This week’s essay in the series about classic children’s books features P.D. Eastman’s hymn to perpetual motion…
Once read, this book is never forgotten. Like a catchy Top 40 tune, the ceaseless rhythm and motion is so compelling that surrender is the only option. Yet as I’ll explain below, Phil Eastman’s picture book Go Dog. Go! was a by-product of America’s post-war moral panic that Communists were everywhere, and were a deadly threat to the land of the free.
But there’s more…the eminent Shakespearean scholar Stephen Booth – his book on the sonnets is still the standard text – would famously use Go Dog. Go! to introduce his UC Berkeley students to the art and rewards of a close reading of the text. Booth was never interested in reducing the text to a single meaning. His aim was to teach students how to observe closely what is right there in the text, often in plain sight.
So…the joy wasn’t in finding the sonnet’s alleged core meaning – but in seeing and enjoying the multiple meanings that Shakespeare has in play at any given moment. As one of his academic colleagues later wrote in an essay called Go Dog. Go!; A Lesson in the Pleasure of Language, Booth had argued that “what is good about Go Dog. Go! is the same as what is good about King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet.”
For example? The amusing Wikipedia entry for Go Dog. Go! says that the book serves children pretty well as an introduction to colour, space and movement. In line with Booth’s teachings about the rewards gained from a close reading of the text – and for the sanity of parents asked to read it dozens of times – the book also manages to pack a lot of character detail into its bare-bones storyline:
Throughout the book, the details in Eastman’s illustrations seem to invite the reader to notice the deeper significance of small things. The girl dog asks the boy dog if he likes her hat with its little flower: he does not; they part. Several pages later, we meet them again. Now they are riding scooters, she has a hat with a feather. Again, he does not like her hat, but as they part, he has made off with the feather. In their final meeting her hat is even more elaborate and finally meets the approval of the boy dog. In this way, a relationship is developed between the characters despite the simplicity of the text…
In similar blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion, the little blue dog who is the only dog in the huge bed still awake at dead of night, is also – come the dawn – the only dog still asleep after all the other dogs have bounded out to greet the morning.
Not everyone was impressed by the denouement. To the American academic Philip Nel, the ending is sexist, in that the girl dog’s choice of hat is changed to cater to the boy dog’s tastes, in order to win his affection. This is not how actor/author Jamie Lee Curtis responded. Reportedly, she once described the exchange of views on the hat as “one of the funniest non sequiturs in all literature” adding that it made her laugh and “and it makes me laugh now, as I’m writing this.”
Finally, the writer Jon Scieszka – author of The Warp trilogy of YA novels and the hit picture books The Stinky Cheese Man, and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs – also had a positive reaction: “To me, Go Dog. Go! is as clear as a spring day, as funny as a dressed-up monkey, as wise as the most gnarly Zen koan.”
The Life, and the Disney Strike
Given these heavyweight endorsements and the popularity of Eastman’s books – Go, Dog. Go! has been turned into a TV series and also adapted (somehow)for the stage – there is a surprising lack of information readily available about him.
Born in Massachusetts, Philip Day Eastman had spent his early working life in the two great cartoon factories of the Golden Age of animation – first in production design and story development at Disney studios from the mid 1930s until 1941, and more briefly later, at Warner Brothers. During his Disney period, Eastman met and married Mary Louise Whitman, who had been working in the ink and paint department. His two most popular books (Are You My Mother? (1960) and Go Dog. Go! (1961) were written much later, when Eastman was in his 50s, and down on his luck.
As the artist Tom Sito says in his history of animation unionism called Drawing The Line, Eastman had been a union activist during the deeply traumatic strike that occurred at Disney in January 1941. The strike eventually involved half to two thirds (the tallies vary) of Disney’s creative staff. At the time, the Disney empire was on the brink of disaster after the commercial failures of Pinocchio and Fantasia. To salvage the studio’s finances, the relatively cheap Dumbo was being rushed into production.
An artistic triumph in its right, Dumbo ultimately generated enough cash flow to keep Disney afloat until Bambi got finished, and these dual successes finally made Disney financially secure. All of that though, lay in the future. In early 1941, the strike posed an agonising dilemma for many Disney artists. By then, the Disney studio was the last major cartoon factory still refusing to allow its workers to join a union. Walt Disney was personally opposed. So…should you strike for better wages or conditions for your family and support your friends on the picket line – but perhaps kill Dumbo and the entire studio in the process?
