The Violet Hour (28 page)

The received wisdom is that it is not good to scare kids, but Sendak's belief was that kids are already scared, that what they crave is seeing their anxieties thrillingly laid out. Much of Sendak's work, then, exists between play and terror, that infinitely intriguing, purely fantastical place where you are joked out of your most serious fears. But those fears are also entertained on the most serious and high level in Sendak's books; they are not dismissed but reveled in, romped through.

Sendak liked to talk about artists who “hid” things in their art—composers like Schubert, for instance. This was a model he applied to himself, the idea of hiding something big and grave in a modest form. He brought the seriousness of a great artist to what seemed to some like a small, humble, or limited
form, and in it he expressed himself entirely. He came of age as an artist when abstract expressionism was the rage, and his unfashionably naturalistic work would have been scoffed at in the art world, but in the narrow field of children's books, he brought his fierceness and spirit and gift to bear on his illustrations. He “hid” many things in his books: rage, terror, death, abandonment, loss, sex, guilt. His themes were the big ambitious themes of all art, but they were hidden in a world of wild things and sailboats and shaggy dogs.

The fantasy of smuggling himself into his art also perhaps owes something to being gay in an era that would not easily accept homosexuality. He hid his sexual preference from his parents. He kept it from readers and reviewers for far longer than seemed necessary. He came out explicitly in public, at the encouragement of his very close friend, the playwright Tony Kushner, in an interview in
The New York Times
when he was eighty. The interviewer asked him if there was anything he had never said in an interview, and he said, “Well, that I'm gay.” Toward the end of Sendak's life, a young interviewer asked him when he had stopped beating himself up for being gay, and he said he never did; the sense of something shameful, or secret, or socially unacceptable stayed with him as an artist even after he came out, even in his eighties.

Children's books had very little prestige when he was starting out. He jokes about going to a cocktail party and a man asking him what he did. “I am a children's book illustrator,” he replied. And the man, looking over his shoulder, said, “Oh, well, I am sure my wife would love to talk to you.”

Even after
Where the Wild Things Are
came out and he achieved the kind of overwhelming, life-altering fame usually reserved for movie stars, he did not rest or stop working crazy hours or feel appreciated. He still felt like he was laboring in a largely hostile and uncomprehending world.

All his life Maurice felt a particular affinity for artists and writers who were misunderstood, unappreciated, uncelebrated. He had a great passion for the story of Keats, or Melville, or Blake, or anyone who was not recognized in their time. This particular passionate identification was ironic, of course, as few artists are as celebrated, famous, feted, and beloved in their times as Sendak was. He was not exactly laboring in obscurity. But there was something in the experience of dying unknown that he recognized: He may have felt famous but not seen.

In the early sixties, Maurice did a watercolor of the man who would be his partner of fifty years, Dr. Eugene Glynn; he called the painting
Landscape with Gene
. The landscape is a pale, watery blue green, the plants lushly delicate, gentle, almost as if you could swim through them. Gene sunbathes on a chaise longue in a striped button-down shirt and shorts, long legs bent gracefully, deeply lost in a book. The scene exudes warmth, affection, a fertile peace.

Gene was tall, imposing, smart, opinionated, erudite, especially about art, in a way that Maurice, who never went to college,
particularly admired. He was also a psychoanalyst who worked with adolescents. Like Maurice, he had a profoundly difficult childhood—his father had been shot and killed—and was driven by the idea of repairing early wounds, fixing childhood pain.

Also very early on, Maurice did a portrait of him in a charcoal suit—angled, opaque, uncomfortable, slightly rumpled, with a romantic masculine aura of a secret unhappiness or dark past.

For most of their decades-long relationship, Gene went to work in the city and came up on weekends, so they lived together but not every day of the week. In the later decades, Gene would go to Europe with friends over the summer and Maurice would stay home.

Maurice had a flair for compartments. When he finally introduced Tony Kushner to Gene, it was a big deal; the mixing and mingling of worlds did not come easily or naturally to him, and he had many passionate friendships that he kept entirely separate.

At one point, Maurice became enchanted with a monastery in upstate New York where the monks raised German shepherds. He visited over the years and bought a farm near it. He had the idea he might escape there. He never brought Gene to the farm. Another compartment in a life of compartments.

And yet the two of them were deeply linked. Maurice sketched a cartoon at the bottom of a letter to someone else that was a
forecast of his weekend. A tiny Maurice is sitting in the boxy house, gazing out the window, the trees curling behind him like smoke, complaining that he can't work. Outside, the shirtless caretaker has broken a planter, and says that he's worried about Gene and Maurice's reaction, and Gene, bearded, holds up his hand and runs after the three dogs, shouting their names. Here the distracting unrest of domestic life is sweet; the dashed-off cartoon of household annoyances exudes tenderness.

In the hospital, Maurice put on a good front so the few very close friends who came to see him wouldn't worry. He was doing physical therapy. He was being a very good patient—perhaps too good a patient, Lynn thought, as he was letting things go instead of complaining, which was unlike him. Lynn advocated for him, but his passive acceptance of hospital life did not seem to bode well.

On the phone, she would tell friends about his progress, as if he were getting better slowly.

If one ever had a fantasy of a mother who would be eternally available, hovering protectively in the background, baking cakes, making lunch, driving you places, buying clothes, dispensing an unconditional and undemanding love, Lynn Caponera did a fairly good job of approximating that role. In general this is not something you can pay for, not a service you can buy,
but if you are very lucky or unusually gifted in human relations, it is something you can stumble into. It is maybe a testament to the sheer magnificent force of Maurice's imagination that he did not create only the superbly benign mother who leaves Max a hot dinner after their fight in
Where the Wild Things Are
but also conjured Lynn into his own exuberant, fretful life.

For most of her life, Lynn lived with Maurice and took care of him. On rare occasions when Lynn went out to dinner, Maurice told her that if she stayed out past eleven he would get worried, and he would get sick, and his heart would beat too fast, and he would have trouble breathing. In fact, if she came home a little late, at, say, eleven-twenty, she would find him taking labored breaths. Other people would say that he was manipulating her, but she would say, “No, he really is sick. It makes him sick if I am out too late.”

Maurice wanted Lynn to do things for him: If he needed a nurse, it had to be Lynn; if someone was going to pick up a pair of pants for him in several sizes and then return the ones he didn't want to the store, or make him a sandwich, it had to be Lynn. Sometimes other people would point out the irrationality of this, but in his mind it had to be Lynn. The dependence was absolute, draining, flattering, consuming; the quasi-maternal care demanded of her was magnificent in scope. The particular quality and seductiveness of the need will be recognizable to mothers of very small children, most of whom won't rise to it.

When Lynn first wandered over as an eleven-year-old with pretty sky-blue eyes, from her family's house down the road,
her brother, Peter, was already working in Maurice's house as a kind of handyman and caretaker. He came with the house, as everyone put it. One day Lynn was helping with the weeding. Her mind drifted and she did a shoddy job, and Maurice told her that she should always do her job, whatever it was, as well as she could.