One-hundred-and-seventh birthdays aren't usually much celebrated for authors who aren't alive anymore. But it seems an appropriately eccentric occasion to mark for the frankly fantabulous Theodor Seuss Geisel – rather better known as Dr Seuss – who came into the world on 2 March, 1904.
Like generations of children I was weaned on his spry, jazzy tales, and now – when Uncle Lindesay steps up to put the kids to sleep with one of his famously thrilling bedtime stories – it's not just a nostalgic kick I'm getting out of the experience. They're still brilliant pieces of writing: as well as the mad imagination, the language turns over with a poise as sure as the lyrics of Cole Porter, and the reader rides his characteristic anapestic metric schemes with effortless glee. It still weaves a spell on the younglings, and many have understandably imitated it, but very few can make it swing like the Doctor:
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
And will you succeed? Yes indeed, yes indeed! Ninety-eight and three-quarters percent guaranteed.
And the reasons to cheer don't end there. His ideology was about as sound as it comes, and not only in the satirical anti-fascist cartoons he drew for the grownups during the second world war, making Hitler and Mussolini look as ludicrous as green eggs and ham.
It's there in the books for children, too. Seuss tried to avoid writing didactically: "Kids can see a moral coming a mile off", he said. But for all its maverick – and often subversive – imagination, the moral vision is clear for anyone who can see past the tufty haircuts and nonsense words.
The first Seuss book I was given, for instance, was The Lorax, written just as the 60s were becoming the 70s. Seuss was no hippy, but the dawn of green politics is plain to see in the lonely struggles of the Lorax "who speaks for the trees" against the scheming Once-ler, laying waste to the abundant woodlands of Truffula Trees to produce and mass market the Thneeds – novelty clothing "which everyone needs".
Not only a warning of the heavy price of ecological plunder written well before most of mankind had thought to worry, then, it's also a smart critique of consumer capitalism: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." Which is of course a moral message, but not of the kind designed to cajole the snappers into behaviour that adults want.
I could go on, but hey, it's a birthday, and I'm sure you folks have some good toasts to raise for the party...