Eastman chose to join the strikers. Like many of Disney’s top animation staff, he left five months later, in the wake of the strike’s resolution. John Hubley, another one of Disney’s great early team (he had worked on Snow White) also left after the strike was resolved, and created what became the UPA studio, and Eastman joined him there. Fun fact: John Hubley’s daughter Georgia is the drummer in the beloved indie band Yo La Tengo.
UPA used a sparser, less realistic style than Disney. It tended to utilize one cel for every two or three frames of film, as opposed to the one cel per frame standard at Disney, and this cheaper-looking UPA style took some time to find an audience. Eventually, UPA had hits with a series about the comically short-sighted Mr Magoo, and with its ground-breaking Gerald McBoing Boing cartoons. By then, the political storm clouds were gathering again.
Walt Disney had never forgiven the 1941 strikers. Letting Disney workers join the screen animators union had been one of the conditions imposed on Walt by the Roosevelt administration, thereby (a) saving Disney films from being picketed all over South America, and (b) saving Walt’s other job as a State Department goodwill ambassador.
In 1947, a still resentful Walt Disney testified in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee about the ‘Communists’ in the animators union who – he alleged -had instigated the 1941 strike. By 1952, the poisonous political atmosphere that became known as McCarthyism had induced UPA to fire Hubley, and to let go most of his staff, including Eastman. These days, Walt must be spinning in his grave, because Disney – via its subsidiary ABC – is leading the legal battle against the Trump administration’s crackdowns on liberal free speech.
In the toxic political climate of the 1950s, Eastman soon found work very hard to get in Hollywood, or anywhere else. Invaluably, Ted Geisel aka Dr Seuss was a friend (and a fellow liberal thinker ) and helped him out. During the war, Eastman and Dr Seuss had done their military service together in the same Army Signal Corps film unit, where they helped to churn out short propaganda films under the command of the great Hollywood director, Frank Capra. This unit had an amazing roster of talent: not just Capra, but John Huston, Meredith Wilson (The Music Man) Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame, Chuck Jones, Mel Blanc, the actor Tony Randall, and dozens of other artists.
The Signals Unit short films that Geisel and Eastman made together included titles like In The Aleutians, No Buddy Atoll (directed by Chuck Jones, voiced by Mel Blanc) and A Few Quick Facts; Inflation. After the Red Scare blacklist made jobs scarce, it was Geisel who urged Eastman to try his hand at writing children’s books. Six years later, Are You My Mother? and Go Dog. Go! opened up an entirely new career. By then, Eastman was 51 years old.
With hindsight, it wasn’t all that big a vocational leap. Other former Disney artists (e.g. Bill Peet) had made the same transition into writing and illustrating children’s books. Certainly, the wit and momentum that made Go Dog. Go! such a success also makes the book feel like a Golden Age piece of animation transferred to the printed page. That’s not as easy as it sounds, or looks. In reality, Eastman’s books were the culmination of decades of training in visual story telling.
Eastman himself once described his own style as “representational, and cartoonish.” Stylistically, the method could hardly have been more simple. Eastman would typically use only two or three colours to fill out his non- photographic ‘blue pencil” original black lines.
The conclusion of Go Dog. Go! is also winkingly cinematic. Like many a Hollywood hero before and since, the boy dog and the girl dog drive off into the sunset together, united at last by the splendour of her party hat. For the first time, the dogs are driving at a leisurely pace, contented in love. That’s all, folks…at least until you have to read Go Dog. Go! again to your young audience.
For a real life variant, you should check out this video.
Jon Scieszka summed up the deep affection in which this book is held by many readers. In his case, he once confessed that it was Go Dog. Go! that had started him “to think about being a writer, and about how to build a world as funny and as purpose-driven as a bunch of dogs in cars, speeding towards a party in a tree.” Exactly.
In writing this essay, Gordon Campbell is much beholden to Paul V. Allen’s 2021 book I Can Read It All By Myself: The Beginner Books Story.
Previous essays in this series: The Moomins by Tove Jansson; Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Badgers Parting Gifts by Susan Varley; The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford; Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The Indian in The Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks; The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper; The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi; Abel’s Island by William Steig; Mrs Frisby And The Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien; Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce.