I went to Manhattan yesterday, an event less and less likely as I get more and more provincial here in Brooklyn. Even with tubes and bridges and the ferry, that river gets harder and harder to cross. Part of the reason is that Brooklyn — and in particular my neighborhood — is so pleasant. Part of the reason is that Manhattan is big and busy and gives me the agita.

After my appointment I realized I was within a few blocks of the Society of Illustrators, a stately old club on the Upper East Side which has been sort of a home base for professional illustrators in New York since 1939. The bottom two floors serve as the SI museum, the next floor up is the new Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts, and the fourth floor is a classic old club/dining room, complete with an oak bar with the original Norman Rockwell painting Dover Coach above it and paneled walls covered with art and portraits by past members. A gorgeous and fabulously cool place that I recommend you check out if you can.

The bottom two museum floors are currently dedicated to a sprawling Maurice Sendak exhibit (through August 17), centered on the 50th anniversary of “Where the Wild Things Are.” Man, how that book got into our collective American (world?) consciousness. He said he based the images of Wild Things on relatives of his, as he recalled them from his Brooklyn boyhood: huge, weird and scary looking.

Sendak had a tough childhood which you can intuit from his work. There’s a sadness to it, and often more than a hint of menace. Note the Wild Things’ “terrible eyes” and “terrible teeth.” Really weird, but compelling. They say every kid loves a monster (a book I read as a kid said that, in fact… so it must be true), and I guess in the case of the Wild Things it was more or less true.

Up on the second floor, right near the stairway to the dining-/clubroom a monitor played loops from a documentary about Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want. Most of what I watched was Sendak talking to the camera, answering questions from the director Spike Jonze, who made the movie Where the Wild Things Are. [sidebar: I found the names of the Wild Things in that movie pretty interesting. The main Thing (voiced by James Gandolfini) was called “Carroll” in the movie. An odd choice for that hulking, striped beast with the terrible teeth and eyes. Throughout the WT show at Society of Illustrators, that critter was referred to (by Sendak’s notes and the curators) as “Moishe.” Much more in line with the old-skool Brooklyn Jewishness of Sendak’s childhood.] In the Jonze video Sendak appears to be pretty candid about his dark side.

From The Art of Maurice Sendak by Selma G. Lanes (1980) he said,

“I wanted my wild things to be frightening. But why? It was probably at this point that I remembered how I detested my Brooklyn relatives as a small child. They came almost every Sunday, and there was my week-long anxiety about their coming the next Sunday… They’d lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like “You’re so cute I could eat you up.” And I knew if my mother didn’t hurry up with the cooking, they probably would.”

Funny. Kind of. Then, later in life, in an interview with Bill Moyers he said,

“You can’t get rid of evil. We can’t, and I feel that so intensely. All the idiots that keep coming into the world and wrecking people’s lives. And it is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage, okay? That you lose hope — I don’t want to lose hope. I get through every day — I’m pretty good — I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk. But, I’m losing hope.”

I hate that he was losing hope.

In the Jonze documentary, Sendak’s legendarily iconoclastic personality was evident. He felt he hadn’t really made an artistic mark at all. He said he wanted to be a big shot and drive a huge care that impressed people. Strange. I like his illustration work a lot. It’s exquisite. Most of his drawings were done in pen and watercolor (really soft colors for such a dark point of view) and some were pencil and watercolor. He worked on very smooth, hot press paper. He put a lot of his darkness into writing his books, but his artwork… his artwork, especially in person, when you see the original stuff and feel his hand and his presence… his artwork is lovely and almost heartbreakingly sweet, funny and charming. Maybe that was where he channeled his hope, into the art.

In a final interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, shortly before he died, Sendak laid a lot on the line. He talked a lot about pain, his private life, his dwindling time left on earth. It was sad, but real, and unlike most radio you’ll ever hear. I recommend a listen.

Finally, from the Moyers show: “I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?”