You Were All Yellow Thursday, January 31, 2008

You know you're in trouble when Mort Walker is the most appealing figure in your own biography. Schulz and Peanuts paints you know who as a miserable, venal, self-pitying, self-mythologizing son of a bitch who could barely believe other people existed. I keep thinking of Mark Steyn's account of meeting another ten-thousand-laker, Garrison Keillor:

I once did a radio show in New York with [Canadian novelist Mordecai] Richler and Garrison Keillor. If a visiting Martian had been told that one was a genial, gently humorous chronicler of small-town life and the other was a cranky, cruel curmudgeon, the space alien would have had no difficulty placing the stone-faced Keillor as the latter and the dishevelled Richler as the former. Keillor was a sour, graceless, obnoxious shit who deliberately derailed every discussion and was breathtakingly patronizing to Richler. By contrast, Mordecai was modest, self-effacing and extraordinarily generous to a writer not remotely in his league.


Still, I came away empathetic. I don't have anything remotely close to world-class talent, or the pressures that come with it, but I know about living in your head and trying to make the stories you tell yourself sync up with the world you move through every day. Not an easy way to live, and I can only imagine how much tougher it is when everyone you meet feels like they own a piece of you.

This will come out wrong, but: I'm glad I never met him, and I'm glad the strips speak for themselves. Without Peanuts, I probably never would have opened up to Walker, or Waugh, or Chesterton, or any of those other manic-depressive oddballs. Thanks for being the first signpost on a long road. And rest in peace, Sparky.

@ 8:19:00 PM,

1 Comments:

At 9:45 AM, Anonymous BeK said...

I know what you mean. I've had a similar experience watching "warts & all" biopics the last few years, where the experience has generally left me with less respect for the person depicted. Ray Charles, I now know, was a musical genius who was also a right bastard; and while the art world might miss one of its masters, the universe itself would probably have been a better place had that miserable excuse for a human being Jackson Pollack never existed.

So I can understand the need to learn more about Schulz, and the book is probably accurate, but it just feels like a gigantic dump is being taken on all the people who enjoyed Peanuts. And I say, fuck that.

 

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