M. Thomas Inge Transcript (2)

December 15, 2007

Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is the eighth anniversary of Charles Schultz’s official retirement from creating the “Peanuts” comics strip. The strip that ended the 49-year-old run of our favorite comic, here in America, had a farewell letter from Charles Schultz attached with Snoopy at the typewriter. The end of this letter read: “Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, how can I ever forget them?” Indeed, none of us will ever forget them, and we still read them every week in classic “Peanuts”.On the show today are two authors and legendary pianist, George Winston. My first guest is the author of “Charles M. Schultz: Conversations”, as well as many other publications. Welcome to the show.

M. Thomas Inge: A pleasure to be here.

Kent Gustavson: It’s M. Thomas. How do you pronounce your last name?

M. Thomas Inge: Unless somebody tells you, it’s hard to know. It’s Inge. It rhymes with words like ‘fringe’ or ‘hinge’. There’s no nice word it rhymes with, but nevertheless, it’s Inge.

Kent Gustavson: There’s no nice word that rhymes with ‘Inge’?

M. Thomas Inge: I can’t think of a positive word that rhymes with ‘Inge’, but nevertheless, that’s OK. I’ll make it a positive.

Kent Gustavson: Well, welcome to the show. Now, it was a few years ago you wrote this collection of interviews with Charles Schultz. He was a personal friend of yours?

M. Thomas Inge: Yeah, he and I came to know each other over the years because I was writing about comic strips, and he, of course, had “Peanuts”. “Peanuts” is the best comic strip of the 20th century, so naturally, I would write about that. And, he saw an essay I had written, and so, we began to communicate, and I would go out and visit from time to time. But, the problem we had was that he wanted to talk about literature and I wanted to talk about comic books and comic strips, so we sort of talked at cross-purposes.But, he was a fine human being, and he cared very much that people, like myself, found his strip of interest. He was a little puzzled when we told him that we thought it was an intellectual strip, and that existentialism was at the base, and he said, well I don’t know what that is.But, whether he knew it or not, intellectually, we certainly felt it. And, that strip sort of touched the souls of all of us in the 20th century because he knew how to put his finger on that basic human situation - that we’re all alone in the world, we’re all insecure, we need a little help. And, more often than not, we’re disappointed, like Charlie Brown, every time Lucy pulled that football away, but we still have the hope, as he did, to try to kick it, nevertheless.

Kent Gustavson: And, he never did kick it over all those years.

M. Thomas Inge: No, and he thought about it at the end, before he retired the strip. He said it’s sad that Charlie Brown’s never going to get a chance to kick that football. And of course, he couldn’t let him do it because it was that kind of frustration, which was at the root of the humor of the strip.

Kent Gustavson: So, maybe that’s what kept Charlie Brown going was that he could never kick that football.

M. Thomas Inge: Exactly. Isn’t that what gets us out of bed every morning? We think maybe today we’re going to kick that darn thing, and we have to try. We know we’re going to fail, but nevertheless, if you don’t have that hope in the possibility, it makes for a pretty dreary day.

Kent Gustavson: When did you start to be interested in comic books and comics?

M. Thomas Inge: As a child, I grew up with them; they came along at the same time I did. And, I read them, loved them, could draw, and therefore, wanted to be a cartoonist, naturally, the way many kids did my age. I drew cartoons through high school and through college, but I began to realize that I was never going to be a great cartoonist. I was never going to be a Walt Kelly, an Al Capp, a Milton Caniff or Charles Schultz. And, I thought well if I’m not going to do that, maybe I should try something I’d be better at. So, I became a professor of English instead because I love literature too.

Kent Gustavson: And, what do your colleagues think about the comics? Have you had some struggles over the years?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, being in English departments, which are fairly traditional - where Shakespeare is the high-water mark, and nothing else seems to matter - they think what I do is rather odd and peculiar, so they look askance at it. But, the way they put it when they speak to me about it, they say, well it’s nice to have a hobby, Tom. And, they don’t realize, I suppose, it’s serious, maybe more serious than my work on William Faulkner and traditional literary subjects, which I do love as well, incidentally.I like the ‘high brow’ literature, the ‘low brow’ literature, the comics and everything in between. So, they don’t quite understand, but I think with time and the publication of more studies, the attention of the academy, the attention of museums to comics, the point will be made that these are extremely important cultural artifacts. They’re not ephemeral, but very central to our cultural experience.

Kent Gustavson: Well, I think culture is turning around a little bit right now with a lot of these graphic novels coming out, and a lot of these movies that are coming out. They look like living comics. What do you think about all of that?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, the comics and movies have been related all along. Some of the very first live action films were based on some of the popular comic strips, so they had a parallel development. And, they both use words and pictures in order to convey the story or the information, therefore, they’ve always been allied. And, the fact that the movies are so popular simply shows that we want more of those characters than we get out of the comic books, per say. We want to see them in real life. We want to see them three-dimensional.And, we also enjoy the same fictional context in which there are the good guys fighting against the bad guys, and you can tell which is which, which is not always true of much of our culture today. We can’t tell who the good guys are, or the bad guys are. And, that whole business of a superhero sort of standing in and trying to bring about a sense of justice, we know it’s not going to happen too often in the real world, but we like to see it happen in the fictional world, at least. And so, there’s a strong narrative appeal there that the films answer to.But, the graphic novels now, while they are outgrowths of the comic book, this is really a very interesting new phenomena, in a sense, is the fact we’re calling them graphic novels is not just an effort to make them sound ‘high brow’. It’s an effort to try to identify that it’s something quite different. And this notion of telling stories, lengthy narratives about complex issues and problems through words and pictures has been a part of our cultural impulse all along.But it’s reaching fruition in a very different kind of genre, and there will be a whole new set of ground rules there. What amazes me is that there are so many young artists and writers who are stepping forward and want to participate in this creation. And were I a younger man, that’s what I’d try to be too. But as it is, I’m going to have to settle for teaching literature and teaching comics, at least in the context of American humor.

