Sadly, the world lost a terribly delightful and talented curmudgeon when Maurice Sendak passed away recently at 83.
Sendak was born to poor Jewish-Polish immigrants in Brooklyn. Relatives on his father’s side did not survive the Holocaust.
He once described relatives on his mother’s side in an interview. “Bloodshot eyes and big huge noses and bad teeth, and they would grab you by the cheek and pummel you and say all the conventional things like, ‘I’ll eat you up,’ and knowing them, they probably would and could.” There’s no wonder where he came up with such interesting creatures for his first book, “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963).
“Wild Things” tells the story of Max, perhaps 4 years old, who is sent to bed without dinner. His bedroom transforms into a lush dreamscape where he sails away to the land of grotesque, snaggletoothed monsters. He overcomes his fear of the monsters with a magic trick of staring straight “into all their yellow eyes without blinking once.”
They crown Max their king and everyone enjoy a wild rumpus until Max finds he must tame the boisterous beasts. He finally sets sail for home. “But the wild things cried, ‘Oh please don’t go — we’ll eat you up — we love you so.’ ”
The book was both genre-breaking and award winning. But, as with many things remotely from the 1960s cultural revolution, controversy sparked immediately. Sendak began hearing from not only parents and librarians, but also from teachers and psychologists, that the book was “just too scary.” Sendak’s reply to this controversy was that children deserved stories that confronted their fears.
“Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy,” he is quoted as saying in “The Art of Maurice Sendak” by Selma Lanes.
“We sentimentalize children, but they know what’s real and what’s not. They understand metaphor and symbol.”
Sendak’s next book, “In the Night Kitchen” (1970), is about another boy who is caught in another dreamscape. This book established Sendak as a bona fide provocateur because this time the boy is drawn without clothes. Mickey, about 3 years old, falls into a giant cake batter that three singing bakers, all looking like giant Oliver Hardys, are preparing for breakfast.
“When I was a child,” Sendak once told Virginia Haviland, editor of children’s fairy tales, “there was an advertisement which I remember very clearly. It was for the Sunshine bakers, and it read: ‘We Bake While You Sleep!’ It seemed to me the most sadistic thing in the world, because all I wanted to do was stay up and watch … and I remember I used to save the coupons showing the three fat little Sunshine bakers going off to this magic place at night, wherever it was, to have their fun, while I had to go to bed.”
Because of Mickey being drawn anatomically complete, “Night Kitchen” has become famously controversial and still appears on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged and banned books.
Television host and comedian Stephen Colbert recently re-aired an interview with Sendak where Sendak asks, “Have you never had a dream, yourself, where you were totally naked?” Colbert spunkily answers, “No.” To which Sendak splendidly responds, “I think you’re a man of little imagination.”
Many in the Northwest are very familiar with Sendak’s theatrical set design for the Pacific NW Ballet’s “Nutcracker.” It’s hard to believe anyone could do it better.
Sendak wrote and/or illustrated numerous award winning books over his lifetime. Last September “Bumble-Ardy” was published. It’s about what happens to a young pig orphaned after his parents are eaten. A posthumous book, “My Brother’s Book,” will be published next February.
But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go — we’ll eat you up — we love you so.” And Max said, “No!” The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye.
— Marylin Olds is an opinion columnist for the Kingston Community News. Comments are welcome at marylin.olds@gmail.com.
