July 3, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Let the wild rumpus start!
‘Sendak on Sendak’ at the Rosenbach Museum
by Dea Adria Mallin

Bill Adair, a longtime Mt. Airy resident who is director of education at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Center City, has been interpreting the Rosenbach’s esteemed collections for the public for the past ten years. In a gallery talk last week, he explored a particular perspective on Maurice Sendak — that of the gay man.

Sendak, now turning 80, has long been a beloved illustrator and author of children’s books —109 of them — and the Rosenbach Museum and Library is celebrating his birthday with a major retrospective, There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak. More than 130 pieces are featured from the Rosenbach’s vast repository of Sendakiana, and the original artwork, rare sketches, and related materials will change every few months, drawing on over 300 objects during the yearlong exhibition.

It would be helpful to re-read your Sendak books — especially the trilogy of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There — before you come. Then peruse the marvelous The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present by Tony Kushner (Abrams). Friend and collaborator, playwright Kushner makes psychological, visual, and biographical connections, leading the reader deep into the recesses of Sendak’s genius and process.

 The exhibition is recommended for ages 12 and up because the wall text is thoughtful and fairly adult. Sendak’s books, posters, beautiful preliminary drawings, and dummy books abound, organized by theme: heroes, villains and beasts, influences, and settings.

Particularly revealing are new taped interviews with Sendak, on digital touchscreen panels in each gallery. Grab the chair, sit back, press the start buttons, and learn a lot about pivotal events in Sendak’s life and how he relies on fantasy and creativity to help him maintain equilibrium. 

To this, Adair adds the ways in which the author’s experiences as a gay man might have influenced his work. His observations are “not the last word and certainly not Sendak’s word,” he says about the notably curmudgeonly but always engaging Sendak, who kept his sexual identity under wraps until recently. Still, Sendak’s sense of himself as an outsider, particularly in the rigid 1950’s, was compounded by his sexuality.

His characters often do things that break the rules, that struggle for control, that question the status quo. Adair walked the group from room to room, pointing out the quiet ways, including ambiguity and double meanings, in which Sendak’s work allows him a voice. One solution to internal struggle and angst is music, which appears regularly in his work. Another is love, and here Adair notes that Sendak’s partner of 50 years died just last year. 

Innocence and Experience

If all writing is autobiographical, then Sendak is a master of self-reference and revisiting the past.

 “Reaching kids is important,” he said, “but first, always, I have to reach and keep hold of the child in me.”

So who is Maurice Sendak?

Brought up in Brooklyn, with parents who left a Poland of virulent anti-Semitism, little Maurice absorbed his parents’ fears for safety and the somber, frightening characters of their shtetl stories and later, the Holocaust. Sendak, who had serious childhood illnesses, admits readily that he was not “out playing stickball in the street” or engaging easily with others. So when Sendak talks about “my first frightened child book,” he says, “It was sad, but they were in for it.”

Sendak says he never forgave an uncle for scaring him witless and then denigrating him as worthless after the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby. Little Maurice couldn’t sleep at night unless his father slept on the bedroom floor clutching a baseball bat to safeguard his children.

“This is where my insomnia started,” Sendak said. “If they could take a blond, blue-eyed baby with nannies and guard dogs, how much more easily they could take me.”

But his uncle said to Maurice’s father, “Philip, who would want your children?” Thirty years later, Sendak gleefully turned his uncle into the ugliest of the Wild Things. 

At 20, living at home, Sendak was a loner, watching the lives of others from his window, especially the brassy 10-year-old Rosie, staging street plays dressed flamboyantly in a red cape (the blanket from her bed) and feathers. Sendak later immortalized her as a leader in his stories, even as he immortalized himself as Max and Mickey, who somehow make it as loners.

Before he wrote his own stories, Sendak illustrated the stories of others. Ruth Krauss, his mentor in the 50’s, wrote playful, witty little books, and encouraged playfulness in Sendak. On exhibit are storyboards for a Krauss book, with girls in easy camaraderie and boys making mayhem.

