My favourite book as a kid: Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss
‘Say! In the dark? Here in the dark? Would you, could you, in the dark?” Dr Seuss’s masterpiece – among his many masterpieces – is Green Eggs and Ham. It transfixed me as a child and it transfixes me now as I read it to my own children.
Perhaps the most haunting passage in it comes with those words. This demented little creature, desperate to press his unappetising brunch on the grouchy protagonist, is in a car, on a train, and that train is now hurtling through a distinctly cloacal tunnel. The egg-and-ham refuser teeters backwards on the bonnet of the car, retreating from the proffered plate. And those words: the cadence of them, the sinister whisper: here in the dark. It could be the strapline for a serial-killer movie starring Morgan Freeman, and here it is in the middle of a zany children’s book.
The same shiver accompanies “goodnight nobody” in Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s something that comes out of nowhere, that changes pace and tone. Et in Arcadia ego. Some of that effect is prosody. Dr Seuss was a genius of prosody, just as Julia Donaldson is – but his has an on-the-hoof quality: short lines, longer lines, and rhymes hitting tickety-tackety. It’s like virtuosic jazz improvisation in light verse. But suddenly, with that “say!” it stops. Those three lines don’t scan. There’s that epistrophic repetition of “in the dark”, there’s the lengthening of the lines: it has a shape and a music to it, but it stands apart from the helter-skelter forward momentum of the rest of the poem.
Then, whoosh, we’re out of the tunnel and back to the would-you-could-yous. And heading for crisis and resolution: a multi-vehicle catastrophe, a sinking ship, and the prospect of death by water – in the face of which the old grump-pot, bobbing about like Ishmael at the end of Moby-Dick, finally submits to try the green eggs and ham. “Sam!” he says. “If you will let me be, I will try them. You will see.” And, lo, he having finally submitted – batter my heart, three-personed ham? – the waters subside and our protagonists walk to the top of the mountain in harmony.
Naturally, my name being what it is, my parents Sam-I-Ammed me enthusiastically. But the business of names in the book is so odd. It opens with that drive-by self-announcement. “I am Sam,” reads the sign that the little creature holds up as he rides past the irritated protagonist on an unidentifiable Seussian quadruped. “Sam I am,” reads the sign he holds up as he rides past, again, on another unidentifiable Seussian quadruped, in the other direction. This obviously matters in some way. Yet the other character, the ham-refuser, is never named in the book. (Elsewhere, he’s since been called Guy-Am-I.) And it becomes clear, too, that the ham-pusher’s real name is not “Sam” to his victim: he’s “Sam-I-Am.” Make of that what you will.
Seuss’s drawings are wonderful, with their extraordinarily expressive style. Everything is bendy and organic, not a straight line anywhere. The plate of eggs and ham – always balancing on Sam-I-Am’s fingertips, never held securely – juggles its contents even as its guardian hurtles through the air but never drops. Contains, you could say, mild peril.
And what about those bystanders? Sure, in time-honoured children’s story fashion, the protagonists have acquired hangers-on: a mouse and a fox. But when they join the train and finally crash into the funnel of a boat, that boat has a pilot and that train contains people on an entirely separate errand; Dr Seuss’s equivalent of the ploughman in WH Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”. These folks, snug in their train carriage, have their eyes closed in ordinary contentment throughout – even as their train leaps off the tracks, turns upside down and plunges into the briny. Only at this point do they perk up, bearing tense witness to that first mouthful, before grinning happily at our hero’s discovery that he liked green eggs and ham all along.
I love this book. Don’t much dig the idea of green ham, though. Not even in the dark.
