The Dark World of Maurice Sendak : He Hates Happy Endings, His Days Are Filled With Dread and He Comforts Himself With Mozart, Melville and Mickey Mouse

IT’S LATE AFTERNOON in a brightly lit dressing room in the basement of the Los Angeles Music Center, and Maurice Sendak is slumped wearily in a chair, overseeing the fittings of chorus costumes for next week’s opening of “Idomeneo.” Suddenly, a young man with dark hair and glasses, the last fitting of the day, announces to the half-dozen costume fitters and wardrobe attendants that the open-front sailor’s jerkin they’ve put on him is totally unacceptable.

“There is too much skin showing,” he insists. “I want to wear a T-shirt.”

For a second, everyone is stunned. A T-shirt? For Mozart?

“Who designed this costume anyway?” he says in a tone suggesting that whoever did has clearly lost his mind.

“I did,” Sendak says.

“Singers don’t have the bodies for something like this,” the man says. “There is too much skin showing. I want to wear a T-shirt.”

“No,” says Sendak firmly. “That would be entirely out of character.”

But the young man is unabashed. “What do I play in this opera anyway?” he demands, “Some kind of fairy?”

The room is frozen in a shocked tableau. “That’s a very offensive question,” Sendak says. “It doesn’t deserve a reply.”

“I don’t know this opera,” the singer continues. “What am I supposed to be anyway?”

“You’re a sailor.”

“What time period?”

“Combination 18th Century and classical. You’re just coming back from the siege of Troy.”

The man seems ready to criticize Mozart’s plot as well, but by this time the costumers have brought out his cape, which covers his chest and leaves him nothing more to complain about.

After the singer leaves, the head fitter hurries over to Sendak: “He’s young,” she soothes. “He doesn’t understand how it’s will look. He doesn’t have your vision.”

“Something like that always happens,” says Sendak bitterly. “Everything is going great. You totally let down your guard and then some mosquito comes along and ruins everything.”

The worst part was that the singer felt no shame for not having read the opera.

“Aggghhh!” he says, stomping off in disgust. It is one more instance of what he’s long contended--that agony, defeat and disaster are the normal human condition. “The bad things always happen,” he says. “The good things--they’re the inexplicable.”

MAURICE SENDAK at 62 is a short, neatly bearded man who wears comfortable, old sneakers, brushed-cotton jeans and walks with a cane. In conversation, he comes across as a concerned, low-key curmudgeon, direct and candid, but with a perpetual air of anxiety that seems to say, “If I don’t worry, who will?”

His preoccupied manner notwithstanding, Sendak is an artist recognized around the world, famous in part for the 10 or so opera sets he’s designed since 1980, but mainly for the 80 children’s books he’s illustrated during the past 40 years, including 19 he also wrote.

“He is the yardstick by which all other children’s illustrators in the world are measured,” says Michael di Capua, his longtime editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “He is the standard.”

“If one hesitates to call (Sendak) the foremost illustrator in contemporary America or the most accomplished draftsman, it is only because those terms set too narrow a limit on the nature of his achievement,” wrote New York Times critic John Gross in 1988. “He is an artist, nothing less; an artist with a powerful vision.”

He is also an artist with a broad repertoire and an ever-evolving style. Sendak started his career by imitating every important children’s artist since the 1850s, and made their work his own. Over the years, his style has become increasingly mature, complex and surrealistic.

Despite his popularity--at the 1988 Bologna Book Fair he was treated as if he were a rock star--there’s little of the self-important celebrity about Sendak. Unlike many established artists, he is surprisingly accessible; he has no secretary and even though he positively abhors the telephone, he seems incapable of not answering it. He lives 70 miles north of New York City on the outskirts of Ridgefield, Conn., in a stone house that dates in part from 1790. It is filled with original art (including Winslow Homer and William Blake), first-edition books by writers such as Herman Melville and Henry James and one of the most extensive collections anywhere of Mickey Mousiana (Disney’s creations were his first love.).

