When Maurice Sendak was a boy, his grandmother would dress him all in white. Innocent enough, this sounds — and may even bring to mind Max’s white wolf suit in
Where the Wild Things Are. However, as is true so often with Sendak, there is much below the surface. This was Brooklyn, in the early 1930s; Sendak was born, the youngest son of Philip and Sarah, in 1928: the same year as Mickey Mouse, whom he once called “an early best friend”. Both parents had come to America before the First World War, and the life of the Jewish
shtetls outside Warsaw was not quite left behind.
Sendak was a sickly child nearly killed by measles at two and a half, and later by pneumonia and scarlet fever. But there was, perhaps, a way to effect escape from the inevitable: “My grandmother sewed me a white suit,” Sendak tells me. “White stockings, and I had white shoes and I could only sit outdoors with her. God would look down and think I was already dead because I was an angel, dressed all in white. This was something that went on in the ghetto. I had to be dressed so as to fool the fates — white, the colour, as if I was already gone.”
And so, in Wild Things, white is transformed from the colour of death to the colour of life, as Max goes on his splendid night-time adventure to be King of all Wild Things. But white is not what springs to mind when one thinks of Sendak’s work: consider the bold blue greens of Wild Things (published exactly 40 years ago now, and perhaps the best known of his books), the vivid yellow-red-mauves of his fantasia of his early Brooklyn life, In the Night Kitchen, or the muted 18th-century tones of Outside Over There. His black-and-white work, from Higglety Pigglety Pop! to his illustrations for the Grimm fairytales in The Juniper Tree, are made distinctive by his textured cross-hatching, the page stitched and stitched with fine lines.
His work has won almost every important prize in children’s literature, from the Caldecott Medal to the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and recently he was the first winner of the Swedish government’s Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Quentin Blake, the former Children’s Laureate, says: “He introduced metaphorical psychology into children’s books, which is very important. And he took children’s books seriously. He never regarded it as a separate act for which you had to reduce your capability.”
In awarding him the National Medal of Arts in 1997, President Clinton remarked: “Perhaps no one has done as much to show the power of the written word on children, not to mention on their parents, as Maurice Sendak.” Yet his work has not been only for children. It’s easy enough to trace a line between Outside Over There and his illustrations to Heinrich von Kleist’s strange gender play, Penthesilea; he has also illustrated Melville’s Pierre. Nor has he been content to stay between covers: in the late 1970s he turned to opera and did designs for The Magic Flute, Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges — and of course Oliver Knussen’s opera of Where the Wild Things Are, which first took to the stage in 1980.
But now, in his 75th year, this greatest of American author-illustrators has added a new book and a celebratory volume. Tony Kushner, the American playwright whose Angels in America won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991, has written the text to The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present, a fine companion volume to Selma Lanes’s magisterial The Art of Maurice Sendak, published in 1981. But of greater significance is Brundibar, a new picture book, and opera — Kushner wrote the words and libretto; Sendak painted the pictures and designed the set.
Brundibar originated as a children’s opera by Hans Krása, a Jewish Czechoslovakian. It tells the story of Aniku and Pepicek, a poor brother and sister who need to get milk for their sick mother. They decide to sing in the town square to raise money, but are thwarted by Brundibar (“bumblebee” in Czech), a hurdygurdy-playing bully who chases them away. But a dog, a cat, a sparrow and 300 children come to their rescue; the bully is driven away; Aniku and Pepicek are showered with cash and can get milk for their mother. So they all lived happily ever after.
Except: they didn’t. Brundibar was written in 1938 and first performed four years later at a Jewish boys’ orphanage. It had three performances before all involved were rounded up and transported to the concentration camp at Terezin. There, it was performed 55 times by the children of the camp. Before long, the Nazis were using this tale — of power overcome by the powerless — as propaganda: it was filmed for inclusion in a Nazi-produced documentary, Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Leader gives the Jews a City). Nearly all the children who appeared in the opera were later transported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered — as was Krása, in October 1944.
Sitting with Sendak in the pretty red barn that serves as workspace on his property in Connecticut, it quickly becomes clear that this latest project is not only dear to his heart but has also released him in some way. We sit in straight chairs at a wide wooden table; Sendak walks with a stick now and thought that if we sat in the armchairs across the room, he might never get up again. He groans at the infirmity of his body; but the eyes behind the big square glasses are sharp and bright, vivid and expressive and interested in everything they see. But interested particularly in the darkness that has shadowed his life and informs his greatest work. “The art book and Brundibar are three years of my life, and I’m exhausted. Exhausted,” he says. His voice is gravelly, deep, rich Brooklyn. “But I’m feeling so good. Like I’ve come home. I don’t need to go there any more. Brundibar is the book I’ve been doing all my life, but I’ve done it best now. It gnawed at me — these are all my dead cousins, all the people who haunted my childhood, who I hated for haunting my childhood. I just knew that I should be ashamed of being alive and having a good time. Play ball in the street, you forget dinner, your mother has to call you, and she says: ‘Your little cousin Rachel can’t have dinner any more . . .’ So I wanted to kill Rachel over again, and my mother. But then later I fell in love with all these people, and drew them in all my books and became a good son of the Holocaust” — wryness in his voice as he says this — “and now I’m free. Je suis fini. It’s a very good feeling.”
Brundibar is certainly his most focused look at the Holocaust. The song the children sing in the square is a lullaby about the end of childhood, how children grow up and fly away. “Baby blackbird, fly now./ Time to go, who knows why?” The double-page picture that follows shows children on the backs of birds — the eye is drawn to them first — flying over a starlit city. But the eye moves down: the mothers, with their smaller children by them, weep and look away.
“The picture is my variation on the actual song,” he says. “It’s a very sweet song, about children leaving, growing up — well, I took that to mean the children are dead. This is Europe during the Nazis. What they’re mourning is that the birds are carrying the children away and the children should not be dead. And all the mothers are reaching for them — it’s a very dramatic picture, but it’s not the drama of the song. The song is wistful; but I’ve turned it into a pogrom.”
Such directness has got Sendak into trouble right at the very beginning. He is, for one thing, not formally trained; his schooling ended when he left Lafayette High School in Brooklyn. He was not a success in the classroom and considers himself lucky because of that: he escaped the die-stamp of “normality”. “I think my neuroses, my unwillingness to cooperate and my doing badly in school marked me by the teachers — he’s a goner, they thought. Leave him alone. So I got away with it, simply because I was impossible to deal with. I also had another remarkable gift — you could call it a weapon,” he adds, and when he does, I lean forward, thinking he will describe how his talent for drawing earned him praise and esteem. But no. “I was a projectile vomiter. No one knew anyone who could do that. I was like Superman. I could go across the room.”
He’s laughing now, and so am I. He doesn’t stop. “You call my name in answer to a question: VRRROOOM!” A huge bellow; an imitative sweep of his arm; more laughter from both of us. “So — don’t ask him questions!”
