The Monster Den! or: children in literature

All this Where Are the Wild Things stuff made me think of another book about wild things that, for better and for worse, doesn't have any of Sendak, Jonze, and Eggers' uplift. The Monster Den: or Look What Happened At My House-- and To It is a sick and nastily unchildlike collection of rhymes. At first, they're lessons in etiquette, Victorian-style, but that gives way to an account of three childrens' subsequent rebellion and escape from the household to a wild outdoor life. When they return a few years later, their parents flee and "never were heard of again."

Edward Gorey, Ciardi's former student at Harvard, illustrates the book. He does a good job of drawing monster heads, hair tangled into an elaborate pretzel, and other terrible things.

In response to parents appalled by the violence in his books for kids, Ciardi cited "intensities and losses" that made his childhood a time of "madness" and "disproportion." His own sons and daughter were the inspiration for the three characters in "The Monster Den," and Ciardi decided that the depiction would be good for them: "Children are savages. I think they need fairly strong stuff. As I recall and observe it, childhood is a time of enormous violence. It's emotional violence: everything is out of proportion. My feeling is that if we can take this sort of violence and convert it into play within formality-- make a little dance and rhythm of it-- I don't know what else that could be except theraputic." Although he betrays a pessimism about childhood in these lines, Ciardi also seems artistically taken by the "high-pitched" "imagination" and extravagence of children: their "language and natural metaphors are violent," but they are still just that: language and natural metaphors, a system of expression that behaves with extraordinary passion and a certain unwitting articulation.

As Ciardi says, "the children are a jury that can't be rigged." (But do they have good taste??) Even the author of such an unsentimental collection believes in children's preternatural ability to see clearly. However, it's this same innocent faculty that causes their anguish and incites them to violence. Children are magic. L-O-V-E!