#292:  SENDAK IN BLACK AND WHITE—II.   In the early nineteen-sixties, an editor at Macmillan introduced the poet Randall Jarrell and Maurice Sendak to each other; Jarrell had written a children’s story, The Bat-Poet, and the editor wanted Sendak to illustrate it.  “That often remains simply professional, or it turns into a friendship,” Sendak said later.  “In the case of Jarrell, it really did turn into a friendship.”  They were both opera buffs; they visited; they talked books.  Jarrell wrote two more children’s stories, The Animal Family and Fly by Night; Sendak illustrated both.  Some of Jarrell’s translations from the German appeared in The Juniper Tree, the collection of Grimms’ tales that, designed and illustrated by Sendak, finally seemed to give critics permission to consider Sendak as an artist, not a mere children’s book illustrator (yes, you can hear me snorting).  Asked which of the three stories he liked best, Sendak said, “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.”

      When I recently picked up and reread The Bat-Poet, I felt a kind of fizzy, soda-pop pleasure: at last, a book to give people who have asked me “What’s it like to be a poet?” (actually, no one has ever asked me that question, but I’ve always thought they should).  That itch to do things others find inexplicable (“What do you want to sleep on the porch for?”); the visitation of the muse (“Sometimes when I wake up in the daytime I make up poems.”) (For me it’s always three in the morning.); the blessed encounter with an audience (“Say me the one about the owl.”); the shared sense that the poem has always edged out a bit beyond simple explanation (“Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?”).  There it all is on the page, simply put, and expressed in Jarrell’s chaste, pointed prose.  I will agree with John Updike, who suggested that the poems in Bat-Poet and Fly by Night are perhaps not quite up to snuff, but I can live with that; and Sendak’s pictures are superb.  And of course there’s the other thing, the endless sense of wanting, needing, to revise:  “The bat said to himself sleepily, ‘I wish I’d said we sleep all winter. That would have been a good thing to have in.’”  Jarrell knew the work’s never done.

        The last of the three, Fly By Night, is perhaps the slenderest of the tales; in it, a boy, David, at night flies out into a dream world where he re-experiences (but does not resolve) the constrictions and loneliness of his waking life.  As he floats naked into his dream world—the illustrations of the boy mimcking the positions of his sleeping self—he encounters an animal world—rabbits and sheep and ponies and an owl, who tells a tale to her young.  The whole thing is lightly surreal, nightstruck, shy of conclusions, which may in turn be why Sendak could put himself into it so deeply.  It was ten years after the story’s composition and Jarrell’s death, and after the deeply challenging experience of illustrating the Grimm tales, that Sendak was able to do the pictures, which have many personal details hiddn in them (the woman holding the infant is a direct copy of a photo of Sadie, Sendak’s mother) but a true dreamlike quality.  This elusive combination of tale and picture is slight, not altogether satisfying, but both burrow into your head and stay there. I don’t think you’ll forget you’ve read it.

      With Sendak, I agree that The Animal Family is the best of the three.  A hunter and a mermaid encounter each other; they fall in love, and begin to live together; the first chapters are a remarkably sustained reverie.  They adopt a bear cub, who of course inevitably turns into an adult bear, which is a very big thing to have in your house; it’s the bear who gives a new comic brightness to the prose:  “The bear was a remarkable tree-climber: he hung onto the trunk with his front feet and kicked himself up with his hind feet, his pawschurning and his claws making big gouges in the trunk.  Like some animal that doesn’t know how to climb a tree, never has known how to climb a tree, but thinks it will just try anyway, the bear went up the trunk by main force; and he didn’t so much climb down as fall, interrupting his plunge with five or six desperate momentary pauses….When he ran, he looked like a bed galloping across the meadow.

         After the bear, the family adopt a lynx, sensuously described:  “In the winter the lynx’s fur was so long and fine and beautiful that you couldn’t look at it without wanting to touch him—all summer, though, his fur had a sketchy, temporary feel, as though he had taken off his real coat for the hot weather and were wearing a rough substitute.”  The lynx in turn discovers the final addition to the family: a boy, discovered in a small boat next to his dead mother, plainly the survivor of a shipwreck.  He is incorporated into the family:  “In a little while they forgot they had ever lived without the boy.”  The last line in the book is when the mermaid says to the boy: “We’ve had you always.”  And there the story ends, on that fragile note of perfection, the source of the story’s surprising, sad emotional wallop: we know, inside a tale or out,  that perfection is a very temporary thing.

        Sendak was leery of illustrating Jarrell’s book: “I felt he didn’t need me.” So he drew where the characters lived: “theatrical stage settings...like little overtures for each chapter.”  In the same interview Sendak detailed the care that went into the book’s design: “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….it would look like his little family. It would be a gift for Randall — his home, finally, inside that book.”  Sendak said of that story, as we suspect he might’ve said of all three: “I love that book.”  It shows.

By Randall Jarrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak:

      The Bat-Poet.  Harper Collins, 1964,

      The Animal Family.  Pantheon Books, 1965.

      Fly By Night.  Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1976.

The earliest of Jarrell’s stories for children, The Gingerbread Rabbit, Harper Collins, 1964, was illustrated by Garth Williams.  Some people have all the luck.

The Sendak interview quoted is online at   https://jerrygriswold.medium.com/maurice-sendak-on-randall-jarrell-e3382bd6ad68

 Also online is an excellent short documentary by Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs on Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCaURqryE3w