Understanding Children, Yet Wanting Them to Grow Up a Bit

The best, of course, from the Brothers Grimm through Roald Dahl and the brilliant Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday, have always been exactly the opposite. Their stuff is anarchic and verges on the nightmarish. These writers want children to take themselves seriously. They want them to grow up a bit, starting now.

Mr. Sendak’s books weren’t in my house when I was a child, an omission that, I have come to realize, was a perverse kind of gift. I got to discover them while reading them aloud, approximately 250 times each, to my two children. “Children are made readers,” the writer Emilie Buchwald said, “on the laps of their parents.” I was made a Sendak devotee with my children on my lap, and I could sense their delight reinforcing my own.

His acknowledged classic is “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963), about Max, who is sent to bed without supper only to find that a tangled forest and a wild sea sprout from his imagination. He stares down fanged monsters by looking into their yellow eyes without blinking. He is made “the king of all wild things.” He throws what is surely the greatest dance party in kid-lit history, engaging the monsters in a “wild rumpus” that Don Cornelius, the creator of “Soul Train,” would envy.

I’ve loved some of the things that Mr. Sendak would later say about “Where the Wild Things Are.” In 2006, for example, he wondered aloud to a New Yorker writer, Cynthia Zarin, about where Max would be now.

“My God, Max would be what now, 48?” Mr. Sendak said. “He’s still unmarried, he’s living in Brooklyn. He’s a computer maven. He’s totally ungifted. He wears a wolf suit when he’s at home with his mother!” You don’t have to agree with that assessment — I bet Max became a marine biologist and resembles Richard Dreyfuss in “Jaws” — to find it terrific.

The gifted British critic Francis Spufford called “Where the Wild Things Are,” correctly, “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger.” In her New Yorker article, Ms. Zarin proposed that Max was a youthful version of early Philip Roth neurotics like Neil Klugman in “Goodbye, Columbus” and Alexander Portnoy in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” There’s a dissertation topic for the student willing to take it on.

The Sendak book that most resonated with my children and me is “In the Night Kitchen” (1970). It’s about a boy named Mickey who floats free of his bed and down into a surreal kitchen staffed with what seem to be Oliver Hardy look-alikes with Hitler mustaches. They almost succeed in baking him into a “morning cake.” The whole thing is supple and serene and terrifying at the same time.

“In the Night Kitchen” has become contentious, among people I hope never to meet, for its mild nudity: We get peeks at Mickey’s penis and testicles. Some have also objected to its would-be sexual innuendo (milk, phallic bottles and the like), and it was on the American Library Association’s list of the “most frequently challenged books” of the 1990s.

Like me, the children of these people can have the distinct joy of discovering this book for themselves in a few decades. It makes a plangent kind of poetry out of its visions and lingers in the mind. It roots around, with marvelous sensitivity and wit, in issues of vulnerability and security. As an added bonus, it proposes cake as breakfast food.

Many people who met Mr. Sendak over the years remarked that he resembled one of his own characters. That is, he was a shaggy and somewhat ornery beast, and he didn’t mellow as he aged. If you’d like a hit of vast and undiluted pleasure, watch Mr. Sendak’s two-part interview, taped this year, with Stephen Colbert.

Last year Mr. Sendak told Emma Brockes, a reporter for The Guardian, who asked him about electronic books: “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”

Some of Mr. Sendak’s relatives died in the Holocaust, and from an early age he was acquainted with death. “I cry a lot because I miss people,” he once said. “They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”

Mr. Sendak, like Max, was the king of all wild things. It’s impossible not to miss him already.