Make A Pledge. Uncommon Heroes. Common Good. Entrepreneurial partners of collaborative educational grants and initiatives. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy. Maurice Sendak has been called the Picasso of children's literature, and godfather to generations of readers. His landmark book, "Where the Wild Things Are," which he wrote and illustrated, catapulted him to international fame.
A new cinematic version of the book, directed by Spike Jonze, has been praised by critics and quickly shot to number one at the box office in its opening weekend. In this interview with Bill Moyers, Sendak reveals some of the early childhood memories and surprisingly dark influences behind his work.
Shaped by immigrant parents and the tragedy of the Holocaust, Sendak provides frank insight into his complicated psyche and a rare window into the soul of an acclaimed artist. He also discusses how he shaped the character of Max, the mischievous lead in his blockbuster book, and where he might be today. He has to wear a straitjacket when he's with his therapist,'" Sendak tells Moyers.
Once upon a time, Maurice Sendak wandered into a dark forest. Childhood has never been the same. We're violent. We're criminal. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are. No supper. He has to wear a straitjacket when he's with his therapist. How does a man with no kids of his own know so much about the wild things of childhood? Tonight, a Bill Moyers conversation with Maurice Sendak. We take a break this week from politics and public affairs to enter the strange and wonderful world of Maurice Sendak.
Millions of us have already been there, with a passport stamped by a virtuoso of the imagination. No one does children's stories like Maurice Sendak He's won nearly every major prize for children's literature plus the national medal of arts.
And no wonder. Our own tattered copy is a Moyers family keepsake. We read it to our children when it was first published forty years ago. We've read it to our grandchildren in the last decade and we fully expect that one day they will be reading it to their grandkids, too. But let me share a Sendak secret with you. A seven-year-old hearing this story couldn't have more fun than a year-old reading it.
For defying his mother, mischievous Max in his white wolf suit is sent to bed without his supper. But strange things happen in his room and in his fantasies and Max is soon off to where the Wild Things are. They are no match for a kid with courage and when he stands up to them, as he did to his mother, Max is crowned their king and leads his subjects in a wild rumpus that ends only when he sends them off to bed without their supper.
But conquest is no cure for a homesick heart and Max sails back to his very own room and, lo and behold, to a waiting hot supper And they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things. And he said, "That is a great moment because it's only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.
I did not know. I was 32 when I did that book. But if he's right, that's a wonderful and touching idea. Do we all, adults and children, have to come to grips with our own untamed passions and We're animals. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.
So, of course. And then, we're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents. We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do. And if I've done anything, I've had kids express themselves as they are, impolitely, lovingly They just don't know what the right way is.
And as it turns out sometimes the so-called "right way" is utterly the wrong way. What a monstrous confusion. That's well said. Because you're really fighting yourself all the way along the line. And I don't know I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted. I'm not Hans Christian Anderson. Nobody's gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me.
I won't have it, okay? So, what is it I was watching a channel on television. And they had Christa Ludwig who was a great opera singer back I saw her in Europe. She's now retiring. And then, she had a surprising interview at the end of the concert where the guy You always sing Schubert.
He's just a Viennese waltzes. And she said, "Schubert is so big, so delicate, but what he did was pick a form that looked so humble and quiet so that he could crawl into that form and explode emotionally, find every way of expressing every emotion in this miniature form.
And I wondered is it possible that's why I do children's books? I picked a modest form which was very modest back in the '50s and '40s. I mean, children's books were the bottom end of the totem pole. We didn't even get invited to grownup book parties at Harper's.
I mean, it was a woman's world, wasn't it? It was always. And then when we succeeded, that's when they dumped the women. Because once there's money, the guys can come down and screw the whole thing up which is what they did. They ruined the whole business. I remember those days. And they were absolutely so beautiful. But, my thought was I didn't have much confidence in myself And so, I hid inside, like Christa was saying, this modest form called the children's book and expressed myself entirely.
I wasn't gonna paint. And I wasn't gonna do ostentatious drawings. I wasn't gonna have gallery pictures. I was gonna hide somewhere where nobody would find me and express myself entirely. I'm like a guerilla warfare in my best books. I don't have an answer. Let me tell you of its origin—it's brief. I had done a series of books and in those days back in the '50s, you couldn't do a picture book unless you'd done a number of books that paid off somewhat or at the very least showed that you had more talent.
And you can move onto the next. There's not much money back then. I don't think Madonna would have been interested in writing a book in the '50s, okay? So, it was my turn.
I had earned my 10 years apprenticeship of doing any number of books. Now, I could do a book. And my editor's name was Ursula Nordstrom. And she without equivocation was the best. She was this torrential woman, passionate woman, who could spot talent 10 miles away. I had no education. I did not go to art school.
