Maurice Sendak

I never thought of Maurice Sendak as a writer for children. Possibly this is because I did not read his books when I was a child. I don't know why we never had many picture books in our house, but for whatever reason we didn't. We had Dr. Seuss and Mercer Mayer and a handful of miscellaneous titles, but no Sendak. I went straight on from The Lorax to the Bobbsey Twins, and, as I grew, did my best to fake the cultural literacy I'd missed. In college I often rewarded myself after surviving exams with a trip to the children's section of Wordsworth, where I marked the hardest moment of my senior year by purchasing two paperback copies of Where the Wild Things Are. I cut away the bindings and funtacked up the entire book on my dorm room wall, page by page. The monsters were familiar to me as the back of my hand; Jim Henson and Maurice Sendak only officially collaborated on a few animated shorts for Sesame Street, but the Muppet monsters (especially the full-sized ones, like Sweetums) and the Wild Things were clearly kin. But, Muppet associations aside, Max mastering the monsters wasn't comfort so much as it was company. Self-mastery is a journey one must make alone, but the wild things remind us that one's travels are fully populated nonetheless. I ate many a solitary supper under those illustrations, in Max's company.

Company, not comfort. I never found anything about Sendak comforting. Not just the explicitly upsetting texts, like We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy (with its rats and starving brown children), or Outside Over There, with its terrifying Holocaust subtext. All of his books were so heavy with dislocation and strangeness, which I recognized then and now as the way the world distorts itself when seen through the telescope of suffering. Even the rollicking books teetered back and forth on the edge of an abyss. Mickey in his cake, sturdy child, was only a nightmare without the screaming, a nightmare yanked into happy ending by sheer force of animal health. We all know, don't we, that some sorrows respond to nothing but fat and sugar. In the Night Kitchen was the only one of Sendak's books that we read with any frequency here when the children were small. "Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake and nothing's the matter!" We chanted that over and over again to general glee, and pretended for a moment that cake would cure our many small disasters, when we knew it was only keeping us company with its promise that the world contained always the possibility of sweetness and love.

Sendak was never a comfort, but, oh, he was brave company. He saw and felt and represented with an unflinching eye. Mary McCarthy once said about Elizabeth Bishop, "Not that I want to have written her works but that I would like to have had her quiddity, her way of seeing that was like a big pocket magnifying glass. Of course it would have to hurt to have to use it for ordinary looking: that would have been the forfeit." That is how I think of Sendak; I cannot read his books without feeling also the hurt that was the forfeit. In fact, that is how I place him, in a line with the poets of looking, like Marianne Moore (who, according to Tony Kushner in The Art of Maurice Sendak, wished that she had written Chicken Soup with Rice!) or Bishop. I do not think it is a stretch to place Sendak in that lineage. He associated himself with it when he illustrated the poet Randall Jarrell's last work, an achingly beautiful fable called The Animal Family, which should have a far more prominent place in the canon of children's literature than it does — or, at least, in the canon of literature that we say is for children because it gets far closer to the heart of being than most grown-ups can bear.

Thank you, Maurice Sendak, for keeping us company with the things for which we have no comfort.