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Musings: There’s A Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott

There’s A Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott

Doubleday, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0385540438

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

I love Maurice Sendak. One of my favorite books to read aloud to children, especially when reading in a storyhour, is Where The Wild Things Are. I mean, there is nothing like getting a crowd of kindergarteners to roar their terrible roars without holding back.

But there is also something that makes many people (mostly adults, I think) uneasy about his work. There are uncomfortable emotions, uncontrollable imaginations, and so much hunger in his illustrations. These are all most evident in the three books he referred to as his “trilogy”: Where the Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There. Of these three books, Outside Over There is probably the least well known, and also the one that came from the deepest places in Sendak’s mind and heart, as well as having broad influences from his past and present circumstances and experiences. In There’s A Mystery There, Jonathan Cott delves as far down as he can into Sendak’s psyche and casts a wide net to capture the manifold ways it expresses itself, specifically through an examination of Outside Over There. 

In a serendipitous set of circumstances, Cott met and interviewed Sendak in 1976, just as he was starting Outside Over There, and again in 1981, after receiving an advance copy of the book directly from the author, so he witnessed both the beginnings and the winding down of the process of creation for what Sendak described as “the last excavation of my soul.”

There’s A Mystery There is Cott’s attempt to go further into Sendak’s soul by exploring his past– family, childhood, and career; his obsessions and associations– the Lindbergh kidnapping, Mozart, the artists who inspired him; his many books, particularly Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There; and Sendak’s own thoughts and comments as expressed to Cott through interviews. It goes further by including discussions of Outside Over There, specifically, with psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Gottlieb, Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck, art historian Jane Doonan, and writer, co-creator, and Sendak biographer Tony Kushner, These are all fascinating discussions, exploring the book from a variety of different angles, and from my point of view as someone who reads a lot of children’s books, reads a lot about children’s books, and loves the art of Maurice Sendak, this was very readable and eye-opening. A brief biographical sketch does not offer the fascinating window that the biographical information and commentary on Sendak’s past found in the first half of this book, so for anyone wanting to go below surface details this is a great resource. The art historian’s close examination of the book’s illustrations is very much worthwhile for someone wanting to get into the details of the art in the book.  The other discussions are interesting if you want to delve deeper into Sendak’s psyche, but an average reader may not necessarily need that level of detail.

From reading this book, I discovered new connections between Sendak and his work, and made observations that I hadn’t made previously. What I didn’t find was a definitive answer to what the book is about, what it really means, or why, despite my fascination with the book, the ending is so frustrating for me.  Rather than providing straightforward information, Cott’s writing is more of a spiral in and out, twisting around the center of what Outside Over There, giving the reader clues without closing the window to manifold worlds.

Outside Over There inspired the movie Labyrinth, and if you are looking for a satisfying ending, you probably ought to check it out. Sendak’s version continues to keep me wondering, and Cott’s writing, while it resolves some things, leaves the book still a mystery.

Recommended for students and lovers of children’s literature, picture book illustration, literary criticism, and Maurice Sendak: and for libraries serving educators and librarians.

Note: I’ve previously written about Outside Over There. If you’d like to see what I said, click here.

 

 

Posted on August 28, 2017 by , Reply

Pictures That Storm Inside My Head: Outside Over There

I’m stealing the title of this post from a poem that appears in a book of the same name to discuss Outside Over There, and there’s a reason for that.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the movie Labyrinth. In it, Jennifer Connelly has to enter the realm of the Goblin King (David Bowie) to save her brother (the movie will be discussed as part of the next Parental Advisory podcast).The movie is, in part, inspired by the works of Maurice Sendak, and, in particular, his 1981 book Outside Over There. The plot of Outside Over There is very similar– in it, 9 year old Ida’s baby sister is stolen by goblins, and Ida must journey into “outside over there” to find and rescue her.

Sendak said in an interview that Outside Over There is the last of three books created to acknowledge the inner world of children, which is often chaotic and feels out of control (I’m paraphrasing radically here). The other two books are Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen. Of the three Outside Over There is, I think, the most unsettling and the most fascinating.

In Where The Wild Things Are, Max’s anger and imagination can’t be contained within mere physical walls. His escape allows him to get his out of control feelings out, to calm down and return home, a place where he can count on coming back home, to soup that is “still hot”. While it’s not a comfortable book for a lot of people, it has a comforting resolution. That isn’t the case in Outside Over There.

Ida’s parents are absent– her father is literally out to sea, and her mother is mentally unavailable. This leaves Ida with unwanted responsibility for her sister. While Ida is, in the words of my son, “busily doing something else”, goblins steal her sister away, leaving an ice baby. And Ida, at first, doesn’t notice. As her anger rises, there’s a storm out the window with a ship astray at sea.

