There’s a Mystery There, The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott ’62. Maurice Sendak was a great admirer of Melville, so it is fitting that Jonathan Cott takes the title of this work, which is mostly about Sendak’s Outside Over There, from Melville’s Redburn. There is enough mystery in Outside Over There, ostensibly a children’s picture book, to sustain this ambitious work of analysis-through- interview and to lead the reader to feel that the last word has not yet been spoken.
The complexity of Outside Over There emerges from a kaleidoscopic range of perspectives. Jonathan interviews Sendak himself, a Freudian analyst, a Jungian analyst, a specialist in children’s literature, an art historian and a highly respected playwright. Each interview shifts our view of the work from autobiography to psychoanalysis to object of art to mythologizing storytelling as life events meet a tender imaginative psyche. This rich mix gives you a sense of the texture of Outside Over There and also of There’s a Mystery There.
From the interview with Sendak, we come to understand the importance of Sendak’s childhood to this work: his mother’s depression, his older sister’s efforts to compensate for the mother’s withdrawal and the impact of the father’s absence. This childhood informs the book, but events from the world impinge as well – the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Dion quintuplets, and most importantly , Mozart, to whom, Sendak claims, the book is an homage.
If you are reading Outside Over There to your children, you might want to treat yourself to Jonathan Cott’s book so that you don’t miss all the fabulous references—the nod to Leonardo, to Grimm and to Marvell-- the ambiguity of the goblins, and the significance of the wonder horn. You will also come away awed by Jonathan’s skill at conducting wholly absorbing interviews.
