My Tribute to Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak
Photo from Imagination Gone Wild
Cloe Poisson
The Hartford Courant (2006)

My alma mater Vermont College has recently honored the memory of Maurice Sendak with a special, Sendak-themed issue of their Hunger Mountain magazine.

Appreciations of Sendak and related articles appear here. 

This prompts me to add my own note of admiration for Sendak, whose stories and picture books I have read and loved from a very early age, books that I later read to my children (over and over). The Little Bear books and No Fighting, No Biting became part of a family language, with familiar phrases cited at opportune moments.

Sendak did not write those books, of course, but would we have come to love them as much as we do had he not been the illustrator? They’re a perfect unity of story and picture, books about characters whose subtle facial expressions and limited physical gestures exquisitely convey their wry humor. Even the blank-eyed Little Bear seems attuned to some cosmic joke about the strange futility of existence as he awaits a birthday supper or marches off to fly to the moon.

I received my first Sendak-illustrated book at the age of 3 years old, from my cousin, who was also 3. (I wonder: How was that possible?). This was back in 1955. The book is called The Giant Story, by Beatrice Schenk de Regnier (1953), and I still have it on my shelf of Most Special Books. 

The story is about a boy named Tommy who one day decides that he is a giant. He will let planes land in on his shoulder, and pick leaves from a tree, and knock over houses. He won’t be able to play with his friend Betsy that day, because he is a giant. He does all these things that day and then becomes sleepy and returns to his usual size as evening approaches. His mother puts him to bed.

The Giant Story (1953)

A nice enough story but the illustrations bring it to life in the form of large child-like outlines and shapes in yellow, blue and black with lots of white-space, that wonderfully capture the outsized imaginative explorations of Tommy’s small-child’s world. Several pictures in the book fill entire pages: one early in the story shows Tommy eating his breakfast of prunes and milk (!). The other, a two-page picture closing the book, shows Tommy asleep under his checked-pattern blanket with streams of moonlight bursting through his window – all done in blue, white and black in thick, crayon-like lines.

To see these illustrations and compare them with Sendak’s later work one might suspect that they are by a different man.

Kenny's Window (1956)

This also applies, only more so, to Sendak’s illustrations for the first book he wrote himself and published in 1956, Kenny’s Window. The chalk- or crayon-like lines are here as well, but printed in muted tones of sepia and tan, to complement very simple drawings in black ink. The austere illustrations depict a sparsely furnished bedroom inhabited by a boy of indeterminate age, possibly between 7 and 12, a boy approaching emotional adolescence while maintaining a younger child’s magically-inclined imagination despite the near emptiness of his environment.

He shares the room, which features only an iron bed and a bureau, with a white dog, Baby, a one-eyed teddy bear named Bucky, and two lead soldiers. A window that looks out onto a city street provides the only access to the world beyond the room. At one point, Kenny’s friend David calls up from the street to invite Kenny to come out and play. Another scene shows a neighboring window, where a man and a baby watch the snow fall down (or at least the man watches; the baby sees only the man’s face).

Kenny converses with his canine and non-animate companions as if they were human beings who can not only talk but who also observe the world around them and, most importantly, share Kenny’s longings and fears about daily life. One of Kenny’s fears is that he might not be loving enough to his friends. At least that is how I interpret a part of the story where Kenny overhears one of the lead soldiers complaining about Kenny’s treatment of them. “Look at me. I’m chipped in four different places.” Kenny in a moment of anger sets the complaining soldier outdoors on the window ledge where the soldier is soon covered with falling snow. Kenny and the other soldier later confer as to why the cold soldier doesn’t ask to be let back inside: because he is proud. Kenny brings in the frozen soldier into his bed and warms it with his breath.

Kenny's Window (1956)

The book features a dream of Kenny’s one night, where a four-legged rooster inhabits a nearby, parallel-world, with a garden and a flowering tree, where night and day exist side by side, and the moon shines during the day and the sun shines at night. In the dream, the rooster gives Kenny a list of seven questions or riddles, and when Kenny wakes up he finds the list on a piece of paper in his "pyjama" pocket. Kenny’s attempts over the next few days to solve the riddles serve as the basis of the plot. The questions are essentially the riddles of life itself, expressed through symbols, implying a symbolic meaning behind everyday objects and actions, with object-lessons providing a way to understand various situations. The questions are charmingly simple and the answers that Kenny comes up with retain the youthful insights and wisdom of a 7- to 12-year-old. Yet, for this reader, the riddles and Kenny’s answers always seem fresh and surprising upon repeated readings, revealing new depths of significance as the years pass.

Kenny's Window (1956

Kenny’s Window suggests that life is a mystery, rife with confusion and false-starts, regrettable impulse, and wishes that probably won’t come true. It’s Sendak’s most thoughtful book and it faces down many concerns of early adolescence. Later books, such as Where The Wild Things Are, and Very Far Away, and In the Night Kitchen, deal more forthrightly with anger and the wonderfully wayward imaginative expressions of early childhood. They dramatize the “wildness” within young people, a quality that bears understanding and should be nurtured, Sendak might argue, if people are to lead creative, fulfilled lives.

