Book Report: On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss

As the book On Beyond Zebra commences, young Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell has just triumphantly mastered the alphabet. Poised ecstatically at the blackboard over his chalked Z, he exults over his mastery of all knowledge, A to Z.

His joy is immediately squashed by a high-handed pal, who sneers at the poor things spelled with the letters A–Z, crowing: “My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!” This boastful squirt, the first-person narrator of On Beyond Zebra, then gives the wide-eyed Conrad a tour of the post-Z alphabet, each letter of which represents an uncanny beast, inhabiting its own uncanny, post-Z world.

Dr. Seuss cheats: the letters do not denote single, new phonemes, but syllables composed of existing English letters. For instance, the Umbus, a cow with 98 “faucets,” starts with the “letter” Um. The character for Um is transparently an amalgam of U and M.

Although this would seem to have killed any mystery stone dead, nonetheless, as an eleven year old, Ralph used this book to intuit alternate worlds, in which fantastic “other” things were possible. So, from the Itchapods, mop-headed creatures that

       Race around back and forth, forth and back, through the air

       On a very high sidewalk between HERE and THERE

Ralph derived intermediate universes, limbos in which only intermediate things happened. What those things might be was impossible to know, while one remained in the mundane, pre-Z world. By any means necessary, Ralph was resolved to pass beyond Z and into those other realms where he belonged.

I read it in the Starbuck’s café at Borders. The above quotes were copied longhand as I sipped my Frappucino. The quality of the drawings disappointed me: I hadn’t remembered Seuss being such a terrible artist.

Ralph kept his copy until he was 21, when he abandoned his BA in Fine Art at London’s Slade School to study Tibetan Buddhism in Colorado. Then it was among the possessions he discarded; the photos, the letters, the books, clothes, records, he carried to the bin unbagged, in valedictory mood, in token of his dedication to the ascetic life.