Marvellous Meals

Everyone knows that in 1963 Maurice Sendak wrote a masterpiece in ten sentences (37 pages, 338 words, beginning with ‘The night Max wore his wolf suit . . .’). That was Where the Wild Things Are (see SF no. 20). A year before, though, he wrote four masterpieces in nine centimetres.

There are four books in Sendak’s Nutshell Library: the cautionary tale Pierre, the ‘book of months’ Chicken Soup with Rice, the alphabet book Alligators All Around, and the counting book One Was Johnny. In its slipcase, the whole tiny tetralogy measures 9cm x 7cm x 3cm. Sendak was comfortable with small scales. He was given to carrying around a pocket-sized edition of poems by Emily Dickinson – ‘You just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman’ – and he was fond of the work of Schubert, on whom he quoted the mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig: ‘Schubert is so big, so delicate, but what he did was pick a form [the lieder] that looked so humble and quiet so that he could crawl into that form and explode emotionally, find every way of expressing every emotion in this miniature form.’ Sendak himself related this last point to his decision to work in children’s literature, a low-status genre in the 1950s, especially for a male writer. But it applies, too, to the vibrant amplitude of Sendak’s work, crammed somehow into these miniature books. The themes and titles – counting, alphabets, morality tales – might suggest something didactic, teacherly, about the books in Nutshell Library, but this is Maurice Sendak, remember. This is the writer who said of the children who read his books: ‘They have to know it’s possible things are bad. They are surrounded by people who love them and will protect them but cannot hide the fact that there is something bad.’ So while things usually turn out okay, more or less, in Sendak’s children’s stories, there’s an undeniable thread of darkness, a very human sense of devilry and chaos, running through his work. There are always wild things somewhere in there. And very often, as in his most famous book, the children are the wild things. All cautionary tales must begin, of course, with an untamed child, and Pierre, who does not care, is certainly that. He pours syrup in his hair, stands on his head, acts like a clown, and over and over again declares ‘I don’t care!’ (Sendak’s rhymes here are very reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline stories). In the end, as is the way of these stories, he gets eaten by a hungry lion (‘He looked Pierre right in the eye/ and asked him if he’d like to die’). ‘Mischievous boy gets eaten by lion’ is one of my favourite minor themes in children’s literature. While you might expect Sendak to show Pierre no mercy, as, for instance, poor little Albert Ramsbottom is shown in Marriott Edgar’s The Lion and Albert (‘Pa said, “Yon lion’s et Albert,/ And ’im in his Sunday clothes, too”’), Pierre instead – like Ben in Polly Dunbar’s Penguin – is coughed back up: ‘He rubbed his eyes and scratched his head/ and laughed because he wasn’t dead. He lives to learn his lesson: Care!’ It’s everywhere in Sendak, this idea of being eaten up, or doing the eating yourself. It’s curiously fundamental to the Maurice Sendak universe. There’s a celebrated story in which Sendak sent a card with a drawing of a wild thing on it to a young fan, and the boy’s mother wrote back: ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ It made complete sense to Sendak: ‘He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.’ The Wild Things – you can see them, I’m sure, without even having to think about it, the manes, the stripes, the teeth, the eyes, the claws – were initially inspired by Sendak’s Yiddish-speaking Polish relatives, who as a child he found both unnerving and hilarious: ‘They’d pick you up and hug you and kiss you, “Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up!” And we know they would eat anything, anything. And so, they’re the wild things.’ And so when Max decides to leave the place where the wild things are, the wild things deliver the immortal line: ‘We’ll eat you up, we love you so!’ And then there’s Pierre getting eaten up by the lion, and, in the marvellous counting book One Was Johnny, an unexpected threat: when Johnny, ‘who lived by himself’, finds himself disturbed by a succession of uninvited visitors (a rat, a cat, a turtle, a monkey, a tiger, a robber), he stands on a chair and declares: ‘I’ll start to count backwards, and when I am through – if this house isn’t empty, I’ll eat all of you!!!!’ In a 2004 interview, Sendak, then aged 76, reflected on how he would like his own story to end, and came up with the line: ‘I became so ripe, people could hardly keep their teeth away from me.’ The allusion is to a letter written by Keats describing the sensation of having a piece of peach in his mouth. ‘It’s one of the sexiest things you will ever read,’ Sendak says. ‘Don’t rush it. Let it go through your palate. Let it lie on your tongue . . . And then, you bite. But, it must be so ripe. It must be so delicious. In other words, you must not waste a second of this deliciousness . . . savour everything that happened.’ I think this was more than a metaphor for Sendak. Eating, consuming, munching, savouring, gobbling up – for him, these things overlapped and were intertwined with loving, feeling, being. Another of his best-known books, In the Night Kitchen, features a small boy named Mickey who gets covered in batter and flies an aeroplane made of bread dough (the writer Gregory Maguire has noted Sendak’s debt to Wilhelm Busch’s 1865 Max und Moritz, in which, among other escapades, the titular mischief-makers are baked into loaves and have to chew themselves free). The Alligators All Around make macaroni and order oatmeal. Even Max in Where the Wild Things Are – sent to bed, of course, without any supper – returns home to find an inviting- looking dish waiting for him in his bedroom (‘And it was still hot’). Most delicious of all is Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice, the ‘book of months’ in  Nutshell Library. Inventive, odd, wholesome and completely charming, it leads us on a jaunty trip through the year with a smiling little fellow and his favourite dish (‘all seasons of the year are nice/ for eating chicken soup with rice!’). Nothing and no one gets eaten up in this story, except those steaming bowls of soup (with rice). I can’t think of another children’s book that makes me as hungry as this one does. (Fantastic Mr Fox comes close: Roald Dahl, like Sendak, believed in consuming life in large spoonfuls.) Sendak’s own childhood relationship with food casts all this in a curious light: ‘I often went to bed without supper,’ he said in that 2004 interview, ‘’cause I hated my mother’s cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she’d make me eat.’ I don’t remember how I first came across Sendak. I don’t know if we had a copy of Where the Wild Things Are when I was a child, or if I borrowed it from a library or read it at school. I must have been very small. All I really know is that when I opened it up as an adult it hit me like a half-brick. Hey! I know these monsters! The Wild Things stay with you. Sendak stays with you. I found Nutshell Library in, of all places, a Halifax antique shop. A small and fastidious part of me hesitates to give the books to my children – they’re so neat and smart and small, despite being sixty years old (the books, I mean, not my children). But I’ll give them to them anyway. I hope they pull them to bits. I hope they gobble them up.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Richard Smyth 2024