Ezra Maas43

Chapter One

A screaming comes across the sky.44

A blood-stained child held up to the light, skin mottled and blue, opens its mouth, fills its lungs with air for the first time, and screams. A baby like any other, emerging into a world of light and noise, its limbs flailing and eyes focusing as it searches for answers in the blurred faces of those around it. But this baby is like no other. At least, that is if you believe in fate. Those who do, believe this new-born was already special, already destined to change the world. Others claim that it was the world which changed him, that it was not fate but chance that made him into the man he would become, starting with events on a cold November day a few short years later, when he would cradle the broken body of his brother in his arms. His ‘phantom twin’,45 covered not in the life-giving fluids of the womb, but the blood that should have been flowing through his veins. A child holding a child, desperate to save him, but unable to do so, and haunted for the rest of his life by his failure; irreparably changed by the first of many tragedies in his life. That day was still eight years away from now. Today was January 1st, 1950.

Before his years in New York and Paris, before international fame and critical acclaim, before exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern, Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Prague’s National Gallery, and the Musée D’Orsay, before the Kings Place Gallery, the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya, and the retrospectives at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Gagosian, before the solo shows in Salzburg, Munich, Bilbao, Montreal, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and Seoul, before the White Cube in London, the East Side Gallery in Berlin, and the Kunstsammlung in Chemnitz, before the nominations for the Turner Prize , and the Nobel Prize for Literature, before the Golden Lion, before the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, before £500m in art sales, before the cult following, before the controversy, before The Maas Foundation, before seclusion, before disappearance, before death, there was a child . A child smearing paint onto a blank canvas with the palm of his hand; a child opening his eyes, looking at the world and trying to understand and express himself through the act of creation . But this was even before that. This was God before the Big Bang.

At 00:03, in his first few seconds of life, he was just another blood-stained new-born, being held up to the light by a midwife in a hospital and handed to a man and woman, his parents Michael and Sarah Maas. Today was January 1st, 1950. The day Ezra Maas was born.

It should come as no surprise to learn that even a fixed date in time is subject to interpretation in the life of Ezra Maas. Like the majority of the seven decades to come, the exact date of his birth is disputed. The Maas Foundation, who write about his early years in almost exclusively hagiographic46 terms, claim he was born in the first few minutes of New Year’s Day 1950, a date that neatly corresponds with the suggestion that Maas was the ‘zeitgeist of the post-war years and the spirit of the postmodern era’.47 Other sources place his birth at November 1947, although it is difficult to determine the true date because his original birth certificate was destroyed in a fire at the Parish Church of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford, in 1953.48 This, along with confusion caused by the mistaken belief that he was a twin (his brother Daniel was born 10 months earlier, but they looked almost identical by all accounts), has contributed to the difficulties in determining his actual date of birth, difficulties of which the artist himself, and particularly The Maas Foundation, may have taken full advantage.

It may be best to start before his birth, and to discuss what we know of his parents and how their stories influenced the man and artist he would become. His father, Michael, the grandson of Dutch immigrants, was a war hero turned travelling salesman, who suffered from depression after returning home from war. Ezra’s mother, Sarah Wake, was an English-born dancer and actress who had worked as a performer in pre-war Paris. Although there is little evidence to support the claim, The Maas Foundation has since written that Sarah was involved with the French Resistance during the Second World War and that Michael’s job as a salesman was, in reality, a cover for post-war espionage for the British Secret Service, which may also have involved his wife.49 Whether the rumours of their post-war exploits were true or not, records indicate Michael Maas reached the rank of staff Sergeant and served in three campaigns, using his proficiency in French and German to help interrogate prisoners of war. He had the distinction of being one of the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp, and fought at ‘Bloody Mortain’,50 Normandy, in August 1944.

Following the war, he spent a six-month period on ‘denazification’ duty in Germany, living in the Weissenburg area, before returning to England where he was treated for ‘combat stress reaction’. Michael and Sarah are understood to have first met in France in 1942 and kept in touch throughout the war. The couple were married in 1947 at the Parish Church of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford.51 The period between this and the birth of their first child two years later is relatively undocumented, although The Maas Foundation speculates that Sarah continued to work for Whitehall, while Michael, ostensibly at least, worked as a salesman for the Oxford-based branch of American engineering firm, Yoyodene,52 which specialised in aeronautical parts. This work regularly took him to London and elsewhere around the UK and Europe. Ezra’s brother Daniel was born in 1949 and almost died after complications with the delivery, believed to be intrapartum asphyxia.53 He suffered a number of health problems in his young life, including viral meningitis and scarlet fever, but the most serious condition affecting him would go tragically undiagnosed.

