Maurice Sendak on Randall Jarrell
An interview about his work illustrating Jarrell’s children’s books
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) is best known as an American poet, the author of several volumes of poetry, and a winner of a National Book Award for Poetry (1961); students often encounter his short lyric “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner” in their anthologies. But Jarrell was also an insightful critic (praising the prose of Anton Chekhov and Christina Stead, for example, or measuring the excellence of fellow poets like Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens). In addition, he was the author of a funny novel about college life (“Pictures From an Institution”) and four children’s books. The latter brought him in touch with Maurice Sendak.
Sendak is an author and illustrator well known for his own work: “The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm,” “The Sign on Rosie’s Door,” “In the Night Kitchen,” “Where the Wild Things Are,” and other books. But Sendak also illustrated three of Randall Jarrell’s children’s books (“The Bat-Poet,” “The Animal Family,” and “Fly by Night”) and provided a picture to accompany Jarrell’s poem “Children Selecting Books in a Library” in the memorial volume “Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965.” He and Jarrell were also friends.
During the summer of 1978, I offered in San Diego a seminar on Jarrell’s fantasies at the Children’s Literature Institute sponsored by Point Loma College and San Diego State University. Sendak was in residence at the Institute and generously offered to come in and speak to the class about his work with Jarrell. The following is a transcript of the questions Sendak was asked and his replies.
QUESTION: How did you get to know Randall Jarrell?
SENDAK: We were introduced by the man who was his editor then at Macmillan. When the editor got a copy of The Bat-Poet, he wanted me to do it; [until then] I had never worked with the editor or Randall. They sent me a copy and, of course, I wanted to do it. An arrangement was made so that I could meet Jarrell. And that’s how it began, on a very professional basis.
That often remains simply professional, or it turns into a friendship. In the case of Jarrell, it really did turn into a friendship, which included Mary, his wife. And it turned out that we were both opera addicts. So, he came to New York during the opera season and we would go to the Metropolitan together, and eat together, and talk about books together. It gradually developed into a friendship.
And there was sort of an agreement that I would illustrate all his children’s books and if I didn’t want to, I would at least have the first option, the first “no,” if I didn’t want to do it. But I would see it first, and that was promised me.
I had missed The Gingerbread Rabbit. I had regretted that but, at the same time, it wasn’t the book for me to do anyway. Garth Williams is an old friend of mine and a terrific illustrator, and it seemed proper that he should do that book.
QUESTION: Did you talk over with Jarrell any of the work you did when illustrating Fly by Night?
SENDAK: No, we didn’t discuss the book. I read the story. I thought it was the most difficult one of all. We had only a brief time together than then because he was killed shortly after. He knew I felt ambivalent about it in many ways. But we never had a chance to talk about it. And then it was ten years from that time until it was published before I felt I could do it; I kept postponing it over and over again. Mary was very considerate because I knew she very much wanted to have his book published. But she understood that, one, I felt very complicated about the story and, two, I missed him so much I didn’t want to do it. When a decade had passed I felt far enough away from his death to try again.
QUESTION: Which of the books do you like best?
SENDAK: Of the three, as a work, my personal favorite is The Animal Family. Of the three, I think the best constructed and artistically controlled is The Bat-Poet. And, in terms of my pictures, my favorite is Fly by Night. So, my likes really cover all three.
Fly by Night’s pictures were really work worth waiting ten years for. I couldn’t do Fly by Night until I had done The Juniper Tree, the Grimm. That was the breakthrough for me in how to interpret Jarrell. I had to struggle so much with Grimm, and I felt I had succeeded. I felt brave enough to try Fly by Night then, and it sort of fell into place. And I know he would have liked what I’d done. Still, it was a consolation to hear from Mary after the book was published that “Randall would have loved this.” I felt very good about that.
QUESTION: Is it The Animal Family that you said was so visual that you didn’t want to illustrate it but only decorate it?
SENDAK: I didn’t want to illustrate it at all. In fact, that was the only time I got close to an argument with Jarrell because he was hurt; he thought I didn’t like the book. I loved the book.
I felt he didn’t need me. If you had drawn the mermaid dragging herself . . . it would have been so vulgar. Whereas, just the image of her is poetic. But you can’t draw her. You couldn’t draw the child. You couldn’t draw the hunter. You could only draw the place where they lived. Little stage settings. I like what I did there, but the pictures are only theatrical stage settings for Randall. They’re like little overtures for each chapter.
More than that, the shape and the design of the book is very square. I know how desperately Randall needed a family. That’s the whole message of everything he wrote — this incredible need for a family — and so, I wanted to give him a fat, square, little book. And if you’ll notice, the type is in the middle of the page with a great “island” of white space around it. That’s for coziness and hugging. So, you have these little pieces of type, big margins, and thick boards — we got triple thick boards for the binding — so it’s almost like a house, like opening a door instead of a book. You see, I wanted to illustrate it not just with those opening pictures, but with the whole shape, smell, and design of the book. It would look like his little family. It would be a gift for Randall — his home, finally, inside that book.
I love that book. In terms of illustrating a book without illustrating it, that’s a very good example.
QUESTION: Was it very different illustrating Fly by Night because so much of it is about a dream?
SENDAK: That’s the difference between The Animal Family where I felt I was intruding into Randall’s private world and Fly by Night where I felt I shared that particular world. His particular longing in that book rang a bell in my own life; I had a similar longing. I was able to tie myself into that very easily. It has nothing to do with the names, to tell you the truth; it had to do with the deep level of fantasy in that book and what he was looking for. I happened to be looking for the same thing. And we meshed better on that book — after I knew what it was; it took me a long time to understand it. But Fly by Night is my book as much as it is Randall’s, while The Animal Family is his book. That’s how I feel.
