After he left school he found work as a window-dresser for F. A. O. Schwarz, the famous New York toystore. It was the children’s book buyer at the store who brought him together with his first editor, Ursula Nordstrom, at Harper and Brothers in 1950. The first book which he both wrote and illustrated was Kenny’s Window, in 1956; but it was Where the Wild Things Are, published seven years later, that brought him real acclaim — the book won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 — and enormous sales.
Yet it was not all smooth sailing: Sendak was still a troublemaker. “The plan and technique of the illustrations are superb,” ran the review in Publishers Weekly, “but they may well prove frightening, accompanied as they are by a pointless and confusing story.”
A couple of generations of children now have found the story of Max — sent to his room without his supper, gone off on a journey to where the Wild Things are and at last returned to where “someone loved him best of all” — neither pointless nor confusing. Sendak’s little heroes make their own journeys and face their own perils. In what Sendak considers his trilogy, Max has his wild things; Mickey, in In the Night Kitchen, woken by a strange thump-bump, has the bakers who try to bake him into their cake; Ida, in Outside Over There — the book perhaps dearest to his heart, influenced as it is by his beloved Magic Flute and his own fearful memories of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping in 1932 — has to rescue her baby sister who has been stolen by goblins. In Brundibar, too, Aniku and Pepicek defeat the bully and save their mother themselves; they have help, but it is not grown-up help. “There are these three children,” Sendak says of Max, Mickey and Ida, “a little boy, a tiny-bit-older boy, an older girl, in moments of crisis that are never seen. It happens right before your eyes as a parent. You know that; and you don’t see it. And that’s the point that just totally fascinates me. Something colossal has just brushed by that’s going to change a child ’s life and you might have helped — if you’d looked! ”
Sendak has no children of his own; he shares his life with Dr Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst and his partner of many years. While it’s clear he dislikes the idea that his skill comes from some still-vivid “inner child”, nevertheless he recognises a connection. “You can’t write for children,” he says. “There’s no such thing. It’s a financial industry, made up. People say, what’s it like to be a children ’s book writer? And I don’t know. I do seem to do it. That’s what I do: but not because I think children are wonderful and I want to save the world — like I am the Mother Teresa of children! Except there’s something in me that’s intuitively tuned in. I’ve never stopped being there. In the children’s book form, which seems innocuous enough, I can burrow in like a bug and do all I want to do, hidden by the form. It’s a great hiding place. You can do all the guerrilla warfare you like. And I did from the beginning.”
He calls the image-maker in his head “the Polaroid button”; he sets a finger against his temple to demonstrate. The pictures come easily; the words, his own words, do not. “That doesn’t happen to me with language — the way I can’t wait to begin with the pictures. I love to write, and want to write more, but there are no clues in writing. There are no clues. I can search high and low and not find it — and that’s why I must admit to being more fascinated with writing than with pictures. The pictures — it all knows what to do without my help. The intuition just comes, I trust the solution, I rarely make a mistake. But the things I’ve written are sheer hell. Sheer hell.”
With a picture book, it is not until the text (“the poem”) is right that he will begin the pictures. The picture book, he says, is “a musical form. People so underestimate the picture book — because it’s for children. But the picture book form is a colossal, erudite form of poetry. Of synchronisation, of tempi, everything musical between language and picture. It’s such fun. It’s so hard. And I’ve devoted my life to getting it.”
So writing and drawing and musical composition are linked. He plays no instrument himself, though music pervades his life, particularly that of Mozart. This reverence for art that is not his own is evident too in the way he discusses Brundibar: he is far keener to promote the opera — which had its premiere in Chicago in June — than his own book, and is dismayed that there are no further productions scheduled. “They were afraid of it because it’s an unknown thing, even with my name and Tony’s name — and it had rave reviews in Chicago, but no one picked it up. ‘Will it sell tickets? Will it sell tickets?’”
It is much easier to get Maurice Sendak to express scorn than admiration; he reads little that is new, though he admits to enjoying Ian McEwan’s Atonement (“but I haven’t finished it yet”) and the work of the English author-illustrator John Burningham. But through the long, often sleepless nights — he has always been an insomniac — it is Melville, Keats, Shakespeare, Dickinson. That is where he finds “that plunging into darkness and then that joy” — there, and on late-night cable TV. Really? “Oh yes!” He says with great animation: “There are these programmes about the birthing of babies, these women who are in distress — she’s crying and her husband is hiding in the corner, and the baby’s born and it’s all right — and that’s it. That’s it. The most obvious scene in the world, but the most important. Mazel tov! And now they have a new show, which I’m fascinated by: autopsies. And everyone thinks, how morbid can Maurice get? But there’s a real silence about death.”
On the train going to Connecticut to see him, I listened to an interview he’d given the day before on National Public Radio. I sat bolt upright when he said to the interviewer, in the course of an otherwise straightforward discussion of his childhood: “Of course, I myself was responsible for the death of a child”. And he told, for the first time, the story of his friend Lloyd, who was playing with him in a Brooklyn alley when they were both six. Maurice threw a ball to Lloyd; Lloyd missed the catch, ran out into the street — and was hit by a car and killed.
“I don’t know what possessed me to tell that story,” Sendak says. “But it’s true. It did happen. I can’t ever forget it.”
He closes his eyes and describes with his hands — they are small and delicate, I see for the first time — the event as he remembers it, and it’s clear that he sees it as he did then — and sees it as a framed image. “Lloyd is reaching up, if my memory is anything like correct, there’s the picture, there’s something like a car — and he’s at the very end of the picture, almost out of the composition, so I don ’t see his head. He’s upside down and his arms are out like that” — Sendak makes a starfish with his arms and legs — “and his feet are up in the air like he’s dancing. It was just after I entered school. I remember him exactly, his face, his funny curved nose, short cropped hair. And of course I saw him go flying. And when I saw him fly I had no thought that he was killed. It was like a movie or a vision. And then when I came out I don’t even remember that I saw his body. But I knew I’d done it to him. I knew I’d done it to him. I knew that I was capable — I always knew that I was capable of destruction. And if I could get through my life without destroying it would be something of a miracle.”
The little boy dressed in white to fool the fates the agent of fate himself.
And yet in art, is there redemption? As Sendak describes the scene to me, I think of all the children in flight in his books — Ida gone backwards out the window into Outside Over There; Mickey falling and flying and tumbling through milk; the hero of Randall Jarrell’s Fly by Night. I list what I can. Sendak listens. The moon is up now, outside the window, a big bright moon just like the one found so often in his work.
“Yes. That’s true,” Sendak says. “He’s most like the boy in I Want to Paint my Bathroom Blue” — a very early book with words by Ruth Krauss — “there’s something about that boy, zooming into space . . .”
His voice trails off. He looks sad, and he looks happy. “You’re right, you’re right. A lot of flying. He was flying. Lloyd was flying.”
The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present by Tony Kushner is published by Harry N. Abrams, £42
Brundibar by Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner is published by Hyperion USA, $19.95
