Stewards watch over Sendak’s wild things
Author’s classic traits materialize in posthumous ‘Ten Little Rabbits’
On a frigid Wednesday afternoon, sunbeams poured into Maurice Sendak’s studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut, crisscrossing one another 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 cups and watercolor sets; there’s his final manuscript, for a book called “No Noses.” And there, glowing like a ripe tomato, is his red cardigan, draped over the back of an empty chair.
Standing among Sendak’s books, art and ephemera, it was easy to imagine that he’d stepped out for his daily 3-mile jaunt down Chestnut Hill Road. Surely he’d come back, pop in a Mozart CD and get cracking on a new project. There are his walking sticks by the front door. His poster paints, wearing price tags from an art store that closed in 2016. His stereo, labeled with homemade stickers marked “power” and “volume.”
The place might be frozen in amber but the vibe in December was future-focused and upbeat. The countdown had begun for a third posthumous Sendak book, “Ten Little Rabbits,” now available from HarperCollins.
It has big shoes to fill: Sendak’s previous books have sold more than 50 million copies. With their unique potion of humor and forthrightness, the most famous ones, “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen,” are as unforgettable as the Pledge of Allegiance or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little
Star.” Sendak’s minutely crosshatched, freewheeling pictures are as familiar and mysterious as the contours of your childhood bedroom in the dark. He was the rare adult who looked under the bed and drew what he saw.
Lynn Caponera, executive director of the Maurice Sendak Foundation, and Jonathan Weinberg, its curator and director of research, led a tour of the sprawling home and a circular archive added in 2016 that contains more than 15,000 pieces of Sendak’s original art. They pointed out paintings and prints by George Stubbs and William Blake; hundreds of Mickey Mouse collectibles; terra cotta figurines dating to the Tang Dynasty; Beatrix Potter’s pencil box and a shelf of her first editions; a sepia-toned photo of the author as a toddler, cheek to cheek with his mother; the wooden desk where he is believed to have written his earliest works; and three toy soldiers stolen from F.A.O. Schwarz, where Sendak worked as a window designer before he became an illustrator. Every wall and surface held another gem.
Caponera was 11 when Sendak hired her to care for six German shepherd puppies; she stayed with him for over 40 years, later becoming his assistant and a surrogate daughter. Weinberg met Sendak when he was 10; his mother was friends with Eugene Glynn, Sendak’s partner of 50 years. After Weinberg’s parents died, Glynn became a father figure and Sendak a benevolent uncle.
Caponera and Weinberg were, understandably, protective of Sendak: At times, they navigated the conversation and the floor plan as if stepping around invisible velvet ropes.
All reticence evaporated when a copy of “Ten Little Rabbits” materialized, and I reflexively lifted it up to my nose. Caponera and Weinberg erupted in unison, as if witnessing a secret handshake: “He would have loved that!” Apparently, Sendak appreciated the nuts and bolts of bookmaking, down to the perfume of fresh print.
“He didn’t care about art hanging on a wall,” Toni Markiet, Sendak’s final editor, said in a phone interview. “He cared about art being reproduced in a book, which 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 artwork.”
It was all part of — apologies for lack of originality — the wild rumpus of Sendak’s world.
In a quiet room off the kitchen is the oval table where the author ate breakfast, read the newspaper and watched television every morning for 40 years. Here, a picture started to take shape of Sendak as he was at home.
“I think a thing that’s not often talked about in this situation is how a person with such severe depression gets through life,” Caponera said. “A lot of the time we were worried that Maurice would take his life. If he finished a book and he didn’t have another project to do, he would fall apart. Nothing could get him out of that depression.”
Therapy and medication helped; so did the view from his desk chair and Glynn, who was a psychiatrist.
Later in life, Caponera said, “Maurice had this way of accepting himself through his work. His eyesight was going. His hands shook. He would say: ‘This is how an 80-yearold draws. This is how I’m supposed to draw.’ ”
They spoke of Sendak’s curiosity, his obsession with his weight, his enthusiasm for babies and his patience as a teacher, whether the subject was gardening or drawing trees.
“Ten Little Rabbits” grew out of a pocket-size volume Sendak created for a fundraiser for the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. The book stars an expressive magician and a multiplying cast of bunnies and is quite slim: Imagine a Shutterfly album documenting an overnight trip. It contains 10 words; in classic Sendakian fashion, eyebrows and whiskers speak volumes.
Will a younger generation devour this book with the zeal their parents and grandparents had for, say, “Chicken Soup With Rice”? Time will tell. HarperCollins declined to share title-by-title sales data for two previous posthumous books but did disclose that, since his death, 25 million Sendak books have been sold.
“We respect the fact that these aren’t our books,” Caponera said. “We’re the stewards. Our job now, because we are getting older, is to find out how we’re going to pass that on.” She dreams about a Maurice Sendak Mentoring Center, “a place that people can come and learn about picture books, art, music and nature.”
Caponera said: “His books are his biography. That’s who he was.”