I am pleased to be speaking in a series which honors the artist and writer Lois Lenski who died twenty years ago and whose Newbery Medal book Strawberry Girl was published almost 50 years ago.

	I've come here tonight to speak about another artist, Maurice Sendak, and his latest picture book We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, which is based upon two short nursery rhymes. Sendak was born in 1928, has illustrated approximately 85 books from 1947 to the present, and has written and illustrated approximately 14 of his own from 1956 till last year's book.

	Certainly at age 65, he's not old, but having completed his picture book trilogy in 1981--Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There--having received most of the honors of children's literature, and facing the devastation which AIDS has brought to a younger generation in arts and entertainment, Maurice Sendak probably felt he has nothing more to prove in books for children. Tired of illustrating other people's works and probably tired of doing his own--each one takes him seven years--he has in recent years been concentrating on set design for opera and ballet, and the Night Kitchen Theater, a children's theater.

	Although Randolph Caldecott and John Newbery died relatively young, the history of children's literature is a field of long-lived people, such as Walter Crane, Lois Lenski, and Dr. Seuss who produced books into their 70s or 80s.

	The projects that have pulled Sendak back to illustration in the twelve years since Outside over There have been predominantly those long traditional to children's literature: the Nutcracker Suite, a supposedly long lost Grimms' tale, Dear Mili, published in 1990, and a reprint of Iona and Peter Opie's nasty playground rhymes I Saw Esau in 1992. Sendak has used nursery rhymes before either for text or inspiration in his works, from Iona and Peter Opie's collection, the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, so it is fitting that he publish his first original picture book for children in twelve years, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, based on a children's rhyme from the Opie's Oxford Dictionary.

	In a way, nothing can be more daunting than a set of nursery rhymes, which often suggests sound more than narrative to an illustrator. For instance, the Opies have collected the following poem:

	Handy spandy, Jack-a-Dandy, Loves plum cake and sugar candy; He bought some at a grocer's shop, and out he came, hop, hop, hop, hop (No. 259).

	Leo Schneiderman, in his article "Psychological Aspects of Nonsense Literature for Children," printed in Celia Anderson and Marilyn Apseloff's book, Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss, describes nonsense literature as "permission":

	Nonsense literature gives the child "permission" to deviate from the customary linguistic formulas and to be flippant and irreverent about language. It dares to be childish and does not pretend in the least to be edifying. Nonsense literature invites the child to take liberties with language and to play games with it, while removing the sense of guilt that comes with laying profane hands on something sacred. The child who has been moved to laughter by nonsense literature is not likely to be awed by language or deceived by charlatans, who know that they can invoke in others whatever emotions they want merely by uttering certain charged words. Nonsense literature instructs the child to be the master of words, rather than their servant, and ultimately their victim (103).

	There is always a tension between writer and illustrator in an illustrated text, because each is telling the same story but in different ways. And just as no two words are completely synonymous, so the two stories must be slightly different, perhaps the second one a commentary upon the first, doing all the violence of interpretation that a reader or a critic might.

	A second source of tension or slippage is that of time, since words and pictures are almost never contributed at the same time. In the case of Alice and Tenniel, that time may be slight. In the case of Alice and Disney, that time may be 80 years. In the case of self-illustrators like Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss, or Sendak in his own books, that time is in the person's mind, since writer and artist are the same. But not the same in terms of time. Dr. Seuss and Sendak have said that words come first because illustration, unlike canvas painting, for instance, is the servant of story.

	Athird source of tension comes in the nature of the arts--writing and picture-making. Music is probably the most abstract and least figurative of the arts, with visual arts on the middle. With the exception of the experiments of Gertrude Stein early in this century and contemporary Language Poets who were influenced by her, language is the most figurative, the most tied to specificity. Given our great ability to make metaphors, it is almost impossible to put words together without a reader being able to conjure up some linear meaning from it, as we move from the capital letter on the left to the period somewhere on the right. Poetry stresses the music of language, and here we can turn to nursery rhymes, a most abstract and reflexive form of writing.

	Nursery rhymes, commonly called Mother Goose rhymes in America. have long been attractive to illustrators, probably because poems are short and can thus support a great number of pictures, and probably with the relative lack of a determinant meaning, the illustrator is free to do whatever he wants. Illustrating a nursery rhyme is illustrating a text that is almost no text. It is illustrating pure nouns and verbs that exist independent of linearity and rigid narrative confines. It is at once the ultimate freedom and the ultimate challenge.

