SENDAK IN HELL

When our sons were little, John and I discovered Maurice Sendak's wonderful books. One of our favorites was Where the Wild Things Are, which had already won the hearts of the public and the 1964 Caldecott medal. I eventually bought a used copy at a library sale and enjoyed it so often that the contents were etched into my brain. So as soon as I saw William Blake's bulgy-eyed Inferno minotaur in my new book, William Blake's illustrations of the Divine Comedy, I recalled Sendak's whimsical bull-monster. It looked to me as if Sendak had borrowed Blake's 150-year-old monster from hell, colored him, and dressed him up in a striped shirt for today's children.

Evidence that the similarity is not mere coincidence was easy to come by. In The Art of Maurice Sendak, Selma G. Lanes quotes him: "...Blake is unquestionably important, my cornerstone in many ways" and "the chief head influence on my art." In a 1990 interview with Martha Shirk of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sendak said, "Wild Things was my leap into limbo." (In other words, his hop into hell.)

In Sendak's version of the Inferno, Max, a mischievous child in a wolf costume, is banished to his room. In the night a forest grows there (at the opening of the Inferno Dante awakens in a dark wood), and Max sails away in a boat to an island where his inner monsters "roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws." Max is crowned king of all wild things and romps with the monsters. Then, like Dante, he leaves the monsters behind; he sails home because he gets hungry and wants to be where he is loved best of all.

So far as I can tell, no other Sendak buffs have thought of his bull monster as Dante's minotaur. There are hundreds of Divine Comedy illustrations; but if we count Sendak's playful one, it is the most popular by far. His minotaur has even been marketed as a soft doll, and I have one.

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