Maurice Sendak’s Connecticut home was surrounded by elephants when the Observer went to visit in 1984; not a regular thing – the circus was in town – but the perfect start to an encounter with the provocatively playful illustrator and creator of ‘fantastical, unsettling, topsy-turvy worlds’.
Sendak lived alone with his dogs in a house full of Mickey Mouse memorabilia; the rodent’s history was one of his passions. ‘As soon as he married Minnie, he started going downhill. In the early days he was as thin as a rat,’ he said of a 4ft waving model. Another was soap opera. Sendak wanted to watch to the end of All My Children: ‘The series had reached a gripping moment where the heroine had unwittingly married a psychopath.’
Once finished, Sendak held forth on everything from atheism (‘If you have to have a god, let him be Mozart’) to misconceptions about children’s authors. ‘People say, “Oh, Maurice you have such a nice life staying in the country and painting those cute little pictures…” I want to break their jaws.’ It was a life of discipline, he said: ‘Every day is the same. It’s a ritualised, hard business.’
Aged 56, he found that his childhood memories, growing up the sickly child of Polish émigrés in postwar Brooklyn (‘When pigs still roamed the streets’), provided fuel for his stories. Where The Wild Things Are drew on memories of his parents’ friends looming over him, their ‘great big teeth, immense nostrils and sweaty foreheads’
Contemplating the ‘years of hullabaloo’ over the sometimes troubling quality of his stories and images, Sendak had little patience for moral outrage or accusations he frightened children: ‘If these kids haven’t thought or experienced such things, then there’s something wrong with them.’ Childless himself, he had no regrets. ‘I would have been a bad parent as I’ve always been a worker. To be an artist, you have to be selfish.’ Instead, he was honorary godfather to a whole generation: ‘There are thousands of little Maxes all over the country.’
