Maisie’s pencil sketch

Maisie’s pencil sketch is the image Rabbit Hendricks made of Lizard Brancussi’s wife in a Syrian village, and the object Lizard carried through years of captivity and wartime upheaval. Its importance lies in the distance between the likeness he could look at and the face he could no longer reliably recall: the sketch preserved an image of Maisie even as memory weakened, giving Lizard something beyond immediate events to believe in.

The image and its limits

Rabbit drew Maisie one morning in a Syrian village. Later, Lizard looked at the sketch every day, lovingly returning to the fixed image on paper. But looking beyond it to remember Maisie as she was brought no certainty: his recollection grew hazy, while his fantasy of Mae West became more powerful. The sketch could preserve a likeness, but it could not stop the living memory behind it from receding.

That tension gives the object its particular force. It is both a record of Maisie and a measure of Lizard’s difficulty in reaching her through memory. As the image remained available to his eyes, the person it represented became harder for him to summon.

Carried through captivity

Lizard kept the pencil sketch through the camps and on the hellship to Japan. He held on to it while enslaved at the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, which was destroyed in the atomic bombing. After surviving, he made his way into the hills and onward to Manila aboard a United States aircraft carrier. During that journey he showed the postcard to American sailors, who told him he was a lucky man. He eventually reached Fremantle on a ship bound for Melbourne and telephoned home.

The sketch’s passage through these events links an intimate domestic image to the scale of wartime destruction. Lizard continued trying to see Maisie in the likeness Rabbit had made, even as the world around him was transformed by captivity, bombing, and escape. The image did not undo what had happened; it remained a personal point of reference carried through it.

A focus for endurance

During a beating, Lizard kept trying to see Maisie’s face in the sketch. He understood his life, in that moment, through his capacity to believe in something other than what was happening before him. The drawing therefore functions not as a simple keepsake that restores the past, but as an aid to sustaining belief when direct experience threatens to occupy the whole of reality.

After the war, Lizard’s story remained too sad for his fellow prisoner Sheephead Morton to repeat. The sketch had survived alongside him, and he continued trying to imagine Maisie as Rabbit had drawn her. Its meaning rests in that repeated effort: the paper image offered a way to hold on to the possibility of a good world, even when memory could not fully recover the person and the surrounding history had become almost impossible to bear.