This month it is 50 years since Maurice Sendak gave children of then, now and tomorrow Where the Wild Things Are: a paper mirror for children to walk through in wonder and see portrayed their inner conflict between frustration, anger and incomprehension, on the one hand, and the need to accommodate a formally illogical but emotionally necessary mutual forgiveness, on the other.
 |
| Maurice Sendak |
The Art of Maurice Sendak
Where the Wild Horses Are: "Hide your Eyes"
 |
| Illustration by Maurice Sendak |
 |
| Maurice Sendak |
 |
| Maurice Sendak |
I’m a happy old man
by Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak, author of classic picture book Where the Wild Things Are, claimed in a 2011 interview never to lie to children. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence,” he said. He was also in search of a “yummy death,” which he believed could be done “if you’re William Blake and totally crazy.” Two months later, less than a year before he died, Sendak returned to the topic. “I’m a happy old man,” he said. “But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.”
 |
| Maurice Sendak |
 |
| Maurice Sendak |
I was a journalist when I started out in the writing game, and I learned not to meet my heroes if I wanted them to remain heroes, and so I never even made an effort to meet Maurice Sendak.
Meeting writers and artists in the flesh is anyway overrated. I met Sendak for the first time when I was 10 or 11. My little sister did not read, and I inveigled my parents into giving me extra pocket money to buy her books, on condition that I read to her. I read her books by Edward Gorey and Heath Robinson, and a book with an interesting cover called In the Night Kitchen.
It was a dream, told in comics panels, although the panels were often the size of whole pages. (It was years before I discovered Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland cartoons, Sendak's inspiration.) I loved the transgressive nakedness of Mickey, our hero, loved the strange pastry chefs who all looked like Oliver Hardy, loved the weird internal rhymes and the read-it-again quality of the story. I now love knowing that it still features on the American Library Association's "most challenged" list. It scared adults.
I bought Sendak for my children, and read them all of it, found them a Wild Thing toy when such things were rare, and then saw Outside Over There, a haunting tale of a girl whose baby brother is stolen by goblins, become a favourite of my daughter Holly.
Sendak, who died this week, did not make books for children. He just made books. His linework was elegant, sometimes even cute, but always honest. He was wise, and he never patronised any readers, adult or child. I devoured interviews with Sendak: he was a grumpy, Jewish, brilliant, wise contrarian and he didn't mellow as he aged. But then, he had never created mellow books. His coming out in 2008, age 80, was a final act of honesty.
Something Sendak once said is the epigraph of my next book. "I remember my own childhood vividly." he explained. "I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them."
2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm
2010
