Sendak’s final gift
When Maurice Sendak died last year, a month shy of his 84th birthday, he’d completed one final picture book — a slim volume dedicated to his brother Jack, the person he credits with having inspired him throughout a 60-year career that earned him numerous awards and an international following.
Unlike most of his books, however, this one is less for children than for the adults they have become over those years. My Brother’s Book, clearly, is one Sendak wrote and illustrated for very personal reasons — and not for the audience he had in mind when creating Where the Wild Things Are or In the Night Kitchen. The cartoonish figures that populated the latter are nowhere to be found in this book. Instead, we get art more in the style of William Blake than Winsor McCay, both of whom Sendak admired.
The text, too, is a departure. Literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, in his foreword, cites The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s works, as haunting Sendak’s imagination “in his beautiful valedictory book.” I’m not familiar with The Winter’s Tale, but I am with Maurice Sendak, having loved his work since the 1960s, and having read two hefty biographies about this gifted artist — one published by Selma G. Lanes in 1980 and one by Tony Kushner in 2003. More recently, I heard Sendak tell NPR’s Terry Gross in a poignant and revealing interview how much he missed his brother, and the many others in his life who predeceased him. So while I might not be able to draw the literary allusions Greenblatt cites in his foreword, I can understand and appreciate the love and the longing behind Sendak’s poetic text about Jack (“A snow image stuck fast in water like stone. / His poor nose froze.”) and the author’s alter ego, Guy (who “wheeled round in the steep air, / A crescent in the sky, / Passing worlds at every plunge”).
What follows is a fantastical tale, beautifully illustrated, in which Guy encounters an enormous bear who “hugged Guy tight / To kill his breath / And eat him — bite by bite” (shades of the Wild Things telling Max “we’ll eat you up — we love you so!”). Guy outwits the bear and frees Jack; the two fall asleep in each other’s arms, Guy whispering: “Good night / And you will dream of me.” As Sendak surely dreamed of his brother all those years after Jack’s death in February 1995.
Kushner calls the book “Maurice’s elegy for his brother, Jack, for his partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, and for himself, for the world of astonishing beauty he created in his books.” It is a volume I plan to reread many times, poring over the paintings and wishing its author had lived long enough to hold the book in hand himself, grateful he at least had time to finish it so we can.