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One great bonus of being the parent of a toddler has been the opportunity to revisit all the books I used to pore over back when I was my daughter’s age. Some, of course, are not much worth revisiting. There’s a book from the ‘40s called The Little Fire Engine, by Lois Lowry, which I’ve taken to calling The Crappy Little Fire Engine because of its pathetic plot and hideously disproportionate drawings that make the citizens of “Smallville” look like they’re about to crush their own homes underfoot. The only reason I would ever read it again would be to teach my daughter how to use the word “crappy” in the proper context. Then there are the few that never get stale, no matter how often I read them. Every night, when my daughter and I rummage through the pile of books next to the bed, looking for something to read, I silently root for her to choose Are You My Mother? or Go, Dog. Go! or The Best Nest. I think it’s probably no coincidence that all three are by the same man: P. D. Eastman, who gets my vote for greatest children’s author ever to walk the face of the earth. Of course, it’s Eastman’s mentor and sometime boss, Dr. Seuss, who gets all the glory. Every few years, Random House comes up with another excuse to trumpet Seuss’ “genius;” this year, it’s the 100th anniversary of his birth, and for the occasion we have a brand new “visual biography” of Theodor S. Geisel, assembled by Charles D. Cohen, called The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss. I fully acknowledge Dr. Seuss’ bravura, wit and high-octane imagination. I laugh every time I see the train flying off the rails in Green Eggs and Ham and I recite whole passages of The Cat in the Hat aloud to my daughter when we’re driving in the car. But I can think of no single book he wrote that I truly love. His early books, like Horton Hatches the Egg and Bartholomew and the Oobleck, are clever enough, but cluttered and fussy and too reliant (to my taste) on that zany nonsense Seuss-speak. The Beginner Books he wrote during the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with The Cat in the Hat and including Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, Ten Apples up on Top!, Dr. Seuss’ ABC, and Fox in Socks among many others, hold up well thanks to their slapstick and teasing humor, dazzling wordplay, and remarkable illustrations, but it’s hard to find any real emotion underneath all the pyrotechnics. In his later years, Seuss descended into preachy parables like The Lorax, The Sneetches and The Butter Battle Book, which I mostly enjoyed as a kid but now find almost unreadable. And don’t even get me started on the perennial graduation favorite, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, which by comparison makes Oprah’s platitudes sound like the musings of the Buddha. Granted, even P. D. Eastman’s best books seem plain and simple next to the panoply of Dr. Seuss’ work. Eastman served a stint during the 1930’s with Walt Disney, and there are traces of the Disney aesthetic in his cartoons, including a standardized, almost cookie-cutter approach to the way he draws his dogs and birds and other animals that is the antithesis of Seuss’ wild inventions (who ever saw a cat that actually looks like The Cat in the Hat?). Where Seuss flung his characters into surreal dreamscapes, Eastman planted his plucky heroes firmly within the real world. Yet by staying tied to the world, Eastman was able to introduce a quality to his books that Seuss utterly lacked: the potential for tragedy. From Eastman’s very first Beginner Book, Sam and the Firefly, there are suggestions of darkness and a host of uncomfortable feelings almost unheard of in books for very young readers. This emotional turmoil reaches an unmatched peak in Eastman’s masterpiece, Are You My Mother?. Having decided to go looking for his mother, who has left the nest to fetch food in anticipation of his arrival, a baby bird asks a kitten, a hen, a dog and a cow if each of them is his mother. (In fact, the baby bird has walked right past his mother without seeing her, a fact that was incredibly agonizing to me when I was little.) Becoming frantic, the baby bird starts running across an increasingly menacing, barren landscape, calling out to everything he sees: a junkyard car, a faraway boat, an exhaust-spewing plane. Finally, he approaches the dreaded Snort, a steam shovel that lifts him back into the nest just before his mother returns with a fat worm to eat and a wing to nestle under. I can think of no more satisfying depiction of happiness in any book anywhere than in the final two illustrations of Are You My Mother?. Yet while everything is made right in the end, the overwhelming feeling is one of disaster averted and relief that the bird was lucky enough to have made it back safely to the nest. You know he’s going to be all right, but you also know things might have turned out much worse. The Best Nest follows in this vein, raising the specter of death when Mr. Bird mistakenly thinks his wife has been eaten by a cat; its long-forgotten sequel, Flap Your Wings, has the bird couple trying to figure out how to raise an alligator that accidentally winds up in their nest. Go, Dog. Go!, while lighter fare, still has a strange page-turning quality about it, and it is the mother of all concept books, introducing colors, sizes, manners, modes of transportation, opposites, and phonics in one 64-page blitz. Taken altogether, these great books encompass a range of emotions and real-life quandaries that Dr. Seuss, for all his talents, never dared to grapple with so viscerally. They’re the kinds of books that capture what it can sometimes feel like to be alive, and they’re the kinds of books that stick with you long after you think you’ve outgrown them; I can think of no better definition of literature than that. So, three cheers for P. D. Eastman. Here’s hoping that, when your centennial rolls around five years from now, Random House will give you the retrospective you deserve. A2P Email
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