“Please don’t write I live in the woods under the mushrooms,” Sendak says. “That gets so boring.”

There is a bit of fondness for the 19th Century about Sendak. As he readily admits, he’s not an artistic innovator--”that’s not my talent.” His “household gods” are Melville and Mozart. Sendak refuses to buy a personal computer--he writes on yellow legal pads--for fear that it might take the agony out of writing. “There should be agony,” says Sendak, who has taken as long as five years to finish a story. “I’m a firm believer in agony.”

From someone who writes children’s books, such pessimism may seem surprising, but, he argues, there is nothing particularly sunny or carefree about childhood. Contrary to the popular notion, children are neither innocent nor fragile, Sendak believes. Because of their powerlessness, they can’t afford to be. Childhood is a time of great passion, fear and trauma. And, he says, adults don’t do children any favors by ignoring their deep emotional life and feeding them half-truths and sociologically approved self-help books for dealing with “pimples and small breasts.”

“Everything relating to them is condescending and faintly contemptuous. I’m not an expert on childhood. It is not my profession. It is only my memory and instincts (that I rely on). But the best fairy tales, Grimm and the rest, are great because they give power to children,” he says.

The importance of empowering children is what Sendak’s work is all about. In his unsentimental fantasies, children experience a wide range of emotions, from resentment of a sibling to fear of abandonment--but transformed through the mirror of his art. In a 1981 review of Sendak’s somber and even “troubling” “Outside Over There,” the Economist described him as “an innocent gone berserk,” “a genius with the magic of madness” and a “masterly” artist with “the key to the back of beyond.”

Some critics, in fact, wonder whether “Outside Over There” isn’t really a book for adults, with its somber, brooding, surrealistic atmosphere and (to some) nearly incomprehensible story set in a golden, 18th-Century romantic German landscape. The heroine, a resolute 9-year-old, loses her much-resented baby sister to goblins. She then dons her distracted mother’s yellow raincoat to save her sister from becoming “a nasty goblin’s bride” “outside over there.”

The success of “In The Night Kitchen,” an earlier work in which a little boy named Mickey (after Mickey Mouse) frolics through a night bakery filled, wrote one reviewer, with cartoonlike characters of “monumental proportions and lunatic energy,” has much to do with its perfectly realized dream fantasy.

But Sendak’s most famous book by far, is “Where The Wild Things Are,” a story published in 1963 about a little boy named Max. When Max’s mother sends him to his room for terrorizing the family dog, Max instead sails off in a fit of pique to an island where he releases his aggression by dominating the wild things (modeled in part on Sendak’s relatives) there and returns home reconciled with his mother and in time for supper, too. The book, which has sold millions of copies in 14 languages has been called by critics “the most suspenseful and satisfying nursery tale of our time.”

“What do they call it in German?” I ask.

“ ‘Where The Wild Guys Hang Out,’ ” Sendak says. “A very bad title.”

“What about in France?”

“ ‘Max and the Maxi-Monsters’--I like that better.”

Despite his worldwide acclaim, Sendak is still amazed at his readers’ reactions to his books. When he goes to colleges to speak (his standard lecture, “Descent Into Limbo,” is about the chaotic nature of the creative life), droves of students, many of whom grew up on his books, come up after his lecture to meet him.

“And they literally are speechless,” he says. “Sometimes they cry and are very embarrassed. They seize your hand. They don’t know what to say to you because you’ve been part of their lives in a way that’s a primary process that started before they had language. In many ways, you had a much more intense and personal relationship with them than their parents did.”

Some young readers, Sendak says, take his books into the bathtub or sleep with them. He once met a young couple who became engaged when they discovered that as children they both took “Wild Things” to bed with them.

“So now,” Sendak says, “these two wild things are going to bed with each other.”

IT’S 3 P.M. on a humid August afternoon and Sendak is rolling through New York state countryside in his blue Volvo station wagon. Lynn Caponera, his cook/housekeeper/chauffeur, is driving. We are headed to Saratoga Springs, where a team of artists, working from Sendak’s small-scale renderings, is painting the sets for “Idomeneo.”

