The Violet Hour (27 page)

It was a dark, snowy day. Thomas's wife, Caitlin, arrived at the hospital in a tight black wool dress, her ash-blond hair pinned up in the usual falling-down bun, still the same bloom or radiance people always commented on, the same slightly menacing
quality of too muchness. She was a bit drunk, and who could blame her? Knowing Caitlin was on her way, Liz Reitell had tactfully cleared out. When Caitlin saw Brinnin, she called out, “Is the bloody man dead or alive?” What happened next was that Caitlin interfered with Thomas's breathing. Ironically, she was trying to be socially acceptable. She later said, “I thought I had to make some gesture of affection to Dylan, because there they all were, looking at me through that window. I started to try to get closer to him; I wanted to give him a hug, so I sort of rolled on top of him. The nurse came bustling in and pulled me off. ‘You'll suffocate him.' ” A little while later, Caitlin also lit a cigarette dangerously close to the oxygen tank, which the nurse didn't like much either. She was told that she had to leave.

The next time she visited, Caitlin smashed a crucifix on her way out. She knocked over a statue of the Virgin Mary. She bit an orderly on the hand. To anyone watching, it was as if Thomas's wife was doing his not going gently for him. Some felt the hospital was overreacting: She was taken from there in a straitjacket to River Crest, a sanitarium in Queens.

John Berryman and Pearl Kazin were at a conference at Bard College. Berryman was shaken by the news of Thomas's condition. He drunkenly recited “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” at a party, and he and Pearl called St. Vincent's repeatedly, trying to get information about Thomas.
That night, they drove back with Ralph Ellison and arrived at the hotel at midnight. Berryman and Pearl went to the hospital and persuaded the nun in charge to let them in. They went into the darkened room and saw him under his oxygen tent.

At lunchtime, Brinnin stepped out of the room to get a cup of coffee and to talk to some of his friends in the waiting room. John Berryman stayed with Thomas. The tall, nervous, bearded poet from Princeton had been one of the most dedicated hoverers. A few minutes after one, Berryman rushed out in the hall to find Brinnin. “He's dead! He's dead! Where were you?” When Thomas died, Berryman was “the breathing nearest other thing,” as he wrote later in a poem, though technically a nurse was nearer. The nurse had been bathing him when he died. She rolled him onto his side and began washing him with a damp cloth, and he stopped breathing. There was no struggle, no gasp for air. Berryman wrote in a letter to a friend, “His body died utterly quiet.”

Brinnin and Liz followed Berryman into the room. The nurses were taking down the oxygen tent. Detached from all the machines, holes in his flesh from tubes, the poet lay like a chunky pietà on the starched white sheets. The biographer held his feet in his hands. They were already cold. The postmortem account would read: “obese trunk, puffy face; wavy brown hair on head; moderate frontal baldness; brown eyes; unshaven
face…all teeth show discoloration—several teeth missing in lower jaw.”

In all of his imagining and reimagining of this moment, Dylan Thomas wrote what in another kind of man would be called prayer. He wrote death as comforting; he wrote great billowing consolations, exalting even in the enduring power of the universe, a shared dream of infinite renewal. He wrote, “That the closer I move / To death, one man through his sundered hulks, / The louder the sun blooms / And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.” There is grandeur here and peace. This poem, written four years earlier, ends “As I sail out to die.”

In this pretty image of sailing out to die there is an element of the child comforting himself. One thinks of Thomas turning back not once but three times to kiss his mother goodbye the last time he saw her. One thinks of a night when the bombs fell on London during the Blitz, when Thomas lay the wrong way in the bed, with his head under the sheets, with his wife reading calmly, the right way round, the noise crashing around them.

Before Thomas's coma, Caitlin had written him a letter from Wales. This is the letter he knew that she was writing, but it arrived too late for him to read it. If he had recovered, he would have read the words: “I knew you were abysmally weak, drunken, unfaithful and a congenital liar, but it has taken me longer to realize that on top of each one of these unpardonable vices, you are a plain, stingy meany as well….There is, without exception, no wife in the whole of creation treated like I
am, and at last it's over for better or worse. And no more slop talk, let's at least cut that out—you may be good at it, but it stinks to high heaven, turn it on one of your new adulators, it always goes down. Whatever you do or say, however foul, always goes down, fuck you.”

When she heard about Thomas's death, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Pearl Kazin, “I think I had expected to hear news like that at any time, but even so it is a bad shock.” Indeed, his death was, to many, both a great shock and utterly anticipated. The collision of his vividness, his vitality, with his self-destruction was hard to assimilate; it seemed both impossible and inevitable, and the grief it inspired was intense, confused.

The autopsy report read: “
CAUSE OF DEATH:
PIAL EDEMA: FATTY LIVER: HYPOSTATIC BRONCHOPNEUMONIA.” The true mystery of Thomas's last days, however, is not the precise medical cause of his coma; it is how the unnatural fear and apprehension of death melts into a craving for it. His long preoccupation with the end, with all the celebrating and singing one can do on the way to that end, his overdeveloped, painful consciousness, always, of that end, is transformed into something almost beautiful. It seems if you are afraid or preoccupied with something for long enough, you begin to develop a feeling toward it not dissimilar to love. This is not a trick of the mind that most healthy people can understand. David Foster Wallace once wrote, in a
Harper's
piece about a cruise ship, a decade before his own suicide: “The word ‘despair' is overused and banalized now, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. It's close to what people call dread
or angst, but it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I'm small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.”

