We’ll begin our tribute to Maurice Sendak with an excerpt of our 1986 interview, in which he told me that when he was a child, adults looked big and grotesque to him, and he couldn’t imagine ever becoming one.
MAURICE SENDAK: It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn’t happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn’t have thought about it much.
TERRY GROSS: Because adults seemed really big and different, you couldn’t imagine becoming one?
SENDAK: And awful. Yeah. I mean they were mostly dreadful, and if the option were to become an adult was to become another dreadful creature, then best not, although I think there had to be a kind of normal anticipation of that moment happening because being a child was even worse.
I mean, being a child was being a child — was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn’t want to be a child.
I remember how much — when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of Peter Pan. I detested it. I mean the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy, I don’t — I couldn’t have thought it out then, but I did later, certainly, that this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer, that any child would want to remain in childhood. It’s not possible. The wish is to get out.
“‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”, NPR Books, 2012-05-08.
May 26, 2019
QotD: Maurice Sendak on childhood
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