The Violet Hour (33 page)

Maurice was one of those confusing people who needed both unusual amounts of solitude and unusual amounts of attention.
He needed to be left alone to work—or not alone but unbothered, unhampered, un-tied-down, preferably with someone stretched out reading in the room, or watching television, or puttering around. But he also needed unusual amounts of focused attention. He connected instantly and deeply; he seduced with his stories, with his outrageousness, with his greater-than-usual capacity to truly empathize. People, especially younger people, melted around him, around the creator of
Where the Wild Things Are
, which conjured ancient nights in pajamas, curled up with their mothers. He did not like his friends having husbands or wives or boyfriends around to divide their attention; he liked untrammeled affection, being the center of things; he liked to perform, to mainline love.

One of the notable effects Maurice had on other people was that they wanted to do things for him. He cultivated a certain helplessness: He was a terrible driver, so people would drive him places, or he couldn't be alone, so people would stay with him. But on top of this, people would just do things for him—scour the earth for some rare book or painting or object he wanted, for instance. Something deeper than his fame made people want to look out for him, some essence that drew people to him and fostered a very particular kind of devotion. Women especially wanted to take care of him. They threw themselves at him, thought of marrying him, brought him pies.

One day a crazy woman from Australia came and sat naked on the front lawn. He called the police, who said there wasn't much they could do, as she wasn't really hurting anyone. Finally Maurice said he would go out and talk to her. Lynn and
Gene thought he was nuts, but he went and took a walk with her. She told him she wanted him to put a French horn in his next book, so he did. He drew Ida playing a French horn in
Outside Over There
.

At the hospital, Maurice liked to have Henry James read aloud. The reader would often trip over one of the winding sentences, and they would laugh. Why did it have to be Henry James? Maurice had said, a couple of months earlier, in an interview, “I want to read as much Henry James as I can cram. Pain in the ass that he is.”

In the documentary about Sendak's life,
Tell Them Anything You Want
, made by Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs, the film crew drives up the snowy road to his Connecticut house. They get out of the car. “Do you have any advice for young people?” they ask, camera rolling. “Quit this life as soon as you can!” shrieks Sendak, shaking or pretending to shake. “Get out! Get out!” He is joking, but there is something terrifying or ragged in his voice. The moment on film is electric because it feels out of control, as if a real wild thing has been momentarily unloosed against the slate Connecticut sky, the bare trees.

Most adults would be incapable of an outburst like that, because they are too constrained; they cannot let such a primal expression into the open; they are not unleashing on the level
that Sendak was able to unleash. Or maybe he was closer to that pain, had more direct access to a deeper self than most people do.

Sendak had always been a natural performer, a great storyteller, a charismatic talker, and a prolific charmer. There were always shocking bursts, a story that his listener could not believe he would be telling, but they were carefully moderated, superbly hilarious. Part of his magnetism was his outrageousness, his readiness with salaciousness, with irreverence, with a brilliantly deployed willingness to say something you are not supposed to say. When he received a National Medal of Arts at the White House, Bill Clinton told him that as a child he always imagined that he would grow up and wear a long coat with brass buttons. Sendak said, “Well, Mr. President, you only have one more year in office. You have plenty of time to pursue your dream of being a doorman.”

One gets the sense that Sendak was crafting a persona for himself as carefully as any of the line drawings he did in his books. He was creating a character of Sendak, brilliant, dark, shocking, that would intrigue, provoke admiration, elicit deep love and loyalty, bind people to him in a way that they are rarely bound.

In his interviews and talks, Maurice presented uncheerful facts with varying degrees of comic acceptance. Most of the time they were assimilated into his mordant persona, darkly humorous, controlled, witty, adult. But occasionally, in his late interviews, there was a howl, a sorrow that was not managed,
a wind that blew through what he was saying. In an interview he did with Terry Gross of National Public Radio in September 2011, he talks about two friends who had just died: “And when they die they are out of my life. They're gone forever. Blank. Blank. Blank.” In the documentary, when a painful childhood memory comes up he says, “I cannot cry. I cannot talk about it.” The rawness is startling, the flicker of jagged rage or pain. These moments are fascinating to watch, because they are unprocessed, untouched by the considerable managing intellect. For a second, there is just despair.

In March 2012, Tony Kushner's father died. He died at home, surrounded by loved ones, at peace. When Tony was talking to Maurice about it on the phone, Maurice began to weep; he was crying so much that Tony asked him why he was so upset: It made sense that he would be upset—his close friend's father had died—but why
that
upset? Maurice said it was because his death was so “decent.” Was he thinking that he wasn't decent? That this kind of decency wasn't available to him?

In his last interviews over the winter, Sendak seemed overall to be crafting the image of an old man at peace with the universe. His closest friends heard his Terry Gross interview and thought, Who is that man? The dignified posture of Buddha-like acceptance seemed distinctly un-Maurice-like, though as Tony put it, he was “working toward it.”

In that interview he said things like “I am not afraid of death,” and “You know, there's something I'm finding out as I'm aging—that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees, my beautiful, beautiful maples,” and “Oh, God, there are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.”