The Violet Hour (31 page)

Maurice was infatuated with opera. He spent decades working on giant backdrops for huge productions of
The Magic Flute, Hansel and Gretel
, and
Brundibar
. He was drawn to the grand
scale, the oversize, the exaggerated, the heroic; he reveled in the constant pitch of emotional intensity, the richness of feeling, the extravagant, lavish, too much-ness of it.

Tony was glad he liked the Gluck. Maurice seemed to him generally in pretty high spirits. He was doing physical therapy. It seemed to Tony that this was just an episode, like others he'd had in the past, but he would get better and go home and draw.

Here are some things Maurice had left behind in the studio when he left for the hospital: One of Lewis Carroll's photographs of the original Alice, when she was older and sulkier at the whole process of being photographed. Several of his Mickey Mouses from the thirties. An authentic Jewish star with the word
JUDE
on it. A beautiful forties'-style photograph of Ursula Nordstrom, his first editor (who looked at the first draft of
Where the Wild Horses Are
, with his failed attempt to draw horses, and observed acidly, “Maurice, what
can
you draw?” “Things,” he said. “Things!”). A red cardigan draped around the back of his chair. A sepia photograph of himself as a child, taken by a photographer in the street, which irritated his mother because she had to pay for it.

Lynn offered to bring Sendak's dog Herman to Danbury Hospital to see him. She thought she could arrange it. The hospital
was very aware of who Maurice was. But he refused. He didn't want to see the dog. That's when she knew he wasn't coming home.

Maurice had always been attuned to the idea that he might die suddenly, but his heart attack at age thirty-nine gave those misty fears tangible form. Afterward, he felt very uneasy being alone; he was worried that something would happen to him and he wouldn't be able to get to the hospital. For decades he was in reasonably good health, his heart ticking along without incident, but he had a strong feeling of impending calamity, of a fall, a collapse, a heart failure, a trip to the emergency room. He wrote in a letter to Minnie Kane on his fiftieth birthday that he is proud of being fifty, that he didn't think, after his heart attack at thirty-nine, that he would make it to such an advanced age.

He wrote about how defining this experience was in his journal: He says he hates May because it is the month of his heart attack. He says that he was born with his heart attack. He describes death as if it is a friend who is waiting for him.

Maurice's first heart attack caught him
in medias res
. He was on a publicity tour for
Where the Wild Things Are
, in England, in the countryside. It was May 1967. He was in the middle of filming a television show for the BBC, and he felt a radiating pain in his chest. He couldn't speak and had to leave the studio,
though, this being England, they gave him a whiskey first. He went back to his hotel room to rest, and he wrote in his journal that he thought he was dying.

In the middle of the night he banged on his editor Judy Taylor's door and was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead-upon-Tyne, where he remained for weeks. The hospital staff doted on him and spoiled him. Judy gave him a stuffed mouse, which he named Judy.

In the midst of the ordeal, Gene flew over to be with him. When Maurice was a bit better, they moved him to recuperate for a few weeks in a nursing home in London. There he read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's
Little House on the Prairie
books, which he found reassuring: “Calmly and clearly she illustrates the courage necessary to live an ordinary life. She is not concerned with fantasy heroics but with falling down and getting up, being ill and recovering. What is important, she says, is to continue. In persevering, you will discover triumphs. This is what I was searching for, what I found in her books. I wanted to learn how to behave admirably in adversity.” He wrote a card to his friend Barbara Dicks, saying that he had been ready to blow his brains out in the hospital. Gene scribbled next to it, “or mine.”

As he recovered his health in the shaky months that followed, he wrote an extraordinary letter to Minnie Kane, who had herself just suffered a loss. He said that now he could truly inhabit her sorrow, he himself having gone through it. He asks her to let him be with her in her mourning. He feels along with
her. He says that together they will go through a “terrible strengthening.” They will survive everything.

As it happened, the years following his heart attack did see him through a “terrible strengthening.” They were harrowing but creatively fruitful; he faced down rafts of grief and fear and worked them onto the page. His mother died; his father was succumbing to the cancer that would kill him; Jennie died; and he poured all of it into the exuberant romp of
In the Night Kitchen
. He wrote to Minnie Kane that this would be one of his best books.

Drawing on the gleaming manic energy of the turn-of-the-century cartoonist Winsor McCay and the Mickey Mouse movies of his childhood, Sendak dreamed up a nighttime tableau of a boy named Mickey, who falls out of his bed, out of his clothes, through his house, past his mama and papa sleeping (or maybe having sex), and into a surreal kitchen where three fat bakers try to bake him into a cake.

The city itself is the giant kitchen, with skyscraper-sized orange juice cartons and jam jars and cake mixes and corkscrew towers against a gorgeous midnight-blue sky. The city—somehow more Brooklyn than Manhattan, with its elevated trains and low buildings, not grand or gleaming or modern but homey, seedy, down at the heels—is steeped in nostalgia, with a comforting, old-fashioned feel to everything, the writing on the labels, the glass milk bottle, belonging to the past.
The world glimmers, lost, forlorn, mysterious, under a fat yellow moon. His obsessions seep into the dreamscape: Jennie, his mother's death, his father's final decline, his heart attack.

The wild, beautiful night kitchen is landmarked with a flour sack that reads 1953.
JENNIE. 1967 BAY SHORE L.I.
, which is where Gene eventually took Jennie to put her down after her cancer progressed while they were on Fire Island. There is a shortening sack that reads
KILLINGWORTH, CONNECTICUT
, which was Jennie's birthplace; an elevated train passes
JENNIE STREET
, and the face of the clock Mickey falls past in his house reads in tiny script:
Jennie
.