Chapter 10

I Speak for the Trees

After many happy years together, Helen began struggling with illness and depression again. On October 23, 1967, she died. She was sixty-eight years old. For forty years, she had taken care of everything for Ted. She handled money matters, shielded him from publicity, and went over every line he wrote. He did not know how to live life alone. He needed a companion. In 1968, he married Audrey Dimond, a close friend of the Geisels for many years.

Ted enjoyed pointing out that when he first met Audrey, not only had she never read any of his books, she had never heard of Dr. Seuss. When he was introduced—as “our very own dear Dr. Seuss”—she assumed he was a medical doctor.

Audrey quickly became interested in his work, however, and soon she was discussing every detail with him, just as Helen had done.

Shortly after Ted and Audrey were married, Ted’s father died at the age of eighty-nine. For years Ted had worried that he was a disappointment to his father. Sometimes they did not speak to each other for a long time. But as Ted became more successful and happy with his life, they had become good friends. Ted always treasured the enormous stone dinosaur footprint his father had given him. He carried it with him from house to house all his life.

By 1970, the view of La Jolla from Ted’s tower window had changed. Once he had looked out on beaches and trees, but now the land was covered with houses and apartments. He decided he had to write a book about caring for the natural world. For the first time, the message for his book came to him before the story or characters.

Writing The Lorax, Ted said, was “the hardest thing I have ever done.” He had read so many facts, and he cared so much about the natural world, that the story kept turning into a lecture. When he was completely stuck, Audrey said to him, “Let’s go to Africa.”

In Kenya, Ted was excited to discover trees that looked just like the puffy ones he had invented for his new book. “They’ve stolen my truffula trees!” he exclaimed. On a safari trip, he saw a herd of wild elephants ambling by. Suddenly he knew exactly what he wanted to say. He grabbed some scrap paper and wrote almost the whole story in one sitting.

The Lorax tells the story of a beautiful land where truffula trees grow. The Once-ler wants to chop them all down to use in his factories. It is the Lorax who “speaks for the trees.” It was Ted’s favorite of all his books, but it didn’t sell very well at first. People thought it preached too much. A few years later, when saving the environment was on everyone’s mind, the book found its audience.

In 1989, The Lorax became the first Dr. Seuss book to encounter censorship. The logging industry wanted it off school reading lists. But Ted argued that he wasn’t against logging or industry. “I live in a house made of wood and write books printed on paper,” he pointed out. He was just against the greed that made people go too far and ignore the damage they caused.

In 1984, The Butter Battle Book came out. It, too, made some people angry. It tells the story of the Yooks and the Zooks, enemies who keep building bigger and more complicated weapons to fight against each other. Finally they each have a weapon that could destroy everyone. They stand facing each other, wondering what will happen next. Ted didn’t feel he could write a comforting happy ending. After all, in the real world, the United States and the USSR were both trying to build bigger, better weapons. So in The Butter Battle Book, Ted left it up to his readers to think about how the story should end.

Some people wanted this book taken off of library shelves. Ted had worked hard to convince the United States to fight in World War II. How could he write a book against war? Audrey comforted him by telling him, “You’re not just writing books for children, you’re writing for humanity.” The book’s success proved her point. It was the first children’s book ever to spend six months on the adult best seller list of the New York Times Book Review.

Ted liked to joke that he was responsible for the end of the Cold War. In 1990, a version of The Butter Battle Book was televised in the Soviet Union. “Right after that,” Ted pointed out, “the USSR began falling apart.”