by Alizah Holstein
In my junior year of high school, I wrote and illustrated a children’s story. Its title was Spiderfish, and it featured a fish who was also a spider, but who thought he had to commit to being either one or the other and was consequently unhappy. To find out who he really was, Spiderfish had to descend to the bottom of the ocean, where he finally met other fish who, like him, were also spiders. It earned the praise of our creative writing teacher, a flaxen-haired, freckled woman who went by her first name, Beth. Beth taught while sitting in a circle with us, cross-legged on the classroom floor, and she was as enthusiastic as she was flexible. She was convinced Spiderfish was publishable, and I needed little convincing that she was right.
I soon saw that Maurice Sendak would be coming to Boston to give a talk at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where my mother had recently begun working. That fall afternoon, I got on the Boston T, holding onto a pole with one hand while clutching two items in a bag under my other arm. Inside that bag: our family copy of Where The Wild Things Are and a 9-by-12-inch manila envelope. Inside that envelope: my stapled-together little story, which also happened to be the original—and only—copy, a hand-written letter to Mr. Sendak, and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope. At the Gardner, I stashed these items under my chair, and as Mr. Sendak took the podium, he began to reminisce about his childhood, describing the little books he and his brother wrote and illustrated as children, and how they earned their first money by offering these books door-to-door to their parents’ friends and neighbors.
The talk was followed by a book signing. My family’s dog-eared copy of Where the Wild Things Are gave me a suitable pretext for standing in line, a costume of sorts, as functional and as convincing as Max’s pointy ears and bushy tail. When I reached the table at which Mr. Sendak sat, he speedily signed my copy of his book. Lingering beyond my allotment, I dropped my manila envelope in front of him on the white tablecloth. He frowned at the sight of it.
I told him I was hoping he’d take a look at the book I had written.
He couldn’t do it, he said, shaking his head.
“Really?” I asked. I promised it was short, wouldn’t take much time.
He said he didn’t do that kind of thing.
***
I could see the line behind me snaking across the room and sensed that a general impatience was thickening. Some people behind me shuffled their feet, coughed, and lifted their bags off their shoulders to rest them against their calves. Small children started acting up. Things were getting embarrassing. But by now, I was ashamed to give up. I must have taken a moment to reflect before crossing the definitively into Wild Thing territory.
If you can’t read it, I asked him, would you at least buy it? It was, after all, hand-drawn, and my only copy.
What I dreaded most was the idea of walking away defeated, pathetically clutching my sad manila envelope. That kind of defeat was not for kids, I thought—it was for the people in the adult-ed creative writing class I took on weekday evenings: middle-aged people, balding men and frizzed-out women who hadn’t done anything with their lives, and who now wanted to write about their difficulties, their prescription medication addictions, their abusive aunts, their status in the Mensa organization, their fixation with cats, their recurring dreams of rotting apples, and every once in a while, their small victories. But me, I was sixteen. Didn’t he have to help? Had I outgrown the stage of obligatory support? Shouldn’t he at least offer me some encouragement?
“Look,” he said, with clear exasperation. This was a book signing, and he was not an agent.
I didn’t know what an agent was.
He looked at me wearily, as if I were begging him for something that was just not in his power to give.
And then.
Shaking his head, he took my envelope and stuffed it into the canvas bag at his feet. I remember the sentence he uttered. “Understand I make no promises.” It was like a line from the movies—a great and wonderful line. “Pithy” is the adjective Beth might have used. Concise. Filled, somehow, with promise.
I thanked him with a great deal of earnestness.
As I walked away, I felt the heat of many pairs of eyes on my back. It was a compromised sort of triumph—compromised because I was both elated and too ashamed to even turn around. As I exited the museum, I swung back and forth between two competing feelings: one, that I had done what I was supposed to do, been persistent, shown a little pluck; and the other, that I had violated some basic rule of propriety, imposed myself and my childish ambitions upon a busy and accomplished man.
***
As it turns out, I never heard from Mr. Sendak, and along with his silence, Spiderfish has been lost to time. But now, as a middle-aged adult who, depending on the weather, might occasionally be described as “frizzed out,” I know how many demands must have been laid daily upon the author’s doorstep. I understand now why he may not have wanted to lug my envelope around with him to dinner, to his hotel, to have one more box on his list of responsibilities to check before going to sleep at the end of the day. And because I am now an author, I have also come to see my youthful experience of handing Spiderfish over as a decent preparation for the life of a writer. In fact we have little control over the fates of our creations, and every day we must go on placing them in the hands of others without even a whisper or hint of where they might end up. I know that every instance of putting one’s work before the public is uncertain, that each reader might as well look us in the eye before taking in a single word and remind us of the same candid warning: “understand I make no promises.” Tough words, fair, and best remembered.
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