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Reviewed by:
  • Conversations with Maurice Sendak ed. by Peter C. Kunze
  • A. Waller Hastings (bio)
Conversations with Maurice Sendak. Edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 232 pp.

It would be impossible to write the history of children's literature in the last half of the twentieth century without discussing Maurice Sendak. As editor Peter Kunze observes in his introduction to this volume, "for Sendak, the picture book was more than words and pictures; it was a place for synthesizing his artistic influences, for philosophizing on the nature of childhood and life itself, for [End Page 275] speaking candidly and honestly with both children and adults" (ix). He began as an illustrator of other people's writing, using various styles but developing his own artistic sensibility, then went on to write and illustrate his own books. Although he repeatedly said he was no great shakes as a writer, his books include truly poetic passages, especially in Where the Wild Things Are and Outside over There, and he experimented with comic-book style panels and dialog for In the Night Kitchen.

Unlike the humor of the other chief claimant to the title of "most influential picture book maker," Theodore Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), the touches of humor in Sendak's books are often subordinated to their psychological content. But in Higglety Pigglety Pop, or There Must Be More to Life, a symbolic tribute to Sendak's beloved dog, the mock-epic quest of the recently deceased Jennie features a farcical dramatic performance. In one of this volume's essays, Sendak calls Higglety Pigglety Pop "the only funny book I ever wrote" (103), but that may be false modesty. Certainly, the caricatures of Laurel and Hardy in the dream world of In the Night Kitchen, along with the book's references to Mickey Mouse, Winsor McCay, and other pop-culture icons, are meant to be taken humorously. Even where Sendak would have us believe that the primary impetus for the monsters of Where the Wild Things Are was his recollection of overly demonstrative Jewish relatives, the contrast between the softly rounded monster images and their "terrible teeth" and "terrible claws" has always struck me as funny rather than scary.

Kunze has curated a dozen interviews with Sendak that cover almost the full range of his mature work, from Nat Hentoff's 1966 New Yorker article to an excerpt from Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview in 2011, shortly before his death the next year. One of the risks in collecting a series of interviews with the same author is that there will be too much repetition; similar questions get asked and produce similar responses. There is a little bit of that here, but not much; the pieces Kunze selected are frequently keyed to new ventures by Sendak or to novel approaches, as when Glenn Edward Sadler brings the author together with Dr. Seuss to allow them to go back and forth about their very different approaches to both art and writing.

In another interview, previously unpublished, children's literature scholar Philip Nel talks with Sendak about his relationship with Ruth Krauss, author of several books illustrated by Sendak, and her husband Crockett Johnson. The interview, collected by Nel as he worked on a biography of the couple, provides much detail on Sendak's early professional life and how he began to [End Page 276] change the culture of book illustration. The dumpy children Sendak used to illustrate Krauss's A Hole Is to Dig are an early sign of Sendak's subtle humor. Discussing the work of a different artist who illustrated one of Johnson's books, Sendak says:

If the story was a bit strange—and it is totally original and open—then her job was to obscure it and make it look as banal as possible. That's what she was taught to do. … And that's what art school teaches you. And if you don't have the instinct or the intuition, because you should be the guardian of the text, and you should be the backseat driver, you have no business intruding on the text—none.

(127)

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