Kent Gustavson: How would you compare, I know you’re an expert on Faulkner, how would you compare Faulkner and Schulz? Do they live in the same world?

M. Thomas Inge: Probably not.[laughs]

M. Thomas Inge: In a certain sense, because the kind of worls where Schulz lived was kind of rare world which he built around himself, where as Faulkner immersed himself deeply in that whole southern experience down there in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner was trying to deal with the dilemma of mankind, let’s say, in the larger universe. Schulz didn’t quite shoot for that high an aim. But what they both did in a sense, there are a few similarities.What Faulkner did was to renew the whole genre of the novel for another hundred years. He showed you could do things with fiction that nobody thought was possible. So he experimented and opened up the novel so a lot of other writers could step in and build on what he started. Schulz has come along and taken the common strip and done something very unique and special with it. After he started doing Peanuts, we began to notice a kind of direction humor took in the other comic strips.Look at the comic strip today, and they are all more or less directed toward satire and humor. There are hardly any adventure strips, any serious strips. Those strips disappeared. And what Schulz demonstrated was you could treat complex issues in that very brief form with a minimalist kind of art. And that you could do it in that space, appeal to readers, and communicate and provide good for the world.And so in that both renewed the art form, you see, made it novel for the present. In that sense they’re similar.

Kent Gustavson: So when you had conversations with Schulz, as in your book Charles M. Schulz Conversations, did you talk as friends? Was it a little more formal? What did it feel like?

M. Thomas Inge: Well, he was the kind of person who made you informal when you were around him. What I would call Mr. Schulz, I still do, in fact, but he said “No, you have to call me Sparky.”. I still have a little bit of trouble with doing that because I revere the man so much. Somehow just calling him Sparky felt like putting him on an equal plain, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there.But he made everybody around him relax, and he was so unassuming, so humble about what he did. Some arguments we would have would be about the comic strip as an art form. He felt that no it’s not art, and I would say well if anything in the world is art, what you’re doing is because for me what art is, is something speaks to succeeding generations. People come at it later on.You go look at the Mona Lisa generation after generation and people find interesting things in it. Are you going to be able to do that with the strip too? So, our discussions might more often than not be sort of arguments about that sort of thing. And then he would want to know why I like Faulkner and why I read Faulkner. One interesting writer we did have in common was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was a great admirer of The Great Gatsby.And there are countless Peanuts panels in which you’ll find Snoopy pretending he’s the great Gatsby at one of his parties. Or Charlie Brown approaching the little red-haired girl in a way Daisy Buchanan was approached by Gatsby. I forgot his name there for a moment. In The Great Gatsby, there was something about the poetry and power of that particular novel. And they both came from Saint Paul, Minnesota, too, so they have a similar background.But that particular novel attracted his fancy, and his copy is marked up and you’d find quotations appearing there. So, that was one writer that he particularly enjoyed and one we shared.

Kent Gustavson: What is the importance, you know, for Schulz, what was the importance of having that classical connection? Having the literature in his work.

M. Thomas Inge: I don’t know that it was necessarily important to him. Only in the sense that great books are important to all of us. But he admired the kind of effect that Fitzgerald could achieve in a few words. He aimed to achieve that same kind of effect in a few pictures as well as in a few words. So, in other words, it sort of tutored him. I mean, one thing about Fitzgerald is that his books were brief; he was to the point. He was concise.And that’s what you have to do in a comic strip. That’s why Faulkner would not be a good influence, because Faulkner was all over the place. Fitzgerald gets right to the point, as Hemingway did. And so for him I think he learned how to write and how to draw, but at the same time he was the self educated person. He did make it through high school, did not attend college. And I believe he, as often the case who don’t go to college, they somehow feel like they missed something and they regret not having had that opportunity.I think his reading is deep reading, and he read lots. He read Dostoevsky, he read all the great books. It was never his part to get the education he missed. Which is a way you can do it. I often tell my students that I’m a guidepost, and I’ll point you to the library and point to the books to read, but you have to go there and read it for yourself. That’s where education takes place, where the learner takes initiative to learn, and he was a learner all of his life.And to me, it was interesting that he wanted to know about great music, about great books, and you know, he couldn’t even read music but you remember how many times he brought music into that comic strip.

Kent Gustavson: Oh yeah.

M. Thomas Inge: When Schroeder’s playing piano, what he’d do is get a piece of sheet music that he wanted and just copied it into the comic strip.[laughs]

M. Thomas Inge: He was so pleased when someone wrote a symphony based on the character’s that played it kind of all those years ago. Because he loved music but he didn’t really know a lot about it. And he loved literature, even if he didn’t know a lot about it in the practical critical sense.

Kent Gustavson: I’m excited to talk much more about Charles Schulz in a minute, here we got to stop for a dish identification. I’ll be back in a second.

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