When I was ten, my family moved in the middle of the school year, and as a goodbye gift, my teacher, Mrs. Hill, gave me a copy of Dear Mili. It is a story Wilhelm Grimm wrote in a letter to a little girl named Mili in 1813 that someone rediscovered in 1983; it was published as a book with Maurice Sendak's illustrations in 1988. My copy, with Mrs. Hill's kind wishes written in it, is a first edition and I have kept it with me all these years.
The story is this: long ago, in some place not named, there is a war, and a beloved little girl is sent by her mother into the wilderness with a pocketful of cake. She comes eventually to the hut of a kind old man, who gives her shelter and sends her out to look for roots to eat, and she discovers a little girl, almost a mirror of herself, who helps her. But the other child is an angel, and the man is Saint Joseph. And after three days, he sends her home, with the other child to guide her. After hard journey, she finds her village, though it is changed, and her mother's house, and her mother is waiting. But in the time she has been gone, her mother has become an old woman. The child has returned home just before the woman is to die, fulfilling her heart's wish to see her own dear child again. They die together, with a rose blooming between them.
When I read it as a child, Sendak's illustrations puzzled and beguiled me. They are beautiful and fantastically ornate, filled with intricate, delicately-hued foliage and scenes within the scene that do not appear in Grimm's tale—hidden angels and broken headstones; a group of other children, wandering together. It was clear that he was seeing something more in this story, another story under and around and behind the story that was being told. I did not know then that Sendak had layered many of the things he had loved and that had troubled him in the illustrations, that his cherished dogs were there and the work of artists he admired, but also Mozart conducting a group of the doomed children who sang in Nazi death camps, and the fantastically ornate gravestones from the Jewish cemetery in Prague. But I felt that the pictures held more than they showed. I began looking for more of his work, which eventually led me to The Bat Poet and A Hole is to Dig and Open House for Butterflies and The Light Princess and Higglety Pigglety Pop and The Moon-Jumpers, books that became very precious to me.
So at the end of January, after weeks of stubborn colds and low-grade fevers and days on the couch, we finally all felt well enough to do something and antsy enough to need to be someplace else, so we got in the car and drove a few hours to walk around the Columbus Museum of Art to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit, Wild Things Are Happening.
And even though I love his work, I did not expect to be as moved as I was, seeing so much of it in person. Maybe it was just lingering effects—the head cold, too many days at home, too many pandemic years, accumulated decongestants in my system loosening my tear ducts—but it was almost unbearably wonderful. It collects, as survey exhibits do, a comprehensive array of pieces spanning his whole artistic career as well as objects and works of art that influenced him. There was the daffy 1939 postcard for Sunshine Biscuits with its white-hatted bakers that reappear in In the Night Kitchen, the toy milk truck that his father gave him, old black-and-white family photos that eventually served as inspiration for compositions of figures in assorted illustrations, a truly delightful selection of art from Winsor McKay to George Stubbs to Goya that he cherished and referenced. (I particularly liked that Beatrix Potter's bat studies inspired the finely drawn bats in The Bat Poet.) There were also the impossibly charming tiny book mock-ups he made, with small sketches indicating how the book could look, and the fantasy sketches, which were drawn to tell a story that lasted the span of a song.
But what got to me was liveness of it all—how all the marks, the doodles, the sketches, the mock-ups, the painfully and astonishingly fine finals destined to be muted by print, all of them, were animated by a singular and idiosyncratic and questing intelligence. To see all the work, to see how much work, to realize it was all necessary, every bit, to someday make an image that has stayed in my mind for thirty-some years, of barefoot girls with their arms around each others' waists standing in the shadow of the gravestones and strange plants while Mozart conducts the lost children and the old man contemplates a rose. Sendak drew with a steel crow-nib quill, which had to be dipped again and again into the ink. And he dipped again and again into the stuff of his life, and the things he loved and noticed and remembered and feared, shaping it into images that reflected how he saw the world, images that made the words on the page stranger and sweeter and funnier and more beautiful and troubling.
Anyway, it made me happy but also sad, because all of it—all of the beautiful work on yellowing paper, all of the saved snapshots and grubby toys and pasted mock-ups—felt like relicts from a vanished mode of creative being, artifacts from another time. In our time, different wild things are lurking in the woods, disembodied intelligences that ingest indiscriminately and hallucinate lies, that generate distorted visions of humanity with hot-dog fingers and warped faces, that work to make everything look and sound more or less plausible, more or less the same. A pen was a tool that we used; now the tools use us. And no one is dipping pens into ink or writing fairy tales in letters to children anymore, anyway.
Maybe I am being too pessimistic, and we will find a way to leave our fingerprints on these new capabilities in ways that capture our messy magic singularness in a way I cannot see just yet. I never thought of emoji as capable of expressing anything particularly interesting until my kid sent me a screen-filling block of sunflowers, hibiscus, waterlilies, roses, tulips, toadstools, leaves, potted plants, and one smiling moon. In the middle, he had typed, "I sent you a garden."
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Velvet Etro dress / Levis 501 jeans / Vivienne Westwood Roman three-strap shoes / Victorian tortoiseshell cherub earrings / Lelet Jackie barrette / Dorette gemstone ring / Herbert Frere Souer Le Gabie half-moon bag / Cirque navy jelly nail polish.