When an accident forces the traffic into one lane, a black lug-tired pickup swerves right in front of us. “Such bastards!” Sendak exclaims. “Such macho bastards!”

There is a smashed big rig over on one side of the road. “God,” he gasps--the accident looks fatal. Then we see the driver standing on the berm, chatting with the state police. “Good,” Sendak says. “Now we can stop worrying about him--the jerk!”

In fact, eternity is rarely far from Sendak’s mind. In 1967, at age 39, he suffered a heart attack during an interview on British TV. Although he was hospitalized for five weeks, he never told his mother, who was dying of cancer, as was Jennie, his Sealyham terrier and beloved companion of 14 years. “That year was a nightmare,” he says.

Although people who survive near-fatal experiences are supposed to come out of them with a new attitude toward life, Sendak says his take-time-to-stop-and-smell-the-flowers phase lasted all of three minutes before his customary free-floating anxiety reasserted itself. “It is a great relief not to die,” he admits. But there were no life-altering insights or permanent change. “I never learned how to play or have a good time or take vacations or treasure life or do all the things you think you would learn from such an experience.”

Sendak comes by his pessimism quite naturally. His parents were Polish-born Jews from two small shtetls outside Warsaw, and they immigrated to Brooklyn just before World War I. “When my father came home with something good to tell my mother, she would put her finger to her mouth: ‘Don’t say it out loud. Who knows if HE is listening?’ ” The idea was if you say something good out loud, Jehovah might think you were bragging. Then, Sendak says, you’d really get nailed.

There was good reason to be wary. The year after Sendak was born, his father, a dressmaker, lost most of the family fortune in the stock market crash. Sendak, always a sickly child, nearly died from the measles and double pneumonia at age 2 and from scarlet fever at 4. He spent his Brooklyn childhood indoors. He wasn’t good at games. He had no friends. The neighborhood kids, he says, considered him a sissy. His companions were his older brother Jack, with whom he started writing stories when he was 9, and his beloved older sister, Natalie (the prototype for the brave and resourceful Ida in “Outside Over There”).

School was a nightmare for Sendak. He was appalled by the regimentation and the competition and shocked, he says, “by how rough and cruel the teachers were, how inattentive they were to my feelings.”

In high school, Sendak got a job embellishing Mutt & Jeff newspaper strips for comic books. The thought of college filled him with dread, so he went to work instead. Within a few years, he landed a job as a window dresser for the New York toy store F.A.O. Schwarz. The book buyer there, after seeing some of his drawings, introduced him to Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, who arranged for him to illustrate “The Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme. That was in 1951. He’s been writing and illustrating children’s books ever since.

LATE IN THEafternoon, we arrive at the Adelphi Hotel, a Victorian hotel with wonderful old paintings, framed mirrors, Persian rugs and wicker chairs--the kind of place where one would not be surprised to see Mark Twain step out from behind a potted palm, in a linen suit, smoking a cigar. The place seems to bring out Sendak’s literary nostalgia; he spends most of dinner talking about Herman Melville, a writer to whom he turns during sleepless nights when he feels especially lonely and low.

“I spent the last year reading about him, obsessively, implacably, relentlessly. He was a genius, maybe the greatest we ever had. He is a great support system to all artists. I mean, just the banal facts of his life are so mortifying--his career, the difficulties of being that original and that wild and living in America in the 19th Century. He was at the height of his powers when he wrote ‘Moby Dick,’ and (it) was a huge and colossal flop. At the age of 32 or 33, his career was over. And he lived till 72, taking money from his family and being regarded with contempt by his in-laws. He could have written a hack book but he wouldn’t.

“He was a very strange man. He wrote very strange books. And there are aspects of his life that are totally unknown--his relationship with (Nathaniel) Hawthorne, which has to be one of the most interesting relationships between two giant writers in America. The letters he wrote to Hawthorne were clearly love letters. But we just don’t know. You can’t prove what you think you are reading between the lines. Even now there are no really good up-to-date contemporary biographies that really cope with the very complicated issues of (Melville’s)life. People seem to steer away from him for some reason, as if he is still too hot to handle.”

