What Shall We Tell The Children? : WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS WITH JACK AND GUY <i> By Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins: $20; 56 pp.) </i>

Can I see another’s woe, And not be in sorrow too? --William Blake

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Maurice Sendak is outraged. Outraged by the plight of the children. By their homelessness, their hunger, by the plague of AIDS visited upon the innocents, by the prejudice to which the children, too, are subjected.

In his latest book, “We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy,” Sendak is more serious, perhaps less introspective, than he has ever been. This book is an exhortation to humankind, a cry to heaven for justice. And, most important, it is a document of reconciliation and of hope. That’s what needs to be said in light of the attacks that surely will be heaped upon the book. And that’s why the book will take some explanation.

“Jack and Guy” is not a fast read. In the guise of a children’s picture book, it is a work of extraordinary complexity structured around two traditional nursery rhymes. Even the title has a double meaning: Either there are the two nursery rhymes, “We Are All in the Dumps,” and “Jack and Guy”; or it is saying, “We, along with Jack and Guy, live in the dumps.” In order for us to understand how remarkably Sendak’s picture book transforms these seemingly innocuous verses, I give their text first (in the version recorded by Iona and Peter Opie in “The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book,” only slightly different from Sendak’s):

IN THE DUMPS We are all in the dumps, For diamonds are trumps, The kittens are gone to St. Paul’s. The babies are bit, The moon’s in a fit, And the houses are built without walls.

JACK AND GYE Jack and Gye Went out in the rye, And they found a little boy With one black eye. Come, says Jack, Let’s knock him on the head. No, says Gye, Let’s buy him some bread; You buy one loaf And I’ll buy two, And we’ll bring him up As other folk do.

If one knows that the standard picture book is 32 pages, one is astonished that Sendak has stretched these two verses over 52 pages. Then, observing the disposition of the printed text and the intervals of illustration in the text-less spreads, one may be amazed that Sendak has made so much of these words.

But if one knows Sendak’s work even slightly, one knows, too, that his is a very special universe--a world of music and art, and--more recently--a world haunted by memories of the Holocaust. One knows that whatever Sendak has to say will be said in good part by allusions to these worlds.

The book’s cover is baffling at first, for the title does not appear on the front but on the back cover; but this will become clear later.

The main character throughout is a little black child, pictured naked except for a torn white cloth, howling in misery on the first page as we open the book. The double spread title page sets the tone and introduces the cast: homeless, bald urchins sleeping in boxes and barrels; a strange monk-like figure who bears some resemblance to Thomas Merton (all such identifications in Sendak are hazardous; one does one’s best); Jack and Guy stage front; three alert kittens; a sad, human-faced full moon in a dark, starry sky; and the little black child, apprehensive in the left corner behind another child’s box home, uttering the yellow speech balloon, “Help?”

This question mark, which will recur, is astonishing, and its meaning deserves careful contemplation.

In the course of the next 20 pages, the little black child, holding out his begging hands, appeals (“Help?” again) to Jack and Guy. They first brush him off. Against a backdrop of homeless, sometimes naked, always distressed children, two vile, yellow-eyed rats carry off the child. When Jack and Guy attempt to rescue him, the rats challenge the boys to a game of bridge, in which diamonds are naturally trumps. With illustrative panache, Sendak shows us only a portion of the bridge players’ hands before (next page) Rat 1 springs the 10 of diamonds (trumps) on us, and Rat 2 makes off with the child. As the cast of dismayed waifs watches, the rats haul off the child in a wagon full of kittens; the child breaks away, reaching again to the other children for help. The shark-toothed rat grasps the child, outlined against the huge and pitch-black gaping maw of the full moon. The enraged moon (“in a fit”) grabs up (rescues?) Jack and Guy as the other children flee in terror.

Strange plot. But of course the plot is only half the story, for in a good picture book, and in Sendak especially, text is merely pretext, and the plot serves only as a springboard to present an intricate visual universe in which the illustrations editorialize on, sometimes even contradict, the words of the text.

In “In the Dumps,” the little black child is kidnaped and Jack and Guy, too, are snatched away. But the larger story is told in three ways: in the cartoon-like spoken balloons, in the words we can read in the newspapers the children are using as clothing and shelter, and in the allusions in the scenes pictured.

The words in the balloons are sparse, but clear. “Beat it!” say Jack and Guy when the little black child says “Help?” “Look what they did!” shouts a homeless waif, perhaps about the rat carrying off the child, perhaps about the squalor, which surrounds them all.

As for the text we can read in the ragged newspapers, the words function as a choral commentary on the scenes of urban waste and desolation in which the action takes place. Sometimes the words serve as captions confirming what we see. At other times, they are bitter contradictions, language of a consumer-indulgent society oblivious to the misery of the dispossessed. “Banks Post Big Gains!” screams one headline, while the cardboard boxes in which some urchins live sport their own significant labels: “Private Property” and “Uneeda Biscuit.”

On one newspaper page we see the words: “Oct. 17, 1992. Jim Goes Home.” This refers to the death of the children’s illustrator, James Marshall, a friend to Sendak and, in the view of many, a champion of humor and the free imagination and therefore a champion for the liberty of children.

