Toward understanding Sendak

Given American picture book artist Maurice Sendak’s long career (more than forty-five years), his multiple styles of drawing, his erudition and use of pastiche, his long practice of illustrating important works (including books by the Grimms, Andersen, Tolstoy, Singer, Krauss, Graves, Stockton, Jarrell, MacDonald, and the Opies), and his own list of ground-breaking works, there is no doubt that we are benefited by a thoughtful and imaginative critical consideration of his opus such as that of John Cech’s.

Sendak has been treated in several critical works, first by Selma G. Lanes in her large-sized, mass-marketed The Art of Maurice Sendak (Abrams 1980). I hesitate to say “coffee-table book,” because this brightly illustrated volume, by one of the first critics to write at length about Sendak, contains first-class scholarship, one of the best Sendak bibliographies, useful biographic information. It is still the best overall work on Sendak. (In fact, Cech calls for a new edition of Lanes in Angels and Wild Things.) There is also a newer survey of his work in Amy Sonheim’s Maurice Sendak (Twayne 1991), and a book on collecting his editions, Joyce Y. Hanrahan’s Works of Maurice Sendak (Randall 1995).

Clearly Cech’s book is timely, for it examines Sendak’s literary output, focusing on eight of his original books, and specifically analyzing the archetypal personalities of his key characters. This is an astute tack because not only are Sendak’s readers enthralled by the creations of Max, Pierre, Jennie, Mickey, and Ida, but also because it allows Cech to show how Sendak’s development of his strong early characters such as Rosie and Pierre, inspire and indeed help to generate his later work.

The early lives of great artists can often be seen as fortuitous preparation for the works they will produce, and Cech argues with great detail how Sendak’s Brooklyn out-his-window sketches and notes of a little ur-Rosie give rise to his strong self-dramatizing child-artists. Art itself is an enduring motif in Sendak’s work, including, for example, Max’s and Little Bear’s drawing, Jennie’s acting, Ida’s horn-blowing; we see how this is turned inward by his “angels and wild things” to harness the tidal forces of the human psyche for productive, if nonconforming, strength. Rosie’s problem in The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) is the crucial task of filling the long boring summer days and perhaps making herself the center of attention among her street-mates since she is not in her family. She creates a diva-like persona and her success is assured as she draws the other children into the illusion. As the tale of a proto-Sendak storyteller, Rosie’s book has its own spectators. In the sparsely written text of the picture book Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Max takes his own aggressiveness and evokes jungle islands and threatening yet manageable monsters, drawing the reader/viewers into the illusion. Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life (1967), with its ravenous heroine Jennie the Sealyham terrier, may be Sendak’s most complex character study. Steeped in elements of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, Higglety Pigglety Pop! deals with matters of singular consequence, out of time. Cech writes, “. . . we meet in Jennie a character who has had enough of [the] weighty seriousness and predictability in her life to want to make a change, that even the possibility of an unstable world outside, with its existential uncertainties and dangers, is preferable to the oppressiveness within” (171). Thus, the Sendak message is a powerful and life-affirming one, while at the same time never backing down from the fearsomeness of childhood, in reaching accommodation with the beast within, rather than taming it.

Sendak, like Dr. Seuss, has become an enormously famous and popular figure, and like Dr. Seuss instrumental to our culture because his subversive influence begins when we are young. The popularity of his stories have produced a number...