This is the nightmare of so many parents– that their child might be stolen away. And it’s unsettling to certain children that their parents might be absent, even if they’re there; that they could be kidnapped themselves; that their sibling could go missing on their watch; that, like “Ida mad”, they could hold that terrible storm inside.

Ida goes on a journey to find her sister, but she is lost. She’s going in the wrong direction, still unable to see her sister in the goblin world of “outside over there”. When finally she turns around and finds the goblins, they are all babies, and, like the Pied Piper she must charm them away with music into the churning water to reveal which one is her sister. Like Max, she takes control, and finds her way back home. In the illustrations the goblin babies are fascinating and disturbing. Those are the pictures my daughter turns to again and again.

But unlike Max, Ida does not return to the comfort of a mother who nourishes him even when she’s not present. Instead, she comes home to a letter from her father telling her to take care of her mother and sister. Her storm has passed, but she doesn’t get to be a child again.

Outside Over There contains feelings both frightening and glad, ambiguous wording, and illustrations that create the impression of a strangely wrought and unpredictable fairly tale. When I talk about it with my daughter it’s in a very nonlinear fashion. We examine the illustrations, we talk about what some words and phrases mean, we skip around and come up with more answers than questions. For her this is fascinating, but not really recognizable as a traditional story. My son, an older brother who is often “busily doing something else” or doesn’t necessarily want his sister on top of him all the time, wants nothing to do with it. Ida’s anger, expressed so visibly and vividly, is unsettling to him.

Not that long ago I wrote about R.L. Stine’s comments on writing horror for children. Stine (to paraphrase) said that scary stories for children need to be over-the-top fantastic, funny, and sometimes gross, so that kids don’t think the stories could possibly be real. I would say that’s the kind of thing my Monster Kid likes- the Scooby Doo school of horror. Outside Over There is not that kind of story. It taps into something deep inside children, something that speaks to certain children and can really be unsettling to others, and certainly to adults (especially those looking for deeper meaning). It definitely wasn’t written with the same purpose in mind as the Goosebumps books. But both somehow fall into the wider category of scary books for kids.

If you are librarian or parent reading this, whether or not you’d classify this gorgeously illustrated and idiosyncratic Caldecott Honor winner as a scary book for kids doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you understand the kind of effect it may have on a reader, and plan to take time to talk about it when you put it in a child’s hands, if that child needs it. In my classes on children’s literature, I learned about many Sendak books: Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Chicken Soup With Rice… but not once (and I’ve taken multiple classes) was this book ever mentioned. And really, I think it should be.

Posted on August 24, 2012 by , 2 comments

Defining the Scary Story

In explaining horror fiction for reader’s advisory librarians in The Reader’s Advisory Guide, Second Edition, Becky Siegel Spratford defined it as

…a story in which the author manipulates the reader’s emotions by introducing situations in which unexplainable phenomena and unearthly creatures threaten the protagonists and provoke terror in the reader.

We argued with her definition of horror fiction in our review, because here we consider genres such as human horror and killer animals as subgenres in horror fiction, as do many, many readers.

When I talk about scary stories for kids, I’m talking about something a little bit different, though, because what I consider “scary” doesn’t necessarily easily fall into genres (and sometimes it’s not especially scary, but has a focus on Halloween, or on creatures traditionally considered scary). I decided to ask my Monster Kid what he thought about all this.

Me: Does a scary story have to have a monster in it to be scary?

Monster Kid: No, a dripping, dark wood where you are lost is scary. That can be a scary story.

Me: So there doesn’t have to be a monster for the book to be a scary story?

Monster Kid: No, getting lost far away from your village in the dark is scary even without a monster. Even when there’s no monster, that’s a monster.

There you have it. You don’t need the unexplainable, otherworldly, or supernatural to make a scary story a scary story.

Here’s a list of the kinds of things that fall beneath the large umbrella of “scary stories” in children’s literature, according to several scholars in the subject:

Nursery rhymes
Fairy tales
Where the Wild Things Are and other picture books
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Graveyard Book
A Tale Dark and Grimm
The Vampire Diaries
Twilight
The Hunger Games

Whether all of these REALLY qualify as scary stories (or horror, for that matter), or whether I should include Halloween books and not-so-scary monster tales in the “scary stories” category here, is certainly up for debate. But that dark and dripping wood that emerged from the mind of my six year old son… well, he certainly scared me with that, more than any monster could.

Posted on August 8, 2012 by , 2 comments
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