Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak died in 2012 aged 83. He is considered one of the most influential picture book authors and illustrators of all times. Most famously ‘Where the wild things are’, which made his career and opened a new chapter in picture book writing when it was published in 1963.
Children in American picture books were traditionally well behaved and nothing really bad happened to them. Parents trying to shield their children from the evil of the world wanted for them apple pie and rose buds. Sendak’s characters are, by contrast, headstrong, naughty even obnoxious and cruel things happen in the world around them. His melancholy stories unsettle us and he doesn’t let us get away with closing the book and switching off the light.
I know many children who were frightened by his outrageous, maniacally monsters and yet they kept coming back to them. Just like in cruel fairy tales we are fascinated and repulsed by the meanness of the world and still we want and need to understand it.
Sendlak grew up lower class, Jewish (the holocaust loomed over his family) and was often sick in bed throughout his childhood. He taught himself to draw and stated later that he always just drew his relatives who as he wrote in his memory ‘had hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the childhood sickbed’. Perhaps he would have liked Oxford with his many gargoyles and ghastly wall lined streets?
But Maurice Sendak also struggled with life because he was gay “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in the 2008 interview, that is attached below. “They never, never, never knew.”
In The Night Kitchen
In the Night Kitchen we see a naked boy with three big bakers who look like Oliver Hardy. This book was often hidden in libraries and teachers would draw diapers over the naked boy. But the real astonishing thing is that many people, including me, miss the reference to the holocaust. The bakers with the Hitler moustaches working on the oven, I still don’t understand how one could overlook something so obvious?
How can we look at books and pictures with our children and teach them about the world when we aren’t able to see ourselves? We are navigating in our new, crazy world and perhaps turned blind to what is really important? In the Night Kitchen Sendak gives us again the opportunity to go beyond ordinary story telling and explore things that make us perhaps uncomfortable and are yet worth exploring!
Here are some excerpts from an interview he gave to the New York Times in 2008:
Some of your books have been controversial. Why do you think that’s so?
It has always seemed kind of foolish to me. Everything that was happening in my work was happening in my life. I recorded what was important to me. “Outside Over There” was and is my particular favorite because it had so much to do with my sister and the awfulness of her having to take care of me. She pushed me and pulled me. I loved her and I hated her. There was nothing in her that made me think girls weren’t as capable of anger the way boys were. We all did the most outlandish things, some of which we told our parents, most of which we did not. We were all keenly aware that parents were scaredy cats.
You mustn’t scare parents. And I think with my books, I managed to scare parents.
Randolph Caldecott was a sneaky guy. Because under the guise of stories about little animals, he had the same passion for childhood. If you just look at the surface of them, they look like nice English books for kiddies. But his books are troubling if you spend time with them. He inspired me. I adored Caldecott. Probably his idea, or my interpretation of him, was that children’s books should be fair to children. Not to soften or to weaken.
Before that, the attitude towards children was: Keep them calm, keep them happy, keep them snug and safe.
Did you think earlier children’s books underestimate children? Misread them?
I think they were trying to find out what a children’s book was. What was a children’s book? A very famous one is “Alice in Wonderland.” It’s a terrifying book; it’s a nightmare. That to me comes as close to the world of childhood as great books do. Carroll was allowing for nightmare, murderous impulses. I don’t know why he got away from it. He told the truth about childhood, about how unsafe it was.
Essentially, there is no protecting children. None. I grew up at a tough time. With the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. There was this invasion of childhood in the air. In my neighborhood, a little girl died. No mention was made of it. We children had to meet in the backyard to imagine what it meant. What’s happened to Rita? It was a world that darkened. The Holocaust demolished my family, my parents. I saw that, I was there, I was a child. I had to bear it even though I didn’t have any idea what it meant. What language was there to tell a child? None. That has stayed with me all my life.
I was very much afraid when I was a child. But all my books end safely. I needed the security in my soul of bringing these children back. Ida comes back safe. Max finds his meal waiting for him. It means his mother loves him. The rough patches between them are solved. Mickey gets safely back in bed. We want them to end up O.K., and they do end up O.K. Unlike grownup books.
I wouldn’t write a grownup book if my life depended on it. We are touching a touchy subject. From the basis of our conversation, I would say that touch of reality in a child’s life is a child’s comfort. The child gets the sense that this person who wrote this book knows about me and knows the world can be a troubling, incomprehensible place.
I have never had a letter from a child that said, “Go to hell.” They are always thanking me for opening the door, even if it was only peeking through to show how difficult life could be.
For the full interview go to
Maurice Sendak – interview Thoughts on Maurice Sendak – The Night Kitchen
Maurice Sendak exhibition:
