The Violet Hour (44 page)

M
AURICE
S
ENDAK

Like nearly everyone under fifty, I came to Maurice Sendak as a child, his books glimmering in my unconscious landscape, the images deeply, sleepily familiar. When he died, I read an interview that mentioned him saying he wanted a “yummy death” like William Blake's, which immediately drew me in. After a little digging, I became fascinated by his attitude toward death, the irreverence, the deep obsessive engagement; he seemed to me a fellow traveler.

The books of his that resonate most deeply in this chapter are
Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Bumble-Ardy, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Outside Over There
, and the strange and lovely
My Brother's Book
. I imposed
Outside Over There
on my then-four-year-old son more than once, only to hear that it was “too scary.” “Good scary, though” I tried, though that was
not a concept he was willing to entertain. The scariness, anyway, is eloquent, communicating a bone-deep loneliness, fears most people are not willing to give voice to, to unloose.

I actually found it a transcendently great experience to return to the books as an adult, reading on my own and not to children, who, let's face it, can be a distraction from truly taking the stories in: Their meanings are different when you have the luxury of living with them; the communication occurs on a whole other level. I also found Sendak's essays on children's literature,
Caldecott & Co.
, particularly illuminating in terms of his thinking about the craft.

Most of the rich background of his life that infuses this chapter came from people very close to him who very generously gave me their time, opened their doors, made me lunch, and shared their memories. The art historian Jonathan Weinberg invited me to his incredible portrait-strewn New Haven house, where we climbed upstairs to his studio so I could ask him questions while he painted a portrait of me. Our conversations were ongoing, about Maurice, about Eugene Glynn, whom Jonathan loved, about art. He talked me through Sendak's illustrations, his influences, et cetera, and he gave me a great deal of perspective on Sendak's world.

Tony Kushner talked to me about Sendak at a diner on the Upper West Side. His stories about Sendak, about their friendship, were critical in bringing across my impression of the man. For insight into his Bensonhurst days, his high school friend Hilma Wolitzer, who sat next to him in art class, recalled the teenage Sendak for me.

The afternoon I spent with Lynn Caponera, in which she made me sandwiches and we sat at the table where Sendak used to sit, was perhaps the richest source for the chapter. Most of what I wrote here springs from her view of the man, her observations, her descriptions. Her own story is fascinating—the decades-long relationship in which she was neither daughter nor mother nor housekeeper and instead was something transcending all of that. I couldn't help thinking that every writer and artist needs a Lynn, and almost none will ever find her. She seemed the perfect protector, muse, helper, friend. One of the things this book taught me is how fluid the boundaries of friendship can be, how extraordinary the roles are that people fall into with each other in unusual and creative forms of love.

Sendak's vast number of remarkable radio, television, and print interviews—which are funny, wild, brilliant—were hugely helpful in creating this portrait, along with Tony Kushner's lovely reminiscence in
The Guardian
. In particular, the long interviews in
The Believer
and
The Comics Journal
were especially compelling, as were his late appearances on
Fresh Air
with Terry Gross, The Colbert Report
with Stephen Colbert, and
NOW with Bill Moyers
. Tony Kushner's superb and gorgeously written
The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present
, was also enormously informative and insightful, as was Selma G. Lanes's earlier volume,
The Art of Maurice Sendak
.

Perhaps the most valuable resource for this chapter was the letters and manuscripts in the Sendak archive, which at the time was housed at Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum and Library. His correspondence is extraordinary, and reveals him to be as much a writer as an artist. His letters also convey a generous side, a great warmth toward others, that does not necessarily come through in his carefully curated public persona. He is, in the correspondence, funny, charming, whimsical, and a great warmhearted friend to a large number of people. Bountifully evident throughout is his gift for intimacy. I was particularly struck by his decades-long correspondence with Minnie Kane, who began as a fan and admirer and became, from afar, a close and cherished correspondent who sent him little stones as gifts. After some deliberation, the Sendak estate refused to give me permission to quote from these letters, believing Sendak's intention was to have all his letters destroyed, which was a great loss for this book and for Sendak scholarship in general.

Seeing the voluminous drafts of the manuscripts and drawings, the tiny dummy books, the preliminary sketches on vellum, was electrifying: the early text for
In the Night Kitchen
, scrawled on yellow legal paper, the recipe for cake written on orange paper—with shortening, eggs, sugar, orange flower water—the later versions, where the terrifying oven is toned down and then toned down further. The exhortations to himself in the margins to make things better and clearer. All this brought home the sheer amount of work that went into Sendak's art, the absolute devotion he had to it. I had heard from other people that he did more work than most illustrators, threw himself more deeply into the process, but this fact came alive to me when I saw the manuscripts. The evolution of the drawings and text allowed me to glimpse the arc of his imaginative process in a way that conjured the man as nothing else had.

