The Violet Hour (35 page)

Maybe the most startling of these objects is Keats's original death mask. Maurice did not keep the wooden box containing it in his bedroom but in the blue guest room. He liked to open it and stroke the smooth white forehead. He said it did not make him feel sad, it made him feel maternal.

Maurice drew Eugene after he died, as he had drawn his family members when they were dying. The moment is one he was compelled to capture, pin down, understand, see. Where many—maybe most—people look away, he wanted to render. He was very wrapped up in the goodbye, the flight, the loss; it was almost Victorian, to be so deeply entranced with the moment of death, the instinct to preserve or document it. It's also the artist's impulse: to turn something terrible into art, to take something you are terrified of and heartbroken by and make it into something else. For the time it takes to draw what is in front of you, you are not helpless or a bystander or bereft: You are doing your job.

He talked to Jonathan about a famous Goya painting they both loved, of the artist with his doctor. Goya looks like he is about
to shuffle off the mortal coil, clutching the bedsheet, and the doctor is behind him, cradling his shoulder and offering him a drink. In fact, Goya is cured, but the scene very much resembles a deathbed scene, a dying man lovingly held by his friend. Talking about the painting, in a lively conversation about art that he had with Jonathan at the New School, Maurice said: “It's so visceral. It makes me feel exalted.”

But why “exalted”? He seems to have found something freeing or exhilarating about looking at something that so deeply frightened and compelled him; he wanted to gaze into it.

Apropos of this, he wrote another beautiful letter to Minnie Kane in 1964. He tells the story of visiting an old family friend who was dying. He was very afraid of seeing her, afraid of how his parents would feel, and afraid of how he would feel. This was the last time he would see her. And yet when he did it was strangely lovely. It was like staring into something he had always been terrified of, and it was exquisite. He left feeling both miserable and elated.

This seems to be key: Staring into something you have always been terrified of and finding it beautiful.

Tony brought proofs of
My Brother's Book
to the hospital, for Sendak to look at and comment on for his publisher.

My Brother's Book
is not a book anyone could believe was for children. It is strange and vibrant. Trees and sky dissolve into ribbons of color. It is as if Sendak is in a private conversation with Blake.

Maurice was passionately entwined with his brother when they were growing up. He often said his brother, Jack, was the better artist, and the two wrote a book together as kids; as teenagers they made intricate wooden toys of characters like Aladdin and Red Riding Hood, which they tried to sell to FAO Schwarz. The toy-store people were impressed with the ingenious designs but didn't think they could be mass-produced. His brother, who like their mother struggled with depression, never became an artist and worked in the post office. He died in 1995. “He was probably a genius,” Maurice said. “But he was severely handicapped.”

The brother in
My Brother's Book
dies. The brother tells a bear that he can eat him if the bear can answer a riddle. The bear asks him what kind of riddle. The boy says, “A sad riddle is best for me.”

February was the month Maurice's brother died and the month Gene was born. The boy says, “In February it will be my snowghost's anniversary.” This echoes an earlier, happier line from
Chicken Soup with Rice:
“In February it will be my snowman's anniversary, with cake for him and soup for me. Happy once. Happy twice. Happy chicken soup with rice.”

When the bear eats him, the boy flies naked through the air. The flying through the air is a graceful rendition of something possibly more painful or brutal.

There are lots of stars in Sendak's late books. As the brother dies, the stars burst over the page.

Lynn's impression was that Maurice was not brave about the little things, but he was brave about the big things. He wrestled with terrible back pain for decades, but he did not complain about that, even though he was what Tony calls a “champion lamenter.” He was once supposed to go into the city for an interview with a woman who had come all the way from Sweden, but he had her come up to see him instead, because he had an ingrown toenail, which was bothering him. When the woman's van arrived and her husband wheeled her down a ramp, Maurice realized that he had forgotten she was paralyzed. He had made a paralyzed woman who came all the way from Sweden to talk to him drive up to Connecticut! He felt terrible and apologized profusely, and she said, “Well, I imagine an ingrown toenail would be painful if I could feel my toes.”

In early April, before the hospital, Tony had been talking to Maurice on the phone while he was recovering from cataract
surgery. He couldn't see properly and he had a terrible headache and his back pain was worse than usual, and he sounded bleaker than Tony had ever heard him. He said he couldn't draw if he couldn't see. He said that there was no reason for him to be alive. Tony was starting to get worried, and he asked where Lynn was; Maurice said he didn't know and he was alone in the house. Tony told him to wait and he would drive up to Connecticut, so he got in the car and drove. He called Lynn but she didn't answer her phone. When he pulled up to the house, the car was gone. The door was open, and when Tony walked in, Herman started to bark. Otherwise, the house was quiet. Tony made his way through the empty rooms, becoming more and more alarmed, and then he came to Maurice's studio. There was Maurice, covering one eye with his hand, stooped over his drawing desk, working away on the drawings for
The Nose Book
. He was slightly abashed that Tony had driven all the way up, but only slightly.

The Nose Book
is the book Sendak was working on in these last months. He hadn't gotten very far into it. But the book merrily takes on the subject of bodily assault, of the sort of alienation from one's body that older people are increasingly familiar with. A boy's nose is stolen.

Maurice loved noses, and he loved Tony's nose in particular. In fact, Maurice loved Tony's nose so much that Tony had a bust made of it on the set of one of his movies, and he gave it to Maurice as a gift. It was a classic Jewish nose, which had been broken and bent to one side. Maurice loved to bend it the other way, pretending to fix it.

He had always wanted to write a poem about a nose, but when he was younger, he thought it would be too silly. At this point in his life, he didn't care.

The penciled writing is spidery. The illustrations are watercolor over pencil; the lines are less precise, less controlled, than in his earlier work, but the drawings, with their splashes of color, are unmistakably Sendakian: gleeful, wicked, irrepressible. There is the water taxi carrying Capri Island cops speeding off, and noses dangling from the sky, with signs announcing
FREE NOSES
, evoking Sendak mischief at its best. The arc of the story is that a mother who does something wrong to her child is forgiven. This is the unfinished business on his drawing desk.