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On a frigid Wednesday afternoon, rays of sunlight streamed into Maurice Sendak’s studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut, interweaving with each other with the precision and warmth of the children’s books that were born in this room.
Sendak died almost 12 years ago, but his studio is exactly as he left it. There are his pencil holder and his watercolor sets; There is his final manuscript, for a book called “No Noses.” And there, shining like a ripe tomato, is his red cardigan, thrown over the back of an empty chair.
Standing among Sendak’s books, art and ephemera, it was easy to imagine that he was out for his daily three-mile walk along Chestnut Hill Road. He would surely come back, put on a Mozart CD, and get to work on a new project. Next to the main door were his canes; There were his painted posters, with price tags from an art store that closed in 2016. There was his stereo, labeled with homemade stickers that said “power” and “volume.”
The place might be frozen in amber, and a little technologically dated, but the vibe on the eve of the winter solstice was future-focused and optimistic. The countdown had begun for a third posthumous book by Sendak, “Ten Little Rabbits,” which will be published by HarperCollins on February 6.
He has big shoes to fill: Sendak’s previous books have sold more than 50 million copies. With their unique potion of humor and directness, the most famous, “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen,” are as unforgettable as Pledge of Allegiance or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Sendak’s carefully scratched, free-form images are as familiar and mysterious as the contours of his darkened childhood bedroom. He was the rare adult who looked under the bed and drew what he saw.
But the wild things — homegrown, stuffed, embroidered and otherwise — weren’t the most memorable part of an afternoon at Sendak’s house. That came in a quiet room next to the kitchen, when an image of the author fighting another type of monster came into focus, using creativity as a shield. We’ll get there shortly.
First, Lynn Caponera, executive director of the Maurice Sendak Foundation, and Jonathan Weinberg, its curator and research director, led a tour of the sprawling house and a circular archive added in 2016. They pointed out paintings and prints by George Stubbs and William Blake; hundreds of Mickey Mouse collectibles (from the rodent’s first decade, before it became what Sendak described as a “shapeless, meaningless bon vivant”); terracotta figurines dating to the Tang Dynasty; Beatrix Potter’s pencil case and a shelf of her first editions guarded by Jemima Puddleduck; a sepia-toned photograph of the author as a child, cheek to cheek with his mother; the wooden desk where he is believed to have written his first works; and three toy soldiers stolen from FAO Schwarz, where Sendak worked as a window designer before becoming an illustrator. Every wall and surface held another gem. It was difficult to know where to look. In fact, dizzying.
Caponera and Weinberg knew the place intimately, having spent there since they were children. Caponera was 11 years old when Sendak hired her to care for six German shepherd puppies; She remained with him for over 40 years and later became his assistant and surrogate daughter. Weinberg met Sendak when he was 10 years old; Her mother was a friend of Eugene Glynn, Sendak’s partner for 50 years. After the death of Weinberg’s parents, Glynn became a father figure and Sendak a benevolent uncle. He is now an artist and art historian.
Weinberg said, “You know when you’re little and you laugh and milk comes out of your nose? “That was how Maurice made us laugh.”
Caponera and Weinberg, understandably, were protective of Sendak: at times, they navigated the conversation and the shot as if passing along invisible velvet ropes. We don’t go upstairs and briefly address the question of whether the house will become a museum open to the public, a possibility Sendak raised in his will.
Weinberg said: “We are divided into zones, so only nine people can…”
“…being in this house at the same time,” Caponera said, finishing the thought. (The correct number is six people, depending on the city.)
The rhythm of his comments was equal parts badminton, decoupage and “when harry met sally.”
Caponera: “Even though we are as much Maurice’s children as if we were his biological children, people think: Well, how do they know? They are not Sendaks.”
Weinberg: “People form their own families.”
Caponera: “They make their own family.”
All reluctance evaporated when a copy of “Ten Little Bunnies” appeared and I reflexively raised it to my nose. Caponera and Weinberg burst out in unison, as if witnessing a secret handshake: “He would have loved that!” Sendak apparently appreciated the practical aspects of betting creation, right down to the scent of fresh printing.
“He didn’t care about the art hanging on the wall,” Toni Markiet, Sendak’s final editor, said in a telephone interview. “He cared that the art was reproduced in a book, that it was the end result of his work and his vision. He wanted to know how the printing press worked. He wanted to know how the cameras separated his works of art.”
