Naming the Beasts

I can’t remember when I first encountered Maurice Sendak. My childhood memories are a patchwork quilt of image stills, smells and emotions. I can't put my finger on much of anything. But I remember leafing through the pages of Where the Wild Things Are, time and time again, reading about and drawing Wild Things. One specific scene imprinted on my mind – my mother has it on video somewhere, which helps – has me looming over a glass table, dead-centre of the room of my grandparents’ house where my family spent Christmas every year (we simply called it ‘the barn’) drawing a picture of a tubby, hairy, round-eyed monster with the horns of a juvenile goat. While I was drawing, my family orbited, oblivious of me, and I of them. I’d been drawing since I was three years old, so they were all quite used to me retreating into my own island wilderness on occasion. It was perfectly fine, and just because I wasn’t joining in, doesn’t mean I wasn’t ecstatically happy. I would return from my retreat all the better for having created and executed my monsters, even if the battle only took place in my sketchbook.

The archetypal metaphor of the ‘monster’, ‘beast’, ‘inner demon’, is as ancient as any tree you’d care to climb and any rock you’d care to hit with a stick to mimic a drum. We find it in the Bible, ‘the thorn in the flesh’. We find it in mythologies all over the world, from Celtic to African. Maurice Sendak wrestled that monster to the ground, hauled it over his shoulder into the 20^th Century, and then resurrected it for children. Put it this way: we might never have had The Gruffalo, or any other contemporary monster tale, without Sendak; and if we had, they might not have been so unashamedly frightening. Spike Jonze’s 2009 movie Where the Wild Things Are didn’t impress everyone. Many children were bored or horrified, and there was the predictable slew of complaints from parents who were hoping that the film would teach them Victorian morality, as children’s stories are supposed to do. (Isn’t it funny, by the way, that we still have that expectation, when Sendak is hardly the only children’s writer to have subverted it? I only have to name that anarchic pairing, Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake.) Anyway, I digress. When I read that these complaints were coming in, from parent and film critic alike, I couldn’t help thinking that Sendak had seen all this before; for him, this would have just been business as usual, as it is for many writers and illustrators pushing the boundaries of children’s literature.

During art A-Level, one of my projects involved comparing the dream-like work of artists Marc Chagall, (and because I insisted) William Blake and Maurice Sendak. All three artists captured what happens when we close our eyes and envision life as it is, and as it might be in another realm. Salvador Dali – like all Surrealists – was interested in the dream-life as well, but his work was always far too rigidly-drawn and photographic for me. I was stubborn: if I was going to draw from my imagination, I wasn’t about to reach for the kind of perfection – in anatomy, still life, landscape – that I knew I’d need to if I was going to imitate Dali. Anyway, during my Art A-Level, I was introduced to everything Sendak. I made sure I read all of his other books, including In the Night Kitchen, every bit as well-drawn and written as Wild Things (even if I was always more interested in eating, and being eaten, than cooking). I studied his drawing style hard, imitating cross-sections like the child peeking over sunflowers and pointing into the distance on the front cover of Outside Over There. I mastered some techniques and tricks that have never left me, including how to overlay an inked, penned or painted colourwash with complex, fine-lined crosshatching. My first book illustration will be published later in the year thanks to Sidekick Books and Bird Book II. I won’t say too much about it now, but this cropped sneak-preview of the image shows that Sendak’s crosshatching is still alive and well in my work:

I realised that the connections between centuries-old William Blake, who I’d loved since GCSE, and Sendak, were staggering; both of them deserved to be known as visionary artists as well as writers, and both were interested in Innocence and Experience: what happens when the smooth skin of childhood begins to grow fur and claws, begins to howl at the moon, and no doctor or faith healer can reverse the process of devolution. I first learned of Sendak’s Jewish American heritage. I read that when Where the Wild Things Are first hit shelves in the sixties, parents of all backgrounds protested against it. They didn’t want to find the book in libraries, especially school libraries where any lack of morality, any portrayal of unchecked anger and allusion to cannibalism (‘I’ll eat you up, I love you so!’), might influence their children.