After all, look at Sendak’s own books, all delightfully, even shockingly, wild, yet funny and loveable at the same time.

Henry David Thoreau would approve. In “Walking,” he wrote “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

On the title page of Kenny’s Window, Sendak offers a dedication to his parents, to Ursula, and to Bert Slaff. The latter apparently was Sendak’s psychoanalyst. Sendak briefly describes the context of his coming to produce Kenny’s Window in his article "Really Rosie" (1976), but the article is about Rosie, a vivacious character who appears in many of Sendak’s works.

My sense is that the story of Kenny’s Window had personal significance to Sendak at that time, a story of searching and transition, a story that emerged from his unconscious mind, his dream-life, as Jung might call it.

Critics have offered faint praise for the book, sometimes merely to contrast it with Where They Wild Things Are, which fully enters the unconscious and returns with all banners flying.
 

Where the Wild Things Are (1963)
RIP Maurice Sendak

A Second Look: Where the Wild Things Are
Leonard S. Marcus, The Horn Book Magazine (2003)
 
In Sendak’s Caldecott Medal Acceptance speech, he describes Max as his “bravest” and “dearest creation,” but goes on to say:

Max has appeared in my other books under different names: Kenny, Martin [Very Far Away], and Rosie. They all have the same need to master the uncontrollable and frightening aspects of their lives, and they all turn to fantasy to accomplish this. Kenny struggles with confusion; Rosie with boredom, and a sense of personal inadequacy; and Martin, with frustration. On the whole, they are a serious lot. (1964)

In contrast to the over-the-top qualities of Where the Wild Things Are, Kenny’s Window expresses naivete, hopefulness, vulnerability.

I admire such qualities. To me, the book’s naivete, hopefulness and vulnerability allow me to experience a more personal connection to Sendak, or at least to the person I imagine he might have been in 1956, and provide insight to a period in his life when posing questions and solving riddles seemed essential acts of preparation for the more confidently assertive stories that emerged soon after.

Days with
Cedar Whitewater (1997)

I never met Sendak, but I dedicated my story Days with Cedar Whitewater to him, with a callout to Kenny’s Window. I also dedicated the story to Henry David Thoreau, because the quality of “wildness” that Sendak and Thoreau so honor looms rather large in my own approach to life. Sendak and Thoreau, of course, lived quite prosaic lives (literally) in their urban and semi-rural neighborhoods; theirs is a constrained wildness. Yet, that is how most of us actually live, prosaically, perhaps ever hoping to stir the fire of wildness from time to time and come up with something to get the neighbors talking.

Kenny's Window
(1984 edition)

My daughter Iris spoke to Sendak once at a reading and book-signing, where she mentioned my life-long interest in Kenny’s Window. She later reported to me that he seemed to pause a moment after her declaration, then said only that it was an early book of his, or something to that effect. I like to think he might have said more had there not been a long line of others behind her carrying books to be signed.

Kenny's Window
(1956 edition

My daughter Amelia a few years ago bought me a newer printing of Kenny’s Window. This one has a beautifully colorful paper cover, unlike my old copy with its tan cloth cover. The bright cover picture draws attention, unlike the old cover that barely excites a moment’s notice. I realize now that my design for the cover of my story about Cedar Whitewater mimics the plain cloth cover of my old edition of Kenny’s Window. I remember thinking that the Cedar Whitewater book should not draw attention to itself, but should be happened upon by those who are searching for something, like the way people who walk in the woods search for lady’s slippers or mushrooms. Kenny’s Window strikes me that way, too. A book to discover when needed.

So I’m startled by Sendak’s cover illustration for an audio production of Kenny’s Window that portrays the four-legged rooster as a florid, monster-like creature whose colossal size dwarfs the city in shadow behind.

What happened? Sendak moved on.

Tribute by Laszlito Kovacs,
Amsterdam

Today, upon looking at the great number of images and links on the internet showing Sendak’s illustrations and other productions for theater and television, I am amazed by his skill and the sheer number of his fabulous creations. His imaginative energies never turned rote, which is always a challenge when readers or audiences prefer a repetition of the familiar.

And it’s terrific to see the ardent testimonials to Sendak’s importance in the lives of so many. Sites feature piquant Sendak quotes; interviews and documentaries share Sendak’s personality and perspectives with thousands of readers and viewers.

- - - -

About Maurice Sendak
William McPherson, May 9, 2012

Maurice Sendak, author of splendid nightmares, dies at 83
Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 9, 2012

The King of the Wild Things Is Dead. Long Live the King. Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)
Philip Nel, May 10, 2012.
Watch the Maurice Sendak Documentary Produced by Adam Yauch [Beastie Boys]
Mike Sampson, May 8, 2012

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Kenny's Window (1956)

Me, I feel stuck in a time-warp, perhaps a parallel world, where the quiet questions asked in Kenny’s Window linger on, for years and years; where the answers to life’s riddles offer only partial solace.

One of the riddle-questions asked by the four-legged rooster is the following:

What is a Very Narrow Escape?

The haunting answer seems perfectly attuned to a great fear of childhood and adolescence: the loss of love.

It’s an important question, at any age.

Thank you, Maurice Sendak, for asking such questions.