Was good old Charlie Brown really good old Charles Schulz, his creator? For that matter, was good old Charles Schulz really good old Charles Schulz? The answer to both questions is a qualified “yes,” and explicating the multiple qualifications is at the heart of David Michaelis’ superb “Schulz and Peanuts.”
Michaelis, author of an N.C. Wyeth biography and other books, has produced a stunningly insightful and compulsively readable account of the life – particularly the emotional life – of the creator of “Peanuts,” the famed comic strip about the “born loser” Charlie Brown and his young friends. Michaelis was given open access to family, friends and personal and business papers, but his most vital source was the strip itself, for, as Schulz always maintained, “Peanuts” spoke for and about him. In that sense, this is, as its title hints, a dual biography.
While the author gives full scope to the wit, originality and inventiveness of “Peanuts” – a title bestowed by Schulz’s syndicate that he hated – and its enormous influence on later cartoonists, the core of his biography is how closely Schulz identified with his creation. It was his very life. “He drew, therefore he was.”
For just short of a half-century, from October 1950 to February 2000, he wrote and drew every single strip – 17,987 individual strips – without an assistant. He accepted almost no ideas for it from others. He had total control of his little world that commented on the greater one.
Born in 1922 in Minneapolis and raised in St. Paul, Minn., Charles Monroe Schulz always considered himself a “nobody” about whom no one ever cared. This has about it more than a touch of that classic self-pitier, Mrs. Gummidge, the “lone lorn creetur” of “David Copperfield” for whom “everythink goes contrairy.” You can pre-empt being overlooked by humbly confessing your overlookableness; timidity is a form of egotism.
In any event, by his mid-30s, Schulz was anything but overlooked. He was on his way to becoming the most famous cartoonist in the world, presiding over a huge merchandising empire.
The strip really began to climb in 1956, four years after he and his first wife had lived (for nine months) in Colorado Springs. Three years before Shulz’s death, “Peanuts” was in 2,600 newspapers worldwide. In his last 10 years, his annual income varied between $26 million and $40 million.
As to the strip’s autobiographical nature, Michaelis drops about 250 examples into the text at appropriate points to illustrate how they reflect, in muted form, events in Schulz’s life (including an extramarital affair). The names of “Peanuts” characters are those of Schulz’s friends, most notably Charlie Brown (a former colleague at the correspondence art school where he worked). Lucy and Linus Van Pelt bear the last name of a friend.
Though Schulz was in most ways a classic “nice guy,” with a family of five children who loved him, he nevertheless felt a lifelong sense of rejection. The rub is that rejection or other hurts did not undo him. Rather, he used them.
For instance, an art-school colleague turned away his romantic overtures. Ever afterward, he mentally manipulated her rejection for his own psychological and emotional needs. And practical needs: He used it repeatedly in “Peanuts” (Charlie Brown’s unrequited love for “the little red-headed girl”). To a friend he confided: “I got my money’s worth out of that relationship.” Michaelis says Schulz used cartooning “to take a sort of revenge on the world.”
“Peanuts” contains a decided Thurberesque strain, especially concerning the bossy girl Lucy. With her arrival on the scene in 1952, Michaelis notes, things get noisy in the quiet little strip. To see Lucy (a reflection of Schulz’s first wife, the active and assertive Joyce) is to see James Thurber’s menacing female figure peering fearsomely around the corner of a house.
By contrast, after his 1973 marriage to Jeannie, his mellower second wife, Lucy becomes less mean. Michaelis largely concurs in the conventional opinion that, overall, “Peanuts” was not as fresh or challenging in its last three decades as in its first two, when it was a kind of seismograph for tremors and shifts in society.
Schulz believed his emotional state was the source of his talent. In his estimation, it was not depression, but melancholy, or perhaps anxiety or fearfulness. And that was all right: “Unhappiness is very funny,” he said. “Happiness is not funny at all.”
His daughter Amy remarked, “Were we his everything? No. His strip was his everything.” And when it was gone, so was he. Mortally ill with colon cancer, he had to give up the strip in late 1999. His death on Feb. 12, 2000, came one day before the publication of the last original “Peanuts.”
Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer.
NONFICTION
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
David Michaelis
$34.95