	At the same time, almost collage-like the poems deal with the serious elements of life. Lucy Rollin writes in Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytical Study of Nursery Rhymes,

	. . . the rhymes communicate the most elementary of concerns of the culture to its children--concerns about nature, food, sex, and language. They also express, in their bodily rhythms and symbols, the most elementary concerns of the child. In Vincent de Santi's words, the rhymes, "are the first cultural experience with language used as a tool to convey a sense of the inner experience of one's body, feelings about oneself, desires for attachment, worry about separation, and the fears and hopes concerning aggressive and sexual urges" (16). By symbolically acknowledging these concerns, the rhymes offer an opportunity for adults to say to children, even unconsciously, "Yes, we know how it is; we remember"--and to offer at the same time the means of control through social interaction and through language (16).

	In We Are All in the Dumps, Sendak has created the challenge of making a narrative by joining two unrelated rhymes. It is something he has dome before, in 1965, in Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water.

	No. 207 Hector Protector was dressed all in green; Hector Protector was sent to the Queen. The Queen did not like him, No more did the King; So Hector Protector was sent back again.

	No. 244 As I went over the water, The water went over me. I saw two little blackbirds Sitting on a tree; One called me a rascal, And one called me a thief, I took up my little black stick And knocked out all their teeth.

	Now, the first rhyme, "Hector Protector," has been illustrated in other collections of nursery rhymes, and in the first half of this book it is easy to see how one can make a story of it. As Hector Protector is dressed and sent out by his mother, he is clearly one of those independent bratty boys that Sendak specializes in, like Pierre and Max. Pierre, from the Nutshell Library, is that kid who answers every question from authority figures with the rejoinder, "I don't care!'" until he is eaten by a lion. It's likely that this is what attracted the artist to these rhymes. In fact, Hector's got Pierre's lion as a consort, which he tames and rides to the Queen, accompanied by a constant negative chorus of 'No's." The blackbird enters this first story and provides a transition to the second, that of Victor and "As I Went over the Water." This rhyme is a little more puzzling, as Sendak shows Victor's boat eaten by a Wild Thing sea monster; as Victor walks upon the dry land he encounters the nasty blackbirds and tames them as well as the beast. All are enlisted in Victor's navy at the end, emblematized by their sailor hats. Both stories share in the orality of Wild Things and Pierre, published just two and three years earlier. It is the cake that occasions Hector Protector's trip, where he is importuned by a snake and a lion, and the queen's rejection of it that sends him home again. Likewise, it is the sea serpent's eating of Victor's boat that occasions his meeting the blackbirds. Victor disarms them, and Sendak shows us the improbably knocking out of the birds' teeth, and the monster disgorges the boat. Where Hector Protector is punished for his negativity by not having any cake, Victor is able to bring peace and harmony to his world. Sendak has succeeded in uniting the disparate elements of the nursery rhymes with his pictures, and making a captivating and satisfying story.

	All this discussion of cake leads to In the Night Kitchen of 1970, in which the nocturnal Mickey glides past his sleeping mother and father, to find himself floating in the milk and dough of the midnight bakers and ultimately saving cake for the world. Sendak's source for Mickey's song is the nursery rhyme, "I see the moon, and the moon sees me; God bless the moon, and God bless me" (Opies, No. 356), changed her to "I'm in the Milk and the milk's in me. God bless milk and Gold bless me!"

	A nursery rhyme meant to make little sense became the centerpiece for Sendak's longest work for children, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, or There Must Be More to Life (1967).

	No. 219 Higglety, pigglety, pop! The dog has eaten the mop; The pig's in a hurry, The cat's in a flurry, Higglety, pigglety, pop!

	This is one of the few nursery rhymes which can be described as intentionally making no sense, since it was written for that purpose by Samuel Griswold Goodrich in 1846. Goodrich, an American publisher of uplifting and educational literature for children, objected to nonsense and books about it, and dashed off this one to show the silliness and worthlessness of such empty jingles. Obviously it didn't work, since the Opies found it still repeated a hundred years later in England. Again, this suggests a truth about nursery rhymes and the nature of discourse. Given the ability of the language to suggest meaning through metaphor, it is almost impossible to make up a sentence of words that we cannot cobble some meaning from.

	Sendak's Higglety Pigglety Pop!, illustrated in black and white line drawings, concerns his most ravenous creation, Jenny the Sealyham terror who gobbles everything in sight. She goes on a quest and as a sign of her maturing, she is enlisted to play the leading lady for the World Mother Goose Theatre, in which Goodrich's poem is dramatized. True to the nursery rhyme, she writes, "Every day I eat a mop, twice on Saturday. It is made of salami and that is my favorite" (69).

	Sendak's other forays into the nursery rhyme world include a picture of Mother Goose for Tail Feathers from Mother Goose (1990), a volume of rhymes illustrated by many artists, to benefit the Opie fund, and I Saw Esau.

