The Land of the Young

At 52, Maurice Sendak has become America's master illustrator. Almost all of the 78 books he has written or decorated are still in print. Some, like A Hole Is to Dig, Where the Wild Things Are, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life, and The Nutshell Library, are contemporary classics; all are collector's items.

Most of his drawings are in the possession of the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia; the few that come up for sale fetch prices of up to $12,000 each. For a man who describes himself as "a solitary and an agonizingly slow worker," Sendak has had an uncharacteristically gregarious year. He oversaw the printing of his new book, Outside Over There, to be published this spring, aided in the production of his off-Broadway musical Really Rosie, designed sets for the Houston Opera's version of The Magic Flute and is at work on the New York City Opera's American premiere of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen. In addition, he has been making appearances in bookstores to sign copies of a coffee-table retrospective, The Art of Maurice Sendak, by Selma G. Lanes. In the midst of this hectic schedule he paused for breath in his bachelor retreat in rural Connecticut and reminisced with New York Bureau Chief Peter Stoler:

Maurice Sendak derives much of his creativity from two early sources, a photograph of his bearded patriarchal grandfather ("I thought he was the image of God") and Mickey Mouse. "Mickey was born the same year I was," says the artist, who has the beard of a prophet and the astonished look of Disney's creation. "I keep acknowledging Mickey and my grandfather in my work." Much of that work is filled with private references: the bakery of his Brooklyn childhood is the scene of In the Night Kitchen, where another early hero, Oliver Hardy, is hard at work. The child's name is Mickey, in honor of Disney's rodent. The fearful, cheerful creatures in one of his best-known books recall adult visitors almost half a century ago: "They'd say, 'You're so cute I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would. So, on one level at least, you could say that the Wild Things are Jewish relatives." At first those relatives were not encouraging to young Maurice. He remembers being "a miserable kid who excelled neither scholastically nor athletically." But he could draw, and he could read. When he was six, he collaborated on a book with his older brother, and when his big sister gave him books for birthday presents, he found a land as new as the one his Polish immigrant parents had sought.

The first real book he received was Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper: "It smelled so good, I remember trying to bite it. My passion for books and bookmaking started then." The passion had to wait 13 years before it was gratified. Sendak graduated from Brooklyn's Lafayette High School, attended art classes at night and supported himself by building window displays for F.A.O. Schwarz's famous toy store. His work caught the attention of an editor at Harper & Brothers, and at 22 he garnered his first assignment, illustrations for The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme. From then on, there was no looking forward. By the time he was 34, Sendak had illustrated more than 50 children's books. Even the youngest readers soon perceived the maturing Sendak style: meticulous crosshatching, stories and colors that charted the leaping congruities of dreams, and an elliptical use of humor in unexpected places--a smiling star, a flying boy, alligators that dress up like lions--and, always, the omnipresence of babies.

"I grew up when there was a lot of focus on babies," Sendak recalls. "They loom very large in my life." Large is too small a word. The frontispiece for Grimm's Fairy Tales shows a baby so huge it dwarfs six adults who hover around him for warmth and strength. Such exaggerations are further references to the personal past. "When I was a child," the artist says, "there was a lot of talk about the Lindbergh kidnaping. There was also a tremendous amount of attention paid to the Dionne quintuplets." Both events are allusions in Sendak's new work.

The goblins of Outside Over There use a ladder similar to the one Bruno Richard Hauptmann supposedly used to steal the Lindbergh baby, and when the heroine finds her little sister, it is in a cave with four other infants who bear an uncoincidental resemblance to the Dionnes of 1934. This sometime preoccupation with the Freudian grotesque has brought Sendak criticism as well as approbation. The usually indulgent Publisher's Weekly found Wild Things "frightening," and Bruno Bettelheim judged its'account of punishment (off to bed alone and without supper) to be a combination of "the worst desertions that can threaten a child." In the Night Kitchen also

found itself on the couch. Some librarians, disturbed by the book's display of frontal nudity, provided the child-hero with a painted-on diaper. Sendak was particularly piqued by a German reviewer who saw the child who will not be baked in the oven as "the symbol of the Jew who refused to be annihilated. And of course he saw the Oliver Hardy figure as Hitler. It sounds as if he was the one who had problems, not me."

Outside, with its Renaissance palette, its baby snatching and undraped newborns is certain to draw more psychosexual analysis. The crossfire is not likely to affect Sendak's life or style. After 35 years of remarkable work he is more preoccupied with the inside than the outside over there. Recently he watched a father carrying his young son in a backpack. The father stopped suddenly and the child bumped his head. "For an instant," the artist remembers, "it looked as if the child were about to cry. Then his head snapped backward, the kid stared at the sky openmouthed, and his face broke into this great goofy grin. I imagined how he felt. He didn't know that what he was looking at was the sky or that the color was called blue. He only knew that it was beautiful. And I thought, God, just let me be in touch with that baby's feelings."

It is an answered prayer. For Sendak, visiting the land of the very young is not something that requires a visa. He is a permanent citizen.

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