But I also remember reading that when Sendak was in the process of creating the Wild Things, it was family which he had in mind. The monsters represented his own: neurotic, argumentative, outrageously immature and difficult, ultimately a big bundle of love and furry comfort – with teeth. If I remember rightly, that famous line, “Oh please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so”, was a paraphrase of Sendak’s aunt, who would say ‘I’ll eat you up!’ while pinching his cheeks until they were red-raw. This is one of the many things that Jonze’s movie got exactly right; the archetypal nature of family personalities. We all know what they are like, and we have all wanted to scarper from them. This is not immoral, this is real, and it’s OK. Ultimately, Sendak does teach us morality. He teaches us what love is like; because yes, the Wild Things are volatile loose cannons, but they are also Max’s family. And we don’t choose our family. Not only that. Max retreats on his pilgrimage (it’s too complex to call a ‘tantrum’) for a short time, during which he remains constantly aware of his mother, even as he sails away from her, ‘over a year / and in and out of weeks / and through a day’. He finally tells his Wild Things, his demons, that he must go back into the familiar, the domestic, despite how much fun they’re having, because he is lonely and wants to be ‘where someone loved him best of all’. Once there, he is rewarded with his supper, which is waiting for him, still hot. This is the parable of the Prodigal Son, only the Father has become the Mother.

Sendak was never one to avoid a controversy, and whether or not this gender reversal was meant (it could have been, but I'm speculating), we know this: Sendak was concerned with living as an outsider, an ‘other’, a non-normative, a Wild Thing. And these are the children, I would think, who were most impacted by his work. In a 2008 article in The New Yorker, Sendak revealed that he was gay and had been living with a partner for several years (how many, I can’t remember).* I hate that he felt he had to keep that information under wraps, but I know why; I know something about the world he moved in, the walls he had to move in order to breathe there. For a child born with Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus, an adolescent who wanted to be a writer and illustrator when he grew up, and now an adult who got his wish – in many ways, not all – Sendak has been more than an inspiration. He’s been a guide. His books and drawings taught me how to live in my body, be an ‘other’, and be fine with it. More than ‘fine’; somewhere, there is a Wild Rumpus starting for anyone who can identify as an outsider. For all these reasons, my heart ached when I heard that Maurice Sendak had died, and it still aches today. I grieve him, even as I can see the Wild Rumpus that erupted upon his arrival in heaven. I grieve him even as, in my mind’s eye, I can see everyone I’ve grieved, joining in that Wild Rumpus with him, their faces lit by a campfire that will never be extinguished. This quote, from the New York Times, says everything: ‘Some of Mr. Sendak’s relatives died in the Holocaust, and from an early age he was acquainted with death. “I cry a lot because I miss people,” he once said. “They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.” ’ I never got to meet Maurice Sendak. It doesn't matter. I miss him.

*I haven’t researched any of this; I’ve written it all from memory. Bite me!

An abnominal for Jón “Jónsi” Þór Birgisson

Þis brig

ninon jib;

Þis born ibis rib

no brió bring rós iris

Þis joss-gnósis

bong-grin

nó Þin jingo

sorb orris nigrosin

I join in Þis song o’

gibbon-origin gó

nó sin Þorn nog

rosin iron sign

I join bóÞ

griss—n—bison

bóÞ

job—n—boss

bóÞ

son—n—biro in Þis song

( )—n—( ) noÞings

rising norÞ

The Icelandic letter Þ – pronounced something like ‘th’ – has no equivalent in English. My use of it in English words is obviously ‘wrong’. I have taken this liberty in the spirit of irreverent fun, and to reflect the musical innovation of Jonsi and Sigur Ros themselves, specifically in the constructed lyrical ‘language’ Volenska (or ‘Hopelandic’) used throughout the album ( ). Effectively glossolalia, Volenska has no semantic meaning but contains some of the sounds found in Icelandic. The poem as a whole, I hope, weaves between sense and lyrical non-sense, evoking the man and the band in its broken textures and images.

Naming the Beasts

Pages

Monday, 14 May 2012

More Sendak Homages

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

Sailing Back Over the Years: Remembering Maurice Sendak

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

RIP

Thursday, 26 April 2012

26. Untitled Fragment

25. Jib Þrongs Jinns Sir

24. Deviancy as God

23. A Dab-toothed Grin Virus