Stefan Kanfer’s tribute to Maurice Sendak underlines how the late writer-illustrator’s “favorite pose of curmudgeon” concealed a profound sensitivity:
Sendak became increasingly Sendakian in his last years. A triple bypass left him diminished, but not too weak to roar. Stocky, bearded, and glowering, the Connecticut Tevye railed against the excesses of technology, sentimentality, and commercialism.
Last summer, New York’s Society of Illustrators paid homage to one of its greatest members with an exhibition that covered two floors. In addition to scores of Sendak’s sketches and finished artwork, the show included videotapes of his final interviews, most of them theatrically grumpy. Asked about e-books, he snapped, “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book.” As for posthumous tributes, he wanted “no statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up on me, à la Hans Christian Andersen. I won’t have it.” When comedian Stephen Colbert asked him, “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?,” Sendak was ready: “You’ve started already by being an idiot.”
But these fulminations didn’t deceive the people who understood him. We knew that Sendak needed his hard carapace to cover a psyche as sensitive as a light meter. Without it, he would never have survived, let alone triumphed. We also knew that toward the end, he made his peace with life—and with death. Shortly before he suffered a fatal stroke in 2012, he looked back in unaccustomed tranquillity: “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready.”
Previous Dish on Sendak here, here, and here.
(Video: An animated clip of Sendak’s notably un-grumpy final interview with Terry Gross in 2011)
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