My drawing was so crude. I had shines on shoes like in Mutt 'n' Jeff in Walt Disney. And she saw through that monstrous crudity and cultivated me, really made me grow up. And then, it was time to do my own picture book. It was so poetic and evocative. And she gave me a contract based on "Where the Wild Horses Are. The whole book would have to be full of horses to make the book make sense.
And when I tried a number of things, I remember the acid tones. She said, "Maurice, what can you draw? Cause she was investing in a full color picture book. That was an enormous thing back then. And so, I thought well things, things. Could be anything I could draw without negotiating things I can't draw. And then, we were at My brother, sister and I were sitting shiva, the Jewish ceremony. And all we did was laugh hysterically. I remember our relatives used to come from the old country, those few who got in before the gate closed, all on my mother's side.
And how we detested them. The cruelty that children And these people didn't speak English. And they were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying. And they'd pick you up and hug you and kiss you, "Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up. And so, they're the wild things.
And when I remember them, the discussion with my brother and sister, how we laughed about these people who we of course grew up to love very much, I decided to render them as the wild things, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins.
And that's who they are. Schwarz in the late s, Sendak met legendary children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom. She helped Sendak land his first job illustrating children's books. In , Sendak published Kenny's Window , the first children's book he both wrote and illustrated himself. Before long, he turned the children's book world upside down with his masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak captured the public's imagination with this tale of a boy's journey into a strange land inhabited by grotesque yet appealing monsters.
Sendak's dark, moody illustrations were a shocking contrast to the usually light and happy fare found in a typical children's book of the time. The main character Max, like many of Sendak's protagonists, acted like a real child, not some idealized version of youth. And I did not want to reduce Max to the trite image of the good little boy that you find in too many books. Playwright Tony Kushner once described Sendak "as one of the most important, if not the most important, writers and artists to ever work in children's literature.
Generations of children grew up enjoying his work. He illustrated his first book, "The Wonderful Farm" in and his last was published in He was a glorious author and illustrator, an amazingly gifted designer, a blisteringly funny raconteur, a fierce and opinionated wit, and a loyal friend to those who knew him," Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins Children's Books, which published his books, said in a statement. Maurice Sendak was such a man," she added. Sendak, who was born in Brooklyn in , was dubbed by one critic as the Picasso of children's books.
Sendak's own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up "All crazy — crazy faces and wild eyes" and pinch his cheeks until they were red. Looking back, he sees how desperate they all were, these first-generation immigrants from Poland, with no English, no education and, although they didn't know it in , a family back home facing extinction in the concentration camps.
At the time, all he saw was grotesques. That included his parents. If he had come from a happy home, says Sendak, he would never have become an artist, at least not the kind of artist he is. Sendak's picture books acknowledge the terrors of childhood, how vicious and lonely it can be. In his latest book, Bumble-Ardy , the hero is a piglet who loses his neglectful parents to a slicing machine on the first page and is left in the care of an aunt.
When Bumble turns nine, she throws him his first ever birthday party and, in the manner of most Sendak stories, things take a dark turn: older pigs gatecrash and, in a kind of porcine burlesque, wreck the place.
The pictures are feverish and transporting — and, although the book ends in forgiveness and a hug between aunt and nephew, the sense of precariousness around Bumble remains. The darkness of his childhood flowed down from his parents. Sendak's mother was sent to the US from Poland when she was just 16, alone but for the name of someone she could rent a room from. She was sent, says her son, because her own mother "couldn't bear her any more".
Sendak's mother had been a flirt and a trouble-maker, who had "committed herself to every living human male in the village", including Sendak's father, the son of a rabbi. He came here after her and became a drudge. His family was sitting shiva for him back in the old country because he had done this terrible thing, chasing a girl when your father is a rabbi and schlepping all the way to New York. It still gives Sendak vertigo to consider the improbability of his parents' survival.
For years, he would look at their photo albums and wonder about these people, their families. Who were they? Then: "This is true. My father belonged to a Jewish social club. The day of my barmitzvah he got word [through the club] that he had, no longer, a family. Everyone was gone. And he laid down in bed. I remember this so vividly. And my mother said to me, 'Papa can't come. And I said, 'How can Papa not come to my barmitzvah? And my father's face was vivid, livid, and I knew I had done something very bad, that I had made him suffer more than he had to.
This year-old ersatz man. They were traumatised people, his parents, angry, fierce, "nuts", and understandably so. In such fires Sendak's talent was forged. He is still raging. But since Eugene's death, says Sendak, it is merely an echo of his former anger. He looks around his property, built in and boasting in its grounds one of the last elms still standing in Connecticut, and approaches something like peace.
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