Maurice Sendak and the Blakean Vision of Childhood

In his studio, to the right of his desk amid reproductions of the works of Watteau, Goya, and Winslow Homer, Maurice Sendak has a reproduction of one of William Blake's works.¹ In an interview, Sendak describes Blake as "from the first, my great and abiding love . . . my teacher in all things."² While the influence of George MacDonald, Andrew Caldecott, Attilio Massiono, and the tradition of the American comic book are all much more immediately definable in Sendak's work, the strength of his emotional response to William Blake is undeniable. In the same interview, he asserts Blake to be his favorite artist and goes on to explain that "of course, the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience tell you all about this: what it is to be a child—not childish, but a child inside your adult self—and how much better a person you are for being such."³

In this paper I want to suggest the usefulness of comparing Sendak's insights into childhood with Blake's and, as well, to compare their responses to the challenge of combining artistic vision and entertainment in a composite medium. For Blake, the state of childhood, with its innocent ignorance of destructive reason and of the processes of the adult's self-conscious rationalization and self-justification, represented a time when the human imagination was most potent. Adulthood too often brought the destruction of the powers of the imagination. Blake's reassertion of the power of the imagination was, of course, part of his rebellion against the reasonableness and moderation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century classicism. Imagination became a "Divine Vision" which allowed the poet to achieve by his own art what the child could do spontaneously—transcend the limitations of the senses and the restrictions of rational categorization. The child of the Songs of Innocence seeking to find out "Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee?" perceives an answer not by his powers of reasoning but by the strength of his love. The child's powers of perception, enjoyment, and responsiveness represent imagination unfettered by the constricting demands of rationalist philosophy, whether in Lockean reason or established theology. That such childhood perception could be re-created was, in a sense, evidence enough for Blake that the Divine existed in man.

Like Blake, Sendak draws unusual strength from the vision of imagination. Like Blake too, he uses the image of childhood to represent the liberation of his creativity: "An essential part of myself—my dreaming life—still lives in the potent urgent light of childhood."⁴ Commenting directly on his own work, he defines the relationship he has with "the kid I was"—an interesting phrase—who did not grow "up into me" but "still exists somewhere in the most graphic, plastic, physical way."⁵ The presence of this child is indispensable to his work, for as he asserts, "one of my worst fears is losing contact with him."⁶ To lose contact with this vision of childhood would be to destroy the substance of Sendak's creative talent—his extraordinary powers of evocative imagination and his sensitivity to the experience of childhood.

Both artists, as illustrators and authors, seek to use their composite form to express their vision through structural tension. Often their words may rationalize experience which may be either elaborated, or sometimes, contradicted by the illustrations, which bring out more fully the dreamlike, wordless level of the unconscious. Since Blake was obsessed with the intention of destroying the dualistic world of mind and body, time and space, he saw in the composite medium the possibilities of dramatizing "the interaction of the apparent dualities in experiences."⁷ Sendak on the other hand, because he was writing and illustrating children's books, was forced to the realization that a child's book is not simply read or rationally understood: "There's so much more to a book than just the reading; there is a sensuousness. I've seen children touch books, fondle books, smell books."⁸ Sendak is similarly conscious of certain contraries in human experience...