Wild Rumpus

he sails in and out of weeks and almost over a year! so obviously the moon can’t stay in the same phase — that would be silly

my copy is at my sister’s so the actually-looking-at-the-pictures bit of the “research” will have to wait — but speculation is also a kind of research….

max sails through a day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year — tellingly, no mention is made of months! what monthly moon-symbolised thing might have eased max’s mother’s mood about his multiple mischief-making?

It’s not so much that the Wild Things are Jewish as that Maurice Sendak’s imagination is Jewish. VIrtually all his characters – human and animal – have Jewish features, because he creates them out of his memories of his childhood, which was entirely Jewish. And why shouldn’t the Wild Things look Jewish?

Where the Wild Things Are was the first book I really remember, and it was the first book that I bought for my first child. The best find we ever made was the video/DVD version of the story which uses the Sendak stills and a lovely narration with accompanying music to tell the story, along with In the Night Kitchen (a book which I still find bizarrely lingers on lists of books that people have tried to have banned from public libraries) and other Sendak work.

Both my boys know the story by heart now, and I think it is a serious contender for best ever illustrated book for children. I will be interested to see the Spike Jonze version of the book which apparently had to be entirely reshot because the original director’s cut was too scary.

I’ve always thought one of the nice things about CT is the depth and breadth of familiarity here with canonical literature.

…and it was still warm.

For me the defining moment is where the walls are no longer there: somehow in the preceding panel the forest is decorated onto the room, but when the walls fade out the room is finally quite lost.

And what of the moon in Harold and the Purple Crayon (a psychodrama of control and self-definition if ever I saw one)?

Lunar eclipse (just finishing)?

It’s a wonderful story, but my abiding memory of it as a child was of how very sad it was – that he renounced the kingdom of the Wild Things and returned home. It seemed unbearably wrong at the time for him to do that, but oddly my kids now don’t seem to think it’s a sad story at all – they’re just impressed that his dinner is still hot when he gets home. Putting my psychoanalyst’s hat on, I presume that my children feel more secure at home than I did, about which I guess I should feel glad.

Slightly OT but regarding Sendak: If you have not seen Sendak’s illustrations for The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm (Powell’s), you’re in for a real treat. If you know a kid–or an adult–who loved books like Wild Things or Night Kitchen and is ready for some Grimm tales in all their original violence and gore, this is the book. There are about two dozen Sendak illustrations throughout, and most of the twenty-seven stories (translated by Lore Segal) are not well-known (or known at all) to English-speaking readers. I haven’t seen and can’t speak to the quality of the in-print one-volume edition, but the 1973 two-volume slipcased edition is really wonderful and reasonably-priced on the used market.

By the way, don’t believe Farrar, Straus & Giroux when they say the reading level for the stories is 4-8. Most parents would not want to read the title story (for example) to any four-year-old I know. Or the original versions of ‘Snow White’ or ‘Hansel & Gretel’, for that matter, also included in the collection.

My recollection, from my 1950’s New York City childhood which included Sendak’s “A Hole is To Dig” illustrations, was that Sendak’s kids, even in those tiny scratchy black ink line illustrations, were recognizably the kids around me in Queens, and not “Dick and Jane”; they were city kids, and looked like they were from a “neighborhood of mixed ethnicities”. Fifty years later, they’re still wonderful and energetic “kids”.