The Violet Hour (32 page)

As Maurice worked endlessly on the illustrations—he made four dummy books, which were mock-ups of the originals, and countless drawings on tracing paper over light boxes, which was part of his exacting technique—his father, who was dying, moved into his apartment on 9th Street. His father was sleeping on a bed in his studio.

At his desk, he drew a giant can of tomatoes with a label reading
PHILIP
'
S BEST
. In another picture on the same page, a can, mostly obscured, bears the label
SADIE
'
S BEST
. And the book itself is dedicated to his parents,
FOR SADIE AND PHILIP
, with Mickey hovering in his dough plane next to the dedication.

He also drew into the book several private references to his own brush with death. There is a shortening sack with a label saying
Q. E. GATESHEAD
, which was the hospital he went to in England. There is a baking soda labeled
PHOENIX BAKING SODA
,
which captures the rising-from-the-ashes spirit of those months of recovery.

In a television interview, when Sendak was nearing eighty, Bill Moyers says to him: “Are you obsessed with death?”

M
AURICE
S
ENDAK:
A little bit. It's such a curious thing.

B
ILL
M
OYERS:
How so?

MS: It's a whole adventure.

In
In the Night Kitchen
, there is a purplish flag fluttering atop a bottle in the distance, against the starry sky, that reads
CHAMPION
. This is a playful reference to one of the nurses at Gateshead calling him a “champion” as he was struggling for consciousness during his recovery. He felt like he was pulling a rope to get out of a well, and he heard her English accent, calling him a “champion.” The harrowing memory appears in this banner, woven in, mysterious. Even if you don't know the references, the mood of quiet triumph pervades.

BM: Did you think about the holocaust?

MS: Of course, my parents would say to me when I was late for dinner playing stoopball, “Your cousin Leo doesn't play ball. He is in a concentration camp. He is dead.” I was shamelessly enjoying myself while they were cooked in an oven.

In
In the Night Kitchen
, Sendak takes the image of children being cooked in an oven and makes it his own. The fat bakers, on the thrilling edge between scary and funny, are baking
Mickey into a pie and putting him in an oven, until he pops out and saves himself. He kneads the dough into an airplane and flies up a giant milk bottle. He dives naked into the bottle and emerges with the milk, crowing against the violet dawn, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” The image of the child in the oven is made over into a fun one.

The grandeur of
In the Night Kitchen
pops up in answer to the child's vulnerability. There is an exaggerated, cartoonish, amped-up vision of transcendence. The book's pure joy is enhanced by its shadows of calamity, its implicit acquaintance with darkness, its undercurrent of melancholy; even the colors, the rich velvety blue night, deepen the comedy. Mickey vanquishes obstacles and enemies, evades and outflies death by cake. Survival is fun, with a tremor of sublimity, of subterranean awe, that gives the book its majesty.

In earlier drafts of the book, the brutality was a bit more pronounced. The words were written out by hand on a yellow legal pad, and there was a point where the bakers sing a little song about a head injury that kills him, but in subsequent drafts the song is removed, the darkness managed and controlled.

If you look closely at Mickey's expression—in his tiny kneaded-dough airplane, atop the giant milk bottle, high above the whole miraculous vista, with the tin measuring cup on his head—you see that it is unhappy or overwhelmed or daunted. Mid triumph, he is considering the terrible or uncomfortable or dispiriting things in the world.

BM: Isn't this a time for a certain kind of ripeness in your life?…After all you will never die, Maurice Sendak. I'm serious about that….Most of us will live only as long as our grandchildren remember us. But you will never die.

MS: I got news for you. I am going to croak.

Maurice flamboyantly hated many things, and among those things were hospitals. He could barely even bring himself to visit people he was very close to, he hated hospitals so much, so Lynn was surprised that he was not complaining more about the hospital, in particular about the hospital food. He was on a diet of thickened liquids, but he would ask for more cranberry mash or whatever they served.

At home, what he loved to eat was cake. He ate enormous amounts of cake, especially, when he was younger, chocolate cake. When he was still working in the city, Gene would bring boxes from the excellent bakeries in the West Village when he came for the weekend. Maurice particularly liked the seven-layer cake from Jon Vie. Lynn would make him marble cakes, pound cakes, lemon cake; she had his mother's recipes for sponge cake, banana cake, and spice cake, and she would make those too. The comforts of childhood were still the salient ones.

From the hospital bed, Maurice took Lynn's hand. “I love you.” She said, “I love you too.”

“Please don't go. We'll eat you up, we love you so!” say the wild things to Max in one of Sendak's most immortal lines. Love here is terrifying, consuming, exhilarating; it is infinitely recognizable, even to small children, annihilating, seductive. It's the purest expression we have of the delirious violence of strong feeling. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once wrote that the mother must resist making love to or eating her child, which resonates because certain loves are so fierce and urgent, it feels as if you want to bite or eat or consume the object of that love.

Maurice said he dreamed up the idea of the wild things as an adult, at a shiva after someone had died, with his brother and sister. They were sitting around, laughing about their relatives from Europe. The relatives didn't speak English. Their teeth were yellow. They grabbed the children's cheeks. It was like they would gobble up Maurice and his siblings, along with everything else in the house. The wild things were Jewish relatives.

In fact, Sendak's books are filled with beasts that might eat you, often lions. There is the lion in
Higglety Pigglety Pop!
, a stately yet cryptic menace, who closes his jaws around Jennie's head; there is the lion in the nutshell library, who swallows Pierre and then, after being hit on the head with a folding chair and shaken up and down by a doctor, spits him out again on the floor; there is the bear in
My Brother's Book
, who bites the brother and kills him. The idea of being consumed by an animal is a code for death—that is, depending on the moment in Sendak's life, either easily reversible or not. He is playing
here with a very basic primal fear—being swallowed by a beast, a child's fear—but it is also a fear of being consumed, obliterated; it is about the loss of self on the most grave and terrifying adult level. Can you be close to another person without being consumed?

He liked to say that when his sister gave him his first book, he bit it. This fits with his sensual apprehension of the universe, his physical devouring of people, places; he took things in more sensually than most—he hugged his friends, grabbed their noses, kissed them on the lips.

There is a moment in
Where the Wild Things Are
when Max gets lonely with the wild things, in his tent, in the great orange dusk, and wants to go where someone loves him best of all. For Max, that someone is his mother, who has made him a warm supper with a big slice of layer cake. She is one of the great reassuring presences of a mother in literature, but for Maurice, that person was never his mother. Did people love him best of all? He voraciously hungered to know that they did.

Lynn made apple crisp and brought it to Maurice in the hospital, because it was soft enough for him to eat.