I also spent a memorable afternoon at Sendak's wonderful house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with Lynn Caponera, and it's there that I saw the manuscript of
The Nose Book
, which was then sitting on the desk in his studio. I felt lucky to see his environment up close: the Keats mask in its box in a guest bedroom with a blue bedspread, his collection of Mickey Mouses, his Blake drawing, Melville's portable writing desk, his ancient kitchen appliances. Most of my descriptions of the place spring from that visit.

J
AMES
S
ALTER

I was drawn to the idea of talking to James Salter for this book without entirely understanding why. I return to his books,
Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, Dusk and Other Stories
, and
All That Is
, over and over. They contain for me some mysterious perspective on life that I am compelled to go back to. I find them reassuring, beautiful; they complete some train of thought I wasn't entirely aware of having. So when I emailed Salter, out of the blue, asking him to talk about death with me, I was surprised and excited when he said he would. I realized it might be good to include in this book a writer I could talk to, that after years of circling my subjects, reading their journals and letters, tracking down their friends and families, it might be useful to talk to a writer himself, one old enough to be facing death in some way, and one tough enough to talk about that confrontation. My conversation with Salter veered into territory I couldn't have predicted, and it was in talking to him that radiant afternoon in August that some of the restlessness of this book quieted down. I had the feeling, finally, of finding what I was looking for, or of suddenly being able to see the subject in a new way, a way I could live with. I'll always be grateful to Salter, for his generosity in having that conversation, for his kindness, for his inimitable way with words, and for his rare instinct about when not to use them.

1.1:
Susan Sontag's loft on Seventeenth Street in New York City. Photo by Dominique Nabokov.

2.1:
Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead, London. Photo courtesy of Freud Museum London.

3.1:
John Updike's desk at his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Photo by Leslie A. Morris © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

4.1:
Dylan Thomas's writing shed in Laugharne, Wales. Photo courtesy of Aled Llywelyn/Alamy.

5.1:
Maurice Sendak's home studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Photo courtesy of Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux.

epi.1:
James Salter's office in his home in Bridgehampton, New York, on June 19, 2015, the day of his death. Photo by Kay Eldredge.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following to reprint the material specified below:

DAVID HIGHAM ASSOCIATES:
Excerpts from
A Pearl of Great Price: The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas to Pearl Kazin
edited by Jeff Towns (Swansea, United Kingdom: Parthian Books, 2013) and excerpts from
The Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas
edited by Constantine Fitzgibbon (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1966). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates.

ALFRED A. KNOPF, AN IMPRINT OF THE KNOPF DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHING GROUP, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC:
Excerpts from “Hospital 11/23-27/08” from
Endpoint and Other Poems
by John Updike, copyright © 2009 by The Estate of John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

MARSH AGENCY ON BEHALF OF SIGMUND FREUD COPYRIGHTS:
Excerpts from letters by Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte, Kata and Lajos Levy, Karl Abraham, Stefan Zweig, Ernest Jones, and Oskar Pfister. Reprinted by permission of the Marsh Agency on behalf of Sigmund Freud Copyrights.

NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING CORPORATION:
Excerpt from “Fern Hill” from
The Poems of Dylan Thomas
, copyright © 1945 by The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas; excerpts from “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and “Poem on His Birthday” from
The Poems of Dylan Thomas
, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

THE WYLIE AGENCY LLC
: Excerpt on
this page
from Susan Sontag's journal, copyright © 1976, 2015 by the Susan Sontag Estate; excerpt on
this page
from Susan Sontag's journal, copyright © 1959, 2015 by the Susan Sontag Estate; excerpts on
this page
and
this page
from Susan Sontag's journal, copyright © 1975, 2015 by the Susan Sontag Estate; excerpt on
this page
from Susan Sontag's journal, circa 1970, copyright © 2015 by the Susan Sontag Estate. Excerpt from a letter from John Cheever to John Updike, copyright © 2015 by The Estate of John Cheever. Art Spiegelman quote about Maurice Sendak, copyright © 1993 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

MARTHA UPDIKE:
Two excerpts from John Updike's New Year's Eve letter to Judith Jones (2008). Reprinted by permission of Martha Updike.

The Violet Hour

In Praise of Messy Lives

Uncommon Arrangements

Still She Haunts Me

Last Night in Paradise

The Morning After

K
ATIE
R
OIPHE
is the author of several books, including
The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism; Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages; In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays;
and a novel,
Still She Haunts Me
. Her essays and articles have appeared in
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, Slate
, and
Tin House
. She has a Ph.D. in literature from Princeton University and is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn.