FANCY THAT! The CAT, and his HAT, are 50

[KiwiCoromandel]

Of all the unlikely, uninvited visitors who have invaded the imaginations of young children, from Judith Kerr's Tiger Who Came to Tea to Raymond Briggs' polar bear, the unstoppable and improbable Cat in the Hat, with his gloved paws and stripey stovepipe hat, towers above the rest.

Six hundred million copies of the book in which the anarchic cat made his debut have been sold throughout the world in the past 20 years.

It is frequently cited as an essential part of any nursery library, and the cat's creator, Dr Seuss, is the world's bestselling children's author.

This month that first, ground-breaking book The Cat in the Hat is 50 years old. Jammed full of jazz rhythms and rhymes, it was in 1957 so unlike anything else that the author - born Theodor Geisel - struggled to get it published. After 27 attempts he was on the point of giving up.

"He was going to toss the book into the nearest wastepaper basket," said Audrey Geisel, his 85-year-old widow.

The book was conceived as a playful experiment. Geisel's publisher had asked him, as an educational challenge, to write something for children using 400 key words young readers were expected to learn.

Audrey Geisel explains the book's appeal.

"A child has to feel they want to know what happens and in this story they want to know. It's about some children in a house without their mother present.

"And then a huge cat in a hat comes into their home. What happens to that house is delicious, but it always gets put back right in the end. So the message gets across."

Each line of The Cat in the Hat bristles with the love of the sound of words and of childish fun.

It was a liberating text with the kind of disregard for conventional form that meant it quickly grew into a literary cult among many of the teenagers who used it to learn to read when they were younger.

It still inspires devotion, and has even been translated into Latin, under the title Cattus Petasatus.

Audrey Geisel, who is now the stern guardian of the Seuss heritage, recalls that there was early pressure on her husband to turn The Cat in the Hat into a textbook for teachers.

"But Ted did the best thing he could have done. He said, 'No, this will be the book that the student will look for after school,' and he was right."

And it is still the book, in its printed form, that reigns supreme.

Numerous efforts have been made to make money out of his creation, but Audrey, who has run the literary estate since Geisel's death at 87 in 1991, has been an impressive and vigilant watchdog.

"I am very controlling. I have my hand on the throttle where necessary," she says.

"I hold back on so many things. The whole food-branding area, for instance. I find I mainly restrict, unless somebody asks for something that is a one-time thing, in a good cause."

But she did countenance the 2000 Jim Carrey film of Seuss' other big hit, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and was relatively pleased with the result.

"I am a fan of Jim Carrey," she says. "It was a little frenetic, but I liked his Grinch."

Mike Myers' screen portrayal of the Cat in the Hat in 2003 was a different matter.

"He was never my choice. I had suggested actor after actor.

"I had never been to see any of his movies, but I knew his humour and it was not Cat in the Hat. So what else could I do but to march into his trailer and say, 'You were never my choice'?

"He had a snide, nasty, dirty sense of humour. To put that into The Cat in the Hat was blasphemy."

The experience has put her off live-action versions for good, and she is instead proceeding with an animated version of Horton Hatches the Egg.

"We are almost halfway done with Fox and it is going nicely."

Their happy marriage was Theodor's second, and Audrey still lives in the Californian home where he worked for many years.

Seated on the swivel chair at the desk where Dr Seuss once drew and wrote, Audrey is staring, she says, at a great star pine in front of an ocean view, and thinking of her husband.

He was German-born and struggled with this during World War II.

"He was very sensitive about his German background," she says. "He tried not to be a German. He did political cartoons at first. They were hard-hitting and very critical of Hitler's regime."

He met his first wife, Helen Palmer, while studying at Oxford.

"She was very important to the way he was going to go. He was already drawing all around the pages of the books he was reading. He had gone there with the idea he was going to be a professor of English, but all these crazy animals kept surfacing.

"One day Helen said to him, 'I have never seen a cow that looked anything like that, but I wish that I had."'

The couple went on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and remained together until Helen took her life in 1967, after a long illness. Geisel married Audrey a year later.

"I have a theory that if you look at Theodor Geisel's life, then everything was meant to happen. When I came into his life I was very necessary. His general health was bad and he needed assistance."

This was when he wrote his blackly humorous book You're Only Old Once!

"It is a howl, page by page," says Audrey. "It ought to be in every hospital."

The complete Dr Seuss collection includes 48 works for children, but progress was slow. Watching her husband work, Audrey became aware of a pattern.

"His productivity had a cadence. When he had a good idea he would come in and say, 'I've got it!' But he wouldn't tell me what. He loved writing and yet it was very painful.

"It was something so deep, he had to do it.

"It wasn't easy, though. He would take a year on a particular book. He would work night and day until he had completed it, and then there would be a dry spell and he would paint instead."

His paintings were stored in the house and never shown. They were published posthumously as The Secret Art of Dr Seuss.

"There was a plethora of cats; hundreds of cats' faces, but no one ever saw them while he was alive."

We looked!

Then we saw him step in on the mat!

We looked!

And we saw him!

The CAT in the HAT!

And he said to us,

'Why do you sit there like that?'

- From The Cat in the Hat

source:OBSERVER

images:AP/www.factropolis.com:THEODOR GEISEL wrote THE CAT IN THE HAT as an academic challenge, and published it as DR SEUSS..