EYES OF A CHILD An illustration from Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic, ‘Where The Wild Things Are’.
Sendak’s Butterfly
The Circling Fin
Fin Keegan
The late writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, described by some as the Picasso of children’s literature, caught brilliantly the sheer strangeness of childhood. In 1963 he published his masterpiece, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, in which a little boy sent to his room in place of supper finds himself whisked off to a wild island inhabited by memorably fierce giants, whose king he becomes.
Sendak later revealed an autobiographical source for his ogres: childhood memories of visiting aunts and uncles. Indeed, to a youngster, we grown-ups with our artificial scents, oversized noses, and uncanny ability to sit still for long periods, must seem outlandish.
Sendak was marked by World War II, in which inferno he lost most of his extended family. In the teeth of evil, he noticed, children protect adults. A seemingly backwards arrangement but then adults, at the best of times, seem far removed from the sharper edges of life.
Parents are free, it seems, to do as we wish, without any punishment or displeasure coming our way (no time-outs or confiscated toys for us). We are not limited by any obvious boundaries. Nor do we face the impositions of bullies or even risk so much as falling from a tree: All we do in fact is loll around either staring at screens or engaged in pointless conversation.
Children’s secrets, on this understanding, are often therefore about sparing an innocent parent. My own father told me The Facts of Life, in abbreviated form, several years after I had picked them up elsewhere. My abiding impression was mortification at being the proximate cause of his excruciating embarrassment. Poor Daddy having to even think about this stuff, polluting his innocent mind, when he had weightier matters like Politics or Economics to be occupied with!
During the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York – in an anecdote Sendak himself was fond of retelling – one girl pretended to her father that the people she had seen throwing themselves from the burning towers were in fact butterflies. Such horrors are not for you, Dad, she must have thought. Go back to your flickering monitor, with its ‘like’ buttons and comment streams, and do not concern yourself with this world, more full of weeping than you can understand.
But perhaps there is a double game going on here. A daughter knows her father knows this world can be cruel but fights to preserve his illusion that she doesn’t. Or, knowing they get presents either way, older kids often pretend to be young enough for Santa Claus simply to keep parents happy. The whole family conspires – and the chimney-shuttling Laplander lives to give another year.
Unfortunately, the truth is that whatever children think they know about this world, adults always manage to come up with worse. Maurice Sendak knew well the measure of human folly but he kept making art for children, right up until the end of his life. Like the best pop music, sometimes the best children’s literature is too grown-up for the grown-ups.
Fin Keegan is a writer based in Westport. This column is based on his weekly radio essay, heard on WRFM on weekend mornings and online at thecirclingfin.com.
