Don't be afraid of the dark

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File photo Maurice Sendak (CP)

I remember being a first-year university student and analyzing the work of revolutionary children's author Maurice Sendak, who died last week at age 83. I was taking a course in children's lit, and the required Sendak reading was Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More To Life.

This melancholy and mysterious little book is about Jennie, a mildly depressive Sealyham terrier who heads out into an anxious world where everybody is either eating or being eaten. Jennie's surreal journey to a place called Castle Yonder -- which introduces her to an angry baby ("NO EAT!"), a hungry lion ("LION EAT!") and a tree staring gloomily into "the empty, frozen night" -- seems to be about the genesis of creativity or the beginning of love or the inevitability of death or the necessity of the examined life.

Or something.

Earnest undergraduate that I was, I tried every which way to get a handle on this book -- Freudian, Marxist, formalist. I deconstructed the thing until steam was coming out of my ears.

Years later, I read it to my four-year-old. "It's sad, but I like it anyway," he said. I think he understood it a lot better than I did.

Sendak's particular genius is the way he confounds adults while entrancing children. Parents often consider his books too confusing, too unsettling, too damn dark. (Why all that death? Why all that danger? How to explain the Auschwitz references?) His two biggest hits, In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are, have constantly popped up on lists of banned and "challenged" books.

Children, on the other hand, seem to respond, immediately and intuitively, to these strange, anarchistic works, where deep sorrow dances with wild joy. The stories don't make logical sense, but they possess the inescapable emotional momentum of dreams and fantasies. Kids get that.

Maybe, too, children recognize Sendak's vision of the often overwhelming nature of childhood emotions, that confusing welter of love and anger and need and rebellion. Sendak sees love not as flowery and sentimental but as ferocious and all-consuming, sometimes literally. ("But the wild things cried, 'Oh, please don't go / We'll eat you up we love you so.'")

And then there's the darkness. Sendak, who looked a lot like one of his square-faced, solid, slightly grumpy characters, knew about death and loss. His own childhood, as the Brooklyn-born son of Polish Jewish immigrants whose European family members were murdered in the Holocaust, was shadowed by horror. Sendak's father received the news that his village had been razed on the day of the 13-year-old Maurice's bar mitzvah.

Sendak believed that we do children no favours when we pretend that sadness and anger and fear don't exist. His books start with the assumption that kids already know most of the important things, most of the difficult things, and what they need is a way to work through this knowledge. Sendak also felt that kids are shrewder, tougher, more pragmatic than we give them credit for. "I refuse to lie to children," he once said, and he wasn't about to pander to what he called "the bulls--t of innocence."

In his art, Sendak follows the dark line of children's lit, the one that flows through the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and takes human suffering as a starting point. He also shares a lot with the two "grown-up" American writers he most admired, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville, whose talents are towering but prickly, odd, unpredictable.

I won't get mushy about Sendak's death, mostly because he'd hate that. I'll just quote Jennie, the Sealyham terrier: "As you probably noticed, I went away forever.... I can't tell you how to get to Castle Yonder because I don't know where it is. But if you ever come this way, look for me."

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 12, 2012 E3