Daniel and Ezra were incredibly close as children and due to the similarity in their appearance they were often mistaken for twins. Ezra, in particular, enjoyed this confusion and even at this young age seemed to embrace the opportunity to step into another person’s skin. The pair were inseparable, and despite the events that were to come, Ezra is understood to have continued to refer to Daniel in the present tense for the rest of his life. The dedication, ‘Daniel will always be with me’,54 in his debut novella, XXXXXX, is understood to refer to his brother. Due to his various illnesses, Daniel spent much of his time indoors and was a voracious reader. His collection of books, which would later become Ezra’s, included HG Wells’s The Invisible Man and The Time Machine, Jules Verne’s Ten Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. When not keeping his brother company, Ezra was almost always outdoors, exploring the nearby woods, building forts, and sword-fighting with tree branches. Although Ezra would later take on many of the bookish characteristics of his brother, almost absorbing Daniel’s personality into his own, according to family members, it is clear he was initially more athletic and outgoing. Their uncle, H.W. Maas, described the brothers in a letter to a friend in Tangier, in 1956:

“Daniel and Ezra are incredible…like two halves of the same person, one reads constantly while the other is never still, mind and body, so different, but so close and so necessary to each other. I wish Michael and I had been the same…”55

Although Daniel was the more advanced reader, Ezra was light years ahead of his older brother in almost every other respect, speaking for the first time at eight months, learning to walk a few weeks later, and generally surpassing every area of child development well in advance. This included a remarkable, almost photographic, memory and an ability to process large and complex number patterns. However, it was the creative arts where his true passion lay. As a result, his early years have been compared to those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Pablo Picasso’s and it is hard to disagree with the classification of him as a similarly gifted child prodigy.56

Where Mozart was composing music at five, and Picasso was sketching and painting realistic images at seven, Maas was already writing poems and complex stories, drawing friends and family, and devising performance and conceptual art pieces. Even by these standards, Maas was an exceptionally creative child. He would draw, paint, sculpt, write stories, and invent names for the characters in his creations, then take on their identities. This would sometimes last for days at a time, where he would only be addressed by his character’s name, which was understandably frustrating for his parents. This fascination with self-reinvention can be seen throughout his career. He also excelled at school, although there were early signs of the rebellious, independent streak that would manifest itself repeatedly in later life. John Henry Simenon, now aged 93, taught Ezra at St Vincent’s First School in Oxford, from 1956, and recalls57:

“You could tell he was special even then. Always writing in one of his notebooks, his little brow furrowed with concentration. Daniel – I mean, Ezra – I always did get those two mixed up…Ezra was a lovely boy…polite, respectful, and warm, as long as you didn’t try to tell him what to do (laughs). He was always good-natured about it though…I know he had run-ins with other teachers who felt he was challenging them in some way, but not with me…I had no ego about it…I didn’t waste my time worrying that he was more intelligent than I was, I knew it…It was clear to me almost straight away that he couldn’t be taught in the same way as other children…It was for that reason that I recommended his parents took him to meet a colleague of mine who worked in child psychology at the university…

“His knowledge at such a young age was frightening. He would talk about Picasso, and Braque, and how Cubism had been the most revolutionary new art movement since the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone,58 five hundred years earlier…I actually had to look up Giotto as I hadn’t heard of him; he was a young prodigy credited with introducing perspective to painting…Ezra seemed to gravitate towards young, radical artists whose breakthroughs introduced new ways of thinking and led to major paradigm shifts…I remember him talking excitedly about Dada, about Hugo Ball, and Tristan Tzara, and what it must have been like to be one of those young men at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1915, planning to change the world…It came as no surprise to me when I heard many years later that Ezra had followed in their footsteps…”

By the age of six, Ezra’s skill as an artist was becomingly increasingly evident. In a letter to her friend Joan Cartwright, his mother Sarah, who had dabbled in painting herself as a teenager and who acted as an early tutor to her son, wrote:

