Conversations with Maurice Sendak ed. by Peter C. Kunze (review)

The mantra about the most important aspect of real estate repeats “location, location, location.” The same could be said about the value of Conversations with Maurice Sendak, in that Peter Kunze has gathered, in a single volume, a strong selection of twelve of the major interviews done with the picture book author and illustrator. Most of these have been previously published or are accessible on the Web, but it is helpful to have them conveniently gathered together in one place. They range from the interview that appeared in the “Sendak at 75” special issue of Horn Book to an NPR radio interview, so Sendak fans can now recycle that big file of photocopies that they’ve collected over the years. With his 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak became the spokesperson for innovative picture books. During his successful fifty-year career, he gave numerous interviews, ranging from short newspaper pieces to Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs’s thirty-nine-minute documentary Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak (2010).

The dozen interviews selected by Kunze are arranged chronologically, from Nat Hentoff’s New Yorker profile in 1966 to Terry Gross’s elegiac Fresh Air interview in 2011, aired eight months before Sendak’s death. Two of the interviews included in the volume are previously unpublished: one conducted by Jerry Griswold in 1978 and another by Philip Nel, recorded in 2001. Although these two interviews are now in print in their entirety, most of their significant information had previously been published in Griswold’s The Children’s Books of Randall Jarrell (1988) and Nel’s Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (2012). Kunze acknowledges in his introduction that there are a number of other worthwhile and significant Sendak interviews that had to be excluded from the collection due to space or reprinting costs, but he does provide a list of additional interviews. Perhaps the most notable omissions are the series of interviews done by Leonard Marcus over several years that were published in his Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter (2012), as well as those conducted by Jonathan Cott. The latter’s absence most likely has to do with Cott’s recent publication of There’s a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak (2017), which draws heavily upon them.

When reading Conversations with Maurice Sendak, one can’t help thinking of and referring back to Sendak’s own collection, Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (1988), which reprints a number of his essays and speeches. Many of the interviews in Conversations with Maurice Sendak touch on the same topics, influences, and obsessions that Sendak examines in Caldecott & Co. Virginia Haviland’s “Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author” and “A Conversation with Walter Lorraine” appear in both collections, although Kunze notes that Caldecott & Co. provided a condensed version of Haviland’s interview, whereas he reprints it in full as originally published in The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress. In many ways, Conversations with Sendak and Caldecott & Co. function as opposite side of the same coin, in that Sendak the essayist confronts Sendak the interviewee in the more recent volume. There is some overlap between the various interviews, although Kunze works diligently to include those focusing on various aspects of Sendak’s wide-ranging career, including his work as set and costume designer for operas. The selected interviews present Sendak as not only a children’s book illustrator and author, but also an artist with expansive interests and influences. The cover photograph, for example, shows him working not on a picture book but on an advertisement for the American Express credit card.

Read as a group, this collection allows one to identify several key themes and subjects that Sendak addressed throughout his career. Music played a pivotal role in that career. As he explains to Patrick Rogers, “Music probably essentially is the most important art form in my life” (173). Sendak’s great...