I have read Monte Schulz’s essay in The Comics Journal, and it’s left me feeling quite relieved. I was one of the admirers of his father who anticipated Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis with a sense of, “now we’ll get the whole story.” And my initial reaction to Monte and his sister Amy’s complaints, which I’d read and heard before buying the book was, “well, of course they’re not going to like it, if it’s airing the family’s dirty laundry.”
When I first skipped through sections of the book, I was stunned by the revelations about Meredith as a wild child, and Sparky’s midlife crisis affair. The more I skimmed, the more it seemed the tone of the entire book was like a tabloid exposé, and I realized I had to stop jumping around and get into a start-to-finish reading.
Mostly what I found was information that seemed to have been well researched, but it was interwoven with a lot of amateur psychoanalysis, almost all of it very negative. I already knew a lot about Charles M. Schulz, and there was nothing of that man in the Michaelis book. Where was the love of cartooning? Why was there no sense of the enjoyment that Sparky had from dipping his pen in India Ink and dragging it across the paper? The fascination associated with creating something so unique and absorbing, with the simplest of tools, was missing. Totally. It’s just not there! The admiration that Michaelis claimed repeatedly to have for Charles Schulz seemed to not be in evidence. I’ll do a bit of amateur analysis myself, and say that I got more of a sense of resentment, if not jealousy.
It was as if Michaelis took delight in revealing something that he thought had completely eluded everybody else’s awareness and understanding of the man. But I already knew Schulz could be “prickly,” and that he had his down moods. My best buddy Dennis Rogers had known one of the Schulz’s former skating instructors, and we knew about the tension between Sparky and Joyce in the final years of their marriage. So we had the “inside scoop,” so to speak, over 25 years ago.
Yet nothing about these insights ever tainted my admiration of Schulz as a man, an artist, and an original creative force. In fact, he was all the more interesting to me. But as hard as I tried to not let David Michaelis taint my appreciation, I’m ashamed to say he managed to do it. He twisted everything around to such a pervasive, if not perversive, extent that as I got close to the end of the book I’d had enough, and I put it down. I eventually went back and skimmed through the rest, concentrating on his telling of Schulz’s death, which is brief.
In his TCJ essay, Monte goes into great detail about his father’s illness and his passing. Monte’s descriptions are instructive, because he provides a tremendous antidote to the hubris of Michaelis writing in an overly intimate style, as if he had been a witness to many of the events in Schulz’s life; when in fact he never met Sparky. The closest he got to knowing Sparky was from talking and corresponding with Monte and other family members, yet he used next to nothing of what Monte had given him. Further, quotes he attributed to Monte were misrepresented and misused, as Monte pointed out in an exchange he and I had on Shokus Internet Radio, and he cites the misquoting again in the essay.
For all of the commentary that Monte has offered to the media, and provided on Cartoon Brew, as well as for this blog, the essay is exactly what he promised it would be. It’s not a collection of what he has already said. It’s a cohesive outpouring of rebuttal against Michaelis’ mischaracterizations and an affirmation of his father’s full qualities, both good and bad.
I have always asked myself about people I admire, “Would I want to know this person? Would I like him or her as a person?” In the case of the Beatles, the answer with Paul has always been yes, and for John a fairly certain no. Last fall I asked myself, “How could I have been so wrong about Charles M. Schulz? According to this he isn’t somebody I would have wanted to know.”
I’m happy to proclaim that I once again feel as I did about Sparky Schulz. Thanks to Monte Schulz, the last vestige of the tainted feeling I had is now gone, and I very much wish I could have known his father. Thanks, Monte.