QUESTION: Why do you feel that the pictures and the text worked so well together in Fly by Night?
SENDAK: When I discovered what it was that was so personal to me, I felt I joined his him almost in spirit in the book. What it was simply . . . what is Fly by Night all about? Randall — without going into the details, because I don’t think I have a right to — had a very unhappy childhood, and what, perhaps, he missed most in the whole world was a mother. In most of the things, including The Animal Family and so much of the poetry, there is this painful longing for a mother. Fly by Night being, oddly, one of the last things he wrote, is like an open declaration of his need for a mother — the whole poem about the owl and the babies, David being alone and coming back to his mother in the end.
I had lost my mother a few years before the Jarrell book and I had difficulties with my mother. This book was a way of resolving many personal issues via his issues. See what I mean? It was Mother that we were both talking about in that particular book. And I was able to talk about my mother through his mother; I was also able to substitute my mother for his mother.
Pictorially in the book, my mother is there all the time. She is on the cover of the book; that’s taken from a photograph of my mother in her wedding gown. In the double-page spread that’s my mother on the far right as a young girl in Europe, a shepherdess. And in the middle of the book is my mother holding me under a tree; she’s overweight having borne three children. On either side are two lambs; one is my brother and one is my sister.
The book was an homage to my mother. It was a farewell to my mother, just as it was for Jarrell. So, it was a farewell to Randall, a farewell to my mother, and a farewell to child dreams that don’t come true.
QUESTION: Do you think that you might also have been attracted to the story because of a minor theme — the sister? In your interview with Jonathan Cott you speak of the first book you wrote about your sister and Cott links it with the Grimms’ “Brother and Sister.” There is something like that in “The Owl’s Bedtime Story” and in the mermaid.
SENDAK: The sister theme floods through a lot of my things. The sister theme became my book after Fly by Night; the picture book I am working on now is an exploration of the sister theme. The beauty of all this is that these pressing pains, needs, or whatever you call them, all find outlet graphically either in someone else’s book like Jarrell’s, or in my own books. And of course I’ll talk about them endlessly until I die because these are the issues of your life and the resolutions you are trying to find to these things.
QUESTION: Can you tell me something about the picture you for this book [“Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965”]?
SENDAK: After he died that book was published and everyone who contributed to that book did so without payment. It was my present for him.
QUESTION: Is Jarrell the child in the picture?
SENDAK: No. That is specifically my brother. Somehow, my brother reminds me of Jarrell. There is a quality in the two men that is similar — which is why, perhaps, I was attracted to Jarrell. But when it came to doing that picture, instead of wanting a Jarrell photograph, I wanted a picture of my brother as a little boy.
QUESTION: Is there some symbolism in the owl?
SENDAK: There are many things in it, but I don’t want to get into that. You can make it up yourself. Your interpretations are just as valid as mine.
QUESTION: But why the owl and the cat? Is that from Fly by Night?
SENDAK: Well, there’s always owls and cats. Animals are threatening or loving or wise. You can decide which one is what for you.
QUESTION: It’s just that the cat . . .
SENDAK: Oh, the cats were special to the Jarrells because they loved cats very much. Cats appeared often because he had one he was just nuts about. He wasn’t a dog person. I’m a dog person and he was a cat person.
QUESTION: I noticed a lot of pairing in the double-page picture in “Fly by Night.” Is that the desire for companionship?
SENDAK: It’s actually a vision, that picture, which is both threatening and — the owl is a threatening bird but also a loving bird. And what I think I’m saying is that’s what mothers are.
Because he didn’t have a pair of parents, I gave Randall one in this vision.
QUESTION: Were you listening to any particular music when you did Fly by Night?
SENDAK: Probably Mozart. I really can’t remember. But Mozart has been a kind of ambience or background for all the work I’ve been doing for about two years now. I don’t listen to anyone else. No Wagner. I’ll get back to those things, but during a time when I’m working on a specific theme and feeling I can’t be interrupted with any other sound. Even composers I love. Even someone as close as Haydn is disruptive to me now. I don’t mind living with Mozart. He’s a great friend.
QUESTION: How do you answer people who ask why David is naked?
SENDAK: Because he is dreaming. Because between him and the dream there can be no clothing. It’s the most personal thing that’s happening to him. You don’t want him dressed when something that personal is happening.
My conception of personal experience meaning exposure — of your soul but also literally of your body — really stems from my love for William Blake and the Songs of Innocence and Experience where people are naked. They’re not naked to titillate people; they’re naked because they are yielding up their most personal moment when they give themselves up to their dream or their fantasy or their wish. To have David in pj’s or Fruit-of-the-Loom shorts while he’s having this . . . it would have been horrible. He had to be only David.
This interview appeared in “Conversations with Maurice Sendak,” ed. Peter C. Kunze (University Press of Mississippi, 2016). I reviewed Sendak’s “collaboration” with Jarrell on “Fly by Night” in The New Republic. My extended study of all of Jarrell’s work for the young appeared in my “The Children’s Books of Randall Jarrell” (University of Georgia Press, 1988). An interesting “rediscovery” of Jarrell’s children’s books appeared in the New York Review of Books (May 6, 2014) by Katherine Rundell (the author of “Rooftoppers”). Finally, you’ll find a collection of my essays on Sendak (with links) if you click here.
If you liked this, “clap” below so others will see this on Medium. To see the ten most popular entries on this blog, click here. And if you’d like to read more essays like this, click the “follow” button at the top of this page.
