When I was small, I believed that my face was so bland that people would not recognize me if they saw me some place other than where they normally would. I was sincerely surprised if I happened to be in the downtown area of St. Paul, shopping with my mother, and we would bump into a fellow student at school, or a teacher, and they recognized me. I thought that my ordinary appearance was a perfect disguise. It was this weird kind of thinking that prompted Charlie Brown’s round, ordinary face.
Later in the same section, he writes, “Charlie Brown has to be the one who suffers, because he is a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning.” This from a man who was making four million dollars in 1975 and was to receive, in the twenty-five years ahead, as much as sixty-two million a year, from the proceeds of the world’s most widely syndicated strip and of shrewdly managed licenses for merchandise (clothing, books, toys, greeting cards), advertising (cameras, cars, cupcakes, life insurance), translations (Arabic, Basque, Malay, Tlingit, Welsh), animated television specials, and the musical comedy You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which went through forty thousand productions, involving 240,000 different performers. Behind the bland face a fiercely competitive spirit blazed; as Snoopy challenged Charlie Brown for the starring role in the strip, his creator bragged, “He is the most recognized character in the world, much more so than Mickey Mouse”—a gratuitous put-down of his mightiest predecessor in multimedia self-exploitation, Walt Disney.
Though short and slight as a boy, Schulz was a passionate athlete, living for after-school baseball games and ranking second on the high-school golf team. As an adult he held a low handicap (Michaelis, an apparent stranger to the terminology, calls Schulz “a scratch golfer, with a five handicap”) and played in the Crosby Invitational until midlife agoraphobia curtailed his travels. In an attempt to re-create Minnesotan pleasures in northern California, Schulz and his first wife, the enterprising Joyce née Halverson, constructed an elaborate skating rink, the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, and there, while Schulz was playing on a hockey team opposing that of his son Monte, “Monte danced away from Sparky during a play, whereupon father slashed son across the backs of his legs so hard that Monte had trouble walking to the locker room.” Still mentally smarting years afterward, Monte told Michaelis, “He really injured my leg—an unbelievable welt,” and did not recall “that his father apologized until two days later.” Nor did Sparky, in Michaelis’s account, “express remorse or show sympathy” when, in 1970, Joyce discovered, through a telltale phone bill, his affair with Tracey Claudius, a twenty-five-year-old employee of the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation who had tagged along on one of Schulz’s innumerable interviews. Interviewed herself years later, Tracey delivered a thoughtful appraisal of her former lover: “He … never got over himself. I guess no one had made him the center of the world, so he became the center of his own world.” His own self-appraisal put it, “It took me a long time to become a human being.”
“She’s something and I’m nothing,” Charlie Brown says of the object of his hopeless romantic longing, the Little Red-Haired Girl. The young Schulz was invincibly chaste and shy. In 1941, when he was nineteen and working long night hours in an alcove in his parents’ attic at gag “roughs” that Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post faithfully rejected, his mother, earthy, vivacious Dena, suggested that his gags perhaps weren’t “smutty” enough. He later confessed, “I couldn’t have drawn a ‘smutty’ cartoon if I had tried.” He couldn’t even say “damn” or “hell,” as his prim father occasionally did. “Maybe there’s some kind of a fatal flaw,” he speculated. When, in 1950, a red-haired girl did stir him to pursuit and proposal, she married a virgin. Joyce herself had married before, at the age of nineteen; her first groom was a New Mexico cowboy who got her pregnant and deserted her so promptly that the child, a girl, was born back in Minneapolis. Michaelis writes, “When Sparky met her at the party, Joyce was twenty-two years old, divorced, with a baby and a curfew.” Both she and his second wife, Jean, are still alive, so they are glimpsed through a mist of discretion. He and Joyce divorced in 1973, after twenty-two years and four more children; from start to finish, she was characterized by friends as “the dynamo of the duo”—brassy where he was wispy, venturesome where he was stay-at-home. She got him, against his inclinations, out of St. Paul—first, abortively, to Colorado Springs, and then, lastingly, to California—which was likely to the good, since he then had to reimagine his childhood instead of merely relive it. (Joyce’s explanation of why they returned from Colorado after only nine months was that “Sparky couldn’t handle being away from his dad.”)
