The Cat in the Hat for President: A Political Fable

By Robert Coover

"Robert Coover remains our foremost verbal wizard, our laughter in the dark." —T.C. Boyle

Fifty years after the original release of Coover's satire, this rollicking fable of the grotesque, unhinged Cat in the Hat (and the stuffed shirts who bet on his success) makes for a bitterly funny indictment of politics-as-usual in 2017.

As Robert Coover read Dr. Seuss to his children in 1968, he noticed “the little Cat in the Hat symbol on the front cover: ‘I CAN READ IT ALL BY MYSELF.’ It looked remarkably like a campaign button, and, by changing one letter, it was one.” Sensing a strange affinity between the anarchic Seussian world and the riots, assassinations, warfare and social upheaval that forever marked 1968 as a year of turmoil, Coover began to write. With the slogan “I CAN LEAD IT ALL BY MYSELF,” he imagines a hedonistic, novelty-crazed public and their shameless, nonsense-spewing, hat-wearing demagogue: the Cat in the Hat.

While this mind-bending classic vividly evokes the late 1960s – with psychedelic flights of fancy and tropes of the sexual revolution, civil rights, and Vietnam all heaving out of its pages – it also feels chillingly prescient a half century later. Its hilarity shot through with anger and fear, The Cat in the Hat for President anticipates and diagnoses the 2016 election’s dirty tricks, unheard-of spectacle, and, well, a cat in a (MAGA) hat.

Includes a new introduction by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781944869724

Book preview

T H E   C A T   I N   T H E   H A T

F O R   P R E S I D E N T

A Political Fable

Published by Foxrock Books/Evergreen Review in association with OR Books/Counterpoint Press. Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

Copyright © 1968, 1980 by Diana Nin Coover and Sara Chapin Coover. Introduction copyright © Diana Nin Coover and Sara Chapin Coover.

Visit our website at evergreenreview.com

.

First printing 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Pauline Neuwirth. Cover design by Bathcat, Ltd and Pauline Neuwirth. Printed by Bookmobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-130-9

ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-131-6

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The Cat in the Hat for President is a 1968 election-year tale, written in a mouse-infested Mexico City hotel with brass spittoons in the lobby, a temporary hideout from the University of Iowa, where I was then employed. Iowa, like so many universities, was on the boil that spring. The nation still had a citizen army then, and the young were being drafted away to die in a stupid war virtually no one believed in, so there was a desperate urgency about the mounting nationwide resistance, and we found ourselves in the middle of it. Vigilante police teams had been created and thrown into battle, heads had been bloodied, students hospitalized and arrested and charged with conspiracy (some of this can be seen online in my thirty-minute documentary, On a Confrontation in Iowa City; a choice of websites available, but my own preference is the one posted and introduced by John Foley at Flashpointmag.com

).

We needed a break. My wife Pilar’s Argentinian guitar maestro was in Mexico that spring, so we decided it was time for a few quiet lessons. While she practiced and lessoned, I entertained our three small children. And it was while reading a Dr. Seuss book to them that my eye fell on the little Cat in the Hat symbol on the front cover: I can read it all by myself. It looked remarkably like a campaign button, and, by changing one letter, it was one. The Cat’s goofy anarchism resonated, I realized, with that of the current generation of students, all of whom had been brought up on the Ted Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) stories, and I could count on them going to bat for the Cat who knows where it’s at. Like Mr. Brown, I had my candidate.

I rented the maids’ laundry room on the roof of the hotel and set to work, and by the end of our trip I had a rough draft of the story. As soon as we got back to Iowa City, I gave it a quick slap of the polish rag and sent it off to Hal Scharlatt, my editor at Random House, in the hopes that we could get it out before the election. Random House was also the publisher of the Dr. Seuss books, so maybe Geisel could even provide some illustrations. But the publishers would have none of it. They buried the original typescript in a locked drawer and told my editor to forget it, it didn’t exist. Dr. Seuss was a multimillion dollar business for Random House, and they were taking no chances. Moreover, Hal was warned that if the story appeared anywhere, I was no longer a Random House author and his own job was in jeopardy.

There were no photocopiers in those days. Two typed carbon copies were about max for readability. I had sent the original and one carbon copy to Hal, kept the other one for myself. Hal didn’t hesitate. He slipped his carbon to his friend Ted Solotaroff, editor of the new New American Review, who had already printed one of my stories in his second issue. The Cat appeared there that autumn in the fourth issue, just ahead of the elections.

While we were still in Mexico, President Johnson, realizing he’d been duped by a disreputable gang of glory-seeking generals and himself no longer believing in the war for which he’d long served as cheerleader, had announced he would not run for reelection. The well-planned