Dr. Seuss. Even his name is a mystery. We all know the characters he created: the Grinch (which he claimed was a self-portrait), Horton the Elephant, the Star-Belly Sneetches, the Whos and, of course, his most famous creation, the Cat in the Hat, who springs to the silver screen across North America this weekend in his newest, Mike Myers incarnation.

But who the deuce was Seuss? Tell me, oh tell me, oh tell me, by Zeus!

I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, by Zeus, in a way that I pray will be not too abstruse.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, who died at 87 in his La Jolla, Calif., home on Sept. 24, 1991, was born in Springfield, Mass., the son of a brew master of German ancestry. With prohibition, his father lost his business and became the local parks superintendent responsible for, among other things, the zoo. His son Theodor liked to hang about the cages, drawing the animals.

Geisel went on to be educated at Dartmouth College and then at Oxford (where he studied Voltaire and Swift), coming back to the United States in 1927 to work as creative talent in the advertising industry. Esso, NBC Radio and Ford were among his clients. Later, during the Second World War, he also tried his hand as a political cartoonist, publishing his rambunctious anti-fascist satires in Judge, Vanity Fair, Life and PM, the legendary left-wing New York newspaper. In 1941, Geisel was conscripted to work in the U.S. Special Services Division's Signal Corps Unit in Hollywood, under Frank Capra, creating films such as Hitler Lives and Design for Death -- both of which won Oscars.

Meanwhile, back in 1937, he had launched himself as a children's book writer and illustrator with the publication of And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (which was rejected by 27 publishers before he found a taker). To date, Geisel's 61 works for children have sold more than a half-billion copies around the world.

Next year, their maker will be celebrated across the United States with a series of "Seussentennial" events marking the 100th anniversary of his birth -- from touring theatre shows to art exhibitions -- all generated by the California-based Dr. Seuss Enterprises, a privately owned company headed up by his widow, Audrey.

Canada, too, is getting in on the act. This month, as theatre queues are forming across the land for The Cat in the Hat, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is Grinching it up with their own Whoville extravaganza: elaborate stage sets and murals of Seuss décor, which frame drawings borrowed from the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California at San Diego, the repository of Geisel's drawings and papers.

Despite all this attention, the author's motivations in writing the works are still largely unexplored, or worse, dismissed as mere whimsy. We even pronounce his name wrong. Seuss, in fact, rhymes with "zoice" -- it was Geisel's mother's maiden name. (His outsider status as a child of German immigrant stock contributed, no doubt, to his lifelong shyness and distrust of the limelight. During the First World War, he was nicknamed "the Kaiser" by his schoolmates.) Geisel adopted the name Seuss when he was a student at Dartmouth, where he studied English and contributed to the Jack-O-Lantern college newspaper. Caught drinking in his room with his friends, he was suspended by the dean from the magazine as punishment, but he continued to work under his assumed name. The "Dr." honorific was adopted later, after his departure from Oxford University, when he abandoned his academic career, and his father's ambitions that he would become a Ph.D., to pursue his love of drawing and cartooning.

The very name Dr. Seuss is thus a product of Geisel's disobedience and refusal to conform, and this is important. Geisel was a genius, and the flavour of his genius is iconoclastic, revolutionary.

In the fertile garden of American childhood of the postwar period, Geisel quietly sowed the seeds of critique in works that champion justice, the power of the imagination and the rights of the little guy, banishing conformity and authoritarianism and even the conventions of language itself.

While the earlier books have their adherents, most true Seuss connoisseurs agree that the "essential Seuss" is 1957's The Cat in the Hat, which can be read as a general call to arms for creative anarchy and freedom. The cat is the trickster, an agent of change who wreaks havoc in stultifying fifties suburbia.

But Geisel's other works tackle a host of political issues with increasing explicitness. The Butter Battle Book, with its escalating, fear-driven contest between the Yooks and the Zooks, is a cautionary tale about nuclear proliferation. Horton Hears a Who brings us a kindhearted elephant who saves the kingdom of microscopic Whos from extinction. (Are the Whos the Jews?)

Yertle the Turtle is, by the author's admission, a take on Hitler's rise to power. (In early drafts, Yertle sports the Fuhrer's short-cropped mustache.) And in The Sneetches, a capitalist named Sylvester McMonkey McBean profits from the trade in imprinting and erasing stars on the bellies of the trend-conscious bird-like beasts, manipulating their desire like the expert Madison Avenue ad man Geisel himself once was. (These stars are also, for many readers, an echo of the Star of David borne by Jews in Hitler's Germany.)

Geisel's own favourite of his books, however, was The Lorax, in which the rapacious Once-ler discovers the profits to be made from chopping down all the truffula trees, building factories and convincing the masses of the need for thneeds (an ambiguous knitted garment), which he produces in his pollution-spewing textile factory. The Swomee Swans fly away looking for fresh air, and the Humming-Fish die. At the end, just one seed is left from which regeneration might begin anew, held aloft by the Lorax, a short and fuzzy prophet of environmental doom, and a repository of wisdom for the future.

Readings of the book have taken place in anti-logging rallies from the Pacific Northwest to Australia, and several U.S. school boards have been petitioned, unsuccessfully, to censor the book, with Seuss detractors alleging that it misrepresents the forest-products industry.

Together these works are delicately coded moral parables on the perils of capitalism, xenophobia and intolerance.

Geisel's biographer, Neil Morgan (who wrote the definitive Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel with his wife, Judith), insists on the central importance of political ideas in Geisel's work, but says that the artist thought of it rather just as ethics, as a case of teaching kids, and maybe their parents, what's right and wrong.

"I'm subversive as hell," Geisel declared in an interview decades earlier, shortly after winning the 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."