Joyce lives in his comic strips, Michaelis claims, as Charlie Brown’s relentless tormentor Lucy Van Pelt. An Art Instruction colleague of Schulz’s is quoted: “She and Sparky were a fun couple … but there were times when she was pretty nasty to him.” To be fair, his passivity and his preoccupation with his strip might have been maddening. Both wanted more than they were getting. In the years of their marriage, he had become a handsome man—slim, fit, silver-haired—as well as a hugely rich national celebrity, and women were beginning to pick up signals. Jean Clyde, sixteen years younger than he, took her daughter to the arena three times a week, and strode through the coffee shop called the Warm Puppy,1 where Schulz, informally separated from Joyce at this point, daily had his breakfast. Jean—“intelligent and, among the women in Charles Schulz’s life, comparatively well educated”—was the daughter of English parents; she had been brought up by her mother on a southern-California avocado ranch, and was the wife of a guitar-playing journalist who had turned to dealing in real estate. Though married to others when they met, Schulz and Jean were divorced and wed within the next year. They moved into what had been a bishop’s residence, complete with prayer grotto.
Schulz’s own religiosity seems to have quietly faded in the California sunshine, though he continued to contribute a cartoon panel to the Church of God magazine and for a time taught Methodist Sunday school in Sebastopol. His manifold newspaper interviews trace a gradual withdrawal: “I’m not an orthodox believer, and I’m becoming less of one all the time.” Robert Short, the author of the immensely successful The Gospel According to Peanuts (1964), admitted, “Sparky … could sound like the conservatives, but … there was always this very humanistic liberal strain that was beneath the surface.” In Schulz’s strip, the Great Pumpkin episodes verge on travesty if not blasphemy, and in his life he diffidently accepted his children’s lack of interest in Sunday school. His daughter Amy, who eventually became a Mormon, complained, “He never read [the Scriptures] to us kids and he never took us to church. He didn’t share it with us.”
Jean turned Schulz from a golfer into a tennis player. Whereas Joyce had worked off her leftover energy by going on building sprees (she married their contractor a day after the divorce came through), Jean flew airplanes with her mother and travelled the world with her two children by Mr. Clyde. She saw her new, aging husband through a quadruple heart bypass in 1981 that momentarily left Schulz’s precise, dashing pen lines slightly shaky, and then through the colon cancer that carried him off, early in the year 2000, at the age of seventy-seven. His obituary appeared in Sunday papers the very same day as his last strip. “In the moment of ceasing to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be,” Michaelis writes. For almost exactly fifty years, he had produced the strip alone—its ideas, its lettering, its every mark on Bristol board were his. Even the mechanical-appearing bars of Beethoven that appear behind Schroeder at his toy piano were hand-drawn by the cartoonist. “I work completely alone,” he insisted. Amy recalled, “Were we his everything? No. His strip was his everything.”
Michaelis secured permission to reproduce 240 images from the 17,897 Peanuts strips to illustrate how often they were closely derived from Schulz’s life. Charlie Brown’s insecurity, his longings, his baseball games, his barber father all go back to St. Paul. Snoopy is closely based upon an abnormally clever dog from
Schulz’s childhood called Spike; as Dena was dying, she said that if they ever had another dog they should name him Snoopy—snupi being a Norwegian term of endearment. The beagle’s fantasies of the French Foreign Legion and of being a World War I flying ace were based on Thirties movies that Schulz had imbibed as a boy in St. Paul’s Park Theatre. Closer to adulthood, his affair with Tracey Claudius left blatant traces in the strip. Snoopy, typing away on the roof of his doghouse, parodied Schulz’s own feverish love letters. In one of them, he wrote Tracey, “Dark hair and a perfect nose. Soft hands that are sometimes cool and sometimes warm”; Snoopy, lying dreamily on his doghouse roof, thinks, “She had the softest paws.… * sigh *.” Joyce’s discovery of his surreptitious phone calls showed up, Snoopyized, in the strip, as did Schulz’s receipt of the summons in the divorce case she subsequently initiated. Snoopy, as Michaelis points out, is a grown-up, with a sex life—at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm—and adult possessions, including a pool table, a stereo, and a van Gogh, somehow crammed into his doghouse. Episodes involving him come to reflect the psychedelic Sixties and are relatively free of the backbiting and unrequited love sadly common in the strip’s population of children. Snoopy acquires a set of disreputable relatives based upon the male Halversons, and there are desert intervals (reminiscent of Krazy Kat’s surreal habitat) derived from the Schulz family’s brief, ill-fated attempt to transplant itself, in 1929–31, to Needles, in the Mojave region of California.
