9 months ago
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As long as we’re shamefully still in a moment of rampant, draconian book bans from the far right, I feel it’s a good time to remind those conservatives of Maurice Sendak: the beloved children’s author/illustrator and beacon of marriage values, having been with the same partner for 50 years. The fact that said partner was Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist of the male variety… well they can read up on that detail for themselves. (Because you have to read in order to learn things.) Although Sendak passed away in 2012, the executive director and curator of his estate have just retrieved a count-along picture book from the 1960s vaults and released it posthumously. I can’t wait to see how conservatives object to this story of a boy pulling rabbits out of a hat:
Counting rabbits: In Ten Little Rabbits, a new posthumous picture book by Maurice Sendak, Mino the Magician waves his wand and, poof, a rabbit appears. Another wave and out springs a second and then a third. By the fourth rabbit, Mino yawns. By the sixth, he’s annoyed. Ninth, he’s exasperated, as the rabbits crawl all over him. So back they go, one rabbit at a time, giving readers the chance to count up and back again by the time Mino is done. … Once again, Sendak’s knack for capturing just about every kind of emotion is on full display, 12 years after his death, in this book being brought to the public for the first time.
Portrait of an artist as a young boy: Sendak fans will immediately recognize Mino. While their names and adventures might be different, the boys in Chicken Soup With Rice, Where The Wild Things Are, Once Was Johnny — Mino, Max, Pierre, Johnny — and other Sendak stories look very similar. “Well, he’s Maurice,” says Lynn Caponera, executive director of The Maurice Sendak Foundation. “He” also didn’t look like most of the other boys in children’s books in the 1950s, says curator Jonathan Weinberg. … “The characters of my earlier books are really only sort of cockamamie self-portraits,” Sendak told Terry Gross, host of WHYY’s Fresh Air in 2003. “Unfortunately, I look like Max and the Wild Things, as children tell you in their brazen way. ‘Oh, Mommy, he looks like the Moishe, the big, wild thing.’ And you just want to crack them.”
An industrious night owl: When Caponera was 18, she moved into an apartment on the property and helped take care of the house and the dogs. She quickly learned that Sendak was a night owl. Her apartment was right underneath his studio. “So I would hear him all night whistling and playing music,” she recalls, “And you could hear when things were going right. He would be whistling like crazy. So like actually whistling while he worked.” She adds it was “a really wonderful way to come up in the morning and see what he did.” Weinberg adds that Sendak, “could whistle entire operas from beginning to end” — a claim that is difficult to fact-check. But some of his fantasy sketches actually note on the back what song he was whistling when he was working on them.
His studio has been preserved: Slippers on the floor, sweater draped over the chair, art supplies on his desk. “Cheap…cake paints” like the kind you’d “use in kindergarten,” [Caponera] notes. Among the many photographs by Sendak’s desk is one of Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired the main character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. She doesn’t look too happy; Sendak loved it. “Maurice used to say that he really identified with that photo because, you know, being an illustrator is a very lonely job,” Caponera says. “You’re usually hours and hours doing tedious work at a drawing table by yourself. So he liked to think that Alice was sort of looking over him and that she looked so dejected because she’s so tired.”
The origins of Ten Little Rabbits: He initially thought the count-along picture book would be part of Nutshell Library, his 1962 collection of pocket-size books Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup With Rice, One Was Johnny, and Pierre. But “he decided to go in a different direction because the other books in Nutshell Library are much more elaborate,” Weinberg says. Eventually, in 1970, Sendak turned Ten Little Rabbits into a 3.5 x 2.5-inch pamphlet for a fundraiser for Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum.
Between his being a night owl and loving a photo that captures someone in misery, Maurice Sendak is a man after my own heart. What a fabulous situation Caponera fell into as an 18-year-old! I smell a film script in there, the young woman coming of age set against the curmudgeonly misfit. Meanwhile, I beseech the irascible, creative, slightly mad artists out there: I am available and willing to be adopted into your home’s mother-in-law suite. I’ll be honest, my housekeeping is abysmal. But I’m great with dogs and am a proficient watercolorist with training in oils as well, so I would be helpful in art studio maintenance. I can also look dejected and tired on command. Easily.
Photos are from Maurice Sendak at a 2004 appearance in NYC and at the 2009 premiere of Where The Wild Things Are. He is also shown in 1982. Credit: Kristin Callahan/Avalon and Getty
