Letters from Max. Sarah Ruhl

Max,

      It certainly feels odd in New York. Thank God you’re uptown and were not at NYU. You must feel a little like Job stuck in the hospital during a hurricane. Like come on, what gives? And a hurricane too?

      I want to come see you and probably can’t get to see you until the subways are more under control. Maybe this weekend if you are still in hospital then?

      In the meantime, I’m supposed to be in rehearsals in New Haven for my play Dear Elizabeth and instead am madly baking at home (luckily we have power) and creating apartment-wide scavenger hunts to entertain the children.

      I will try to think of some books that might entertain you.

      Sending all good thoughts,

      Sarah

      NOVEMBER 4

      Sarah!

      I miss you, and the class. Seeing you this weekend would be wonderful. My mornings are spent in the hospital getting chemo drip and then I’m released to my apartment in the afternoons. It would probably be nice to spare you the childhood chemo ward (which is horrific) and the least functional part of my day, and see you in the afternoon.

      I’m midway through the first run of chemo. The side effects seem to be accumulating, but I can talk and walk a little bit, and think clearly if with a marked slowing of pace. I’ll send you some of my writing.

      I am so lucky to feel your warmth and concern. You are such a specific helpfulness in my life. Don’t know what I’d do without you.

      Max

      I visited Max after that surgery in New York, at his apartment on the Upper East Side, as soon as Hurricane Sandy allowed me to brave the subway. I brought noodle kugel and met his family. Max teased that though I was a Midwestern goy, my kugel passed his beautiful mother’s Israeli muster. Max was always good company, even post-surgery. I could tell he was furious if he wasn’t well enough to make the people around him laugh. If he was not well enough to make people laugh, he usually told friends not to come by.

      I gave him Dear Elizabeth to read because he was wrestling with the ethics of quoting someone else’s letter in the play he was working on. I thought Max would enjoy reading Lowell and Bishop’s whopping fight about the ethics of Lowell using letters from his ex-wife in his book Dolphin.

      Max was still very much my student—I gave him notes like “Put that speech in iambic pentameter.” “Bring in that scene rewritten with a twenty-five percent word reduction.” “Write a little song for that moment.” I would write him about a scene: “I love how specific and never arbitrary you are.” And he would write me about his hopes for a new scene: “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”

      Max handed in his play at the end of the semester. It begins at an altar, and also features a scene in which a sick boy goes to get a new tattoo, but at the tattoo parlor, the tattoo artist is something of an analyst, and the boy and the tattoo artist speak in iambic pentameter. The boy says to the tattoo artist:

      “So I have brought inside my little pouch, a little draft of a Hokusai crane.”

      Max got a tattoo after every surgery. He wanted to make something beautiful out of something painful. They were all birds, modeled after different artists. One was a crane, inscribed on his head, inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai. In his tattoo parlor play, Max wrote these stage directions:

      The tattoo artist finishes, and picks the boy up, very gently like an angel helping another angel. She offers him a compact mirror gently like an angel offering a compact mirror to another angel. He smiles and begins to check it out.

      Then the boy says: “It’s dope. I really love it in this light.”

      NOVEMBER 8

      Dear Max,

      It was a delight to see you today; you triumph over portal and charcoal and are great company. I also enjoyed meeting your mom and dad.

      I want to invite you to come see my play Dear Elizabeth when you’re back at Yale, or come see a rehearsal if you can.

      Good luck with the move back to New Haven and let me know if there’s any way I can be of help. Looks like the matzo ball soup department is covered.

      More soon,

      Sarah

      That long winter, amid chemotherapy and scans, Max worked hard to graduate from Yale. His mother stayed with him in New Haven to help him through chemotherapy.

      Not only was Max dealing with mortality and school, he was dealing with all the vagaries of college life. Perhaps my empathy was informed by my own experience of college. My father was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of my freshman year, and I lost him a year later. So college was, for me, a bizarre juxtaposition between my own extreme grief and a private, obsessive attempt to get some wisdom from books and teachers. My teachers at Brown University invited me to their homes, and into their lives, and I think that gave me the strength to remain far from home. I lived for my frequent trips from Providence home to Chicago, and somehow survived the indignities of being twenty, surrounded by many drunk young people who were thinking not at all of mortality.

      So I imagined that there was a gulf between Max and the young people who surrounded him, who couldn’t quite fathom what he was experiencing. He would write me, asking if we could speak on the phone, saying, “My romantic life is falling apart; I don’t really know how to talk to people about my illness in a nondestructive way, or how they’re supposed to listen, and you write really wonderful listeners.”

      Always, always, Max wanted to know what was the best way to listen. Perhaps because I wrote characters who listened to each other, Max suspected that I might be a good listener.

      Max came to Dear Elizabeth at Yale Repertory Theater. He hugged me afterward, in tears, and said he felt I’d written the play just for him. And though I hadn’t met Max when I wrote that play, it did feel somehow that I’d written the play just for him.

      That winter, we pursued soup. And shared poems.

      Max somehow got me to share with him my early poems, written when I was his age. I seldom share my poems with people. Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems are to me the height of beauty—unshared, unfinished, written on envelopes—as partial as they are sublime, as hidden as they are revealed.

      My plays get consumed by audiences in front of me; the audiences either laugh or don’t laugh, clap heartily or not at all; the plays get reviewed well or badly; this was as much vulnerability, I’d decided, as one writer could absorb in one lifetime. The poems were private. I wrote them as gifts for other people—occasion poems, you might say, in the old-fashioned tradition. I wanted desperately to be a poet before I discovered playwriting, but once I wrote plays, I began to think there was a kind of equation for playwrights—indifferent-to-bad poets made good playwrights. The poems were a compost heap for the plays. And if you like your friends, you don’t send them compost in the mail.

      But Max asked for more poetry, and Max could be very persuasive.

      In sharing our poetry with each other, I came to feel less and less Max’s “teacher,” and more his colleague and friend. I was certainly not the only teacher who had a close working relationship with Max. Max spoke often of the astonishing poet Louise Glück, who mentored him beautifully at Yale and afterward. Max would go on to charm scores of teachers who ended up asking for Max’s feedback on their own writing.

      That Max turned many of his teachers into colleagues in short order,