In Thomas's wallet, there was a faded clipping from a Welsh local newspaper. It had a photograph of him winning a long-distance race as a child. He had carried it around with him for thirty years. He was a slim, beautiful boy winning a race. Of all the interviews, the awards, the profiles, this is what he kept with him in his wallet, this clean victory, this running and winning, in a time before he was running and not winning.

Several years before his own suicide, John Berryman wrote in a letter to Robert Lowell: “Dylan murdered himself with liquor. Tho' it took years.” When he was young and healthy, Thomas had referred to his poems as “statements made on the way to the grave.”

One can't help thinking Thomas would have enjoyed the fact that his funeral, in Laugharne, was by no means a solemn or orderly or upright occasion. Drink flowed freely. Fights broke out. Several of his papers were stolen off the battered wooden desk in his writing shed behind the boathouse.

Credit 5.1

Maurice Sendak had an unusually bad headache. He thought it was the beginning of a migraine and went to bed, but by morning it was so bad that his companion, Lynn Caponera, called an ambulance. The ambulance took him to Danbury Hospital. A blood vessel had broken in his brain. His balance and swallowing had been affected.

Maurice had always been obsessed with death. He drew through his obsession, used it. He drew lions that would swallow you; he drew wild things that gnashed their terrible teeth; he drew faceless hooded goblins stealing babies out of a window; he drew fat bakers who'd bake you up in a pie; he drew a nine-year-old pig that promised he would never turn ten. He drew funny, charming, cheerful, haunting near-deaths. He drew narrow escapes, popping up, resurrection.

He knew what it was like to be so depressed that dying did not seem crazy or outlandish or remote. He had a kind of intimacy with death, with the idea of it, anyway.

Even as a tiny child in Brooklyn, Maurice was unusually alert to the prospect of dying. He was floored by every childhood sickness—measles, scarlet fever, double pneumonia. “My parents were not discreet,” he said. “They always thought I was going to die.” He laid out the toy soldiers on the blankets of his sickbed. He watched other children play through the window.

One day his grandmother, who had emigrated from the shtetls outside Warsaw, dressed him in a white suit, white shirt, white tights, white shoes, and took him out to the stoop to sit with her. The idea was that the angel of death would pass over them and think that he was already an angel and there was no need to snatch him from his family.

During one illness Maurice had as a toddler, his mother found him clawing a photo of his grandfather that hung above the bed; he was speaking Yiddish, even though he only knew English. She thought a dybbuk was trying to claim him from beyond the grave, so she tore up the photograph. She said she burned it, but years later Maurice found the torn-up pieces in a Ziploc bag among her possessions. He had a restorer put it back together and he kept it in his house, this grandfather calling him to the grave.

The general message from his family seemed to be that he should be grateful to be alive, that his continued existence involved
some aspect of luck that should not, if he was smart, be pushed. When he was very small, his parents told him that when his mother was pregnant they went to the pharmacy and bought all kinds of toxic substances to induce a miscarriage, and his father tried pushing her off a ladder. They hadn't wanted a third child. Why would they tell a tiny child this? As a famous artist, later in life, he brushed the question off in an interview, as though it wasn't in fact a big deal—they were harried immigrants, they didn't need another mouth to feed, though surely something deeper was etched into his sense of himself. He was unwanted, unwelcome, somehow meant to die, meant to be carried off. He said once, “I felt certain my mother did not like me.”

Maurice had bought the house next door to his in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and he invited young illustrators to come and stay there, as a kind of artists' colony. One of these illustrators, Aaron, had a pair of track pants that Maurice particularly liked. Aaron had given them to Maurice, and Maurice wore them around the house; then he wore them in the hospital. Somehow the hospital laundry lost Aaron's track pants, and Maurice was upset. Lynn Caponera, who spent every night at Danbury Hospital with Maurice, went out to buy him new track pants, this being something she could fix, but somehow they couldn't quite replace Aaron's track pants.

There is a formal photograph of his dumpling-shaped mother, her wavy hair chin length, with her three wary children, the wariest of all being baby Maurice, who is dressed in a white bonnet and appears from his scowl to already be seeing some pretty wild things. She is looking at the camera as if it might at any moment leap out and attack her. Theirs was not a happy or relaxing home. Sadie Sendak was often furious. She had trouble with warmth. The siblings turned to one another, sometimes sleeping together like kittens, three in a bed. Maurice, who struggled in public interviews to be generous to his mother, said that she should never have had children, and distant, absent, prickly, punishing mothers would be a big obsession of his books.

His mother's anger was a large part of his childhood, her love for her children suffused with rage and resentment. In addition to the usual immigrant stress, she suffered from serious clinical depression. Once, when Maurice was little, a friend was over, and his mother was furiously fuming and stomping through the house. The friend said, “Who is that?” and Maurice, embarrassed, said, “Oh, we had to hire someone.”

The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt once wrote about Sendak's books: “Love often takes the form of menace, and safe havens are reached, if they are reached at all, only after terrifying adventures.”

All his life Maurice bristled at the idea of childhood innocence and at those who thought his books were offending or challenging it. In a comic Art Spiegelman did in
The New Yorker
of a conversation they had in the woods, Maurice says: “People say,
‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!' As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!…In reality, childhood is deep and rich….I remember my
own
childhood vividly….I knew terrible things…but I knew I mustn't let adults
know
I knew…it would scare them.”

Maurice liked to tell the story of the daughter of a friend who was at school near the World Trade Center when the towers fell. She told her father that she saw butterflies on the building as the towers collapsed. Later she admitted that they weren't butterflies, they were people jumping, but she didn't want to upset her father by letting him know that she knew. Children protect their parents, which is the funny part of childhood that slips away from us, the awful knowledge it contains.