Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 112

Popular Culture Review

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Oxford University, where, in contrast to most of the other Americans on campus,
he still bore his social stigma:
The Americans who came to Oxford as Rhodes scholars were welcomed
socially and many made lifelong friends on the playing fields or in the
crews. But in England, so soon after the war, Ted was sensitive about
his German background, and since he was neither a serious intellectual
nor an extrovert, and certainly not an athlete, he spent most of his free
hours with “other outsiders.”14
At Oxford, he almost certainly would have studied Beowulf; and given his personal
circumstances, it seems natural — indeed, quite likely — that he would have
identified to a degree with the exile figures in that poem — most notably, of course,
the figure o f Grendel. That he no doubt took the poem lightly and might have been
inclined to parody it someday is evident in the way he responded to his studies in
literature by making cartoon sketches in his loose-leaf Oxford notebook, “illustrated
evidence of his wandering mind during lectures on Geoffrey Chaucer (whom he
called Jeff), Shakespeare and Milton.” As for Old English:
Beside his notes in Anglo-Saxon for Beginners stands a drooling milk
cow burdened with a sagging udder, rams’ horns and angel wings. A
pair of baroque daggers decorates the margin, along with a coat of
arms from which a trapped bird struggles to free itself5.
And he would illustrate with a comic touch that other great work centered around
an exile figure: Paradise Lost. For example, “he drew the angel Uriel sliding down
a sunbeam, oiling the beam as he went from a can that resembled a tuba”!16
Like Grendel and the Grinch, young Ted Geisel had been left out of the
distribution. Kin to the enemy — the Kaiser and the brewer — he was compelled
to distance himself from the crowd. Understandably, then, he has a degree of
sympathy for his later creation, the Grinch, who embodies an aspect of himself.
Unlike the Beowulf-poet, who presents his outcast character, Grendel, as a demon
— a monstrous enemy of God and mankind, someone to be driven away, never to
be welcomed into the community — Geisel humanizes and brings home his exile.
He shows his audience that the Grinch has a heart after all, that he can change for
the better, and that his acceptance into the community makes for a richer, more
joyful and secure, integrated whole.
Arkansas State University

Robert L. Schichler