“He’s already better than I ever was. It makes me want to stop painting altogether. I’m kidding, but I genuinely don’t think there’s anything else I can teach him. I’m so proud of him, of how good…no, that’s not right…how great, he could become.”59

Although art was his greatest passion, a school friend from 1956 to 1957, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed Ezra displayed gifts in a number of fields, and hints, albeit light-heartedly, at the resentment this may have caused:

“Ezra was just one of those children. He could have been a star of track and field, the captain of the football team, a budding artist, and a maths wizard, all at the same time…He seemed to master everything he tried his hand at. Naturally we all secretly hated him, and wanted to be him at the same time.”60

Maas was also taught to play chess by his father, Michael, around this time and reportedly had a strong aptitude for the game, quickly surpassing his teacher and reaching an advanced level at an early age. Various accounts confirm that chess became a lifelong obsession of Maas’s, who continued to play throughout his life.61 According to notes from The Maas Journals, his interest in the game stemmed from its ability to help:

‘…develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives, at a time when being impulsive seems very attractive…’62

The following year, in 1958, an eight-year-old Ezra visited The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, which was located relatively near the family home in Oxford. His mother, Sarah, knew the art historian Edgar Wind, who worked at the school and was eager to see her son’s prodigious talent recognised. It was here that Ezra first met the American artist R.B. Kitaj, who had recently moved to the UK. Kitaj, who would leave Oxford to study at the Royal College of Art in London shortly after this, was reportedly astounded by Ezra’s talent.63 The pair would later become friends, with Maas attending Kitaj’s first solo show at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1963, with his uncle, and briefly working with him in the mid-1970s.

It was two months after this visit that everything would change for the Maas family. The date was November 1958, and Michael’s brother, Henry William Maas, had recently returned from Europe. Henry, or H.W. as he was more commonly known, was undoubtedly the ‘black sheep’ of the Maas family, although the true depths of his problems were not known at the time. If they had been, Ezra’s parents, Michael and Sarah, would surely never have left their children in his care, although to blame him completely for what was to happen would be wrong. H.W. had also served in the Second World War, suffering a hip injury in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region of France, which left him with a limp for the rest of his life. Following the war, he struggled to reintegrate back into society, turning to alcohol and drug abuse, and eventually left the UK in 1949 with dreams of becoming a poet. These dreams took him to New York, South America,64 Mexico,65 Tangier, and Paris. In New York, between 1950 and 1952, he would allegedly meet and befriend the beat poets and writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S Burroughs, although he enjoyed little of their literary success. In Paris, he lived in the Latin Quarter,66 and also in Montparnasse near the La Rive Gauche,67 where artists had been living and working for decades, including the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso.68

If H.W. hoped the influence of these artists would transfer to him he was sadly mistaken, for his poems and other literary compositions remained largely ignored and unpublished by the journals he approached, during this period. It is not clear where or when, but at some point, during his extensive travels, H.W. became addicted to heroin. Remarkably, he was able to keep this secret until shortly before his death. There were rumours of a morphine addiction before he left the UK, following his post-war treatment, but it seems that while abroad he turned to other forms of medication. H.W. returned to England in 1956, after legal problems caused him to leave Mexico,69 and reunited with his brother Michael.

Full of stories of his ‘success’ as a writer in Europe and America, H.W. was able to negotiate his way back into the lives of the Maas family, convincing everyone of his sobriety and reliability, whilst masking his worsening drug addiction and depression. Initially at least, he had a very positive effect on the family, particularly Ezra and Daniel, while living in the spare room of their new rural home just outside Oxford. The boys’ mother, Sarah, who had herself been a performer in pre-war Paris, enjoyed H.W.’s largely fictional stories of his bohemian life abroad, while the boys benefited from his extensive collection of books. Michael, who had always had a weakness for his brother according to reports, was pleased to have H.W. back. It also allowed Michael and Sarah to spend some time together away from the children, and this is exactly what they were doing in London, on the 19th of November 1958.70

H.W. had been left in charge of the boys and took to the idea enthusiastically. He planned on taking them into Oxford to visit the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. However, the morning Michael and Sarah departed, H.W. received a letter from London publisher William Wilson and Co informing him his collection of poems had been rejected, and his mood reportedly changed. The trip to Oxford was cancelled and H.W. retreated to his room. Ezra and Daniel were happy enough to entertain themselves while their uncle slept. Daniel disappeared to his favourite spot in the attic, to read, while Ezra was playing in the garden outside. The day was much like any other, until shortly before 3pm. That was when it happened.