The origins of The Cat in the Hat, too, are political -- in the broadest sense of empowering the powerless. Geisel was of the opinion that "too many writers have only contempt and condescension for children, which is why we give them degrading corn about bunnies." Clearly, they deserved better.

Responding to dropping literacy rates, his publisher Bennett Cerf challenged Geisel to write a book using just 220 easy-to-read words, a book that children could read on their own, and an antidote to the dreary wholesomeness of so much early reading. (Green Eggs and Ham, which followed it, was written using just 50 words.) It was, as Geisel put it, "a way of kicking Dick and Jane out of the school system."

The result was a sensation and The Cat and the Hat has since been the subject of many an academic foray. Heinz Insu Fenkl, director of creative writing at the State University of New York at New Paltz, who has written on Seuss's relationship to alchemy and cabalistic thought, describes the way in which cat (id) and fish (superego) battle for domination of the children. He notes, as well, that the absence of the mother makes the story frightening.

Fenkl points to the ending as particularly charged, with the reader asked: "What would you do if your mother asked you?" Would you disclose the truth about the day, or conceal it? "Children who read this understand profoundly the nature of this transgression," he argues. "They understand that the culture of children is actually quite different than that of adults, that there are things that you keep from adults."

Other interpretations are more political in focus. Art Spiegelman, in his essay accompanying Richard Minear's Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, posits the cat as a permutation of Uncle Sam in his stovepipe hat. (In many of Geisel's earlier political cartoons, the U.S. is figured as a busted-down eagle in a high hat.)

It's worth noticing that The Cat in the Hat was written not long after the Americans ended their peacetime occupation of Germany and Japan. Can it be read, one wonders, as a parable of American interventionism, with Geisel implying, albeit subliminally, that the United States always cleans up its mess? (Okay, so he had a few all-American blind spots.) Still, it's not so far-fetched when you consider that he declared Horton Hears a Who to be inspired by the plight of the Japanese following the war.

The cat also serves as the distillation of a number of figures from children's literature. He's a cousin of Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, another famous subversive, but his oversized bow tie suggests Mickey Mouse, as do the white gloves. (Or do we detect a touch of Al Jolson here?) Fenkl notes, too, the way we read Geisel's stories differently as we age, with the narratives taking on new meanings from our more adult perspectives. "Classic German fairy tales function in just this way," he says.

The Cat in the Hat is not the only Dr. Seuss work to be subjected to close analysis. Philip Nel of Kansas State University is the author of the forthcoming scholarly book, Dr. Seuss: American Icon, cataloguing Geisel's accomplishments and analyzing his legacy. In the course of his research, Nel has managed to scare up some exotic academic interpretations. Jonathan Cott, for example, has compared And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street to Goethe's The Erl-King, an interpretation that Geisel evidently endorsed. (Goethe's story was a favourite of his in childhood.) There is also Mary Galbraith's Agony in the Kindergarten: Indelible German Images in American Picture Books, which, Nel says, "reads Mulberry Street and H. A. Rey's Curious George in terms of intersections between the author-illustrators' lives and German and American history and identity."

Alison Lurie's The Cabinet of Dr. Seuss examines the negative image of women in Seuss's books. (It's true -- they are usually the party poopers.) Naomi Goldenberg's lecture A Feminist, Psychoanalytic Exegesis of The Cat in the Hat reads The Cat in the Hat Comes Back as a "masculine attempt to overcome womb envy." And Shira Wolosky's Democracy in America: By Dr. Seuss interprets Geisel's work as endorsing "classic American liberal individualism while exploring the dangers of extreme individualism."

How, then, does the movie measure up to this weighty legacy? Is it a desecration or a reconsecration of Seuss's masterpiece? It can't be as bad, say, as the pseudo-Seuss books put out by Seuss Enterprises after Geisel's death, like Oh the Things You Can Do That Are Good for You -- with its encouraging words about personal hygiene and the benefits of healthy food choices. Infamy!

The critical response to the film has been overwhelmingly negative. And it certainly fiddles a fair bit with Geisel's original plot: A love interest is inserted for mom, who works as a real-estate agent. The daughter has an electronic day timer. There is a babysitter. One's initial instinct is to bury one's face in one's hands and despair.

Worse still, the essential ambiguity of the cat (is he friend or foe?) has been for the most part lost; he's now just a little too lovable. (Echoes of the giggling Uncle Albert from Mary Poppins and Oz's Cowardly Lion inflect Myers's rendition.) In Seuss's original, the children never smile until the very end, and we are never quite sure just whose side the cat is on. (His own, actually.) This uncertainty lends the character much of its mystique.

Still, all is not lost. Thing One and Thing Two are simultaneously horrid and cute -- just as they should be. The fish is annoying and eminently dismissable. The sets and costumes are spectacular. And the major theme of the work is preserved and amplified: the dichotomy between order and chaos, and the need for both in everyone's life.

What a movie can never do, however, is achieve all of this miraculously with just a few sheets of paper and a pencil, the simple tools of language and line.

So go ahead and enjoy the movie, such as it is. What's not to love about Mike Myers dressed up as a giant pussycat? "The problem is," as Nel puts it, "Seuss is a genius. And you can't replicate that."

More titles for fledgling dissidents

The Rabbit's Wedding (1958) by Garth Williams. A tale of interracial marriage between a white and a black bunny.

The Story of Ferdinand (1936) by Munro Leaf. A pacifist bull defies the patriarchy by preferring shade and quiet to the heroics of the bullring.

Spotty (1945) by Margret and H. A. Rey. A rabbit with spots stands out from the crowd. Will he find acceptance?

The Last Flower (1939) by James Thurber. Set after World War XXII, the story contemplates environmental catastrophe.

--S.M.

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