MY LIFE WITH CHARLIE BROWN

The latest addition to the ever-growing comics criticism library at the University Press of Mississippi (one of my publishers) is My Life with Charlie Brown (216 6x9-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $25), a collection of the major prose writings of Peanuts’ creator Charles M. Schulz, edited and with an introduction by M. Thomas Inge, a popular culture scholar (and a friend of mine) and author or editor of more than sixty tomes on such esoteric subjects as author William Faulkner and African-American cartoonist Oliver Harrington as well as comics generally. Inge, who is the general editor of two UPM series, Great Comics Artists and Conversations with Comics Artists, edited the first volume in the latter series, Charles Schulz Conversations. (At Inge’s invitation, I did the second, Milton Caniff Conversations—just so you are perfectly cognizant of the incestuousness of all this. And, to commit in shallow grasping merchantilism, we sell copies hereabouts.)

 

The collection at hand includes some pieces never before published — for example, the essay he wrote when taking a course in novel writing at the Santa Rosa Junior College in 1965, about which, Schulz wrote: “I took a college course in the novel a few years ago, and oddly enough I got an A in it. When I was a kid, I was a lousy student, the way Peppermint Patty is. I never knew what was going on, never did my homework, never did the reading assignments. This time, I did all the reading and wrote a paper on Katherine Anne Porter’s book, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. As I wrote it, I pretended I was writing for The New Yorker. Afterwards, the professor said to me, ‘I just want you to know that this is a perfect example of what a paper should be.’” This essay alone — entitled “Don’t Give Up” — is worth the price of the book for the paragraph I just quoted: it is one of the few times Schulz admitted to having unabashed talent. But there are other such occasions, and many of them are in the prose of this book. (His Porter essay, by the way, reads much like a typical New Yorker piece: it begins with what appears to be an irrelevancy, which Schulz then makes relevant.

 

Most of these essays are culled from the introductions to various Peanuts reprint volumes; the value of this compilation is that it brings all such endeavors together in one place. I was happy to find herein my favorite fragment in Schulz’s speech to the National Cartoonists Society in May 1994: “I’m still searching for that wonderful pen line that comes down — when you are drawing Linus standing there, and you start with the pen up near the back of his neck and you bring it down and bring it out, and the pen point fans out a little bit, and you come down here and draw the lines this way for the marks on his sweater and all of that. This is what it’s all about — to get feelings of depth and roundness, and the pen line is the best pen line you can make. That’s what it’s all about. If there’s somebody who is trying to be a cartoonist or thinks he is a cartoonist, and has not discovered the joy of making those perfect pen lines, I think he is robbing himself — or herself — of what it is all about. Because this is what it is! The time you make these wonderful pen lines and make them come alive."

 

It is perhaps the perfect short explanation of why cartoonists — and, indeed, all other graphic artists — spend their lives drawing.

 

The essays, 25 in all, are arrayed under three headings: My Life, My Profession, and My Art. There are some illustrations, about a dozen Peanuts strips (a few of which are stupidly spread across two facing pages, straddling the gutter, making the pictures — and speech balloons — in the middle panel wholly undecipherable), but Schulz’s graceful prose is the reason for this book. With this volume and the other Inge-edited book of Schulz conversations, we meet the authentic Schulz, I think — a creative individual a good deal more in touch with the sources of his creativity than you might imagine if you read only David Michaelis’ biography of the cartoonist. You can find both UPM books — and others in its comics library — at its website.