The Playful Antiquarian

The man with Beatrix Potter’s magic walking stick

March 13th, 2004

Returning home last night, after a very trying week, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and not emerge again. But, then, I remembered that I saw a post yesterday on Kids Lit about Maurice Sendak being interviewed by Bill Moyers on NOW and decided to postpone my hibernation.

I am glad that I chose to stay awake and watch that program. As a child, I had mixed feelings about Sendak’s books. Chicken Soup with Rice was a favorite, but In the Night Kitchen would have been banned from our household if I had any say. Where the Wild Things Are was strangely problematic. On the one hand, I felt obligated to love the book–it was given a Caldecott award, after all–but, on the other hand, I felt ambivalent about Max and his behavior.

Hearing Sendak speak last night gave me a different perspective of and new appreciation for his work. His honesty, sadness, and realism were both refreshing and painful. At one point, he became tearful, and I thought that I would start to cry, too. But, through the painful parts of his conversation with Moyers, I felt that I understood his work better.

His comments about Where the Wild Things Are were particularly informative. Responding to Joseph Campbell’s analysis of the story, he said:

“We’re animals. We’re violent. We’re criminal. We’re not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures . . . 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 don’t mean any harm. They just don’t know what the right way is.”

After he said that, I no longer felt ambivalent about Max in his little wolf suit . . . I also learned quite a bit about the author–quirky things, the sort of things that make people interesting. He does not like J.M. Barrie, but he finds great comfort in Emily Dickinson, for example. The full transcript is available at the NOW website, and while I was searching for that, I grabbed a few more links that may be of interest.

More wild things:

• More from the NOW website:
  • Test your knowledge with a quiz on children’s literature.
  • Read about the tragic story of the children of Terezin and about Brundibar, Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak’s adaptation of the Czech libretto.
• Rosenbach Museum and Library:
  • Home of the Maurice Sendak archives among many other things. The wild rumpus started and ended last year, but if you are traveling to Philadelphia between now and August 15, you can see “Alligators All Around” (in the museum’s Maurice Sendak Gallery).
• Where the Wild Things Are: Maurice Sendak in His Own Words and Pictures
  • An exhibit created by the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and currently traveling across the country.
• Wally Hastings’s essays and links on Maurice Sendak
  • An academic look at Maurice Sendak’s life and work. Includes some useful links if you have a reasonable tolerance for broken links since this site has not been updated in a while.
• Sendak at MIT last April
  • I am still despairing about not being able to get a ticket to his Arbuthnot Honor lecture, “Descent into Limbo” last year. *sigh*

Entry Filed under: Book People