My Life with Charlie Brown
Inge’s gathering of “Schulz’s major prose writings” attests the cartoonist’s consistency. He wrote without drawing as limpidly as he did with. His sentences are as chaste and precise in diction, as direct in address, and as lucid in meaning as the words he put in the Peanuts gang’s speech and thought balloons. His stylistic peers are Hemingway and the best of the lean, clean, mostly crime-fiction writers who followed Papa. But he’s never as passive as Papa, never as sentimental as those crime-fictionists. He sounds ingenuous and comradely, one person talking to another, engaged but uncontentious. He’s that way in the big pieces here, all excerpts from Peanuts Jubilee (1975), in which he’s spellbinding about his life, his creative process, and the themes of his great comic strip. He waxes most enthusiastic about religion when young (older, he is more diffident on that score), about golf when older, about hockey always. The previously unpublished fragments Inge includes sometimes approach prose poetry. All in all, verification that Schulz was an artist, indeed. --Ray Olson