NakedCity Wichita

the catcher in the hat

Posted on 05. Mar, 2010 by Seth in entertainment

words > BART WILCOX

Still got that stack of leftover Christmas Barnes & Nobles gift cards as thick as a pinochle deck crammed in your wallet—three or four dollars left on each one? Go out and find the two books that changed your life and buy them again. I just did this.

Not a moment’s indecision which to buy for me: The Catcher in the Rye and The Cat in the Hat. On reexamining them together, I find that the similarity in the titles is no accident. Nor are the parallels in the story and theme and, of course, the profanity. Am I suggesting that J. D. Salinger and Dr. Seuss stole from each other? That would be ridiculous, even laughable. I am just suggesting the obvious—they were the same person.

Proof? What is it with you “Proofers” crawling out of the woodwork lately? All right, consider the telltale passage where “I,” the troubled young narrator of The Cat in the Hat, suddenly breaks out of the rhyming couplet form:

“I’m happy that the rake is broke! In fact, I think I’d like a smoke!—But, you know what really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

For me, like any confused, post-adolescent five-year-old—struggling with angst, a wicked paste-eating habit, and a nascent beard—that author was, of course, J. D. Salinger, who, tired of being teased over his name, had by 1957 changed it to Dr. Seuss and was writing stuff I could really connect with. So clearly when J. D. “disappeared,” he was really operating as Dr. Seuss.

Proof? Again? Okay, I’ll offer the same incontrovertible proof I heard Pat Robertson use to back up his claim that the Haitian earthquake victims were paying the price for their pact with Satan: “True story.”

No controverting? Then I’m moving on. But I’m leaving the lesser of the two works out of the discussion now and focusing on The Cat in the Hat. Mostly because I was able to finish The Cat without leaving the bookstore, whereas The Rye was going to set me back $5.99 and was well over my limit of 150 pages (paperback). I mean, I’m as big a bookworm as the next guy, but those Battlestar Galactica DVDs from Netflix aren’t going to watch themselves.

In Cat, the negligent Mother leaves her children unattended while she goes on some unspecified 1950s spree—most likely tracking down communist sympathizers. The abandoned-children plot device of Cat prefigures that dark and conflicted, later work, Good Dog, Carl, in which the even younger and more helpless child is left, not alone, but under the nannyship of a Rottweiler. This was okay, because in Simpler Times you didn’t have to be a perfect parent, losing your marbles over every little accidental poisoning. It was accepted when I was growing up that things could be “good enough.” Not everything had to be “awesome.” In fact, damn little was awesome. You have to remember that this was a time when a skateboard was actually a skate, pulled apart and nailed to a board.

Yes, I hate to admit it, but The Cat in the Hat was hot off the press when I first read it. Which means I was also alive for the introduction of Sea Monkeys and the Frug. So I was ready for the bizarre time stretching and the unreality of Thing One and Thing Two, a talking fish, and pink snow—all things I would later witness firsthand in the 60s. In fact Cat was probably, for most children of the 50s, their first exposure to formal Surrealism. (Excepting those who read Salvador Dali’s less popular effort One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Melting Fish with Face of Pope Leo XII.)

It’s not true, however, that The Cat in the Hat and other Seussian classics could not be written today. In fact I just rewrote them, under the impenetrable pseudonym Herr Dr. Zeussman to avoid litigation. In the Zeussmanian “dirty realism” update The Cat in the Hat Is Fat, nothing happens. Mother is at Pilates. Sally is in a saffron robe, selling carnations at the airport. I is in military school. The Cat—neutered, microchipped, lethargic, and preoccupied with his memoirs—has grown too huge to leave his apartment. And anyway, his crew has broken up since Thing One rolled on Thing Two, who’s doing a stretch upstate for breaking and entering. In another Zeussman reimagining Horton the Elephant, upon announcing that he has heard a Who, is dropped at a hundred yards by a tranquilizer dart full of Thorazine.

But as it turns out, Seuss’s Cat is, in the end, a predictor of our own age. Somehow in the time it takes Mother to come up the walk, the Cat puts the whole house back together with his splendid Cat-A-Machine—the same model, a couple of decades later, I would use to clean my apartment seconds before letting women in the door. And we’re left with the children’s moral dilemma whether to confess. So, what’s the message? “Mothers, don’t leave your children home alone.”?  “Children, don’t let strangers in the house.”? Hardly. More like, “No harm. No foul,” or “Children, Mother is already on Prozac, so really, how’s the truth going to help anybody?”

Besides our current questionable ethics, we must also thank Dr. Seuss for rap music (or blame, depending on your viewpoint). This one’s self-evident. If you don’t hear a pounding subwoofer under “I will not eat them in a house. I will not eat them with a mouse,” you’re just not listening with your spiritual earbuds plugged into your inner Who. Awesome.

Tags: books, dr seuss, entertainment