You Make My Heart Sing

Most great children's literature, despite its greatness, is still an open book. As adults, we know why these books work. We see and recognize the masterful, rhyming whimsy in Dr. Seuss' greatest hits; the bursting-at-the-seams anarchy and just a hint of loneliness and lost-ness in the Eloise series (minus the dreadful Eloise at Christmastime, that is); the simple-minded, almost soulless innocence of Curious George.

All these books, while unique in their tone and content, and while groundbreaking in their day, are transparent enough. They're not quite formulaic, but they were written in an idiom that is fairly easy to copy, both for the original author and for the epigones following in his or her footsteps.

I know only three exceptions to this general rule: Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, a book that has occasionally forced me to pretend I had something in my eye; Alice in Wonderland, awash in odd imagery and day-glo allegories; and Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. (Admittedly, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon deserves at least an honorable mention here.)

Of these, to me, Wild Things is the most impenetrable mystery. It's Heart of Darkness for toddlers. It stirs something deep in me, and presumably in generations of other readers, that I cannot put into words. I'm tempted to compliment the book by saying that it is pure poetry, but that's a meaningless descriptor — especially for someone who, like me, has never cared for poetry that much.

Wild Things is, I believe, irreproducible. It appears fueled not by a calculated "what if" (what if a little girl lived in the Plaza Hotel, what if an explorer brought an African chimp to America), but by one author taking a kernel of an idea and recklessly letting it take him where it wants, giving in to the pull of his intuition and subconsciousness.

There's no internal logic to Where the Wild Things Are, no overt meaning (though lots of hidden ones), let alone (shudder) a message: rather, the book is a danger-skirting fever dream that Sendak rides without holding back, capturing a wisp of inspiration that can't be willed to return.

Sendak is an admirer of Herman Melville, and once said of Melville's books

"There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me."

I doubt there's higher praise for any author. It applies equally to Sendak himself.

Whether Spike Jonze's movie will do justice to Sendak's masterpiece, I don't know — I'm prepared for the film to be somewhere between a glorious flop and this generation's Kazaam.

So why am I even writing about Sendak on Nobody's Business? Because the irascible author tells scared little children to go fuck themselves. Well, almost.

Sendak told this week's edition of Newsweek that he would "not tolerate" parental concerns about the book being too scary. "I would tell them to go to hell," Sendak said. And if children can't handle the story, they should "go home," he added. "Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like."

That's a whole new level of caution-to-the-wind curmudgeonry. I have to say, I admire it a helluva lot more than the bromides of professional audience-panderers like Disney Corp (the a-holes who turned A.A. Milne's beautiful Winnie the Pooh into a godforsaken saccharine cuddleball).

I also like imagining how Sendak's remarks will rile the mollycoddlers and the nannies who insist that children's entertainment must be exclusively wholesome and educational (the kind of people who are not above trying to ban his books, such as In the Night Kitchen, from public libraries).

We need Wild Things, like Sendak. Yeah: Wild Things, too.

Comments

[Jim Lebeau]

Did you notice that in his Walrus and Carpenter poem that the author of Alice in Wonderland predicts the confluence of global warming and swine flu. I quote "of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings".

I do not know what else he predicted, I leave that up to those far wiser than I.

P.S. Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling are great for kids.

[Namnezia]

Interesting post... I know my comment comes a bit late, but this reminds me of an interview with Sendak on NPR in which he denies ever writing children's books. He states that he is writing about his childhood experiences with his foreign relatives telling horror stories about what was happening to the Jews in Europe. And his books reflect his vision of things as a child. When you read "In the Night Kitchen" in this light it makes for a much scarier, darker book.