Goodnight, Mr. Sendak

"Please don't go. We'll eat you up. We love you so."
from Where the Wild Things Are

It's hard to add anything new to the tributes to Maurice Sendak that have been flowing in since his death on Tuesday, so I'll just let the great one speak for himself. Here are some quotes that especially resonate with me.

"You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them."

"I believe there's no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do."

"A woman came up to me the other day and said, 'You're the kiddie-book man.' I wanted to kill her."

"Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters--sometimes very hastily--but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, "Dear Jim: I loved your card." Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, "Jim loved your card so much he ate it." That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

"There must be more to life than having everything."

"I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better."

"I'm not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody's gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won't have it, okay?"

Sendak Sunday

In a Nutshell: The Worlds of Maurice Sendak, a traveling exhibit, recently came to my local library. Yesterday I went to see it and to hear a talk on how Sendak connects with his Easter European roots. The lecturer put Sendak's work in historical context, showing how Jewish immigrants (such as Sendak's parents) kept one foot in the old world, through memories and by keeping in touch with relatives who remained in Europe.

The exhibit and talk brought home what John Cech, a professor of children's literature and author of a book about Sendak, once said in an interview in the New York Times. "His whole life's work in some way is an attempt to understand and fathom the complexity of that heritage, with its almost unbearable legacy of loss."

Here's a sampling of the fascinating tidbits I discovered:

In Where the Wild Things Are, the spread of the wild rumpus is the only scene in which the monsters take their eyes off Max. Their eyes are fixed on the Moon, that mysterious orb that can change men into wolves and other beasts of the night.

The Lindbergh kidnapping always held a special horror for Sendak. During the time the story was in the news, young Sendak made his father sleep on the floor next to his bed, a baseball bat at the ready. An uncle, hearing this, inquired "Philip, who would want your children?" Sendak took offense at his uncle's remark, and years later took his revenge, turning the man into the ugliest of the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are. Which one was that? He never said.

Sendak based the illustration of the character Atzel in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories on a photograph of Sendak's grandfather that once hung in his bedroom. While suffering the effects of scarlet fever as a boy, a delirious Sendak tried to climb into the frame. His mother snatched the photo of her father and, in her fear, tore it up to protect her son. Years later, after his mother had died, Sendak found the torn pieces stuffed into tissue paper and had the photo restored.

Gallimaufry Friday

As weeks go, this one has been kind of blah. Not bad, but not great either. I did manage to get a ton of work done, which definitely goes in the good column. Here are some scraps of interest I found this week while trolling the Web.

National Geographic posted a list of Ten Top Literary Cities. Edinburgh, Scotland, tops the list, followed by Dublin, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Portland, Washington, D.C., Melbourne, and Santiago, Chile. Sad to say, I've been to only one, London (where I visited Dickens House). My hubby, thanks to all his business travel, has visited half the list, having just returned from Dublin, where he viewed The Book of Kells, a lifelong dream. Which places have you been to?

Last month Maurice Sendak appeared in a two-part "Colbert Report" and if you haven't yet seen it, please do. It was laugh aloud funny. In the show, Colbert shows Sendak a children's book he wrote, entitled: I Am a Pole (And So Can You). Sendak dismissed the book as "terribly ordinary" (and he was being generous), but admitted, "The sad thing is I liked it." Well, hold on to your hats, I Am a Pole will be published in May by Grand Central Publishing.

And get this, according to a survey of 2,000 UK parents, one in five have put the kibosh of reading fairy tales to their young ones. The reason? They're too scary--and not politically correct. Hansel and Gretel? Abandoned children. Snow White? Dwarves aren't a nice term for little people. Cinderella? Too much housework done by a female. Rapunzel? Kidnapping. Goldilocks? The kid's a thief. Have these people never read Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment? Apparently not. My daughter's favorite tale hands down was "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids". Little goats left alone get tricked and swallowed up by a wolf, except for the youngest one. He tells his mother what has happened and she springs into action, using her smarts and sewing basket to free her kids and kill the wolf. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the story's appeal to a small child. No matter what happens, Mom's got your back. I feel sorry for the children of these parents who won't be able to resolve their fears because they never got the chance to hear these timeless stories.

This week saw my 1,000th tweet. I started Twitter a little over a year ago, not expecting to like it. Instead, I've found it an amazing resource, especially for people interested in children's literature. If you have a Twitter account (and if you don't, why not test the waters?), feel free to follow me @TheCathInTheHat. Happy tweeting!