Another mentor (“the best person I ever knew”) was Ursula Nordstrom, his editor at Harper. She advised him not to get stuck in a single style and to make every illustration meld with the deepest resonances and rhythms of the text. Soon, Sendak was writing the text himself, as both author and illustrator of Kenny’s Window in 1956. By 1963, the masterful (and controversial) Where the Wild Things Are pretty much changed the face of children’s literature.

Sendak sees American 19th and 20th century children’s books as moralistic, sentimental, with well-behaved characters and false comfort. There are no dark impulses. No sudden emotion. His landmark Wild Things gave validity to the presence and authenticity of children’s feelings — and fears.

Ever since, Sendak has been breathing life into stories in which children become aware that they are not completely protected and resort to magical restorative dreams. He combines this with adult introspection and wisdom so that children can be heard, and perhaps consoled.

When Max, in his wolf suit, makes too much noise, his mother calls him “WILD THING!” Vilde chaya — “wild thing” in Yiddish — is how many immigrant Jewish parents described their kids. In a power play, Max shouts that he’ll eat his mother up, and she sends him to bed without dinner.

Being fed is important to Sendak, as it is to all children. Not being fed is deeply threatening. Sendak spends the rest of the book conquering fear with imaginative flight. He was in psychoanalysis at the time, but it was probably his art that was his best therapist.

The wall text says, “My characters look as if they’d been hit on the head so hard they weren’t able to grow anymore … it’s the way I know I felt as a child.” But when imagination kicks in, Max gets control. “Be still!” is his mantra to authority figures, and Max’s magic is to stare into their eyes without blinking. The touchscreen interview reveals the origin of this trick: in childhood, Sendak was told that if he stared for five minutes without blinking, he could make an angel visible. So he did it. And the angel came.

Sendak’s early life centered around reading, watching movies, and writing stories with his brother on men’s shirt cardboards. HarperCollins published almost all of Sendak’s work, and has wisely kept even the books from the 50s and 60s in print.

At 80, Sendak still looks youthful, with the face we recognize from his baby pictures and stories. And while he certainly deserves a happy birthday, one wonders if he can risk it.

Sendak’s alter-ego characters celebrate, but they celebrate briefly, differently. At the adventure’s end, Max is glad to have a hot meal and return to his safe warm bed.

The orphaned toddler in Jack and Guy will be living on the streets with two savvy 11-year-olds who tossed a coin to decide between killing him and raising him, but at least he isn’t being devoured by rats. In Outside Over There, which took Sendak five years to write, Ida’s baby sister — snatched by goblins from her bedroom while Ida plays lullabies — is rescued from among the goblin babies by Ida’s bravery and her music, and restored to human life.

For such things, one must be grateful! But what if we pause too long or celebrate too much? As a writer and artist tapping into elemental fears, can Sendak fully celebrate his birthday when there is so much outside over there that threatens?

“This keeps me from ever being happy,” Sendak said. “I always live on the edge of calamity.”

The “love letter” from Sendak’s opera collaboration with Tony Kushner, Brundibar (Hyperion Books), reminds children that “bullies (like the Hitlerian Brundibar) don’t give up completely.” The letter is signed, “I’ll be back. Love, Brundibar.” Yikes!

Always, Sendak is caught between telling children the terrible truth and withholding it as too terrible. Still, he wants children to process their fears and asks them to resist malevolence. And he wants us to look knowingly at the mountains, the caves, the dense forest, the shadows, the ladders propped against nursery windows in his illustrations, and to recognize what he calls “the other story,” the hidden message in every tale.

In the end, we rely on the bravery and sheer pluck of ordinary people against dark forces, and the Rosenbach exhibition will confirm, in Sendak on Sendak, that even while he is making his characters brave, he himself has had to be very brave in order to write and illustrate his stories. And he’s still working! “Every day,” Bill Adair added.

For more information and special Sendak events, go to www.rosenbach.org