	In 1964, the writer was considering a nursery rhyme collection and looking through the Opies' Dictionary, where he found most of these rhymes ("Sendak talks," 1). New York Times writer Sarah Lyall has written about the present book, [Sendak} ". . . came to the story backwards, in a way, finding two Mother Goose nursery rhymes called "We Are All in the Dumps" and "Jack and Guy" more than 20 years ago and always planning to make a book from them. . . But he never knew what the rhymes meant, nor did his close friend, Iona Opie. . ." (B1-2). In many articles and interviews for publicity for this book, the author has described the inspiration which unlocked the story: ". . . a few years ago in Los Angeles, I saw a kid lying in a box on the street, with his bare feet sticking out. The juxtaposition of this luxury-ridden street with a kid sleeping in a cardboard box inspired a fantasy--a city of homeless children" ("Sendak talks," 1). This helped him to understand the line, "And the houses are built without walls."

	A colleague of mine suggested that We Are All in the Dumps is a difficult book to read to a child, because there are so few words. Made up of two nursery rhymes, there are only 84 words for 52 pages, but this is not really too out of line for a picture book, even including Where the Wild Things Are. There are even many wordless picture books today. Nevertheless, with numerous dialogue balloons, newspaper headlines, sign posts, book pages, We Are All in the Dumps is an especially literate book, awash in text.

	With the few examples I've mentioned, obviously, Sendak's books are full of eating and orality, as Max in a wolf suit threatens to eat up his mother, as Jenny swallows everything in sight, as Pierre is gobbled by the lion, and as the parents in most books are understandably described as expressing their love by providing meals. Like Hansel and Gretel, Sendak's children want their parents' love and food, but fear their independence will eat them out of house and home. If separation anxiety is expressed in terms of eating in childhood, it is only in We Are All in the Dumps that Sendak moves away from the symbols of hungry monsters and gives us the full brunt of the very real dangers the children face daily. This book has married the timelessness of nursery rhymes to the specificity of a newspaper to highlight the universality and timelessness of interpretation. One is pushed to search the pictures for clues and messages.

	The pictures bleed to the edges of the pages, in the nighttime colors of Where the Wild Things Are and the comic page Winsor McCay-inspired cityscapes of In the Night Kitchen. Considering we're talking about dumps and homeless people here, the book cover and endpapers resemble the rough brown paper of cardboard boxes.      Sendak does not have much to go on with these two rhymes:

No. 523 We are all in the dumps, For diamonds are trumps The kittens are gone to St. Paul's! The babies are bit, The moon's in a fit, And the houses are built without walls. No. 253 Jack and Gye Went out in the rye, And they found a little boy with one black eye. Come, says Jack, let's knock him on the head. No, says Gye, let's buy him some bread; You buy one loaf and I'll buy two, And we'll bring him up as other folk do.

Still, it's fun to see what he does with the details. "Trumps" become not only the card game in which the boy and the kittens are taken into bondage by the rats, but the symbol of 1980s affluence, New York's Trump Tower. St Paul's is transformed into a bakery and an orphanage for plot reasons, and the moon becomes the deus ex machina to rescue the children from the rats.

Sendak's landscape has tended in his early books to be urban and often ethnic. In the Night Kitchen showed us the New York City of his youth, while other books evolved into a timeless 20th century American city street scene. Lately, inspired by Grimm, he has turned more and more to the German Romanticism of Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Philip Otto Runge, Kleist, and E. T. A. Hoffman, which heavily influenced Outside Over There. Ironically, the nursery rhymes, some of the oldest elements of children's tradition today, served as the vehicle for Sendak's most contemporary and time-specific book.

We Are All in the Dumps recounts the story of two street urchins named Jack and Guy (Anglicizing the name) who find a little brown boy, living in a shanty town of homeless children. As the entire narrative has somehow sprung from the written word of the nursery rhymes, Jack and Guy wear their names on their shirts, taking their identities from text. These children fashion clothes from newspapers which allows the headlines to comment upon the state of the American social system; near naked boys and girls don newspapers hawking expensive houses and mortgages. Headlines, like a Greek chorus, also talk about layoffs, homeless shelters, famine, the AIDS epidemic, as well as the personal allusions always found in Sendak's books, here to Schubert and Mozart, as well as Iona Opie, Sendak's first editor Ursula Nordstrom, and several mentions of the children's book illustrator Jim Marshall, whose deal from AIDS is noted "Oct. 18, 92."

