With a convert’s proverbial fervor, I rushed pell-mell into the very heart of what I considered Babar’s unresolved problem: his mother’s death, of course.
I never quite got over that death. The ease and remarkable calm with which de Brunhoff blighted the life of his baby elephant numbed me. That sublimely happy babyhood lost after only two pictures! Then, as in a nightmare (and too much like life), Babar, cruelly and arbitrarily deprived of his loving mother, runs wildly out of babyhood (the innocent jungle) and into cozy, amnesia-inducing society (Paris, only blocks away from that jungle). It is there that he feverishly embraces adulthood, culture, manners, any distraction, to forget the hideous trauma of that useless death. Or so it seemed to me then. Why give us a mother’s death and then deprive us of the pleasure of wallowing in its psychological repercussions? Why not, in fact, go back and find another, less volatile reason for Babar to flee the jungle? Easy enough solution, thought I. In summation, I judged this death to be a gratuitously punishing touch, an issue raised and bewilderingly passed over. Somehow I missed the point. It took years of further exposure to the work of many different artists, my own redefinition of the picture-book form, and much growing up to complete my appreciation of Babar.
—Maurice Sendak, “Jean de Brunhoff”
Transcribed by me from page 97 of my hardcover edition of Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures, © 1988 Farrer, Straus and Giroux.
Tweet: Children’s author Maurice Sendak discusses Babar.
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