Remembering Maurice Sendak
“Where the Wild Things Are” taught me how to employ imagination purely as a survival tactic, a refuge from droning schoolwork, nagging parents and brothers and―now that I’m older―droning desk work and eye-rolling social obligations that seem to roll over me on a daily basis. It’s hard to control external forces, but Maurice Sendak helped teach me that it’s your own obligation to control how you deal with what comes your way. Max sails to another world, conquers all, and returns home for a hot supper. No wonder he continues to resonate with the world.
Most of our lives are spent alone in thoughts, wondering where to go next in a world that is largely indifferent. Sendak captured our mind’s spiky cocktail of terror and bewilderment with a fearless intensity, not just in “Where the Wild Things Are” but also “In the Night Kitchen”, “Brundibar”, and dozens of other classics. His work is representative of a group of people who remain too transfixed by their own worries and curiosities to simply run away from them. And it cuts deep: One kid loved his work so much that he decided to eat it.
Born a lower class Jew in 1928 and raised during the Depression and through the Holocaust and World War II, Sendak kept his homosexuality away from his parents out of fear of disappointing them. The Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder of 1932, Sendak once said, worked as an unintended influence, a real-life nightmare that made him realize the instability and unpredictable nature of life. Likewise, a baby is hauled away by goblins in “Outside Over There.”
Exposed to the realities of life from the get-go, he later single-handedly ripped children’s stories out of the innocent fairytale realm and placed them on a plateau on par with reality, fear be damned. He didn’t do it for shock value (which he sometimes unfairly found himself in hot water for), but out of a profound respect for the courage of young people and their fresh worldviews. Those monsters in Max’s adventure? They were based on his relatives, who would cower over his crib when he fell gravely ill as a child. It’s no small coincidence that Max overpowers and rules them.
It’s scary out there, but his characters never stayed scared―or inside their rooms―for long. Like Max, Mickey from “In the Night Kitchen” was also a fearless explorer of the corners of his own imagination, escaping the noisy confines of his bedroom to embark on an all-night baking adventure throughout New York City. And like Max, Mickey returns home after his surreal travels, glad to be back but all the wiser for exploring his innate curiosity. The same can be said for Sendak, only he left us all the wiser as well. I’d offer my own words here, but it’s hard to imagine a more fitting castoff than the one he once offered to us all as words of encouragement:
And he sailed off through night and day
In and out of weeks
And almost over a year
To where the wild things are
