The late, great - and sublimely anarchic - children's author Maurice Sendak knew there was more to life, says Gaby Wood
Where the Wild Things Are Photo: Maurice Sendak
The Telegraph - 09 May 2012
Re-reading Higglety Pigglety Pop!, which has always been my favourite story by Maurice Sendak, it seems strange that it should ever have been thought of as a book for children. Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83, was referred to in the New York Times this week as “a shtetl Blake”, a visionary who hovered over the lives of virtually all Americans born after 1960. Where the Wild Things Are, which he wrote and illustrated in 1963, has become so widely read as to make its hell-raising mundane, but the sum of his work is riotous, grumpy and full of an otherwise unpredictable character – qualities that have made him the mascot of so many children’s lives.
Higglety Pigglety Pop!, written in 1967 and based on Sendak’s recently deceased terrier Jennie, is the story of a pet in the grip of a mid-life crisis. “You have everything,” says the pot plant on the window sill to Jennie as she heads for the door, “Why are you leaving?” “Because I am discontented,” the dog replies. “There must be more to life than having everything!” Then she eats the plant.
Sendak always said that he based the “wild things” in his most famous book on his relatives, first generation Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn from Poland, who crowded around a bed in which he was often ill. His childhood, which took in the Depression, the Holocaust and (on a smaller but still influential scale) the Lindbergh kidnapping, was, he routinely suggested, unhappy overall. His father heard the news that he had lost his entire family on the day of Maurice’s bar mitzvah; his mother was “nuts” in a way that seems not to have been a passing figure of speech.
Though his parents eventually welcomed his long-term companion Eugene Glynn, the fact that Sendak was gay was never addressed directly.
Though his parents eventually welcomed his long-term companion Eugene Glynn, the fact that Sendak was gay was never addressed directly.
He began to illustrate children’s books in the early 1950s – his collaborations with Ruth Krauss and Beatrice Schenk de Regniers were especially memorable, as were his drawings for Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear series – but his own truly Max-like figures were not born until a decade later, when he published the Nutshell Library, a box set of four tiny, soon to be seminal stories. The year of Max also brought Little Lori, who tried to get to Times Square on the back of a turtle, and hasn’t been heard from since (this last was written by Amos Vogel, an influential postwar film programmer, who first brought the work of Polanski and Cassavetes to New York screens). And in 1970 Max gave way to Mickey and his terrifying adventures In the Night Kitchen, being built into batter by Oliver Hardy lookalikes. These were great escapes – out of the house, into one’s mind (“and the walls became the world all around,” reads Where the Wild Things Are). They operate in many ways against the establishment in favour of liberty, and the pursuit of…well, more to life.
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