A ‘good’ man
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- October
- 26
At 9 p.m. Monday on PBS (WNET/Channel 13 locally), “American Masters” will present “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” about the life and work of the “Peanuts” paterfamilias.
I haven’t seen the program yet, but it couldn’t be more timely, not only because of the recent publication of the controversial Schulz biography by David Michaelis but because of what that controversy says about the way we perceive art and human nature.
It will be very interesting to see what tact the documentary takes. Apparently, the book, written in cooperation with the Schulz family, portrays the creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, et al. as something of the proverbial tortured artiste. (I just loved the cartoon that ran in The New York Times’ Oct. 14 “Week in Review” section, depicting Charlie Brown as Vincent van Gogh in the self-portrait he created after he cut off part of his ear. He, too, never seemed to win a ballgame.)
Once the Schulz book hit the fan, so did the criticism, with son Monte calling the bio “preposterous.” First of all, you will always get as many impressions of a subject as their are people looking at it. We are multifaceted creatures, shimmering prisms as we rotate in this world. It’s possible Monte Schulz and David Michaelis each caught different facets of Schulz as he spun on his axis.
The larger issue to think about as you watch “American Masters,” though, is the real nature of art. An artist, a writer, only has to be funny, compassionate, brilliant, noble  in other words, what we think of as “good”  on paper. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to be good on paper  where it costs you nothing but time and may afford you a handsome living  than it is to be good in the real world. If you don’t think so, ask yourself one simple question: Would you rather read a book about Mother Teresa or be one of her nuns working with the poor in India? I’d rather read a book.
There is another deeper, darker way of looking at this: It’s quite possible that the very qualities that made Schulz seem moody and misanthropic to some are precisely the qualities that made him a memorable cartoonist. For without some misery, where would he find the longing to create that ultimate yearner, Charlie Brown, whose reach, to paraphrase poet Robert Browning, always exceeds his grasp?
There are plenty of artists who are happy and lead structured lives; others, less so.
The one true thing is that we are, like cartoon figures, a product of shadow and light. How we are perceived by the viewer may depend less on character than on context of the panel.
Associated Press photo, 1997, by Ben Margot.
This entry was posted
on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 4:29 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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I have feel obliged to point out here that it is not, in fact, “possible Monte Schulz and David Michaelis each caught different facets of Schulz as he spun on his axis.” Why? Because I spent 49 years with my father and David never even met him. There can be no sense of David as the outside being more objective, either, because his knowledge of the subject is based on interviews with people who are also outsiders, even close friends, who will readily admit they never spent much time with our family back in those long ago days. My objections to David’s book revolve around suppositions and innuendos he states as facts, and deliberate omissions that create false impressions of my father and the lives we led all those years ago. His book is objectively untruthful, and demonstrably so. Worse yet, he knows it.