What should a children’s picture book look like?
Well, there is the ‘all is well’ world of happy, beautiful children living wonderful yet exciting tales, and then there is the world of Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) where big-footed children go through a world riddled with danger and sadness, and the illustrations refuse to reassure the readers of happy endings.
A self-taught artist, Sendak wrote and illustrated over 150 books during his 60-year career, including Very Far Away, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, Nutshell Library, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, and a self-termed trilogy - Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There. He collaborated with celebrated authors as Meindert DeJong, Tony Kushner, Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Krauss.
Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Sendak was a frail child and had nearly died of scarlet fever at the age of four. He would illustrate children playing on the streets below his window, make toys and other forms of make-believe he shared with his older brother Jack.
Very early, he realized that his calling was art. Children in danger always preoccupied Sendak, mainly because his own childhood and adolescence in Brooklyn were fraught with the insecurities of the Great Depression and World War II. Children his age in Europe were being sent to death camps, a thought that appeared in some of his illustrations.
Sendak skipped college and got a job as an assistant window decorator at the Fifth Avenue toy emporium FAO Schwarz. The store’s book manager leafed through Sendak’s sketch books and introduced him to Ursula Nordstrom. If there was an event that ‘shaped’ Maurice Sendak’s career, it was this fateful introduction.
Nordstrom, known as the field’s ‘most audacious editor and inspired mentor’, hired him immediately to illustrate a book. Soon, Sendak had a stream of assignments but the momentous ones were with Ruth Krauss. His first collaboration with her, A Hole Is to Dig: A First Book of First Definitions, established his talent.
Krauss and her husband, the cartoonist and author/illustrator Crockett Johnson, frequently invited Sendak to their home in Connecticut for weekend getaways. During the summer of 1963, Sendak was struggling to finalize the text of Where the Wild Things Are, Johnson contributed the single word that came to stand for the sense of exultation and abandon experienced by Max in the book. ‘RUMPUS’. He had said, “Let the wild rumpus start.”
And so it did. In his career, Sendak illustrated his own books, record album sleeves, CD covers, works of other authors including William Shakespeare and Herman Melville.
Not many know of him as a collector of antiquarian books, having a significant collection of rare books, limited editions and letters. He adored Melville, and had one of the best private collections of his books; from the first printing of Moby Dick to Melville’s personal writing desk.
Sendak had Mozart’s last known letter to his father Leopold as well as Wilhelm Grimm’s 4-page letter, dated 1816 which opens with “Dear Mili” and continues to unfold with the familiar “Once upon a time... ” This unpublished fairy tale tells the story of a good mother who sends her daughter into the woods to escape a threatening war, and Sendak translated and illustrated the book as Dear Mili.
Talking of influences, Sendak once remarked: “I have been feeding myself artistic, culture things – Blake, the English illustrators, Melville – but those crappy toys and those tinsel movies are much more directly involved in my life than certainly William Blake ever was, though Blake is really important, my cornerstone. But the cheap crap I had to grow up with is what made me.” Nevertheless, his drawings were influenced by the consumption of literature, art and music.
Doris Orgel, one of his collaborators, recalled him saying once: “Every book has to have a dimension of the fantastic.” Before he started designing for stage, Sendak treated the page-openings of a picture book as a theatrical space for the unfolding of stories, as a kind of a tabletop theatre. He carried a sketchbook constantly to record children’s body language, facial expressions and emotions within.
Nordstrom, when decoding his success, said, “Where the Wild things Are is the first American picture book for children to recognise that children have emotions – anger and fear, as well as the need, as Max had, after his anger was spent, to be where someone loves him.”
Later in his career, Sendak designed a few posters – where he expanded his characters to fit the extra space – and had a remarkable foray into designing stage sets. Starting with Frank Corsaro’s The Magic Flute, based on Mozart’s composition, to Where the Wild Things Are, Hansel and Gretel, The Cunning Little Vixen and more.
Incidentally, in 2005, an unseasonal hurricane destroyed the grand backdrops of The Magic Flute which were stored in a storage facility in Florida. Corsara noted that Sendak’s response was to take the calamity as his doing – an omen for wandering away from his bailiwick and withdrew into depression.
Ultimately, Sendak’s success may have been not just due to his vivid, magical watercolour illustrations but his ability to understand the world as seen by a child, to feel the pains of the real world where all things aren’t perfect or end happily. He kept the child in him alive and made books the safe place where children could encounter dangers. The foremost expert on American graphic history, art historian Steven Heller described Maurice Sendak the best: "Maurice had the heart of a poster maker, the eye of a book illustrator, and the soul of an artist."
Things Maurice Sendak said
On ‘Kiddiebookland’: “It’s that awful place we’ve been squeezed into because we’re children’s book illustrators or children’s book writers…How infuriating and insulting, when a serious work is considered only a trifle for the nursery!”
About style: He called style a trap and preferred to “Walk in and out of all kinds of books by drawing as the occasion demanded, in a fine style, a fat style, a fairly slim style and an extremely stout style.”
On working in theatre: “When I was working in this situation, I became the person I want to be.”
On death: “Death has the features of Mozart’s face and is my waiting friend.”
Trivia
· Maurice Sendak’s first ‘professional illustration stint’ was a commission by his high school science teacher who apparently threatened Sendak to illustrate the book he had co-authored – Atomic for the Millions (1946)
· All the books in the trilogy Where the Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen and Outside Over There have original Sendak text and involve a protagonist setting forth and returning. But the style of illustration is different in each of the three.
· During the making of Outside Over There, Sendak was stressed as he had planned a daring theme where a girl Ida must rescue her baby sister who was hauled off by hooded goblins. Sendak was nicotine-deprived, taking the wrong medicines for insomnia, having an emotional crisis and still, he showed the first draft to friends in Europe who advised him to abandon the book. He returned home and fought depression, and finished the book in 1979. Although he had planned to dedicate it to his mother, he decided to dedicate it to Barbara Brooks, a friend who had died suddenly and tragically before the book was published.
· Where the Wild Things Are has the famous six-page wordless sequence in which Max and the Wild Things have a ‘wild rumpus’.
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