MAURICE SENDAK: EVERY SHADOW MATTERED

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/05/maurice-sendak-every-shadow-mattered.html



The passing of Maurice Sendak, author and artist, is a loss not only, or even primarily, to the world of children’s books, but to the larger American literature of the imagination. Sendak’s gift was for creating worlds—“In the Night Kitchen” (magical title!) and “Where the Wild Things Are” come first to mind—where an almost Muppet-like note of charm and warmth was matched by a mood not so much dark as shadowed, o’er cast, as Shakespeare would have said. Shadowed by fear—a three-year-old I used to know, now teen-age, still knows how to gnash his terrible teeth when the occasion calls for it—these worlds also pointed to a shaded path towards survival. Though Jim Henson, with whom Sendak tried, once or twice, to collaborate (Henson’s Creature Shop did, in the end, provide the puppetry for the film version of “Where the Wild Things Are”), had a hammier, more vaudeville-like cast to his imagination, they shared a knowledge that children, before they are creatures of innocence, are creatures of needs and fears—but ones who like their fears, or are at least fascinated by them, as Max is by his monsters and Mickey is by the “racket” he hears in the night.

Yet even those of us who love Henson are not wrong to see something more in Sendak. It is a terrible cliché to say that what distinguishes his work is its darkness or its embrace of fear; the Nancy Drew books do that as well. What distinguishes his art is the calm poise that his children possess in the face of darkness. What his people seek is what we all seek: calm amid the storm of the world. They are studies in unostentatious courage—Max and Mickey don’t act out; they just carry on. It was this gift for endurance that Sendak said he loved in Emily Dickinson: “She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.” His kids take their place in a visual tradition grander and nobler than the term “illustration” can quite contain: they are the distantly related offspring, the great-great grandchildren of Phillip Otto Runge’s large-eyed, old-souled Hülsenbeckschen children. At once older than their years and permanent citizens of childhood, they have big heads, curious gazes, wise eyes. It was not so much the darkness—and certainly not any element of camp, as was often the case with his haunting, more light-fingered contemporary Edward Gorey—of Sendak’s vision, as it was his intensity that counted. Every shadow mattered.

Though the two classics mentioned above will doubtless remain so, anyone with a taste for the literature of the early mind will think of others. Perhaps highest ranking among his lesser-known books should be the three he wrought with the great poet Randall Jarrell—“The Bat-Poet,” “The Animal Family,” and “Fly By Night”—all strange Northern Romantic fables about art, love, and the needs of the artist. (It is one of the queerer things about modern American art and writing that these two men of genius managed, in the ashes of German ruin, to bring entirely back to life the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and the whole world of the dark mysterious northern forest.) Put alongside these the “Little Bear” stories that Sendak illustrated so touchingly and add a forgotten but no less imposing work, the best guide to etiquette ever written for children, “What Do You Do, Dear?” Odd that a master of the night kitchen would have illustrated a book on how to be polite? Not really. For what is etiquette, after all, but a guide to remaining calm when the demons of this world are gnashing their teeth?


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