Of Innocence and Experience

A little girl ventures into a forest and before long, she is lost. Her shoes are soft and flimsy, the ground beneath her feet thorny and treacherous. Tree trunks twist into crouching, threatening shapes. As she flees along a ragged path deeper into the woods, a crow sits on one branch over her head, a parrot on another.

The forest she’s running through might be anywhere in the world: exotic flowers bloom against the bare branches of a deciduous wood - land. And in the background, world history unspools. She rests beside an ancient temple carved with lions, flowers and fish. It looks like a ruin in the depths of a South American rainforest. In the distance, a group of refugees in thick winter clothing make their way across a rickety wooden bridge. There’s something about their clothes and their faces, rendered in a grainy newsprint grey, that tells us they’re fleeing the darkest days of twentieth-century Europe. We are untethered in time and place; in the background a bewigged figure who might be Mozart conducts a choir against a backdrop of ruined buildings. One of the singers bears a striking resemblance to Anne Frank, with neatly parted hair and a pinafore; another is a boy wearing flared jeans and a T-shirt. This is Europe and the Americas and everywhere all at once. We are in the timeless time of fairy stories and the history-book time of war, totalitarianism and atrocity. Old wars are echoed in new ones and each conflict sets new refugees fleeing through the forest. This is Dear Mili, a picture book which weaves together words by Wilhelm Grimm and illustrations by Maurice Sendak. The story was written in a letter addressed to a little girl called Mili in 1816, the year after the Napoleonic wars ended following fifteen years of continuous conflict. It was published for the first time in 1988 alongside Sendak’s lavish pictures. I must have had the book read to me when I was perhaps 5 or 6 years old. At the time, I was also a small girl called Mili. For largely egotistical reasons, it immediately found a place in my heart – it was my book, addressed to me. Grimm describes his story as a flower thrown into a brook which, on its travels, eventually meets another flower, thrown by another hand. It is ‘one human heart go[ing] out to another, undeterred by what lies between’. The little girl, Mili, wants a story and apparently needs one; why is not explained, but I wonder if she has lost her mother, as the little girl in the story loses hers. Though they have never met, Grimm writes her the story she needs. He throws it like a flower; through it, his heart goes out to her heart. Sometime in the early 1990s, it found its way to me. The story is about an unnamed little girl who lives with her widowed mother. War is coming, so the mother sends her daughter into the forest. There she meets St Joseph – patron saint of people living in exile, of travellers and the dying – and her guardian angel, a little girl who looks a lot like her. Her mother has always believed she must have a guardian angel, since everything she does turns out so well. Sure enough, the girl finds her angel waiting for her in the forest to lead her by the hand. She spends three nights with St Joseph before he sends her back to her mother with a rosebud from his garden, telling her that when it blooms, she will be reunited with him. She returns home to find that thirty years have passed, and her mother is an old woman. They fall asleep in one another’s arms; the rose opens between them, and they never wake. In a 1966 interview with the New Yorker, twenty years before he illustrated Dear Mili, Sendak described his father as a prolific story-teller. He had, Sendak remembered, brought a flavour of Polish folktales with him when he emigrated to America; through his stories, myth and fantasy were woven into the texture of daily life. Sendak longed to turn a particular one of these stories into a book. In it, a child is walking with his parents and becomes lost. He takes refuge beneath a tree and cries in fear until an ‘enormous figure hovers over him and says, as he draws the boy up, “I’m Abraham, your father.”’ The child is no longer afraid and is no longer lost. When his parents find him, he has died. Sendak said that, for him, this story had the character of one of William Blake’s poems. It was a fragment of ‘Jewish lore’, and it showed ‘how tremendously [Sendak’s] father missed his parents’. If Sendak ever realized his wish to capture this story of myth and grief in a picture book, it is in Dear Mili; a little girl loses her way in the woods where she is kept safe by a patriarch before returning to her mother one last time. It is just like his father’s story, only in this version the child is reunited with her parent before the end. The illustrations, particularly the faces of the mother and the angels which appear on each page, could be pages from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: faces in profile have the same distinctive nose and wide eyes; the cherubic angels might be directly copied from Blake’s ‘The Angel’. One or two pictures are so close that the reference is unmistakable. Blake’s poem ‘Spring’, for example, is accompanied by a picture of a mother holding a baby. This mother and the mother in Dear Mili are wearing the same dress. The link with Blake raises many questions, not least about whether this should be taken simply as a children’s picture book. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience looks like a children’s book, brightly illustrated and telling little moral tales. But they unfold into something much larger, more complex and darker. Sendak, too, said that he ‘refuse[d] to lie to children’, or ‘to cater to the bullshit of innocence’. He believed that children understand more than they are given credit for, and that childhood isn’t necessarily left behind as simply as people think: ‘An essential part of myself – my dreaming life’, Sendak said, ‘still lives in the potent urgent light of childhood.’ For both Sendak and Blake, innocence and experience, child and adult, were not as separate as they might seem, and a story could grow with its reader through the course of a lifetime. The same can be said of Grimm’s fairy and folk tales, which were not originally intended exclusively for children. In 1944 W. H. Auden wrote that it would be ‘a mistake if this volume [were] merely bought for a child; it should be, first and foremost, an educational must for adults’. The ways in which these fairy tales ‘educate’ are oblique and not a matter of simple moralizing. In his introduction to Grimm’s first edition, the American professor of children’s literature Jack Zipes writes that the brothers Grimm ‘viewed their collection as an educational primer of ethics, values and customs that would grow on readers, who would themselves grow by reading these living relics of the past’. My relationship with Dear Mili has changed and grown over the years. The things I loved in it when I was a child are still there and I still love them. I remember being struck by the idea of guardian angels and the little story within a story about bindweed flowers getting their purplish stripes from being used as wine goblets. They were little details of a benevolent and magical universe in which, if you paid attention, you might find wonders. And I have always loved the illustrations which are beautiful and intricate, telling their own story which sings alongside Grimm’s deceptively simple fable. But there were many things I couldn’t have grasped as a child and don’t think I even noticed. Certainly I don’t remember finding them puzzling. The girl stands in a cemetery with her guardian angel. The writing on the gravestones is indistinct but looks like Hebrew and one is carved with the Star of David. Grimm wrote his story in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars, while Sendak’s own childhood was marked by the persecutions of the Second World War. His mother, father and sister were safe in New York, but in Poland his extended family suffered and died. The little girl and her mother look as if they belong in the early nineteenth century, but the people who emerge in the backdrop are from other times entirely. Wars echo and overlap across the centuries. I didn’t understand any of this when I was small. Years later, when my father was dying, some memory of this book bubbled to the surface, and I searched it out again for the first time in twenty years or so. I’m sure I didn’t realize when I first read Dear Mili that it was a book about loss and grief and consolation. When Sendak said his father’s story of a lost child meeting Abraham was an oblique reference to how much he missed his parents, it resonated with something in me. I first read Dear Mili at a time when the idea of losing my parents was unimaginable and yet, after hard experience, it was waiting for me, a new book that had grown as I had. It has been a fable that taught slowly – a children’s book for the children we were and the adults we become.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Camilla Cassidy 2024