”and now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
Music: The Cure: Disintegration (1989)
Children’s book author Maurice Sendak has just published what I hope is not his last children's book, and it’s been a thirty-year wait. Bumble-Ardy is about a nine-year old pig who throws himself a birthday party because he was tired of waiting for one (after all, his parents were slaughtered). I’ve not got my copy yet and plan to do so this week. If you’re like me---and many of you reading this are---Sendak has a stronghold on the youthful heart, since we all saw ourselves in Max. Adorable, mischief-making Max.
In a promotional blitz, Sendak has been doing rounds of interviews. He was on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air radio program last week, and today the Associated Press released a profile that covered much of the same ground. Bumble-Ardy is perhaps one of Sendak’s darkest books, engaging the topic of child abuse. In his characteristically charming, crusty manner, Sendak dismisses the claim this book---and many others---is inappropriate for children. He was more sharp-tongued when asked about Where the Wild Things Are back when the film version debuted. In an interview with Newsweek, he was asked about how he might respond to parents who believed the book and film were too scary for children:
"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. But it's not a question that can be answered."
Sendak’s concern is one I’ve heard echoed by a number of academics, most notably Jack Zipes, a retired professor at the University of Minnesota. I was fortunate of take a course with Jack on Walt Disney and fairy tales, and it was wonderful and has stayed with me for over a decade. At the time I took the course, the first Harry Potter novel came out, and Zipes was highly critical of it because he thought the book represented what the culture industry has done to fairy tales. Rather than introduce children to the horrors that will greet them in the world, after Disney, fairy tales metamorphosed into utopian visions that forestalled convictions in social justice and change. As he puts it in his classic study, Happily Ever After:
Children are exposed to the social design of reality from the moment they are born. Adult versions of “reality” are imposed on children to ensure that they are positioned physically, socially, and culturally to experience their own growth and life around them in specified ways. “Reality” is held up to them as empirically verifiable and as an inexorable force. Fairy tales have always balanced and subverted this process and offered the possibility of seeing reality as an illusion. As children become aware of the artifices and machinations of their lives, they gain the sense of alternatives for making their own lives more meaningful and pleasurable.
In other words, fairy tales are, as Uncle Burke said, “equipment for living” for young persons.
Sendak understands this, and his children’s books reflect it. Parents are not always good. People are not always good. Evil is not necessarily a monster, and abuse is not necessarily avoidable. When his book In the Night Kitchen was banned from school libraries because it featured an image of a naked boy crowing like a rooster, Sendak said it “was so fatuous, so incredible, that people would get so exercised by a phallus, a normal appendage to a man and a boy. . . . We live in a different country altogether. I will not say an improved version. No.” I’m teaching a graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, and we just engaged a similar outcry that Freud faced when he dared to suggest infants and adolescents were sexual creatures. The cultural struggle here is over the romanticization of children as “innocent" beings, and the subtext of the critique, of course, is that Sendak is a child abuser for daring to suggest that children should confront issues that make their parents uncomfortable.
It's the same subtext behind Bachmann's suggestion Perry's HPV vaccine order harms "innocent little girls." My, what ridiculous political claims are made in the name of a childhood innocence that is, well, an illusion---an illusion just as any fairy tale.
One thing that strikes me about Sendak’s recent interviews, however, is his explicit sadness. I admire him for sharing that sadness with his many audiences. Just like we are not supposed to introduce our children to human sexuality and human ugliness, we are also not allowed to be sad in public (remember prozac?). Yet he makes it a point to let people know he is sad, and that there is nothing wrong about it. He is not ashamed of his sadness. On the radio interview he breaks down into sobbing at times reminiscing about his longtime lover Eugene Glynn, and friends who recently died. “Everything is over. Everything that I called living is over. I’m very, very much alone,” he says in the AP piece. “I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They’re nowhere. I know that they’re nowhere and they don’t exist, but if nowhere means that’s where they are, that’s where I want to be.”
We're also not supposed to admit we do not believe in the immortal soul, perhaps the greatest illusion of all. Hats off to you, Mr. Sendak, for having the courage of your convictions.
Still, as much as I admire Sendak's public sadness, his statements are somewhat devastating to me, because his books brought me so much joy in my youth---and now. I just spent some time with my copy of Where the Wild Things Are and found myself laughing aloud when Max, christened King of the Wild Things, declares it’s time for the “wild rumpus to start!” I hope (and suspect) Sendak does not believe he is very much alone. So many of us wild things have been dancing with him for most of our lives!