“You should write a book,” I tell Sendak.

“Maybe I will.”

“It would make a great movie,” Caponera says. “But who would play Melville?”

“William Hurt,” Sendak says. “He always plays characters who look like they are about to vomit.”

THE NEXT MORNING,Sendak goes to see the canvas drops for “Idomeneo,” which are being painted in a sprawling, turn-of-the-century abandoned factory on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. Sendak began sketching and painting the renderings for these drops two years ago, although the painters didn’t start on the canvases till this past spring. While Sendak stands on a tall aluminum ladder, the painters uncover one by one the 20x70-foot canvas drops on the floor (ultimately there will be 38 of them).

Though outwardly calm, Sendak is more than a little anxious, especially when it’s time to view one complicated series of seven drops representing a pastel ocean and sky from deep in a rocky cave. “Oh, oh, oh,” he says, when they pull out a scene of a gowned goddess floating over a cringing sea dragon. “Tales of Jung.”

When they display the final climactic scene, even Sendak is surprised. “God,” he tells his chief painter, a cheerful bearded German named Michael Hagen, “I’m the first to be amazed. Even the stars are in the right place. Gorgeous. OK, thank you. They look wonderful.”

Sendak has always wanted to do the sets for “Idomeneo,” he later tells me. “I’ve just been waiting to be asked.”

A fanatical opera buff, Sendak was flabbergasted when director Frank Corsaro first asked him to design the sets and costumes for a 1980 Houston Grand Opera production of “The Magic Flute.” Reviewers found his set designs “sumptuous,” with intriguing undertones of foreboding.

Designing opera sets, he says, provides a rare, keen thrill. “There is something very beautiful about so temporary, fragile, elusive an art form. It is the fragility of it that makes it so appealing. It sort of speeds up the whole life cycle.”

Before leaving the set factory, Sendak sits down to autograph gift posters he designed. People seem to love them, but they are a little bewildered by the prominently featured sea dragon floating through the clouds.

“I say the purpose of posters is to sell tickets and lie. If you get them in, you get them. The worst that can happen is that they fall asleep.”

Heading back to Ridgefield that afternoon, Sendak is exhausted, both from the psychological strain of having to approve the drops (he was afraid that if he had to reject one it would have crushed the crew of young painters) and also from the fact that the hotel desk clerk woke him that morning at 6:30.

“I was furious,” Sendak says. “I couldn’t get back to sleep. I said, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ ”

LIFELONG INSOMNIAC, Sendak spends his nights fretting about everything: his huge, 7-year-old German shepherd, Runge; his own erratic health, and what he seems to regard as his fleeting and ephemeral success.

“He can’t figure out how he came this far,” says Jeff Diamond, who acts as liaison between Sendak and the Los Angeles Opera Company, “or how he ever got rich illustrating children’s books.”

That is also a mystery to his detractors, some of whom object to his surrealistic settings and what they see as his illogical plots. Sometimes their criticism becomes quite particular. Some people saw no reason for his drawing Mickey’s penis in “In the Night Kitchen,” others don’t appreciate his penchant for including dogs, Mozart, and fat, ugly babies (Sendak often draws himself).

“The worst review I ever had,” he says, “was a full page in the New York Times on ‘Dear Mili.’ The reviewer hated it and launched an attack against my perverse obscurity, strange and meaningless allusions and tiresome references to Mozart and dogs. Basically (the reviewer wrote), ‘Why didn’t I stuff the whole thing?’ That reviewer was Salman Rushdie.”

Frustrated by what he considered priggish reactions to his stories (in later years, some librarians would draw diapers on Mickey in “In the Night Kitchen”), in 1965, Sendak resorted to deliberate sexual symbolism in “Hector Protector.” He drew a picture of a little boy standing on the back of a lion and holding a fat snake in the queen’s face. Because it was based on a nonsensical Mother Goose story, he says, adults overlooked the sexual connotation. “But the children read it instantly--symbolism is the language of children--and I got a bunch of letters from little boys wanting to know if their penises would get big like that.”

