Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, which has sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide, is 83 and walks with a stick (“It’s for hitting people”).
Sendak has not published a book that he has written and illustrated in 30 years, but this week BumbleArdy is published - the story of a pig whose parents are dead who wants to have a ninth birthday party. He talked to Tim Teeman for The Times. Here are some of his frank, and touching, words:
On work
“People think I’m an antiquated sleeping beauty. But I’ve been illustrating other people’s books and designing opera sets, but I haven’t wanted to do a book until now.”
On his new character
“I wanted Bumble-Ardy to do whatever he wanted, without blame or shame.”
On today’s world
“I think the whole world stinks: everything is decaying, the lack of culture depresses me most. I’m happy that my career is over and I can do what I like. I don’t want to be part of anything. I like where I live, what I read; I’m still doing my books, people are still purchasing them.”
On happiness
“Who’s happy? What does that mean? Of course I’m not, I’ve nothing to be happy about. I can’t complain about my life, I’m just a little bit nervous about how it’s going to end.”
On dying
“It’s time to go, it’s time to get the fuck out — it really is… I’m old enough to die. I despise religion in all forms, so I have no hope of an afterlife. If I saw my mother and father again, I think I’d kill myself. I will be nothing and nowhere, and that will be such a relief. To be something and somewhere is very tiring: the good times are so few.”
On Eugene Glynn, his partner of 50 years, who died in 2007
“I dream of him constantly. I’m always feeling guilty that I didn’t do enough for him. I had my success, which was a distraction and disturbance for him. I’d see people meet him and look away indifferently and I’d hate them. I never betrayed him. I wish I had been more demonstrative, but it’s not a thing I do very well. Being gay in the old days was hard, being gay later was weird. I very much wished not to be. I came from a regular depressing family. I was brainwashed.”
On his brother Jack
“He used to hold me close; we never did anything, but it was the happiest time I remember. We intended our lives to be entwined like those of the Grimm brothers. He was probably gay but he married, and his wife hated me because I was more famous than him.”
On the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby
“We were the same age. His being rich and Gentile and everything a poor Jewish boy could not be, yet still be taken away and found dead, was unnerving. The fear of death has been with me ever since.”
On his first sexual encounter (with a man in a New York toy store where he created window displays)
“in a giant doll’s house on the second floor”
On relationships with women
“I was engaged, I impregnated her, but she lost the baby. I blame myself. We had a fight. I pushed her after she pushed me and she fell. I assumed it killed the baby.”
On his recurring dream of his child at Saint-Izaire station in France
“My eyes are looking for my daughter. I know she is waiting for me. I get off the train, I see her, she is pretty, I don’t talk to her. The dream fizzles out.”
On homosexuality
“I went to a therapist. I wanted him to hammer me straight, but of course that failed… It’s amazing, just dumb luck, that I didn’t die of Aids. Some of my very dearest friends died.”
On teaching
“I don’t know how to tell them the truth, it’s a waste of time. Publishing is vulgar and cheap and they won’t make a living.”
On his 30-year absence from writing
“I enjoyed the opera design, but just being alive is troublesome. That’s why I’m ready to die. I think a good deal of suicide. I once asked a doctor to give me a pill and he was horrified. I’ve been ready to die since childhood.”
On loneliness
“My body so much wants that comfort, but as you get older and older you realise that it’s not acceptable. You learn to live with it. I’ll just keep working till my hand falls loose.”
Bumble-Ardy will be published by HarperCollins on Thursday at £12.99
You can buy it for £10.39 inc p&p at thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
