The Wild Things Maurice Sendak Says

By KEN GORDON

So I’m talking to Maurice Sendak on the phone. Not sure where to begin with the septuagenarian genius of American children’s literature, I mumble something about how the people who produce contemporary Jewish kids’ are fairly conservative. (I mean, of course, conservative with a lower-case “c.”) We’re talking, I tell him, about an extremely small market, and authors and publishers don’t feel they can take many risks.

I don’t mention this to Sendak, but this idea comes from Ellen Frankel, the CEO and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society, who emailed me weeks before to say that Jewish children’s literature is “a niche within a niche,” and that “the more ‘Jewish’ the subject matter and perspective expressed in these books, the smaller that market becomes.” I’m also echoing Anna Olswanger, a literary agent who recently published the terrific and unusual kids’ book Shlemiel Crooks, who explained that there isn’t “enough risk-tasking, both on the part of writers and probably on the part of editors. Most of the Jewish-themed manuscripts I receive [as an agent] are dull: they have a flat voice and the content is didactic.” Then the creator of the indelible In the Night Kitchen shuts me up by talking about “the high level of bullshit in America.” When I stop laughing, Sendak adds that it takes a lot of courage to speak up, and that people didn’t want to risk losing their jobs. “They know they have to turn out shit.”

Sendak, who has collaborated with everyone from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, says he doesn’t believe in “Jewish books for Jewish children. I believe in books for children.”

He speaks about how the Jewishness in his work is mostly sub-textual. Says that if you don’t sneak it in, librarians will “chop it in half.” This seems to be an important issue: if you make your story subordinate to some big theological point, you’re going to have trouble engaging the (secular Jewish) reader. What does William Carlos Williams say? That’s it: “no ideas but in things.”

“I stand out of the official Jewish thing,” he later says. “When I was bar mitzvahed, that was it. I wasn’t gonna hear [any more] about Him. Childhood was a nightmare because of Him.” Him, of course, was God. As Sendak’s friend Tony Kushner once wrote, “Like most Jews, he is shadowed always by the Holocaust. Relatives of his who didn’t make it to America died in the camps. In much of his work, obeisance is made to these ghosts.”

“There was a real deep dark fury in me,” said Sendak into the phone. “No shit,” I thought, slipping into the Great Man’s scatological mode and mood.

We talk about The Carrot Seed, a 1945 classic by Ruth Krauss with pictures by Crockett Johnson, which happens to be one of my young kids’ favorite books. I see it as a parable about children who have more faith than their parents. (In some ways, it’s a version of Emerson’s “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s.”) In it, a little boy in what looks like a yarmulke plants a carrot seed, and his mom, dad, and big brother—all of whom are hatless—tell him that it won’t “come up.”

At the end of the book, the carrot does indeed come, “just as the little boy had known it would.” (It’s as huge as those radioactive vegetables they grew on Gillian’s Island. He hauls it around in a wheelbarrow.) Sendak said that he was best friends with Johnson—and that Crockett’s real name was Dave—and that they were “hanging out” when Johnson was illustrating The Carrot Seed. At the time, Sendak told me, he was in therapy, and so all he saw was that, at the end of the book, the little boy “gets the biggest dick of all.”

More laughter.

Of course, it hasn’t all been knee-slapping. Sendak told me that, back in the ‘60s, he and Philip Roth became friends because they were both considered shandas, Roth for Portnoy’s Complaint and Sendak for Where the Wild Things Are. To which I found myself saying: “Well, if you’re gonna be a shanda, be a best-selling shanda.”

Finally, he got to talking about the difference between anti-Semitism when he was a youngster and how it is now. He says that it hasn’t changed much, and told me this interesting anecdote. He has a kind of—don’t know what to call it; a fantasy?—in which some anti-Semite comes to his door with a shotgun and asks, “Are you a Jew bastard?” To which he answers: “I am a Jew, and you’re the bastard. Fire away, fuckface.”

The wild things Maurice Sendak says….