The Violet Hour (30 page)

“I'm totally crazy, I know that,” he once said. “I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good.” The craziness was in his work. The blackness was vital; he called it “the shadows.” The shadows were in the illustrations. Without them, there would be only charm.

Those close to him sometimes heard the extremes of depression in his voice; he had more than a passing acquaintance with the edge. He smuggled moments of numbed depression into
Higglety Pigglety Pop!
—“The lion said, ‘Please eat me up. There is nothing more to life' ”—and into
My Brother's Book
—“For five long years he lay so sunk / Till bark enclosed his living trunk, / Bare vines entwined his glittering head. / Ask of the wild cherry tree: / Does he live? Is he dead?”

Maurice wrote a letter to Jonathan in the mid-seventies about being in a funk in San Francisco. He is working on a book that he thinks may be his best. This makes all the difference to his mood. He talks about the book as if it has entered the world to redeem him. He knows that the idea of art rescuing you is a cliché, but in this case, it's really true. He's going to make it because of the book.

This seems not an overstatement: The books and drawings and opera backdrops came to save him. Or he dreamed and labored to save himself.

While Maurice was in the hospital, Lynn talked to Jonathan about being more of a presence once Maurice got home. Jonathan agreed that he would come once a week, and maybe stay over, to help with his recovery.

Lynn told Maurice that they had redone the bathroom in the house to accommodate his loss of balance, but he was not interested in hearing about it. He was not talking about going home.

In the sixties, his intimations of mortality got very specific; his floating terror of death attached itself to specific losses. He began to work the deaths and illnesses of those close to him into his art.

Sendak was laid low by his white Sealyham terrier Jennie's illness in 1967. He would say later that Jennie was the love of his life, which was mostly a joke, but not entirely. The rawness blows through a bleak and howling letter he wrote to his friend Jan Wahl. He writes that he is staying home with Jennie because he is nervous about leaving her and is constantly checking that she is breathing. He says he drops to the ground and writhes. Destruction is everywhere, magnified. Caterpillars attacked a vine, and when he drenched them with insecticide, they trembled and thrashed on the ground as ants consumed them. He feels like death is everywhere and he is
bad at life. He is so filled with self-contempt that he wonders how Jan can bear him.

Maurice's panic over Jennie's decline suffuses the book he was working on,
Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life
. Behind this was also his panic about his mother's cancer, though he said it was easier to be worried about the dog dying than his mother because the latter would be too huge and consuming. The darkness threatened to engulf him, and he tried to draw his way through it. He couldn't explain what was going on, he wrote in another letter to Jan Wahl about the book. He wrote about how grueling the writing process was, the toll it was taking on him. He is writing through a kind of blackness, both sure of his art and in great, unmanageable pain. He tells Jan not to worry about him, that this anguish is a reasonable price to pay for creative power. Even if the book doesn't succeed, it will have been worth it. The letter is an extraordinary mix of certainty and rawness, both harrowing and triumphant.

The book itself is shot through with pain; the terror of death is tamed like a dancing bear; it performs.

The illustrations are meticulous line drawings with elaborate cross-hatching, evoking another century. They are so intricately drawn they could almost be etchings. He traced over a photograph of Jennie to get her shaggy jowls exactly right. A creative, transformative kind of tracing over a light box was integral to his process.

The story flows with a dream logic: A dog leaves her owner, even though she had everything; she eats mind-boggling amounts of food, meets various animals, and ends up as the new nurse to Baby. Baby's parents have mysteriously left, and a lion downstairs has devoured the previous nurses, because they could not get Baby to eat. Jennie saves Baby, though not before she has her head in the lion's mouth, and she ends up as a star in the Mother Goose World Theatre at Castle Yonder. She writes a letter to her master, “Hello, As you probably noticed, I went away forever….I can't tell you how to get to Castle Yonder because I don't know where it is. But if you ever come this way, look for me. Jennie.”

Along the way, the odd, whimsical story gives voice to a very high level of bleakness, of nearly giving up. Take Jennie's conversation with the ash tree: Jenny wonders why the ash tree is complaining when it has everything. The ash tree cries, “The birds are gone, my leaves are dead, and I'll soon have nothing but the empty, frozen night.”

But the story pulls back from the brink it is flirting with. There is a darkness lapping at the edges, a gloom being fought off, but it is so gloriously, stylishly fought off that one feels, in the end, consoled.

The softness of the drawings also plays against some of the more alarming bits of text. The cross-hatching almost reproduces the dog's shagginess; there is a furriness to the drawings, which comforts. There are no hard lines or angles; everything is shaded, gentle. There is a sweetness to the illustrations
that answers some of the bleakness and wondering in the words.

The pain Maurice felt in this period morphs into a sharp, comic, wry production of the play
Higglety Pigglety Pop!
The stately elegance of the drawings collides with the silliness of the scene: “The pig is a top-hatted doctor who pours pills onto Jennie, who is lying on the floor. The cat comes in and says the lion is loose, and the pig jumps out the window, and the lion comes onstage to say, “Higglety” and “Pigglety,” before Jennie pops him with a mop.

The idea of the afterlife as a rhyming absurdist play, where the dog eats salami mops as a famous star of the stage, is a great generous joke that only Sendak could dream up. There is in
Higglety Pigglety Pop!
a restorative, wholly sui generis charm. But the book does not do away with what Maurice elsewhere calls “the shadows.”

In an early draft of the book, one can see the traces of his struggle to tackle loss. The early version ends on a more upbeat and less sublimely mystical note. Jennie's owner writes, in answer to her letter, that he had read an item about it in the newspaper, and promises to visit. The loss in the draft is not really a loss—it is too easily undone; the mystery, the beyond reach–ness, of Castle Yonder is dismantled in this version. But Maurice began to whittle the coda down in subsequent drafts and finally took it out entirely, scribbling in pencil that he should take it out because it is too solid and worldly. He wants the ending to tantalize and bewilder the reader.

In earlier drafts, the drawings on the final pages are also sweeter: All of the characters climb atop a lion and ride off together, as they do in Sendak's nutshell library story,
Pierre
. The ending is neater, prettier, cozier; the difficulty managed, glossed over, cute.

But as Sendak worked through the drawings, the ending became sharper, more eloquent. In the final version, we can only see the cat holding the lion's tail. The rest of the lion is out the window, offstage, unseen. The absurdity lingers, un-childproofed. The festive darkness, the exuberant bewildering frolic, is unhampered. There is no resolution in this version of the drawing, only buoyant mystery.

Tony Kushner writes of the book's ending: “ ‘Pop! Stop! Clop! Chop! The End.' Samuel Beckett couldn't have put it more succinctly.”

Tony came to see him at Danbury Hospital. He brought the opera
Le Cinesi
to play for him. Gluck had written it for the household of Empress Maria Theresa. Maurice loved listening to it. He told the nurses that he wanted to be addressed as Your Royal Highness Princess Amalia, who was one of Maria Theresa's daughters.