Blockheads

First published April 25, 2020

I.

You’re tucked into the corner of a couch the size of a world, reading a book.

You’re standing under a young tree, planted for those who will live in these suburban houses a few generations hence, in the short, bitter season between fall and winter—the one they have in the American upper midwest—the one after which snow comes as an otherworldly gift. Or in the longer, sadder season between winter and spring, season of gray grass.

You’re alone, somehow, in a schoolyard—not the playground proper, but on the blacktop where games of foursquare happen at recess. The school building is made of warm brick, and a window is open somewhere above you. You’re lonely, but grateful not to be inside.

You’re sitting on a hill, lumpy little head outlined against a literally ink-black sky with pinpoints of white paper to make the stars. To show the boundaries of your body, you too are haloed by a border of white page. The starry heavens are above you, the moral law within you.

II.

Here are a few of the things that I, a 30-something academic and writer trying to figure out my future in a blasted economy, have in common with Charles M. Schulz:

• Midwestern upbringing (Schulz: Minnesota; me: Illinois and Wisconsin)
• Relocation to California (Schulz: Santa Rosa; me: the South Bay, a 90-minute drive away in light traffic)
• Love of routine, coupled with a tendency toward nostalgia (Schulz had breakfast at the same café every morning: the Warm Puppy snack bar, attached to an ice rink that he had built in said Santa Rosa, not otherwise known for its thriving hockey scene. I regret not eating at the W.P. when I visited the Schulz Museum a couple of years ago: the Museum is temporarily closed for quarantine reasons, and while it will doubtless open up again, it may not do so before I leave the Bay Area, probably for good, in the fall. If you make it up there, please have a Snoopy’s Special or a Good Grief Grilled Cheese in my honor. They have WiFi and a fireplace.)
• Melancholic temperament

Here are a few of the things that I, a 30-something academic and writer trying to figure out my future in a blasted economy, do not have in common with Charles M. Schulz:

• Discipline
• Complex spirituality grounded in a Christian upbringing (although I might, like him, qualify as culturally Lutheran)
• Genius

Here are a few of the things that I, a 30-something academic and writer trying to figure out my future in a blasted economy, owe to Charles M. Schulz:

• My early emotional education
• Who am I kidding, my middle and late emotional education
• Everything I know about baseball (not much, glimpsed mainly through Charlie Brown’s disappointments) and figure skating; embarrassingly much of what I know about tennis and World War I
• The comfort I feel when thinking about postwar intellectuals — the kind who appear on the televised “panel discussions on art” that Linus finds so intensely exhilarating; the kind who wrote the books on child development and astrophysics and animal behavior that Charlie Brown and colleagues go around reading to each other, invariably beginning “This is very interesting. It says here …”
• A deep connection with my father’s parents: my grandfather, who maintained an exhaustive archive of Peanuts paperbacks that I liked to read on the scratchy couch in “the den,” which was both my grandfather’s office and a room of retreat for anyone who needed it, lit by a green-shaded desk lamp and, forever in my imagination, by the watery, tactful sunlight of a Chicago February; my grandmother, who looked after me every weekday for years, who patiently allowed me to describe Peanuts strips aloud to her from the backseat (“and then Snoopy leans too far out of the tree and he falls on his nose and goes KLUNK”) as we drove to and from her daily errands, and whose sense of humor and everyday ethics remain impeccably, gracefully Schulzian
• My marriage

That last one, of course, is a stretch. But if you asked me when I knew my husband was “the one,” I would have to tell you that it happened at some point during a conversation about Peanuts in which he demonstrated a respect for, sensitivity to, and intellectual appreciation of the brilliance of Charles M. Schulz that I had never encountered in anyone else. That wasn’t the reason he was the one; at most, it was a symptom of our total soul-synchrony; but that was what made me realize it. (Before we even started dating — so I had no idea what to do with this certainty yet — but there it was.)

III.

Like probably every academic, and a lot of normal people too, I’m constantly torn between two impulses: wanting to explain everything I love, exhaustively, deliciously, an explanation that lasts forever; and wanting to preserve some zone of untheorized pleasure. In the installments of this newsletter—one a week for each year of Peanuts, making 50 weeks or almost a year, and probably a couple of extras thrown in—I’m likely to flop wildly between these two extremes. But I can promise right off the bat that I will not be spending any time justifying my decision to bring to Peanuts the attention I would bring to a work of art, because it is one. Like the contributors to the great recent anthology The Peanuts Papers (published, appropriately, by the Library of America), I will take for granted that you’re at least amenable to thinking seriously about this modular epic and dive right into the deep end. But that deep end will still have a number of recognizable floaties and foam noodles in it, because those are the stuff of Schulz’s thinking: AAUGHs and sighs, kites in trees, the peace that a blanket brings and the anguish of its absence, the taste of a peanut butter sandwich, the cocked ears and drumming feet of a beagle at suppertime.

If anything, what I feel bound to justify isn’t the value of Peanuts, which feels inescapable, but the value of “criticism” itself, of this one-person panel discussion on Schulz’s art. That’s a harder task, but since Schulz himself will surely get the very last word, I feel better about ending this introductory letter with one explanation. Here’s how the art historian Michael Baxandall ends his great book, Patterns of Intention:

If one looks at the origins of modern art history and art criticism … it is noticeable that really it arose out of conversation. … After all, why else than for dialogue do something as hard and as odd as attempting to verbalize about pictures? I shall claim inferential criticism is not only rational but sociable.

Mercy: there’s always something to explain.

Your friend,

Hannah