Sendak as a Born Curmudegon

Among all the encomia for Maurice Sendak that have appeared in recent days, I particularly appreciated Michael Patrick Hearn’s clear-eyed remembrance posted at Educating Alice. Rather than focus exclusively on Sendak’s storytelling talent and contrarian statements about childhood, Hearn wrote about the personality that produced that work:

Almost every conversation began with the kvetching. Oh the kvetching! It was not a word I really knew until I met Maurice Sendak. He was constantly upset with this and that, with that person and this person. His anger fueled him. Look in the dictionary under the noun kvetch and you will find:

1. A chronic, whining complainer.
2. A nagging complaint.
3. Maurice Sendak, American picture book artist-author.

But once he got that off his chest, he was the funniest person you could ever meet.

Hearn also writes about how Sendak “loved being the provocateur,” and “was emotionally needy.”

Such comments reminded me of Leonard Marcus’s recollection of meeting Sendak in Publishers Weekly:

I arranged to be introduced to Maurice at the giant children’s breakfast at ABA, and at first he didn’t really look me in the eye. “Another interview?” he must have been thinking, as he commented on the banquet hall’s sprinkler system, which he said reminded him of a Nazi gas chamber.

That remark would make sense for someone who’d actually been threatened by, you know, a Nazi gas chamber. But Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928. He lost Polish relatives in the Holocaust (the same sort of foreign relatives he cited as the scary inspiration for the Wild Things), and later described that news as introducing him early to thoughts of death. But Sendak was already eleven when Hitler invaded Poland, and I’m pretty sure every American child growing up during World War 2 had to think about death.

As with the Lindbergh kidnapping (another memory Sendak invoked, this one really from his early childhood), the Holocaust seems more likely to have provided a focus for his anxiety and fears rather than their cause or inspiration. He explored themes of endangered children in his later books, when he could tell any story he wanted, because that situation struck deep chords with him.

Not that Sendak wasn’t also a charming person and a terrific picture-book creator, as both Hearn and Marcus describe. His critical writing was often very insightful, but I think it was at its best when he wrote about other people’s work rather than when he made pronouncements about childhood and literature based on his own idiosyncratic world-view.

Back to Hearn:

No matter how many other directions he went into and how far he grew as an artist, everyone wanted another Wild Things. Once a book was published, he was through with it. He did not go back. He never wanted to repeat himself. He was constantly evolving. He called Wild Things the first in a trilogy that also embraced In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There. But their artistic connection is dubious. What they did have in common was that Maurice was working out his therapy through them. The traumas of his childhood came out as metaphors. The books are fraught with Freudian symbols.

Hearn calls attention to Sendak’s 2005 edition of Ruth Krauss’s Bears, a “sequel of sorts” to Wild Things since it included a wolf-suited Max. It was “one of the most delightful of Sendak’s books in many years,” Hearn says, but “almost universally ignored by the reviewers and the public.”

A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius

Of all the reviews I’ve seen about Spike Jonze’s movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, one of the most incisive comes from student dn in Monica Edinger’s class at the Dalton School:

Where the Wild Things Are is a good movie. The only problem is there is not an appropriate age to see this movie.

I take “appropriate age” as reflecting the idea that there’s a level of maturity at which one can relate to the emotions and milieu of a movie without also being troubled by them. And there’s no such age for children or adults because Where the Wild Things Are is a troubling movie.

Far more troubling than Maurice Sendak’s masterful picture book, which explores young Max’s wildness only to bring him, and his readers, back home. Of course a ten-sentence book must change to become a two-hour movie. But the movie’s story, fleshed out by Jonze and Dave Eggers, isn’t just a longer journey over the same path. It’s different in fundamental ways, producing a deeper and less reassuring work of art.

In the picture book, the Wild Things are reflections of Max’s wild mood. By taming them, exercising them, and finally leaving them behind, he gets himself back under control. Those Wild Things come in different shapes and colors, but they don’t have individual names or differentiated personalities. They’re wildness in general—Max’s own wildness in particular.

In contrast, the Wild Things in the movie have names: Carol, K.W., Alexander, and so on. And they have distinct personalities, broadly drawn. Some critics, such as Claire E. Gross at The Horn Book, interpret them as reflections of Max: “Each Wild Thing embodies a different aspect of Max’s psyche — his anger, loneliness, disaffection...” But that typology provides no place for officious Douglas or depressed and sniping Judith.

Carol, the most prominent Wild Thing in the movie, has the same problems as Max: feeling abandoned and lashing out. It’s only natural that they bond most closely. But Carol isn’t simply a manifestation of the boy’s angry mood; he’s a separate character. All the Wild Things are difficult personalities writ large, and beyond Max’s control.

As disconcerting as it might be, I think we have to consider the possibility that within the movie’s reality Max’s entire visit with the creatures occurs just as we see it. In the picture book, his bed and room clearly melts into being his boat and the sea, and he famously returns before his supper gets cold. The movie doesn’t provide the same sort of reassurance that the adventure is all pretend, taking place within Max’s psyche. From what we see and hear, he is really away for days on an island of monsters. Jonze is, after all, the director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, neither fully in the world we know.

