You Probably Don’t “Have Time” for this Maurice Sendak Interview
Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” interviewed Maurice Sendak four times over several decades, the first time in the mid-1980s and most recently several months ago. Her show yesterday was a compilation of all those interviews, a full hour dedicated to Sendak.
Radio is not so fashionable these days, and most of us don’t “have time” to listen to interviews, but I have to say this is the finest work Terry Gross has ever done. You get a real sense of Sendak’s tortured and in the end joyful and completely realized life as an artist and as a human being.
In one of the interviews, Sendak explains to Gross why he stopped doing book signings for children, and why he stopped visiting kids in their classrooms: he realized that he had become one of those frightening and problematic adults that many of his monsters were meant to depict!
One little boy who had been standing in line with his copy of “Where The Wild Things Are” — upon being pushed forward by his father for Sendak’s signature — defiantly and bravely screamed “Don’t crap-up my book!!!”
Sendak loved this kid, and took the father aside to plead mercy for him.
In the course of these four interviews over the years, he developed a trust in Terry Gross and clearly a fondness for her. In the last interview several months ago, Sendak — who had always been obsessed with death (in a good Buddhist way, it seems to me, although he was actually a secular jew and a dedicated atheist) — in the last interview he told Terry “I’ll cry my way to the grave,” and a little later, “I’m not afraid of death” and a little after that “I’ll probably die before you, which is good because I won’t have to cry over you.”
Sendak, a very very sweet man. RIP.
Listen to the compilation of the Terry Gross interviews with Maurice Sendak here if you … “have time:”
2 thoughts on “You Probably Don’t “Have Time” for this Maurice Sendak Interview”
I enjoyed the interview but my soul wept at the end as his life seems so empty in his thoughts at the end.. He seemd so void of something. There was something about that interview that I found haunting and strange. When my parents died, they looked forward to an afterlife….I walked awy in eace with each do their deaths, This poor man (at least in the interview at the time) was empty..he was grateful to have grown old but empty. He wept as he missed all of his friends who had died but ever so wanted to see his brother again.
I respect his body of work. His spirit cried out during that interview in a way that it felt like screaming to me…a scream that does not stop. I was touched and feel haunted by all of this.
I hope that screaming spirit within him found peace.