Daniel is understood to have been climbing onto a chair to reach a book, later revealed to be Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when he slipped and landed on an upturned nail, exposed in the floorboards below, suffering a small but deep puncture to his neck.71 By itself the wound may not have been fatal, but the bleeding would not stop because, unknown to his parents and certainly to the eight-year-old, he suffered from a severe variation of the genetic disorder haemophilia.72 Unable to stop the bleeding, his face colourless and drawn, his strength already failing, Daniel struggled to push open the window of the attic and call his brother for help. Eventually picking up a hardback book in desperation, he threw it at the window and broke the glass at the third attempt. The book sailed through the air, landing on the grass near where Ezra was playing, its pages fluttering in the wind, followed by Daniel’s weak voice on the air crying out for help through the jagged, broken glass. His white face was peering down at his younger brother, his small hand pressed over the wound, which bled relentlessly.

Ezra raced into the house and was up the stairs in seconds, climbing into the attic to find his brother passed out in a growing pool of blood. Sweeping him up in his arms, Ezra struggled down the stairs with his brother, screaming for help. H.W. did not respond, later claiming to have been sleeping, although the belief is that he was passed out either from alcohol, heroin, or a combination of the two. Ezra lay his unconscious brother on the sofa and tried to use the phone to call for an ambulance, but the line was dead.73 Alone and frightened, the eight-year-old pressed a kitchen towel to his brother’s neck, lifted the limp body into his arms, and began to walk.

Awakening at last, H.W. followed the trail of blood down the stairs and out of the door. He ran along the lane looking for signs of the boys, but was unable to find them. At 3.21pm, Michael and Sarah received a confused phone call at their hotel from H.W., who had evidently reconnected the line, telling them about an accident at home. In a state of panic, they began the drive back to Oxford immediately.

The exact circumstances of their accident are not known,74 but it seems that as they sped home, desperate to learn what had happened to their children, Michael’s dark green Morris Oxford II75 came off the road near Stokenchurch, overturned, and caught fire. Michael and Sarah reportedly died at the scene, trapped inside the wreckage of their car, never knowing what had happened to their children – how one lay dying, and the other had been changed forever.76

Notes

43. Note to reader: The following chapters marked ‘Ezra Maas’ are all that remain of Daniel’s original biography. They are based on handwritten journals recovered by Daniel during the course of his research. The Maas Journals contain a large amount of archival material, including letters, photographs and personal belongings. The Maas Journals, as Daniel came to refer to them, provided a highly detailed account of the artist’s childhood and personal history, although their validity has been questioned by several sources. Daniel verified and expanded on the information from the journals, combining it with his own research and interviews, and unifying everything he had discovered into the biographical chapters presented in this manuscript. Sadly, the original copies of the journals, alongside much of the archival material recovered by Daniel, were later destroyed. The surviving chapters of Daniel’s biography, collected for the first time in this book and beginning on this very page, are all that remain – Anonymous.

44. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

45. The Maas Journals Vol.1 1950 – ’60.

46. Hagiography is the study of saints. The term ‘hagiographic’ has also been used as a reference to the works of biographers and historians perceived to be uncritical or reverential about their subject.

47. Atkins, T.J, Critical Maas: A Life in Art, Bloomsbury, London, (1987), p.24.

48. The birth and death records for the parish were being kept at the church as a temporary measure after water-damage to the registry in Oxford city centre caused by flooding during the winter of 1952.

49. See the limited Maas biography available at www.ezramaas.com

50. Otherwise known as the Mortain counter-offensive, in which 2 – 3,000 Allied soldiers died in six days, attempting to repel a counter attack by German forces following the Battle of Normandy in August 1944.

51. The tower of the Parish Church of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford, dates back to 1050, making it the city’s oldest building. An interesting fact in addition to this is that the font was removed from the former St Martin’s Church at Carfax and was likely the same one that William Shakespeare stood at during a baptism at St Martin’s, where he acted as godfather to a friend’s child.

