In last weekend's Lives They Lived issue, the longtime contributor to the magazine Christoph Niemann sketched a clever, touching tribute to Maurice Sendak. Niemann (self-rendered in a way that recalls Calvin's father in "Calvin & Hobbes") recreates an afternoon in 2011 when he listened to the children's book author being interviewed on the car radio. His drive was taken over by images from Sendak's work the way Max's bedroom is overrun by jungle in "Where the Wild Things Are," with glimpses of Max, wild things, Jennie the dog, Mickey, a couple of bakers.
Sendak's original material is great (of course), and a double source of nostalgia (one's childhood, one's kids' childhoods), but there's another reason I'm a big fan of the man: he loved Herman Melville. And nearly 20 years ago, he illustrated a new edition of Melville's novel from 1852, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities." It's a dark and unhinged book, and not something you read to your kids. (Seriously — "Herman Melville Crazy" was the headline of one contemporary newspaper review.) If "Moby-Dick," the novel's immediate predecessor, marked the beginning of the end of Melville's career as a writer, "Pierre" was the nail in the coffin. ("The Confidence Man," his last published novel, several years later, was the graveyard dirt hitting the lid.)
And yet, according to the editor of that new edition, "After a century and a half, the fate of Pierre may yet be a happy one, for Sendak's provocative and provoking pictures . . . may lure more readers than any literary analysis could ever do." Here are a few of those pictures, along with passages from Melville's writing that inspired them.
But now! — now! — and again he would lose himself in the most surprising and preternatural ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind. Himself was too much for himself. He felt that what he had always before considered the solid land of veritable reality, was now being audaciously encroached upon by bannered armies of hooded phantoms, disembarking in his soul, as from flotillas of specter-boats.
Let no unmanly, mean temptation cross my path this day; let no base stone lie in it. This day I will forsake the censuses of men, and seek the suffrages of the god-like population of the trees, which now seem to me a nobler race than man. Their high foliage shall drop heavenliness upon me; my feet in contact with their mighty roots, immortal vigor shall so steal into me. Guide me, gird me, guard me, this day, ye sovereign powers! Bind me in bonds I can not break; remove all sinister allurings from me; eternally this day deface in me the detested and distorted images of all the convenient lies and duty-subterfuges of the diving and ducking moralities of this earth. Fill me with consuming fire for them; to my life's muzzle, cram me with your own intent. Let no world-syren come to sing to me this day, and wheedle from me my undauntedness.
Impossible would it be now to tell all the confusion and confoundings in the soul of Pierre, so soon as the above absurdities in his mind presented themselves first to his combining consciousness. . . . Now indeed did all the fiery floods in the Inferno, and all the rolling gloom in Hamlet suffocate him at once in flame and smoke. The cheeks of his soul collapsed in him: he dashed himself in blind fury and swift madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity.
For some interval it almost seemed as if his own heart would snap; his own reason go down. Unendurable grief of a man, when Death itself gives the stab, and then snatches all availments to solacement away. For in the grave is no help, no prayer thither may go, no forgiveness thence come; so that the penitent whose sad victim lies in the ground, for that useless penitent his doom is eternal, and though it be Christmas-day with all Christendom, with him it is Hell-day and an eaten liver forever.
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