	Watched always by a brooding moon, Jack and Guy first try to drive the little brown boy off, but he's snatched along with a pile of kittens by two rats in harlequinade. Jack and Guy gamble in a bridge game for the youngsters and lose, so the group is taken off by the rats to St. Paul's Bakery and Orphanage, where presumably they won't meet good ends, probably to be baked into bread. Dragging off this group of children is reminiscent of Disney's 101 Dalmatians and the Holocaust; the latter was a theme in Sendak's rendering of the "long-lost" Grimm tale Dear Mili, and later we see the kittens housed on Auschwitz like shelves. The moon transports Jack and Guy to the St. Paul Orphanage and Bakery, and turns into a large mother cat who rescues the kittens. Though Jack is first tempted to knock the little boy with one black eye in the head--and this episode is eerily similar to the kidnapping of a two-year-old boy by two ten-year-old boys in Liverpool last year--he is prevailed upon by Jack and Guy and they resolve to "bring him up as other folk do." All return home, to the shanty-town of homeless kids, without walls, now watched over by a faceless moon. Though this is no Cinderella Story, parenting of a sort has prevailed and the community is restored.      Sendak has said,

	I was completely at home with Dumps because every book of mine has the same theme. It's still Max on his own for fractions of seconds, unsupervised by his parents. this has always been at the core of my work. It's my own theme about my own life, but it applies to all children because every child in the universe has some few seconds alone every day. . . .

	But what if the mother turns her back physically? Max is alone in his room--it's hysterically frightening. What does he do with the anxiety of being locked up and not fed. That's what Where the Wild Things Are is about.

	So, it's 1993, and the children get shot on the way to school, children contract AIDS, children are in the most vulnerable position imaginable. If we aren't honest with them, they'll die. That's why there's an immediacy of presentation in Dumps. It has not graphic finery to seduce the reader--it's in your face. if we don't look, and if we don't listen, and if we don't do something, kids will be lost. Where is everybody? Why have we abandoned our children ("Sendak talks," 2).

	I would say this is the same message of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, but Sendak has here taken us into the wild night that is outside our windows and given a grim picture tinged with the hope of literary closure. The "little boy with one black eye" doesn't get his parents back, but he has love and nurturing in a non-traditional family.

	Leo Schneiderman writes,

	Nonsense literature, then, sends a conflicting message to the young reader; namely, that dangerous possibilities exist in the world, but through cleverness, particularly verbal ingenuity, disaster can be averted. Perhaps the most important implication of the message is that dangerous thoughts can be neutralized by verbal humor, often involving mock-logical, esthetically satisfying "solutions" to absurd or menacing situations (97).

	Sendak says simply, "Dumps is a manual on how to make it" ("Sendak talks," 3).

	I've suggested that this new book is a departure for Sendak, in dealing directly rather than symbolically with the dangers confronting children in 1993. It suggests how a creative artist relates his work to his world, and it is certainly not an image that would have succeeded in 1953. What saves it from total grimness and makes it a good book is the wit of nursery rhymes and the magic of a fairy tale which brings about a happy ending.

Nursery rhymes are a literature of children and they work because of sound and wit and the playfulness of language rather than their ability to tell a story. Against a skeptic like Goodrich, we have the undeniable fact of their longevity, usually outside of the venue of publishing and commercialization. As humble as they might be, they come close to purity in art, since they only poorly serve the narrative and figurative role of language. In We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, the pictures have made sense of the words, but the words are intact for the new reading next year and the new reading in a hundred years.

Sources Anderson, Celia Catlett, and Marilyn Fain Apseloff. Nonsense Literature for Children:      Aesop to Seuss. Hamden, Conn.:Library Professional Pub., 1989. Lyall, Sarah. "Shedding Moonlight on a Dark Tale." The New York Times, September      20, 1993, B1. Opie, Iona and Peter. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. London: Oxford UP,       1951. Opie, Iona and Peter. I Saw Esau: the Schoolchild's Pocket Book. Illus. Sendak.      Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 1992. Rollin, Lucy. Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Study of Nursery Rhymes.       Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1992. Sendak, Maurice. "Maurice Sendak talks about We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and      Guy." New York: HarperCollins publicity pamphlet, July 1993. -------- We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. -------- Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water. New York: Harper and Row,      1965. -------- Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life. New York: Harper and      Row, 1967. -------- In the Night Kitchen. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Schneiderman, Leo. "Psychological Aspects of Nonsense Literature for Children," in      Anderson and Apseloff. Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss.       Hamden, Conn.: Library Professional Pub., 1989. Pp. 94-109. --George Bodmer Professor of English Indiana University Northwest Gary, IN Lecture materials used with permission of George Bodmer. Copyright, George Bodmer, 1994.

Milner Library, Illinois State University E-mail comments to: web@milton.mlb.ilstu.edu Last revised: June 22, 1998