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An interview with Maurice Sendak.

Article Excerpt
ROGER SUTTON: Last night on that show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," one of the makeover experts made a joke about how the guy's wallpaper looked like Where the Wild Things Are. How does it feel to realize that your work--Wild Things in particular--is so much a part of public culture?

MAURICE SENDAK: So you watch trash TV, too. Well, it's been true for a fairly long time now, and, honestly, it doesn't have any effect whatsoever. I see that book almost entirely in personal terms: I think about what I was like at that time, I think about Ursula [Nordstrom]. I'm not very impressed with being a catchword every time someone needs something to be "wild." But then, it's my book, right? So maybe I'm due the right to take it a little bit for granted. I certainly have a right not to be impressed.

RS: I wonder, too, if not being impressed and taking it for granted are both symbols of the same thing: that for you it's also become part of the background.

MS: I do realize that Where the Wild Things Are has permitted me to do all kinds of books that I probably never would have done had it not been so popular. I think I took good advantage of that popularity to illustrate books that I passionately wanted to do without having to worry if they were commercial or not. That was a great opportunity. I can still do it based on that book. I've always wished that Herman Melville weren't so afraid that he would be remembered for the popular Typee instead of Moby-Dick. He said, I just know that on my tombstone it's gonna say, "Herman Melville, the author of Typee: The Land of the Wild Naked Women," or something. Well, that's what happened. But the fact is that Typee got him through a lot of books; it sold extremely well. You know, his first two novels were terrific boy-on-the-island sex novels. It's only when he met Nathaniel Hawthorne that he decided to allow himself to be driven and passionate and write a serious work of art. His subsequent work, the books we honor him for, were "failures" and cost him his popularity. I don't think Wild Things is my best book. But I don't care what they put on my tombstone; God knows I'm no Herman Melville, but I've been blessed with having been taken seriously and having profited from my work financially and personally. It's good.

RS: Does it ever feel like it gets in the way? Do you ever wish that like Doris Lessing you could publish something under a different name and see what people would think if they didn't know it was by you?

MS: I fantasize that all the time. I guess most authors do. But I know that when In the Night Kitchen came out it was a disappointment to people because it had nothing to do with Wild Things. Why couldn't I have just stayed put? The style was different, everything about it was different. The cartoons, the nakedness, everything seemed to be a rebuff of what I had "accomplished." But I had Ursula, who would never have let me do another Wild Things. Never. Never. She never suggested it, to her immense credit. And then the other books were notorious in one way or another, but they've all finally settled in nicely, couched on top of the Wild Things. When I first discussed Wild Things, Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There as a triumvirate, people said, "What's he talking about, he's just trying to pull his not-so-good books into the good book," but I always knew there would be three. It was a triumvirate.

RS: I think that those three books, in lots of different ways, allow people to use them as a lens on you. This is what matters to him. This is what he's about. These are the kinds of things he's afraid of; here's what makes him laugh. Obviously you've done lots of other books, but those three give people a way into the work as a whole.

MS: Everything is in those three books. Over the longevity of a man's life and work you get a sense of where his mind is, where his heart is, where his humor is, where his dread is. It's the best thing you could ask, that this kind of understanding of an artist doesn't happen posthumously. What more can you ask? Herman would have settled for a quarter of that.

RS: So what it's like, then, at midlife to have published Outside Over There, what...

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