Years later, Sendak says, he told that story at a meeting of librarians. They were uniformly appalled. “But it was charming and innocent. Because it was about dicks, and dicks are charming and innocent.”

Although criticism deeply wounds Sendak, he’s fully capable of giving as good as he gets. In casual conversation, he will announce that Jackie Kennedy has “vulgar” hair, that Paul Newman’s salad dressing is as “awful” as the actor is, that Mary Martin “castrated” Peter Pan and that Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Phantom of the Opera” is “puerile, simple-minded, banal, trivial and soporific. I wish I could say something good about it. I liked the chandelier falling down.”

Sometimes, he says, people tell him, “Lighten up, Maurice. Does everything have to be so serious? Can’t you just go and have fun?”

Occasionally, he does go into New York to see a show, but he rarely has a good time. “I would much rather see a Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton or even a pornographic movie.” He does like to watch movies on the VCR while he works. “I can draw and have videos (at the same time). Drawing is almost congenital.”

Which does not mean, Sendak says, that drawing is the most important thing. “When you teach, you find students who technically can draw circles around you.” But often “they don’t have anything to say. There is nothing in the work that has any heart. When I was young, I tormented myself by envying everyone who drew better. First it was the hands, then the feet, then the ears. And to this day I have not improved. That is the way I draw hands, ears and feet. And now I have people who analyze the meaningfulness of the big feet in my drawings. Great.”

Academicians long have been intrigued by the Freudian, Jungian and Reichian implications of his work. “I don’t understand the cross-references or the psychobabble,” he says. “I skip those parts and get to the good parts about me--why (my characters) are naked, why their feet are big, why their ears are odd.”

Although scholars attribute Ida’s big feet in “Outside Over There” to everything from her alleged fear that “spiritually she is flying” to the realization that “emotionally she has no gravity,” the truth, he says, is simply that he doesn’t know how to draw small feet.

“Maybe all your models (just) have big feet,” says Caponera, a neighbor whose feet were drawn by Sendak when she was a teen-ager for “Outside Over There.”

“I got carried away,” he says.

T HIS AGE,with such a large collection of work behind him, no one would begrudge Sendak a thing if he slowed down. But he remains a self-proclaimed workaholic, because, he says, it keeps his mind “off the human condition.” His future projects include: two Ravel operas in New York in November and a revival of “Where the Wild Things Are” at Christmas in Chicago. He’s working on costumes and sets for yet another Mozart opera, “La clemenza di Tito,” as well as revising a screenplay that he wrote with director Carroll Ballard. Sendak is illustrating a new book, and he has recently founded a children’s theater to produce stories of real fire and passion, like the unbowdlerized Peter Pan.

“You’ll be your own producer?” I ask.

“Yeah,” laughs Sendak. “I’ll be able to hire and fire all those people who had their heels on my neck all those years.”

Sendak and I have been talking about art and politics, death, eternity and the often-denied passions of children. And as we roll back into Ridgefield, it suddenly occurs to him that “in a way, we basically have been talking about the same thing this whole trip--Melville and why (his relationship with Hawthorne) hasn’t been dealt with and children and why (their emotions) haven’t been dealt with. Why is this so difficult to discuss?” he asks. “If you believe anything Freud says, children have a deeper sexual life and intense sexual love. If a child has a crush on somebody, we call it puppy love. We have to denigrate it. ‘How real can it be?’

“In my small way, I’m fighting the creeping death that has occurred in children’s literature--it has become a business and a profession. There are formulas and the formulas abound and most of the books are quite terrible.”

Not that Sendak has much hope that this is likely to change. In the cultural Dark Age of contemporary America, money has become the measure of everything. “You judge people (not by their merit) but by how much money they have,” he says. Which is why he finds himself turning more and more to his personal gods, Mozart and Melville. “They were pure. They never gave in. They did it their way. And it cost them.”