Maurice Sendak
"I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. What I dread is the isolation. I love the world. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready. " Maurice Sendak, 2011
“I just thought I was writing” is what Maurice Sendak said
when asked about why he chose to write childrens’ books. In fact his books caused controversy
when they were first published. Some deemed them too adult for children, but
Sendak believed that children shouldn’t be written down to. He believed that
his popularity arose from his younger audiences’ ability to sense something in
him and his work that they could trust. His most famous work Where the Wild Things Are is commonplace
in the American family library. At 82 Maurice Sendak died and is now in the
pantheon of literature legends like Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. He died
today, May 8; also the day that Shel Silverstein died. Like Silverstein, Sendak
was much more complicated than people seemed to know. He wasn’t unlike many
Jewish youth of his time; a childhood cloaked in the aftermath of the
Holocaust. Sendak lost all of his extended family in Europe. As a child he was
quiet. His parents couldn’t understand him. He was young, Jewish, gay, and
growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940’s. He sought refuge as a child in the arms
of his older brother who would act as his shield. Sendak would loose him while
still young.
He didn’t seem to bother with
pretense and in interviews was open and honest. He spoke and felt welcoming. He
could bring you back to a place where you remembered all those deep feelings
from your early years. Yet something in his face let you know now that he was
also a very sad man. Burdened for years over the secret of his sexuality that
he kept from his parents up until their death, his work allowed him to convey
much of who he really was. The isolated character in his work gave him another
face. In the past few years he’d come out more and we were privileged to see a
new side of him. He never had children, never wanted them; his partner died in
2007, his publisher and dear friend in 2011. He said in an interview close to
his death that he was alone. I was brought to tears. I didn’t know much about
him, though I read every book many times. Still like many others my recent awareness
of Maurice Sendak came from his interviews. But it made me sad to think that this man saw himself as essentially
lonely. His work is personal to me; I knew the books by heart. The characters
and themes wove themselves in and out of my life for years. There are millions
of people whose hearts are always open to and will always remember the
wonderful Maurice Sendak, artist and man.
Originally post on http://www.pattismith.net/
