“Fly by Night”: Randall Jarrell’s Best Children’s Book

A haunting book created by Maurice Sendak and Randall Jarrell (from the New Republic)

“Fly by Night,” by Randall Jarrell. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

There is a great distance between the callow clutter of books-for-kids and the high haunted aeries of American fantasies as told by Randall Jarrell or pictured by Maurice Sendak. These two fantasy kinsmen have worked together before (The Bat-Poet, The Animal Family) and Fly by Night is the last of these collaborations. Jarrell finished the tale before his death. Sendak has now provided the pictures.

Jarrell was a master of the pleasant seemings of American juvenile literature that hide grim truths. The Animal Family, a Newbery Honor Book, is a seemingly peaceful pastoral about a hunter who seeks and find companions. It is an idyllic tale so tranquil we are likely to overlook the fact that the hunter befriends each of his “sons” over a cashiered mother. That fact, and that the only female of the book is a mermaid in whom the hunter sees his dead mother, hints that something is amiss in Eden.

Fly by Night is likewise an embodiment of the wish for companions. David lives on New Garden Road and, because “there aren’t any children for him to play with,” spends his waking hours daydreaming in a tree house. Sometimes he is accompanied by a striped cat who makes the…