NOT NICE.(Maurice Sendak)(Interview)

Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator, can usually be found in one of two places in Ridgefield, Connecticut: in the studio off the kitchen in his eighteenth-century clapboard farmhouse, where he works most days, or a quarter of a mile away, in a small, two-story red barn he built ten years ago, which doubles as a second studio, and where he prefers to meet people he doesn't know very well. My first meeting with him was in the barn. I took a taxi from the train station, through snow-bleached woods, until the road became a dirt road. The taxi dropped me off in front of the barn, but when I knocked there was no answer. I had been told that the door would be open. It was locked. I waited, alone in the woods. About fifteen minutes later, a man appeared, wearing a long, buttoned-up shearling overcoat. He had gray hair, a cropped gray beard, and large, slightly slanted agate eyes. He walked with a cane and was accompanied by a German shepherd, like a man in a fairy tale. He put out his hand and said, "I'm Maurice Sendak." We went inside the barn, where it was a bit warmer, but we kept our coats on: the implication was that I might not be staying long.

On the floor was a round hooked rug with the face of a Wild Thing picked out in green-gold wool. Over the sink, instead of a mirror, was a pen-and-watercolor sketch of Little Bear flying across a moonlit landscape. By the north window was a bookcase painted a pale blue and filled with literature--Henry James, Melville, Shakespeare--the spines neatly aligned. (Later, Sendak told me, "Even my loneliness is organized.") When I went to look, Sendak said, "Now that I'm old, I am reading more seriously. I can read Emily Dickinson now. It's a relief and a privilege. This fall, I reread 'The Winter's Tale.' It turns out that the dead are not dead. Perdita, the lost girl, grows up in Bohemia. My hair stood on end." He pointed out a dilapidated wrought-iron bench that had belonged to his parents. He said, "My brother and sister and I sat on that bench and listened to 'Let's Pretend' on the radio. 'How do we get to Pretend Land?' And a little boy would say, 'Let's go on a boat!' We'd stare at the radio."

Sendak asked if I would like to take a walk. The winter had been mild, but the cold weather had returned. As we went up the road, he said, looking at an early patch of skunk cabbage, wilted by the frost, "Dummkopfs. You'd think they'd learn. Nobody learns!" When Sendak was young, his good looks were saturnine--he resembled the pop singer Eddie Fisher--but now, at seventy-seven, he looks more like his drawing of the winged servant, for Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Fool's Paradise." (Sendak likes to say that his parents didn't take him seriously until he illustrated Singer, in 1966.)

Sendak published his first work in 1947, an illustration for "Atomics for the Millions," which was written by his high-school physics teacher. He drew molecules doing the Lindy Hop, and made a hundred dollars. Since then, he has illustrated more than a hundred books, including "Little Bear," by Else Holmelund Minarik, the first "I Can Read Book"; "The Animal Family," by the poet Randall Jarrell; "The Juniper Tree," a collection of Grimm fairy tales, translated by Lore Segal and Jarrell; and "I Saw Esau," a collaboration with the British nursery-rhyme scholars Iona and Peter Opie. His style encompasses homely thumbnail sketches and detailed drawings that have their roots in the work of Cranach and William Morris. When he began illustrating, he said, he was asked, " 'Where are your blond children? They look like dumbfounded immigrants!' Which they were." But it is the handful of children's books that he has both written and illustrated that constitute his autobiography. The best known of these is "Where the Wild Things Are," a book about a tantrum and a time-out, published in 1963. When Max, a boy dressed in a white wolf suit, is sent to bed without supper, his room becomes a forest, an ocean swells outside his window, and a boat takes him to a land where the Wild Things are--lumpish creatures who roll their eyes and gnash their teeth, and were based on Sendak's own relatives in Brooklyn. Max stares the Wild Things down; they anoint him king; and he reigns until, lonely and a little hungry, he sails home to find his supper waiting for him.

Like every Sendak story, "Where the Wild Things Are" explores his preoccupations, chief among which are the vicissitudes of his own childhood, and the temerity and fragility of children in general. His ...