The Violet Hour (34 page)

Still he had bursts of grouchiness, of wildness, of irreverence that winter. “Look at nature,” he said in another interview. “How beautiful when she isn't having a fucking nervous breakdown and killing all of your trees.”

Tony remembers going for a walk with him. Maurice was in the middle of telling him that he had stopped caring about his reputation, about what people thought of him, about whether he was a great artist; none of this mattered to him anymore. It was all vanity and he was at peace, and he had started to love trees and care about the things he'd overlooked before. Just then a car pulled up next to them. One of his neighbors rolled down the window and started to talk about how she had seen another “kiddie-book writer,” Jim Henson, on television. Maurice cringed at the phrase “kiddie-book writer” and launched into an obscenity-laced rant against Henson, who he felt had stolen some ideas from him. So he hadn't quite given up the worldly chatter. Kushner once called his wrath “scorching as dragon's breath,” and the heat was still there.

In a television interview in January, in Sendak's living room, Stephen Colbert tried to badger and shock, but Sendak, cane
leaning against his chair, was his superbly wicked self. “Do you like them?” Colbert asks, referring to children. “I like them as few and far between as I do adults, though maybe a bit more because I really
don't
like adults.” Colbert flips through the pages of
Where the Wild Things Are
. “Is rumpus sex?” “Yes…your mother screaming. Your father saying ‘shut up.' ” When Colbert questions the nakedness of the boy in
In the Night Kitchen
, Sendak says, “Have you never had a dream yourself where you were totally naked?” Colbert says no, and Sendak says drily, “You're a man of little imagination.” Later in the interview, Sendak starts singing “Remember Pearl Harbor.” You can see the respect in Colbert's eyes. The eighty-three-year-old children's book writer has been funnier than him.

Which is closer to the real mood of those last months, the wily black humor of the Colbert interview or the dignified gray eminence of the Terry Gross interview? It's absurd to think any interview plumbs the depths, but both contain bits of his evolving attitude, glimmers of him at eighty-three, still madly eloquent, still game.

In 2006 Maurice dug out an old idea for
Bumble-Ardy
and worked on it while Gene was dying of lung cancer in the house. They had set up a bed in the dining room. Gene had four nurses and Lynn to take care of him. Maurice wanted to pitch in, but Gene mostly wanted Lynn to do the caretaking, and Maurice would increasingly escape to his drawing desk. “I did
Bumble-Ardy
to save myself,” he said. “I did not want to die with him.”

As Sendak was doing the drawings, the artist he was playing with in his mind was James Ensor, a nineteenth-century Belgian painter whose moody canvases are full of skeletons at festivities, of mad, colorful, chaotic, terrifying masked balls. They feel like what would happen if Van Gogh had a nightmare about attending a party. Maurice liked the mood.

Maurice viewed artistic influence as an active process. He picked an artist to borrow from for many of his projects. As he put it, “The muse does not come pay visits, so you go out stalking, hoping that something will catch you. Where do I steal from?” As Jonathan put it, “He had a way of swallowing an artist whole, but what he came out with was wholly his own, unmistakably a Sendak drawing.” The artist he swallowed for
Bumble-Ardy
was Ensor.

Bumble-Ardy
is the story of a pig whose parents die when he is little. He is never allowed to have birthday parties, and he goes to live with his aunt Adeline, who loves him. While she is at work, he organizes an elaborate costume party for pigs. “
Bumble-Ardy
was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own, and it took a long time,” he told Terry Gross during the NPR interview.

The forbidden party Bumble-Ardy pulls together is magnificent. The masked pigs are tumbling into all sorts of wildness;
there is a disturbing disjunction between the smiling masks and the staring, serious eyes.

There is a gorgeous, haunted quality to the festivities, a frenzied jubilation, an eerie garishness, tambourines, pigs covered in stars, backgrounds very dark, almost purple. The mood is celebration in duress, mayhem under a shadow. There is a great pressure in the drawings. There is, in most of the pictures, one pig in a skeleton costume, playing a horn, or reaching out for a cupcake.

Finally Adeline comes home and is furious, and she chases the pigs out with a knife, threatening to turn them into ham. She says, “Okay smarty you've had your party! But never again!” A tearful Bumble says, “I promise! I swear! I won't ever turn ten!” There is a rapprochement on the next page, but this cryptic note feels like the real ending: Will Bumble refuse to age, to move forward? Will Bumble just give up? Will Bumble die?