As for the rich allusions in the illustrations, space allows no more than a few examples. In 1993, the little black child--his shape, his color, his misery--must remind us of newspaper images of starving children in Somalia. The iconography of the Mammon-ridden city in which the waifs live is pregnant, too, with meaning: the towers of the metropolis rising in squared splendor amid the akimbo angles of the children’s makeshift dwellings. In case you miss the message, one building bears a sign the visible portion of which reads “Tower,” while the speech balloon covering its hidden portion bears the exclamation “Trumped!”--referring to the story’s bridge game as well as to New York’s Ozymandian monument to avarice, the Trump Towers.

What the city stands for is put into question by an ambiguous projection of a shack, a sort of steeple that looks like an automatic rifle, the cartridge of which blends into what may be the Queensborough Bridge, while the towers recall the smokestacks of the crematoria of the Holocaust. The wagon in which the rats cart away the child and the kittens bears the lying legend, “St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanages,” a reminder of other cattle cars, boxcars on German and Polish sidings, all filled with their horrible cargo and also ostensibly going to factories or orphanages 50 years ago.

If you are still skeptical of the meanings, you need only follow those kittens into the second half of Sendak’s book.

Here Jack and Guy, at play in fields of rye, trip over the little black child lying on the ground. Jack picks him up and holds him in a comforting manner. Then, with the shocking arbitrariness of the rhyme, he suggests they “knock him on the head.” The child covers his face in terror. Guy, however, counter-suggests that they “buy him some bread.” In the next spread, the boys come upon a monstrous white cat. On its back they ride into the square, sharp-cornered factory with black smoke-belching chimney (the sign sinisterly proclaims it to be a “bakery and orphanage”), where the cat pounces upon the villainous rats. On the next page, sitting on a table proclaiming “Free bread today!” Jack and Guy feed the child, and the great white cat lies protectively over a great huddle of kittens who are smiling and yawning and stretching contentedly. Jack and Guy, having bought the child two loaves as the rhyme demands, leap toward the moon; and for the words, “we’ll bring him up,” the three are shown sleeping peacefully on the surface of the moon.

The next spread--the most startling and amazing of the book--shows Jack lifting the closed-eyed, limp figure of the child down from the great golden globe of the moon on which they had all found their comfort. There are no words.

And on the last spread, a clear echo of the first, all the waifs and kittens are back in their makeshift homes. No longer in postures of stress, anxiety and agitation, however, all sleep peacefully with calm faces.

So much for the surface text. The book is, in fact, written under two guiding stars. The first is the visionary world of William Blake. Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” (1789) and “Songs of Experience” (1794) are sometimes considered literature for children--as are Sendak’s books. Perhaps they are. No question that both authors speak of and to childhood. Blake’s subject is, in large part, the plight of children, their suffering as orphans or as chimney sweeps, as victims in a materialistic and hypocritical world of woe. In the end, a number of his children are saved by their own resilience and innocence. The startling baldness of Sendak’s urchins may be associated not only with the scourge of AIDS--of which Sendak reminds us explicitly in the newspaper texts pictured in this book--but also with Blake’s young chimney sweep who remembers his pal, little Tom Dacre, “who cried . . . when his head was shave’d.”

The page to which I have already referred as the most startling points to the second star under which Sendak writes, and by light of which we must read this tale. Sendak might have ended his story with the boys and the kittens saved and sleeping in peace on the moon. But on the wordless spread that follows, Jack lifts the child down from the moon in a scene we recognize immediately as a deposition--the traditional depiction of Christ being taken down from the cross.

So then, once again He has come to us in the guise of a little child. Sendak’s turns out to be an oft-told tale. Jack and Guy have met their test. In the dumps where we are all together, in the world of vermin and smoke-belching chimneys of evil, the urchin boys find the cowering babe and they rescue him. Unlikely babe; unlikely saints! But, as Jesus said, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.”

And the end is peace, not on the moon, not in the sky, but peace here on this Earth, such, precisely, as this Earth is: raggedy, rickety, sinful and human.

And then we close the book, and we have that title placed so oddly on the back cover. And we puzzle. And we turn the book over, and we see on the front the little child rising out of the black maw of the moon, the waifs and urchins looking in astonishment. They hold those straws, those haulms of grain. And again with that little round-headed black baby and his grain, we may think first of famine-stricken babies of Africa today. But the newspapers in which the children are clothed lend themselves, with slight ambiguity, to happier interpretation:

“Homeless Shelters. Leaner Times. Meaner Times. Children Triumph. Kid Elected President.”

And the child taken down from the moon and resting at the end in pieta-like sleep-death in Jack’s arms comes full circle. He appears, open-eyed, before the amazed lookers-on. We may well think of Piero della Francesca’s “Resurrection.” That is, technically, the book’s beginning. In fact, it was the book’s end. But that end--rescue, salvation, resurrection--simply marks a beginning. For us children; for the book. For the child is come again, announcing, curiously even in the book’s design, that “in my end is my beginning.”