Seuss Lets Loose

The Eyes Have It in Exhibition Of the Author-Illustrator's Work

It's nice, for once, to report that the unknown, private art of a great popular artist isn't all just a sad, secret stab at immortality. When Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss in the eyes of millions of children if not, in fact, in the eyes of an accredited medical school) painted at home, for his own amusement, he wasn't trying to be Picasso.

Alone in his studio, on a hilltop near La Jolla, Calif., the beloved inventor of the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat worked without any trace of greater ambitions turned sour, without any particular intention of being proclaimed, after his death, "a neglected genius" overshadowed by his popular fame.

Almost everything on display at Georgetown's P&C Fine Art Gallery, which is hosting the well-traveled "Dr. Seuss Retrospective," is pretty much of a piece with what you already know about him from "Green Eggs and Ham." Although he worked in advertising, did illustrations for the war effort in the 1940s, penned editorial cartoons and sculpted his own line of bizarre animal heads (he called them "unorthodox taxidermy"), almost everything feels certifiably Seussian.

The strange birds with distended necks and the elephants with huge ears are as much a part of "The Tower of Babel," a dark watercolor-and-ink drawing, as they are staples of his children's illustrations. The cartoon landscapes with brilliant colors where Horton heard the Who and the Butter Battle loomed are the same landscapes of his more private imagination, seen in large paintings he made throughout the 1960s. Barring the release of even more private images, it's a relief to learn that his life wasn't divided into public and private worlds, that what he sold to children also pleased him, too. His obsessions were consistent, enough so that one can pronounce him, apparently, a sane man with a deliciously twisted imagination.

The works on display in Georgetown are, unfortunately, reproductions, limited-edition prints made from originals still in the possession of Seuss's widow, Audrey Geisel. The tour is very much a commercial venture. But the people behind it have put together enough information to make it informative. The reproductions are at least very fine, and even for people who know the original books backward and forward, surprises make it worth the visit.

For instance, a scrap of doggerel in the distinctively rat-a-tat style that is billed as Seuss's "first poem":

Mrs. Van Bleck

Of the Newport van Blecks

Is so goddamn rich

She has gold-plated sex.

That's not going into a children's book, but it is every syllable unmistakably the product of Seuss's pen. He deals himself a good hand by inventing an easily rhymed last name, but the rhyme is unexpected. Good doggerel is rather like running across a perfectly made wall of stones in the forest. Of course, you know human hands made it, but the fact that the stones all fit so neatly in place brings with it the uncanny sense that they were made to fit together in just that way. Rhyme such as Seuss practiced does the same thing to language, making his verses seem inevitable and giving his ideas an extra aura of truth -- because it seems that these words were always meant to be put in just this order.

Also in the category of not-for-kiddie-eyes are pages from Seuss's failed effort to write an adult book, 1939's "The Seven Lady Godivas," which features naked ladies who end up learning "horse sense." Each section leads to a kind of visual play on expressions such as "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" and "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." There's nothing particularly shocking or salacious about it. It's just filled with naked cartoon ladies, emblematic of the thousand small twists he gave to ordinary things, adding up to a world that was both innocent and mischievous, harmless yet delightfully cracked.