There’s no shortage of Seuss-bashers. That’s an occupational hazard for all worshipped authors. Sooner or later, the deifiers will demonize them. The indignant You-Tubers who threaten to “ruin your childhood!” by exposing “the real” Dr. Seuss, like this one and this one are the tip of the iceberg.
Yes, Dr. Seuss wasn’t a doctor, except for his honorary doctorate. He didn’t pretend to be a medical doctor. Yes, he produced anti-Japanese cartoons for the U.S. government during the Second World War—anti-German ones too—along with stuff like this for Flit, a spray-pump insecticide company, starting in the late nineteen-twenties. Yes, he fell in love with his wife’s best friend and dated her while his wife was dying of cancer. Yes, she killed herself, leaving a loving note, when she found out. That makes him a terrible husband, but terribly human too. The personality creating those zany rhymes and characters was anything but mature. Could a psychologically mature man have drawn those wacky cartoons? I doubt it. Dr Seuss was childish and childlike. He married a woman who took very good care of him, a maternal woman who was a little older, too.
When she became seriously ill, he reacted not as a mature husband but as the child he was. It is the rare young child who copes well with a sick mom. Mothers who hope the two-year-old or the four-year-old will understand Mommy feels bad and needs rest are typically disappointed. “Mommy, get out of bed! Make me breakfast!” Or they turn their heads, refusing to speak, treating their sick mom to the pout, the scowl, the tantrum. The narcissism of children prevents them from entertaining the notion that Mom is human and vulnerable. The notion she could be is terrifying—Mom as weak as me? Unforgivable! Mom is supposed to be perfect, all-powerful, never felled by the same bad cold the kid had. What a traumatizing notion, mom falling ill and failing to focus one hundred percent on the child. He’ll never forgive her. When his wife, Helen Palmer, killed herself, Dr. Seuss considered doing himself in too. But he needed love and another mommy, so he married the woman with whom he’d betrayed his first wife.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to Dr. Seuss—but I admire the strength of the woman who enjoyed devoting her attention to him and who apparently accepted the knowledge that any adopted child—for she couldn’t have her own—would have damaged her relationship with a man who needed her laser-focus on him.
Since the Woody Allen fiasco, and long before, artists have been cancelled for their tragically criminal or immoral behavior. But the reality remains that abnormalities or, medically speaking, “co-morbidities” tend to go together. A genius IQ is an abnormality, as is any extraordinary musical or writing or artistic talent. Caravaggio, that pimp and murderer. Benvenuto Cellini, that murderer and rapist. Lord Byron having sex with fifteen-year old boys and allegedly (who really knows?) fathering a child with his half-sister. Ezra Pound ranting against the Jews. William S. Burroughs killing his wife. Norman Mailer trying to kill his. Bertolt Brecht loving Stalin. Paul Gauguin sleeping with young teenage girls and allegedly giving them syphilis. Freud and his cocaine habit and his affair with his sister-in-law. Picasso, thinking women were made to suffer and making them suffer. You don’t have to look far among talented writers, artists, musicians to find liars, cheaters, sadists, pedophiles, bad mothers (Enid Blyton, Doris Lessing) bad fathers, bad-all-over people.
I wouldn’t let Woody Allen into a room with my daughter if the national guard were surrounding her, but I love his movies and his writings. Artistry and personal relationships are separate spheres; let all who marry artists be warned: buyer beware! But to cancel the art or the music or the cartoons—this is wrong. Art is to be appreciated—it’s a joy. Art is transcendence: artists in the act of creating are not usually simultaneously in the act of morally reprehensible or criminal activities. Art may arise from a wish to kill or harm, but it’s an expression of that wish rather than the fulfilment of it. The sources of inspiration may seem vile or be vile, but without the inspiration there’s no art.
Returning to that flit cartoon:
You won’t find any interpretation other than “racist stereotype” on the net. But it pays to instead consider this primarily a self-portrait of two naughty boys or two Dr. Seusses snidely competing with each other. In the first frame, the king, African, smilingly anticipates his colonial-explorer soup while fanning away the insects. In the second, an insect with a scarily large stinger makes a beeline for him, at which point (frame 3) the colonial explorer—apparently unscathed by his sojourn in a boiling cauldron—whips out the insecticide, destroying the insect. The king’s happy. So is the explorer. They both look ridiculous—linger on their facial expressions: they share the same fears, the same triumphs, the same absurdities. They share the joy of watching their enemy die. To all intents and purposes—the stereotype of the Black man, the stereotype of the White colonial explorer—they are equals: equally silly. That’s the real message here—not the racism, even though that’s present too. Do we forgive the artist for childish behavior making his art possible? Yes. Do we forgive the man for living in a period when attitudes toward White explorers and Black people differ from our own? Of course. Do we really think some kid seeing this cartoon will automatically think, “Aha! Black people are dumb savages and white people are cool explorers?” Not really. Do we actually assume any child seeing this cartoon automatically infers
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