In the book, Max chooses to leave the Wild Things because he gets homesick. It’s entirely his choice. In the movie, Carol turns against him, and he leaves in part out of fear, in part out of the realization that he can’t make the Wild Things’ lives perfectly happy, as he’d promised them—and himself—that he’d do. And that’s what so troubling. While the book’s Max controlled the fantasy land, the movie’s Max cannot.

Some critics make much of how some of Max’s early episodes of anger come in response to family tensions: his teenaged sister wanting to be with her older friends, his divorced mother having a boyfriend. But he also wears a wolf suit, rough-houses with the dog, and plays kill-the-man on the school playground with no link to those family frustrations. Max feels and acts wild at times like any nine-year-old boy; his family struggles just hurt the worst.

I think the ultimate lesson in Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is that such struggles will always be with us. Max can’t escape them in his family life. (What younger sibling doesn’t watch the older sibling become more distant?) And Max can’t shield his furry new friends from sadness, either. Their troubles arise from their own personalities, rivalries, and resentments.

We can’t make everyone’s life happy. All we can do is show our family and friends that we love them, whether by making a heart out of twigs or by serving warm soup, and hope that in the long run that’s enough.

That’s not the level of comfort we expect from a children’s film. Or from any genre film. But it’s the emotional experience we should expect from a work of art.

The Mark of the Wild Thing

Last week Entertainment Weekly ran this photo by Michael Muller of Max Records, star of the cinematic adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. (The magazine's website features a different image.) It immediately made me ask:

What did he have written on his left palm?

(Me, I've always preferred this new technology we call "paper.")

Many attendees at the San Diego Comic-Con reported online that the words were something author-illustrator Maurice Sendak had told Records during a birthday phone call. He'd written them down to read to the audience:

“You know I really love this movie and I hope people like it, because if not they can all go straight to hell.”

Strangest Comic of the Month

Blotchmen, by Kevin Cannon, is a parodic mash-up of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say," Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

Seriously.


As a bonus, this page throws in unnecessary action labels from Japanese comics.

Thanks to Matthew Holm for the pointer. I think.

Sendak as a Lion in Winter

Yesterday's New York Times profile of Maurice Sendak at 80 might be summed up as, "He's gay, but he's not happy." Which is a short way of saying that Sendak appeared just as comfortable telling interviewer Patricia Cohen "that I'm gay" as he was enjoying any other aspect of life, which is to say not comfortable at all.

This wasn't really a public coming-out. Other authors have written about Sendak's long partnership with psychiatrist and art historian Eugene Glynn: Tony Kushner in The Art of Maurice Sendak in 2003 (excerpted here) and Cynthia Zarin in a New Yorker profile from 2006. But this may be the first time Sendak brought up the question with an interviewer, and people are responding to it as news.

I'd wondered about Sendak's family life, hoping he hadn't been living like One Was Johnny, alone with his books and anxieties. But he had a long partnership with, apparently, a good temperamental match until Glynn died in May 2007.

And temperament appears to play a big role in Sendak's life and work. Most of Cohen's article is taken up with dreads named and nameless, everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping to a poor review from Salman Rushdie. He was charming, she assures us, and I've seen Sendak in front of an audience, a completely entertaining curmudgeon. But every profile I've seen describes the same rough emotional ride, and in this one Sendak comes across particularly like my grandmothers when they're fretting and unable to hear any reassurance.

Indeed, I suspect that Sendak's natural anxiety is more of a factor than the many historical events that he hangs his worries on. He's often written and spoke of the shadow of the Holocaust over his work. According to this 2004 AP dispatch archived at the Jewish News Weekly:

Sendak, his sister Natalie and late brother Jack, are the last of the family on his father’s side since his other relatives didn’t escape Europe. The only family member Sendak really knew on his mother’s side was his grandmother.

But Sendak's also stated that one inspiration for his Wild Things were frightening immigrant relatives who visited his house as he grew up in the 1930s--so there must have been more survivors on his mother's side, just not people he "really knew." The disappearance of the Lindbergh child in 1932 also predates Hitler's ascension.

Kushner wrote of those deeper anxieties, still tying them to Sendak's heritage:

Maurice is a child of the Great Depression and of Jewish Depression, if I may generalise. Jewish Depression is that inherited awareness of the arduousness of knowing God, the arduousness of knowing anything, an acute awareness of the struggle to know, the struggle against not knowing; and it is that enduring sense of displacement, yearning for and not securely possessing a home.

But even by American Jewish standards, Sendak is a world-class fretter. I suspect he would fret no matter what historical period he lived through, and would fret--albeit in a different way--no matter what culture he was raised in.

Of course, being gay in mid-20th-century America, even in New York art circles, would have increased Sendak's sense of unease. Not just keeping his partner private from his mother, but wondering what the people who criticized In the Night Kitchen for showing a naked boy would have said if they'd known.

Pulling all this together, I end up wondering about Sendak's thoughts on passing on the family name, a Jewish tradition even for people who don't perceive their family to be in constant danger. Sendak didn't raise children--not an option for him and Glynn. (And at least that meant fewer things to worry about.) But his decades of artistry have made a huge impact on children, and have made the Sendak name both famous and beloved.

Let the Wild Rumpus Begin

Here's the first production still released from Spoke Jonze's filming of Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, courtesy of Movieweb. A well-chosen image, I must say. Evocative, exciting, and yet unrevealing.

Almost enough to overcome my dread based on the track record for feature-length movies made from picture books.