By Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College
Hero image from Dr. Seuss Enterprises website
On the centenary of the adoption of his pseudonym “Seuss” in the Spring edition of the Dartmouth Jack-o-Lantern, we invited Seuss Dartmouth Professor and Seuss expert, Donald Pease, to share some thoughts and context on the formation of Dr. Seuss in his Dartmouth Years.
The fellowships Geisel forged at Dartmouth provided for his sense of belonging from 1921 until the outset of World War II. The letters he wrote to Norman Maclean, Whit Campbell, and Robert Sharp during the summers he spent at his family home in Springfield were filled with plans for the upcoming year and declarations of resolve concerning where to live and what projects to take up next upon his return to campus. 16. His sister Marnie was a supportive link between Ted’s biological family in Springfield and his extended Dartmouth family. After Ted was elected to the Jacko staff in 1923, he invited Marnie to attend the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. She was met at the White River Junction Railroad station by a horse-drawn sleigh that delivered her to rounds of ice-skating at Occom Pond, and a rush from Ted’s brothers at Sigma Epsilon fraternity, which he had pledged that same year. Having met Ted’s circle of friends, she was able to commiserate with him during the summer months when he was away from Dartmouth.
Despite these close-knit bonds, however, in his senior year at Dartmouth, Ted Geisel underwent an experience that proved almost as disorienting as his family’s misfortunes in Springfield. The year began auspiciously: Ted took over editorial responsibilities for the Jack-O-Lantern and enjoyed the social standing that came with the position. The year before, he had been one of 20 students elected a member of the Casque and Gauntlet, perhaps the most prestigious of the senior honors societies. Fifteen of the twenty members moved into the Casque and Gauntlet during their senior year. His friends Pete Blodgett, Whit Campbell Larry Leavitt and Kenneth Montgomery initiated him into the renowned Knights of the Round Table. But Ted decided that it was more economical for him to share a room with Robert Sharp at the Randall Club, a clapboard boarding house for students and faculty.
As graduation approached, Ted Geisel was surrounded by classmates who had clear plans for their future. Whit Campbell was about to enter Harvard Law School, Blodgett was to be a banker, Ted’s roommate Robert Sharp was going to graduate school in English. At a final meeting of the Casque and Gauntlet, the members voted their predictions for one another. After the ballots were counted the Knights of the Round Table achieved unanimity on only one decision -- that Ted Geisel “was least likely to succeed.” 17. With a grade point average of a 2.45 and an academic ranking of 133 in a class of 387, the vote did not come as a complete surprise. Ted Geisel turned the incident into the occasion to demonstrate his gifts at self-caricature. Having been successful in his quest to become the Jack-O-Lantern’s editor, he had acquired the only honor that truly mattered to him.
On the evening of Holy Saturday, Ted and nine members of the Jacko staff friends were sharing a pint of bootleg gin at the Randall club that they had purchased from the bootlegger who had earned President Hopkins’ seal of approval. At the peak of the evening’s festivities, Ted and Curtis Abel climbed onto the tin roof of Ma and Pa Randall’s Boarding House and squirted seltzer water at each other. Ignorant of the source of the fluids showering down from his roof (and deficient of the capacity for merriment), Pa Randall imagined the worst of offenses and called the Hanover Police. When the Chief of the Hanover Police raided the apartment, he took all the young men into custody for the violation of the liquor laws.
After a hearing, Craven Laycock, the redoubtable Dean of Students, placed Ted and his friends on probation for defying the law of Prohibition on one of the holiest days in Christian calendar. Dean Laycock removed him from the position of editor of the Jack-O-Lantern and barred him from contributing to the periodical he’d spent four years establishing as a cutting edge college publication. Ted considered the terms of the Dean’s punishment excessive in their severity.
Craven Laycock’s decision to remove him from the editorship of the Jacko recalled previous scenes of humiliation that Geisel had undergone—his schoolmates’ taunts during World War I, Theodore Roosevelt’s public shaming, the family’s loss of its livelihood. Following the Dean’s stripping him of his title as editor of the Jacko, Geisel felt as if the portion of himself that expressed his authentic identity had been torn out of him.
Ted expected his father, who had been comparably devastated by the injustice of Prohibition, to mount a campaign against the harshness Dean’s decision. To his son’s disappointment, however, T.R. Geisel wrote in complete support of the terms of Dean Laycock’s punishment:
While I do not object to your taking a drink, I do object to your taking one in Hanover, while in College, if the rules of the college do not permit it. You have violated the rules and you have been penalized, consequently abide by the decision of the authorities, And in this connection, Ted I want you to serve your full sentence conscientiously.
While I regret this affair has happened, and you are about to graduate make an attempt the next few weeks to eradicate this blot from your good record. 18.
Ted obeyed the conditions of the Dean’s justice to the letter. He removed his name from the masthead and he stopped publishing materials under his given name. Within the week, however, he submitted a series of cartoons to the Jack-O-Lantern that were published under sundry pseudonyms – the horticulturalist L. Burbank, the biochemist L. Pasteur, the warden of Sing Sing, Thomas Mott Osborne, the decadent poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Finally Ted turned to his own middle name and for the first time signed either T. Seuss or Seuss under the following two cartoons.
By inscribing the signatures “Seuss” and “T. Seuss” to these cartoons, Ted Geisel had followed the letter but overturned the intent of the Dean’s justice. Ted used his mother’s maiden name, Seuss, to designate the agent responsible for their creation. By signing “Seuss”, he had also quite literally followed his father’s demand that he wipe the blot from Ted Geisel’s record.
“Seuss” differs from other pseudonyms--D.G. Rosetti, L. Burbank, L. Pasteur, Osborne - in that it neither concealed nor obliterated his identity. It may have initially provided the guise needed for Ted to continue publishing at the Jacko, but it birthed an extension of Ted by means of which he was able to liberate, expose and thereby enlarge and realize his art.
“Seuss” turned the Dean’s punishment into a prohibition that Ted enjoyed transgressing. Not privy to what the Jacko staffers and Geisel’s inner circle knew all too well, the Dean was turned into the dupe of one of Ted’s comic performances. The signature thereby enabled Ted to convert his anger, humiliation and shame into a symbolic event that transformed the terms of the Dean’s prohibition into the precondition for the pleasure of quite literally making a name for himself. But he would not comprehend the full significance of this signature until he linked the persona with the author of his children’s books.