Peanuts, of course, was more than a running autobiographical tease, as the reader can reassure himself by leafing through the lavish Peanuts Jubilee or its less lavish, rather jumbled successor, twenty-five years later, Peanuts: A Golden Celebration. The elegant economy of the drawing and the wild inventiveness of such pictorial devices as the towering pitcher’s mound and the impossible perspective of Snoopy’s doghouse keep the repetitiveness, talkiness, and melancholy of the strip a few buoyant inches off the ground, and save it from being fey. With the introduction, in 1970, of Snoopy’s friend the tiny yellow bird Woodstock, Schulz gave himself access to a whole fresh realm of tenderness; a sort of parenthood at last crept into the strip, where human parents are invisible. And yet, in the end, it was the woeful personal undercurrent—the frozen memory of a grade-school loser’s unshakable existential angst, a child alone behind his unrecognizably bland face—that set Peanuts apart and attracted the devoted loyalty of millions, including future celebrants like the artists Chip Kidd and Chris Ware and writers like Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Franzen. As Schulz said, most of us are better acquainted with losing than with winning. Peanuts was a unique creation, a comic strip at bottom tragic.
1“Happiness is a warm puppy”—Lucy Van Pelt, in a strip dated April 25, 1960.
Gallery Tours
OLD MASTERS
A Wistful Würzburger
TILMAN RIEMENSCHNEIDER: Master Sculptor of the Late Middle Ages, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 10–May 14, 2000.
The Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition of the sculpture of Tilman Riemenschneider and some contemporaries is, I would guess, the most exquisite package to arrive on these shores from pre-modern Northern Europe since the Vermeer show at Washington’s National Gallery in 1995. As with the Vermeer, there is a problem of seeing. The Vermeer paintings, though most of the twenty-three had walls to themselves, were hard to glimpse through the scrum of art lovers in front of each; and, once a view had been obtained, it was hard to maintain it for more than a moment in the press of bodies. The Riemenschneider exhibit is besieged by no such throngs, but its elements, ingeniously mounted through seven spacious chambers, pose in acute form the perennial visual problem of sculpture: from what angle is it best, or most appropriately, viewed?
A color reproduction of a painting gives us, as precisely as the printer’s process can manage, the thing itself, minus only the (not inconsiderable) qualities of its texture and scale. Sculpture, however, exists in three dimensions, and in variable light, so that no photograph can be definitive for more than one moment, usually a frontal and evenly lit moment, in a potentially infinite array of appearances. Most of these pieces were designed as aids to worship, mounted in churches at some height above the congregation and to be seen, dramatically shadowed, in the trembling soft glow of candlelight. Is it proper to approach, as I did in hopes of duplicating a supplicant’s aesthetic sensations, a large limewood representation of the Virgin and Child, raised on the museum wall to place her feet level with my eyes, so closely that, looking upward, I created steep perspectives wherein hands, drapery, and the two holy heads achieved a dramatic, foreshortened conjunction? Was it legitimate to admire, from the side, in the Seated Virgin and Child attributed to Michel Erhart, the way the Christ Child’s tiny uplifted right arm is freestanding in the narrow slot of space between his mother’s abdomen and her arm, which thrusts into the Man-God’s mouth one of the world’s earliest (c. 1480) representations of a pacifier? More urgently still, did it deviate from permissible connoisseurship to look behind the wooden tableaux that predominate in Riemenschneider’s late work, and to see, with a perverse thrill, that the figures so impressive and finely worked from the front are hollowed out like huge salad bowls, figures five feet high but hardly more than six inches deep? Riemenschneider, we feel, somehow tricked his public with such august trompe l’oeil, but the modern museumgoer sneaks behind the altarpiece and catches him out.
In his 1955 Mellon Lectures for the Fine Arts, The Art of Sculpture, Herbert Read claimed that sculpture appeals to the “haptic” sense. The word, scarcely heard of in 1955, can now be found in dictionaries, defined as “related to or based on the sense of touch.” Read employed it in a subtler sense, closer to its parent Greek haptikon, “to lay hold of”: the forms of sculpture arouse in the viewer “tactile impressions” which translate into semiconscious “bodily sensations,” a virtually muscular apprehension of the object’s dynamic mass and weight. Riemenschneider is a disconcerting sculptor in that his career evolved toward weightlessness, in the form of large altarpieces like bas-reliefs without the grounding panel of wood or stone.
