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ShadowSax: I think you're proceeding from a false dichotomy. Does it have to be either/or? Why can't it be both/and? he's talking, basically, about substance and style—and ideally, a work will have both.
I'm not crazy about Seuss, frankly: it's entertaining doggerel, but doggerel nonetheless. Sendak, though—that's the real music. The poetry—and I would call his stuff poetry, yes—is all about the rhythm. I saw a museum retrospective of Sendak's book work, and was not surprised to see that, despite the grogeous illustrations, it all begins with the text.
I love the way Sendak fragments the texts, the grammar undiagrammable (the long run-on sentence that begins Where The Wild Things Are), the diction jazzy but somehow archaic. Listen to them read by a competent narrator, and they crackle with life.
And Sendak's work seems touched with a weird sort of melancholy, something that seems very true to childhood. He isn't just writing for kids—he's writing about them, in a way that Geisel didn't. From a piece in Slate (emphasis mine):
"Mischief-maker though he is, Max lays down the law to the wild things; he parrots his bossy mother as he rebukes the beasts. Meanwhile, she's plainly cooling down offstage; on the last page, she has his supper set out for him in his bedroom. Sendak's is a spiky parable about the struggle for self-control, and it speaks to big readers and small listeners alike. It's a far cry from the chaos the Cat in the Hat wreaks while the kids watch aghast and their mother is off doing who knows what."
Seuss, in his books, doesn't even seem particularly interested in children—not as much as in flumrumplers or schmendlers or thneeds, anyway. Where kids are present in Seuss, they are usually passive patsies, placeholders around which to drop funny words. (This is less true of his "prose" books—the Bartholomew Cubbins stories, for instance, have a few flashes of character—but I think it holds as a general rule.)
Sendak, though, gives us an amazingly accurate and detailed recreations of the feel of childhood—the petty squabbles, the shifting alliances, the occasional unloveliness of it. He did this, he says, by close observation: Rosie was real, he says, a young neighbor of his when he was living in Brooklyn: she would play outside his window and he would write down her riffs. And Rosie is indelible, while "Sally and I" and Cindy Lou Who are ciphers and shadows.
(Ted Geisel and his wife were unable to have kids: I don't know anything about Sendak's parental status or his sexuality, and it doesn't really matter. The point is that he watches, and he remembers, in a way that Seuss never did.)
And honestly, Geisel's art was never much more than functional. Sendak's works his compositions, matching the visuals with the text on a thematic level—look at how Wild Things starts off with text and image on spearate pages, the pictures squeezed down to a frame at the center of the page, the frame gradually expanding, going full-bleed, before exploding into those cinematic double-spreads, then pulling back in as normalcy is restored. Or the astonishing detail of the Winsor MacKay homage In The Night Kitchen, with its cityscapes of brand-name foodstuffs—nostalgic, creepy, and visionary all at once. |
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