Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things

Overture: Little Brother, Little Sister

This is the way the fairy tale begins: ''Brother took his little sister by the hand and said, 'Since our mother died we have not had one happy hour. Stepmother beats us every day and when we want to come to her she kicks us away with her foot. Come, we will go out into the wide world together.' All day they walked over meadows, fields and stony paths and when it rained sister said, 'God and our hearts are weeping together.' In the evening they came into a great forest and were so tired from misery, hunger and the long journey that they sat down in a hollow tree and went to sleep.'' Bewitched by the evil stepmother, Little Brother is transformed into a deer, but Little Sister promises never to leave him. Untying her garter, she ties it around his neck and leads him deeper into the forest. ''And when they had gone a long, long way, they came to a hut and the girl looked in and thought, here we can stay and spend our lives. And so she collected leaves and moss to make a soft bed for the deer, and every morning she went out and found roots and berries and nuts for herself, and for the deer she brought tender grasses which it ate out of her hand and it was happy and gamboled all around her. At night, when sister was tired and had said her prayers, she laid her head on the fawn's back and that was her pillow on which she fell gently asleep. And if only brother had his human form, it would have been a lovely life.''

Perhaps it is only in childhood,'' Graham Greene has said, ''that books have any deep influence on our lives.'' But it is important to realize that it is exactly in those books that children have adopted as their own that our deepest wishes and fantasies are most simply expressed.

One of the most haunting of these fantasies concerns the Two Forsaken Children who, as these archetypal siblings are beautifully described by the poet H.D. in her meditative Tribute to Freud, form a ''little group, a desig?, an image at the crossroads.'' One child, H.D. tells us, is sometimes the shadow of the other, as in Greek tragedies. Often one is lost and seeks the other, as in the oldest fairy tale of the twin brother and sister of the Nile Valley. Sometimes they are both boys, like Castor and Pollux, finding their corresponding shape in the stars. In the 19th century we discover them in the story written by Edmond Goncourt about two acrobats (actually foils for himself and his beloved brother Jules) who ''joined their nervous systems to master an impossible trick,'' as well as in the unsurpassed visionary tales of George MacDonald. But they are most deeply imprinted in our minds in the Grimms' ''Little Brother, Little Sister.''

When Maurice Sendak was six years old, he and his 11-year-old brother Jack collaborated on a story called They Were Inseparable, about a brother and sister who, Maurice says, ''had a hankering for each other — it was a very naive and funny book. We both idolized our sister, she was the eldest and by far the prettiest, and we thought she was the crown jewel of the family. So because we idolized her, we made the book about a brother and a sister. And at the very end of the story, as I recall, an accident occurs: the brother's in the hospital, they don't think he's going to recover, the sister comes rushing in, and they just grab each other — like at the conclusion of Tosca — and exclaim: we are inseparable! Everybody rushes in to separate them as they jump out the hospital window....Yes, you see, we did know dimly that there was something wrong, we were punishing them unconsciously.

''I imagine that all siblings have such feelings,'' Maurice continues. ''The learning process makes children become aware that there's a taboo with regard to these feelings, but before you learn that, you do what comes naturally. My parents weren't well-to-do, and we had only two beds — my brother and I slept in one, my sister Natalie in the other, and often we'd all sleep in the same bed. My parents would come in — sometimes with my uncle and aunt — and they'd say: 'Look, see how much they like each other.' I loved my brother, and I didn't know that that could be this, and this that... kids find that out later.''