Born around 1460, he appears on the records of Würzburg, in Franconia, in 1483, as a journeyman, having evidently received training elsewhere. Fourteen months later, in early 1485, he received his citizenship in this, the smallest (at six or seven thousand souls) of the three centers of woodcarving, the other two being Nuremberg and Ulm. An early Annunciation in alabaster, dated circa 1485, is displayed with another, anonymous, alabaster Annunciation, produced in Würzburg in 1484, and, though the comparison is meant to be in Riemenschneider’s favor, the anonymous work distinctly makes the stronger appeal to our haptic sense: the figures are palpably blocks of stone, the faces rather lightly nicked by their features, whereas the Riemenschneider Gabriel’s robes swirl and the Virgin’s cup her torso like a crumpled chalice. The hair of both Riemenschneider figures is wonderfully dematerialized; the angel’s long locks curl around deeply drilled vortices and the Virgin’s long strands ripple in their gilt like slender snakes. The alabaster is subverted to animation and lightness; spirituality tugs at the relatively chunky figures. In another early alabaster, of Saint Barbara (c. 1485–90), the characteristic Riemenschneiderish expression—mournful eyes drooping down at the outer corners and underlined with at least one crease; lips pressed together with pensive, determined dents at the downturned corners—is already in place.
Riemenschneider, Saint Barbara, c. 1485–90. Alabaster with traces of polychromy. (Photo Credit Ill.1)
Throughout the exhibition, regrettably, I was instinctively attracted to the statues that were not Riemenschneider’s: the two finely carved Virgin and Childs attributed to Niclaus Gerhaert von Leiden, especially the superb small boxwood piece, whose tight grain permits the most uncannily delicate carving of the show; the faintly Romanesque, round-eyed applewood carving Virgin and Child on the Crescent Moon, attributed merely to “Strasbourg(?)”; the good-humored, even humorous sandstone Saint Anne with the Vi
rgin and the Christ Child, also from Strasbourg; and, from 1516, the robust, theatrical Archangel Raphael and the Young Tobias by Veit Stoss, described by the catalogue as “Riemenschneider’s most important contemporary and … often seen as his polar opposite.” All of these works have a certain earthiness, an aura of good cheer, that is not prominent among Riemenschneider’s beautiful qualities.
In Till-Holger Borchert’s instructive catalogue essay on Riemenschneider’s “shifting critical fortune” in Germany, it is noteworthy that Riemenschneider’s name emerged from the multitude of late-Gothic sculptors only in the nineteenth century, and that a Weimar Republic exponent of “the autonomous entelechy of German art,” Wilhelm Pinder, found Riemenschneider “dried up” and “senile” compared to what Borchert terms the “expressionist modernity of a Veit Stoss.” Pinder, who became a Nazi supporter,1 admired Veit Stoss’s unbending, pugnacious character and saw Riemenschneider’s prolific production as having corrupted all of Lower Franconia, blaming “this gentle tyrant” for “the destruction of the individuality of an entire artistic region.”
Such cultural politicizing was encouraged by the political content of Riemenschneider’s life. A prominent artist-burgher, he was several times elected to the Würzburg municipal council, and served as mayor in 1520–21. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, aimed at the Catholic nobility and especially violent in Franconia, he was on the municipal council which refused to allow Würzburg’s prince-bishop, Konrad von Thüngen, to gather all his troops in the city. After the rebellion was crushed, Riemenschneider was dismissed from the council, jailed for two months, and, it is said, tortured. Though he lived for six more years, until 1531, no new sculpture appeared under his name; his resistance to the prince-bishop apparently cost him the state’s indispensable patronage. In 1945, speaking at the Library of Congress in the immediate wake of Allied victory, Thomas Mann cited Riemenschneider (in contrast to Martin Luther) as a good German who had resisted authority for the sake of “freedom and justice,” which were “more important to him than art and peace of mind.” At the same time, the artist’s popularity within Hitler’s Third Reich was second only to Dürer’s, though the leading expert on Riemenschneider, Justus Bier, was a Jew and had been forced to emigrate in 1936. In the years of Communist rule in East Germany, Riemenschneider was cherished as a hero of “early civic revolution” and thus as a forerunner of German socialism.