ABSTRACT
Just as his latest picture book, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, was about to hit bookstore shelves in 1993 for its short, failed run as a consumer product, Maurice Sendak was interviewed by Art Spiegelman for the New Yorker. For readers of Sendak, the interview covers familiar territory. “Childhood is deep and rich,” he says “It’s vast, mysterious, and profound” (Spiegelman, “In the Dumps,” pp. 80-81). And sounding perhaps his most controversial note, Sendak defends the nature of his children’s art, its intensity, and its brutal honesty: “You can’t protect kids; they know everything.” For Sendak this amounts to a belief that adults should not protect kids, but should honestly offer up the mysterious confusion of the adult world-and the sometimes horrific consequences of the adult’s attempt to control and order it. Sendak makes this remark in the context of defending what was then his latest picture book, and the most political to date: We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, a story about the abandoned child who, for Sendak, is a Gandhi, a Christ, and a Jewish Holocaust victim all rolled into one. The picture book is uncompromising as a commentary on the many ancillary cultural consequences that detached human relations give rise to, including homelessness, greed, and predatory violence. The frankness of the story-and
the starkness of the situation-undoubtedly led to its commercial failure, though not to its critical success. Jack and Guy failed to become a commercial favorite not just because it didn’t appeal to children-though this is certainly a part of the situation-but because it disturbs adults who have a difficult time with a children’s text that does not idealize and simplify the child and childhood. In short, Jack and Guy is a very scary story. The child, according to Sendak, already understands the story because he is living it all the time. Adults, on the other hand, have learned to forget what happened to them as a child, and Jack and Guy is a painful, challenging reminder.1