Later, Maurice would say of
Bumble-Ardy
to Dave Eggers, “This is obviously the work of a man who has dementia. But I'm very happy with it.”

Even after they had arranged for hospice care in the house, Maurice did not quite accept that Eugene was about to die. He would ask Lynn about treatments, even though Gene was very clearly beyond treatments. The flock of nurses hovered. Jonathan photographed and drew Gene. Jonathan read
Through the Looking-Glass
aloud to him.

One day Jonathan went for a walk with Maurice. It began pouring while he was telling Maurice that it was too late for treatments, that Gene was dying now. Maurice dissolved into tears. He collapsed. Jonathan had to help him into the house, his T-shirt soaked with rain.

When he was about to die, Gene suddenly wanted to go to the hospital, even though they had made hospice arrangements in the house. But he was worried about Maurice. He knew Maurice would not want him to go. Lynn told him not to worry about that, that she would talk to Maurice and that it would be all right. Gene was thinking even in that moment of how this decision would affect Maurice, but he couldn't stay in the house and die at home with Maurice, as Maurice had wanted. This seemed to Lynn like a snapshot of their relationship: how entwined but apart they were.

After Eugene died, Maurice wanted Lynn to take photographs of his body. He held on to these photographs and liked having them.

Eugene was cremated and his ashes were buried in the garden with Jennie, under a piece of a gravestone from a Jewish cemetery in Poland someone had brought. Maurice wanted to be buried there too. He had a terror of being buried with his mother and spending eternity with her.

Eugene's death walloped Maurice. There was a period of deep grief that followed. He couldn't sleep. He had nightmares. He felt guilty. He was unmoored. There is a pig in
Bumble-Ardy
with a stubbly hobo mask, holding a stick with a handwritten sign:
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

In order to amuse Maurice in the year following Gene's death, Jonathan, who was living on the adjacent property with Nick, began to organize drawing “classes,” though they weren't really classes. He and a couple of artist friends would find a male model on Craigslist and hire him to come up from the city. That afternoon Maurice would call, “Well, is he coming?” or “What does he look like?” and then he'd wander in an hour late, Herman in tow, and begin a large charcoal drawing of the nude model. Jonathan would tell Maurice not to mention who he was, so that it wouldn't somehow get out in the world as a gossip item—“Renowned Children's Book Illustrator Hires Nude Model from Craigslist”—but Maurice would begin talking to the model and somehow the name of one of his books would slip out. One of the models even ended up sending Maurice his own illustrations for a children's book. Maurice got a kick out of the whole thing. Sometimes he would stop drawing and just talk. He loved the casualness of four men standing around, charcoaling a nude, the safely erotic charge of it. He told Jonathan that when he could no longer see a handsome man walk by and feel desire, he would be ready to die.

Maurice liked to watch medical shows. He would be happy sitting at the dinner table, watching a graphic reality-TV surgery show while eating spaghetti. Someone sitting with him
might wonder why he liked watching a human body ripped open, what he wanted to see.

On some level this could be seen as research, as Sendak belaboring a problem that obsessed him. He had always worked extraordinarily hard. He did more drafts, more dummy books, more tracings over light boxes, more fully realized drawings for his opera backdrops than he needed to, than other artists would, than necessity demanded; he labored toward the final version; he fought for it. His mastery of so many different styles and his vast strides in technical achievement are not a mystery: He worked insanely hard for them, and he was also working, in his own vivid way, on death.

Tony wrote about a conversation he had with Maurice:

I tell him I will visit him in Connecticut. “Great,” he says. “We can dance a kazatzkah!”

“What kind of dance is that?” I ask.

“A kazatzkah is the Dance of Death,” he tells me.

“Sounds good. Do you know the steps?” I ask.

“Do I know them,” he says with glee, making a kazatzkah sound like the most fun imaginable, “I know those steps in every notch, every noodle, every nerve cell! Of course I know them! I've been rehearsing them all my life!”

Sendak had collected a series of beloved objects that dealt with death: Mozart's letter to his father telling him that his mother was dead. A Chagall funeral scene. A grief-struck letter he
wrote at sixteen to his future self on the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, full of lavish adolescent sorrow, railing against the people who just chattered and laughed as if nothing had happened. Wilhelm Grimm's letter “Dear Mili,” to a child whose mother had died.

These objects were soaked in meaning for him. It was as if he had traveled somewhere and brought home souvenirs.