the jaws of an overbearing consumer culture, that's a choice, too. Why did Geisel just about finish 'What Pet Should I Get?' and then not publish it? Dr. Seuss made reading aloud something parents, too, could reliably enjoy. MARIA RUSSO is the children's books editor of the Book Review.