52. This should not be confused with Yoyodyne, the fictional defence contractor featured in Thomas Pynchon’s novels V. and The Crying of Lot 49. It is possible Pynchon was inspired by real-life Oxford based company Yoyodene.

53. Otherwise known as the impairment of oxygen to the brain during pregnancy and childbirth.

54. Maas, Ezra, XXXXXX, Sun Press, New York, 1967.

55. Kenner, Everett, (Editor), H.W Maas: The Tangier Letters 1949 – 1965, Routledge, 1980.

56. We should always be cautious of accepting ‘history’ as fact, of course. History is just another story, after all. It is often based on personal accounts and, as we know, memory is unreliable, and people have agendas. Even the circumstances of Mozart and Picasso’s lives, cited above in the text, are highly disputed – Anonymous.

57. During an interview with Daniel in 2011.

58. Giotto Di Bondone (1267 – 1337)

59. This letter was discovered inside Vol 1 of The Maas Journals by Daniel.

60. This anonymous source was interviewed by Daniel in mid-2011.

61. Knight Moves: Maas, art, and games of the mind, Look and Listen Issue 2, Vol. 2, University of Maryland Press, (1989), p.33.

62. The ‘Maas Journals’ Vol.4.

63. The ‘Maas Journals’ Vol.1.

64. Allegedly on the trail of the legendary drug Yage, which promised the user telepathy.

65. Where he reportedly studied a form of Mexican picture writing known as codices.

66. The Latin Quarter is a Left Bank area in the 5th Arrondissement, Paris.

67. The Left Bank is the southern bank of the River Seine in Paris. This generally refers to the Paris of writers, artists, and philosophers, specifically the artistic community of Montparnasse, and figures such as Picasso, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Matisse, Sartre, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

68. Interestingly, the Latin Quarter would also become home to Ezra in less than a decade.

69. H.W. was allegedly facing undisclosed charges of obscenity, but decided to flee the country after his attorney disappeared, citing his own legal problems after an altercation with the son of a government official.

70. Michael and Sarah were planning to see the Oscar Rabin Jazz Band, at the Lyceum Ballroom in London’s West End. They had booked a room at the Langham Hotel on Regent Street, and it was here that H.W. reached them by phone.

71. It seems Daniel may have inadvertently penetrated the left common carotid artery in his neck, a potentially fatal injury even without haemophilia.

72. Haemophilia is a group of hereditary genetic disorders that impair the body's ability to control blood clotting or coagulation, which is used to stop bleeding when a blood vessel is broken. The disorder lowers blood plasma clotting factor levels of the coagulation factors needed for a normal clotting process. Thus, when a blood vessel is injured, a temporary scab does form, but the missing coagulation factors prevent fibrin formation, which is necessary to maintain the blood clot. A haemophiliac does not bleed more intensely than a person without it, but can bleed for a much longer time. In severe haemophiliacs even a minor injury can result in blood loss lasting days or weeks, or even never healing completely. In areas such as the brain or inside joints, this can be fatal or permanently debilitating. It seems strange that this condition was not known to the Maas family as severe haemophilia is often identified at birth, or during a child’s early years during tooth extraction etc where excess bleeding may be observed. However, after investigating this, it appears that mild haemophilia, which can be missed, can worsen due to a number of genetic and/or environmental factors. It would appear this was the case in the tragic life of Daniel Maas – Anonymous.

73. It has been speculated that H.W. was responsible for disconnecting the phone line before he went to sleep in his room, or that in anger he had torn the phone line out after receiving the rejection from his publisher, but this is speculation.

74. The Maas Foundation has suggested, largely based on Michael and Sarah’s alleged counter intelligence activities during wartime, that there may have been suspicious circumstances relating to their fatal road accident. There seems to be little evidence of this, but it cannot be discounted.

75. Produced by Morris Motors Ltd, based in Cowley, Oxford, not far from the Maas family home.

76. It has been suggested by at least one interviewee that the deaths of Maas’s parents and brother actually took place months apart, and were not as closely related as the above chapter would suggest, the implication being that either Maas or his Foundation intentionally reimagined history for dramatic effect and/or as justification for the artist’s later behaviour. This has been aggressively denied by The Maas Foundation.