THE COMPLETE CAT IN THE HAT by Dr Seuss

HarperCollins, £9.99

I WAS A BORED AND LONELY child, with a new baby sister who took all my mother’s time; I had to sit, sit, sit, sit until she could read to me. Then one day she gave me an odd-looking red, white and blue book, and told me to have a go.

It did not look promising. Rain outside and inside two gloomy children. But then BUMP! That wonderful, magical cat bounced into my life as into millions of others. Mad, show-off, friendly and irrepressible, he is the life-bringing force that turns everything upside down.

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Competition: what's under the cat's hat?

Is it a person, a place or a thing? Does it swim, dance or sing? Show us! You might win! Prizes include a Dr Seuss miniature library, bookends and the 50th-birthday edition

Many people can’t remember that magical moment when letters liquefy into words, surging through your head like a glittering river of meaning; but I do, thanks to Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.

This year is the 50th birthday of The Cat in the Cat and World Book Day today seems an appropriate time to celebrate it. What child has not done at least some of the things that the cat, and his helpers Thing One and Thing Two perpetrate on the children’s suffocatingly tidy, dull house? Putting fish in teapots, flying kites indoors, jumping on mother’s bed without adults being the slightest bit wiser is the dream of many young anarchists. So who was their creator?

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, was born of German parents in 1904 in Spring-field, Massachusetts, to brewmasters. His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, often soothed her children to sleep by “chanting” rhymes remembered from her youth. Ted credited his mother with both his ability and desire to create the rhymes for which he became so well known.

With Prohibition, Ted’s father gave up his business and became the local parks superintendent responsible for, among other things, the town zoo. His son’s interest in zany creatures probably stems from this, as young Ted liked to hang about drawing the animals in their cages. He was shy, and nicknamed “the Kaiser” by schoolfellows, which probably didn’t encourage him to be outgoing.

The boy went on to Dartmouth College, where he was suspended as editor of a college magazine for drinking. He had been contributing cartoons, signing them with his mother’s maiden name, Seuss (pronounced “soice”), and he continued to contribute under this pseudonym. To please his father, he went on to Oxford, where he studied Voltaire and Swift. Academia bored him, so instead of becoming a college professor (as his father wanted), he returned to America and went into advertising.

Here, in the late 1930s, he branched out from a career drawing for Ford and Esso as a children’s author. His first book, And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected by 27 publishers.

What is often not realised in this country is how political Seuss was. During the Second World War he drew for magazines such as Judge, Vanity Fair, Life and PM, the left-wing New York newspaper. His robust antiFascist satires had their counterpart in children’s books, such as Yertle the Turtle ? a send-up of Hitler, complete with moustache.

In 1941, Ted was conscripted to work in the Signal Corps (US Army) in Hollywood, under Frank Capra, creating films such as Hitler Lives (1945) and Design for Death (1947) ? both of which won Oscars for Best Documentary.

“I’m as subversive as hell,” Seuss said, shortly after winning a Pulitzer Prize. “ The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that the cat cleans up everything in the end. It’s revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn’t quite go as far as Lenin.”

It is worth remembering that The Cat in the Hat was published in the year that Sputnik was launched at the height of the Cold War. One year later The Cat in the Hat Comes Back appeared: you don’t have to read it too closely to sense the author’s mischief in the wildly spreading pink stain, stopped only by the unleashing of “Voom!”, a mysterious substance that looks suspiciously nuclear. Geisel never gave up the fight: in 1984 he published The Butter Battle Book, which took on the arms race and was attacked in The New Republic for being “soft on Communism”. As Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker: “That’s not the kind of thing people used to say about The Pokey Little Puppy.”

But the linguistic origins of The Cat in the Hat, too, are political. Seuss, a champion of the little man, believed that “too many writers have only contempt and condescension for children, which is why we give them degrading corn about bunnies”.

His classic was, in fact, inspired by a publisher’s demand for a children’s book limited to a vocabulary of 220 words. Although other modern authors such as Judith Kerr, Helen Craig and Arnold Lobel use the same technique, most schoolchildren are still doomed to experience reading through books about anthropomor-phised farmyard animals, such as the Reading Trees.

Seuss’s bouncy couplets, insane creatures and Heath Robinson machines are a world away. They link reading with the wild, untameable Id, and turn what should have been a limitation into an explosion of creative force. At the time of his death in 1991, Seuss had written and illustrated 44 children’s books, including Green Eggs and Ham, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with more than 200 million copies sold. There have been attempts to film some of the most famous, including The Cat in the Hat, but his books are as unfilm-able as they are mysterious and anarchic. If you want your child to grow up with a passion for books, get them ? but stand well back for the results.

A touch of class

Dr Seuss (above) revolutionised early learning on both sides of the Atlantic, by effectively killing off Dick and Jane. His 1,700word story uses only 220 different words, of which 54 occur once, and the most common, “the”, “and”, “I” and “not”, occurring more than 40 times each.

It is now a staple of children’s first forays into mastering the basics of English in US and British schools. In libraries and classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic, teachers reach for Dr Seuss to fire the minds of inquisitive three-year-olds.

The secret, according to Dr Elaine Millard, of the National Association for Teaching English (NATE), is that it is perfect for developing children’s “phonemic awareness”. The books help children to practise difficult sentences and recognise difficult words through repetition.

Although the Dr Seuss books are not on the national curriculum, nor is Beatrix Potter, and Dr Millard says that they are recognised by teachers as a “rich resource” of phonics teaching .

“I don’t know of a primary school where it’s not used,” Dr Millard said. “The driving motivation in learning is pleasure and interest in story, not because it’s good for you.”

A similar series recommended by NATE to help toddlers to learn to read is the Hairy Maclary books by Lynley Dodd, published by Viking.

Inspired voices

Cressida Cowell, Author of How to Train Your Dragon and How To Speak Dragonese

Reading his books is a bit like being in a fast car that is being driven by someone who might, just possibly, be a lunatic. It’s a hectic and unpredictable ride.

I found the “Cat in the Hat” character both glamorous and scary, because I had absolutely no idea what he was going to do next, or how far he was prepared to go. But I suspected the answer was PRETTY FAR. So, as a child, I turned those pages with anticipation, but also respectful alarm.

And I have been known to cry outright at the moment at the end of The Lorax when the Once-ler throws the very last Truffula seed of them all to the little boy.

Meg Rosoff, Author of How I Live Now and Justin Case

I still know lots of it by heart. Having read The Cat in the Hat to my daughter, I just love how weird and radical it is, with the two blank-eyed children staring out of the window, and the mother who is somewhere else. It was very out there at a time when much of children’s literature was so anodyne. The image of the anxious children and the fish on top of the cane saying stop, stop this anarchy! It stays with you.

Francesca Simon, Creator of Horrid Henry

My favourites as a child were in The Cat in the Hat and Yertle the Turtle. Indeed I had a turtle, which I named Yertle. I loved how many rhymes he had and the anarchic stories, which felt very trangressive. I enjoy rereading them now. I’m always surprised by the endings.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, Scriptwriter and novelist

The Cat in the Hat made me really unhappy. I just wanted them to PUT IT ALL BACK. It made me feel that my world was too fragile and vulnerable to feline attack. Green Eggs and Ham on the other hand made me feel life might just possibly be better than it looked – which turned out to be true.

Ian McMillan, Poet and radio presenter

I remember having green eggs and ham in a hotel in Oaxaca, Mexico, and launching into an explanation of the seminal place of Green Eggs and Ham in children’s literature, which would have perhaps made a small corner of Central America into a hotbed of Seussness!

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