Since I was very little, Where the Wild Things Are has been one of my absolute favorite books. One of my earliest memories is my mother reading that story to me in my bedroom in our old house in Richmond after I woke up from a nightmare, and her sleeping in the chair in the room with me all night. I used to have reoccurring dreams that I was in the world of the book at least once a week for much of my childhood. I still have that dream from time to time, though not as often these days. It's probably strange to have the same dreams at 24 that you did at 4, but I look forward to the nights when I can ride my private sailboat across the ocean and into the land of The Wild Things.
I've told a few people about my plans to decorate a room in my house, should I ever buy one, with the framed pages of the book. I've considered getting a WTWTA sleeve tattoo at some point. I have WTWTA decal stickers over my desk, and one of my favorite articles of clothing is my WTWTA tshirt. Despite the fact that it is a 37 page picture book for children, Where the Wild Things Are still has a strikingly profound effect on my life.
I've tried several times to figure out exactly what my fascination and connection with this book stems from, and I've come up with several unsatisfying answers. Is it pure nostalgia; a wish to go back to a time when my mom reading me a book and sleeping in the room with me could make me feel safe, like nothing could hurt me? Is it the fact that Where the Wild Things Are taught me how to use my imagination; that it awakened in me the idea that there is a world much bigger and with infinitely more possibilities than the one we can see with our eyes? Is there something innately cathartic about the story; does Max's kingship over The Wild Things satisfy some deeply human desire to control rather than to be controlled?
The answer to all of those questions, of course, is "probably". Maybe that should be reason enough to explain why I love this book so much. Maybe my quest for something beyond that is entirely quixotic, full of wholly-fruitless romantic idealism. Rereading the story today though, something else struck me:
Max is kind of a piece of shit.
I know he's a child and children get wild and that's sort of the point of being a kid sometimes. But Max goes above and beyond. He maliciously destroys things. He chases the dog with a fork. And when The Wild Things give him everything he ever wanted and treat him as a God, he sends them to bed without supper. Not the way his mother did - as punishment for misdeeds - but purely out of spite. Something bad happened to me, so now something bad has to happen to you too. It's the equivalent of one kid dropping his ice cream cone and deciding it would be appropriate to go around and knock everyone else's ice cream on the ground too.
I've read this book literally hundreds of times and I always knew that Max was doing bad things, but I think this last time through it really clicked exactly how bad he was.
But now I can't stop staring at this picture after the wild rumpus is over and Max has demanded that all The Wild Things go to bed without supper. The text below the picture reads:
"And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all."
And it's not just the words, but the look on his face - Maurice Sendak's illustration has the most nuanced and human expression that I've ever seen in a cartoon before. The words on the page say that Max is lonely and wants to be loved, but his face says that he's lonely and wants to be loved and he doesn't think that anyone can love him. It's on this page that Max realizes that he's been a total asshole, and THAT is why he leaves The Wild Things. He knows that they will be better off without him as their king - he waves them a simple goodbye, denies their pleas for him to stay, and then turns away from them forever, because he knows that he does not deserve their adoration.
If this were just a story of a bad kid doing bad things and then going home to find that his mom still loved him enough to give him his supper after she said she wouldn't, it would still probably be a fine children's book, but it wouldn't have the following it has or the impact it has. What makes Where the Wild Things Are really resonate with me is the fact that Max realizes he doesn't deserve love, but receives it anyway.
I've done, said, thought awful things in my life. Terrible things that were cruel and petty and heartless. I've sought vengeance and delighted in other people's misfortune. I have manipulated, played, and taken advantage of people. I have hurt countless numbers of people countless numbers of times. And as much as I try to never do things like that again, as much as I try to be a good person, I will always fail.
Like Max, I realize that I am not the person I ought to be. And like Max, inexplicably, people still love me. And I am grateful.
That is why Where the Wild Things Are has endured as a staple of kids' lives for almost a half-century. That is why I have loved it so much for nearly my entire life. I think that very few of us are entirely happy with every decision that we've made. Lingering on past mistakes too long is a mistake in itself, but the warm feeling you get when you realize that somehow people still love you despite all of the things you have done is something that feels as good and as surprising as an adult as it does when you are a kid.
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