Authors Behaving Rudely

Sendak griping about Silverstein

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Please note: One of Sendak’s longtime editors, Michael di Capua, wrote in to cast some doubt on the authenticity of this document. Well, di Capua has no doubt at all: He says it’s not Sendak! “I think you should know that the piece you bought from the Keller estate doesn’t contain any handwritten comments from Maurice Sendak. Since I received hundreds of handwritten communications from Maurice over fifty years, I know his handwriting when I see it. Sorry about that.” Worth keeping in mind!

Jon and I keep saying we’re going to do a post about finding good picture books on eBay and we will. We will! But today I wanted to show a strange treasure I found there.

I have a lot of eBay saved search terms, which I go through every morning, like a hermit checking his traps in the woods. Recently, I had the feeling of having caught a lion in a rabbit snare.

Here it is. (It’s going to take a second to explain what this document is, but it’s wild.)

The auction listing was for a note from Maurice Sendak, sent to Lew Keller, an animator who worked on Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sendak and Keller were friends. The note came from Keller’s estate; Keller’s writing is in all caps in red and graphite pencil. The stuff in black ballpoint was written by Sendak.

But there’s a third man’s writing here. The centerpiece is a piece of vellum with hand-lettering by Shel Silverstein, from his picture book parable, The Missing Piece, published in 1976 (The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends had already come out and were huge successes; Sendak and Silverstein shared an editor, the legendary Ursula Nordstrom.)

So: Somehow, Sendak got some original art from Silverstein’s book. (One surmise: Silverstein gave it to him.) He taped it to a piece of paper and sent to his friend Keller, a fellow artist, with a pair of acid annotations:

"FROM HOOZIS NEW BOOK
(I don’t like it very much anyway.)"

and

“when you become FAMOUS & successful you can get away with STUFF like this.”

Whew!

It’s incredible to see Sendak and Silverstein’s writing on the same piece of paper (and Keller’s too, I guess, though I don’t know a ton about him. I like Rocky and Bullwinkle though! And he really seems to know he’s got something special: “SAVE. SAVE.”).

The gossipy spirit makes it even better. Here is this catty, competitive, petty palimpsest, a children’s writer behaving like a human being — or, more precisely, like a writer (which is a type of human being).

Oh yeah and it only cost about 40 bucks!