It was all part of (apologies for the lack of originality, but it has to be said) the wild rampage of Sendak’s world.
Which brings us to that quiet room off the kitchen, to the oval table where the author ate breakfast, read the newspaper and watched television every morning for 40 years. Here, an image of Sendak began to take shape while he was at home.
“I think something that isn’t often talked about in this situation is how a person with such severe depression manages to live life,” Caponera said. “We were often worried that Maurice would take his own life. If he finished a book and had no other project to do, he would fall apart. Nothing could get him out of that depression.”
Caponera and Weinberg described how Sendak worked methodically and diligently, as if his life depended on it, which, in some ways, it did.
There were periods when Sendak would stay in his room for days at a time, not eating and sometimes physically ill. “He wasn’t allowed to talk in the house,” Weinberg said. “It was really bad.”
Therapy and medication helped; So did the view from his desk chair. So did Glynn, who was a psychiatrist.
Later in his life, Caponera said, “Maurice had this way of accepting himself through his work. His eyesight was failing. His hands shook. He said: ‘This is how an 80-year-old man draws.’ This is how I’m supposed to draw.’”
Added Caponera: “This never felt like work. I never felt like you were with this person who was super famous and everyone calls a genius. You just felt, ‘This is how Maurice is kept alive.'”
Sendak was also fun and playful, introverted and irreverent, complicated and occasionally petulant, loyal to some humans and all canines.
“If he couldn’t walk his dogs, he didn’t want to live,” Caponera said. “Every time she got sick, she said, ‘You know the rule, right?’ I would say, ‘Yes, yes, yes.'”
Caponera and Weinberg addressed Sendak’s impatience with small talk. How, if he liked you, he would pinch your nose lovingly. (She liked noses, especially Tony Kushner’s, which is immortalized in plaster next to the landline in his office.) How he made up absurd stories about what he read in the newspaper. How he claimed that the place he had at the end of the street, which he called Buttcrack Falls, had been named by George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
They talked about Sendak’s curiosity, his obsession with his weight, his enthusiasm for babies, his habit of offering his midwifery services to pregnant women. His patience as a teacher, whether it was gardening or drawing trees.
This was, without a doubt, the best part of the day. Why stand on the shoulders of giants when you can pull a chair up to their table?
Caponera described how, as septuagenarians who had never lived with a child, Sendak and Glynn welcomed their young son as a member of their family.
“Maurice was a big help,” he said. “But he would get jealous too. When he had to go do something at school, he would say to me: ‘What do you mean? Aren’t you going to help me get my lunch?’”
She continued: “He couldn’t do things by himself. He couldn’t use the microwave. He was like, ‘Why don’t I know how to press these buttons?’ And I told him: ‘Maurice, you can draw. I can press a button. He had all these insecurities, but not about work. “Everyone who knew him knew that work was his salvation.”
The archive contains more than 15,000 pieces of Sendak’s original art. Academics and artists can visit by appointment.
“Ten Little Bunnies” grew out of a paperback volume that Sendak created for a fundraiser for the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia (which he later sued his estate for). The book stars an expressive magician and a growing cast of bunnies, and it’s pretty slim: imagine a Shutterfly album documenting an overnight trip. Contains 10 words; In classic Sendak style, the eyebrows and mustaches say it all.
Will a younger generation devour this book with the enthusiasm that their parents and grandparents had for, say, “Chicken Rice Soup”? Time will tell. HarperCollins declined to share title-by-title sales data for two previous posthumous books, but revealed that since his death, 25 million Sendak books have been sold.
As for what comes next, Weinberg said, “We are very aware that people want to see the work. “There are different ways to make it accessible.”
In October, the Denver Art Museum will host an exhibition of 400 works of art from Sendak’s 65-year career, including drawings, paintings, posters and set designs for film, television and theater productions.
“We respect the fact that these are not our books,” Caponera said. “We are the stewards. Our job now, because we are getting older, is to figure out how we are going to convey that.” He dreams of a Maurice Sendak Mentoring Center, “a place where people can come and learn about picture books, art, music and nature.”
Caponera said: “His books are his biography. “That’s how he was.”