The Immortality of Maurice Sendak

 
I sort of hate that I have two memorial blog pots in a row but it seems like the last 8 days have been a period of loss. First it was Adam Yauch (MCA of the Beastie Boys), then Wednesday we lost Vidal Sassoon, a man who raised himself up from abject poverty to incredible success due to his talent, creativity and marketing genius, revolutionized the hair industry and donated an enormous amount of money to charities. 

But today it's Maurice Sendak whom I want to honor.

It's hard to imagine there's a human being in this country over four who hasn't experienced a Maurice Sendak book. Where The Wild Things Are is what he's best known for but there are so many more stories to choose from. In The Night Kitchen, Outside Over There and so on. What I loved most about the books when I was a kid (and perhaps even now, as an adult) were the illustrations. They were sometimes dark, sometimes fantastical, and always enthralling. When I hear Sendak's name it's those images that come to mind first.

But although I did thoroughly enjoy his books as a kid it's the man himself that I grew to love. Over the last two or three years I've seen a handful of interviews he's done and I adore his irreverence, his complete rejection of the whole PC mindset, his nonconformist ways and I'm delighted that it was his refusal to conform that made his books so successful. Sendak gave us wild frolicking monsters rather than cutsie animals marching to a tame beat. He gave us kids who ran around naked in their dreams with pots on their heads rather than uniformed children learning to do their chores. He rejected the utopian depictions of childhood life in favor of stories that showed childhood as a time where fear and laughter, insecurity and audacity, independence and need all go hand in hand. Before I started watching those interviews I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of man Sendak was and I hadn't picked up one of his books in ages. But those interviews made me realize that there may have been a subtext to his books that I either missed as a child or (more likely) understood but didn't bother to analyze. Which is how it's supposed to be. Children know how they feel, they don't have to over-think it. Sendak understood that and he expressed that understanding in his books in a way that children continue to understand and love. And instead of trying to break it down for a thesis paper we, as children, just pick the books back up and reread them again and again.

The way it's supposed to be.

So thank you Maurice Sendak. Thank you for being a nonconformist. Thank you for being true to your artistic vision despite all the naysayers. Thanks for being you. Although you may have passed on your legacy ensures that you will be with us in a very real way every single day.

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