Have you heard me yet on the Shokus Internet Radio calling into Stu’s Show? I’ll post my part of it on Wednesday, after the re-runs of last Wednesday’s program are done.
And have you heard the AARP online audio interview with Schulz biographer David Michaelis? One point he makes is about a Peanuts comic strip with “Snoopy chickening out of giving a speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.” Unless Michaelis is referring to a different series than I think, that’s not quite how the story played out. In fact, in his book Michaelis includes a couple of strips from those weeks in 1970, because they introduce a “girl-beagle” that Snoopy pines after. A girl-beagle who apparently represents Charles M. Schulz’s real life object of affection, a woman named Tracey.
©UFS
Reading these comic strips in the context of the timeframe, the connection seems pretty clear, and I have to agree with Michaelis about that. However, Monte Schulz’s complaints against the Michaelis book are given great weight by his candid admission that the family knew and accepted that his father’s affair with Tracey would be revealed.
The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm sequence with the unseen girl-beagle won’t be reprinted in The Complete Peanuts for a couple more volumes, so I’ll put it here. The first cartoon is above, and you can read the rest of them by clicking the thumbnail pictures. Isn’t the closing gag in the very last panel laugh-out-loud funny?
Note: If the images look jaggy, your browser is re-sizing. Click again to see them full-size.
Being over 50, and not lacking in real-life experience, the only explanation that I can come up with is that Michaelis was deliberately deceptive, in order to get what he wanted. Mark Evanier said during Stu’s Show that he assumes Michaelis had convinced himself that he was on track with his central focus. So perhaps there was no outright malice involved, yet — and this is the kicker — Michaelis said nothing to you about the direction he was taking. In fact, he insisted otherwise! So he MUST have known it would not sit well with yourself and other family members.
It was only after Michaelis had gotten everything from you that he needed, and you saw the completed first draft, that you knew from what angle your father was being presented. That is not what I would call “sincerity as far as the eye can see!”
As I’ve said before, “complicated,” by the very definition of the word, cannot mean only “negative”! It’s only now, after all of the push-back from family, colleagues and fans, that Michaelis seems to be offering a bit more balance himself in interviews.
But if someone who hasn’t yet seen “Schulz and Peanuts” flips through it at a bookstore, they will see there is indeed a pervasively negative psychoanalytic tone. Beyond a cursory glance of the book, the downbeat interpretations of Charles Schulz’s life and character are pushed so hard that one is left feeling drained, and wondering how Sparky could have met every daily deadline for 50 years — even through his coronary bypass surgery — let alone done it with such humor and originality, thereby providing readers with so much fanciful mirth and merriment.
I still think it’s important to remember what David wrote to me in an email a few years ago:
“Monte, I know, I know: your father didn’t draw from life; and I’m not looking for a one-to-one match-up here; and the reader probably can’t finally understand art any better by knowing the conditions of the life of the artist—ideally, art has to be understood on its own terms.”
And any of us can tell you that, although there are many occasions when it “seems” clear from events Dad’s life that he’s using his own experience to fashion a storyline in the strip, it’s never quite that cut and dried. And the question that never seems to be addressed is what else appeared in the strips during the time frame of his affair, and who is ever to say that one single thing ever inspired what he wrote at any given time in this life. It’s all conjecture, even when it appears to be a certainty. And regarding David, here’s the question: Are we to suppose he simply changed his mind about the one to one connection in strip sometime after he wrote that email to me? Or was he being disingenuous when he wrote that? Or did he not, in fact, really believe those connections were geniune at all, but something he simply chose to put forth? It would be interesting to hear his response. My opinion is that a lot of what he wrote, and things he “discovered” are figments of his own imagination.