"Fantasy is the Core..." - Sendak

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"Fantasy is the Core..." -Sendak Patricia Dooley "Children do live in fantasy and reality: they move back and forth very easily in a way that we no longer remember how to do . . . . Fantasy is the core of all writing for children, as I think it is for the writing of any book, for any creative act, perhaps for the act of living. My books don't come about by 'ideas' . . . they well up."1 Maurice Sendak's deep-seated Romanticism, explicit in this statement, is implicit in all his writing and drawing. His best work is expressive: it centers on the inner life of emotions, dreams, and fantasy. At the same time an intense devotion to the vehicle of this feeling, and to its embodiment in the "real" world, keeps him from the pitfalls of sentimentality. "In the way a dream comes to us at night, feelings come to me, and then I must rush to put them down. But these fantasies have to be given physical form, so you build a house around them, and the house is what you call a story, and the painting of the house is the bookmaking."2 Sendak is perfectly aware of the difficulty of such an orientation in a post-Freudian world. He is impatient with attempts to "analyze" his work, while acknowledging the "fine line" betweenunconscious imagery and conscious manipulation. In this respect, he considers children a peculiarly discriminating audience: they discern inauthenicity immediately. A child-audience, then, may impel the writer to more stringent discipline, but for Sendak it does not essentially alter the creative act. Sendak asserts that he does not "write for children specifically. I certainly am not conscious of sitting down and writing a book for children. I think it would be fatal if one did. So I write books."3 As an illustrator too, Sendak maintains this uncompromising attitude towards his work and its audience. "Those illustrators and writers who attracted me were the ones who did not seem at all to be hung up by the fact that their audiences were small people. They were telling the truth, just the way it was."4 Behind this position is an exalted view of the function of illustration in relation to a text. By the illustrations "we are embellishing, or we are enlarging, or we are involving ourselves in some very deep way with the writer of the book, so that the book (when it is finally illustrated) means more than it did when it was just written."5 The illustrator fulfills his responsibility to the audience by bringing reader and text together, by "opening up the words in a way that children at first did not see was possible."6 Sendak's model in this endeavor is Blake. For Sendak, "he created the perfect illustrated book because he enhanced and compounded his verbal meanings in his images."7 Click for larger view View full resolution Illus. by Maurice Sendak from WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. © 1963 by Maurice Sendak. By perm. Harper & Row, Pub. Sendak's sensitivity to the highly-charged inter-dependence of words and pictures conjoins with his own experience as a writer. He has said that he thinks of his own books first as words: "In fact, I don't think of the pictures at all."8 Elsewhere, disputing an interviewer's assertion that the illustrations for Where the Wild Things Are were more important than the story, Sendak reaffirmed the equal importance of [End Page 1] text and pictures in that book: one could as little be left to chance as the other. "I carefully selected the 384 words used."9 An examination of the mss of the book bears this contention out. Such an examination—not only of the mss but of various stages of the illustrations—can in fact be made, thanks to the scholarly offices of Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum. Since the late 60's the Rosenbach, by special arrangement with Sendak, receives all mss and artistic material connected with the production of his books. The collection now includes well over 2,000 pieces, among them an abundance of preliminary sketches, final drawings, and "dummy" books. The Rosenbach also...