Horns & Halos

May 9, 2012

Maurice Sendak Scared Children Because He Loved Them

“Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life’s concern,” Maurice Sendak told NPR in 1993. His lush visual idiom managed to evoke the strange—and sometimes malign—intensity of real childhood, as fey, unruly protagonists sparred with adversaries (fanged monsters and imperfect parents). All his work demonstrates a strong desire, and uncanny ability, to capture the eerie vividness of youth and its crucibles. “I am trying to draw the way children feel,” Sendak told The New Yorker in an early profile. His ambiguous phrasing is apt—as though “the way children feel” was both what he tried to draw, and how. […]

Sendak railed against what he perceived to be an insidiously overprotective parent culture. The evidence does suggest we adults sometimes take our good-natured desire to protect children from unpleasantness to perverse depths. I see it in the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting,” for instance—the misguided attempt to thwart all potential pitfalls through hovering omnipresence. We seek to foil internal darkness, too, by plying young people with antidepressants and anxiety medication. And we’re highly sensitive about showing children any sort of “challenging” material, even in cases when censorship verges on absurd. The new documentary Bully, which depicts the brutal realities of life in the hallway and playground, was initially deemed “too violent” for children, the very audience it portrays, and attempts to reach.

But it is this expurgated account of childhood—what he called “the great 19th-century fantasy that paints childhood as an eternally innocent paradise”—that Maurice Sendak fought tooth and claw, horn and beak. He knew that children are unavoidably beset by grief, yearning, anxiety, and rage, the same wild and turbulent emotions that seize adult human beings. “To master these forces,” Sendak said, in his 1964 Caldecott acceptance speech, “children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.”

Read more. [Image: AP]