Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

All My Worries

2010 marks the tenth anniversary of Charles Schulz’s death, so it seems like a good time to revisit David Michaelis’ long biography of the cartoonist, now that some of the controversy that surrounded the book’s publication in 2007 has died away a little.

In the preface to Schulz and Peanuts, Michaelis notes that ‘Sparky’ (his subject’s preferred nickname) was fascinated, even a little obsessed, by the famous Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane. Schulz apparently watched it more than 40 times, and a number of Peanuts cartoons pay tribute to it. Kane is, of course, framed as a biographical quest, one undertaken by a quizzical journalist trying to discover the meaning of a dying man’s last utterance: “Rosebud”. By film’s end, the audience (but not the journalist) knows that “Rosebud was his sledge” (as Lucy Van Pelt, in a 1973 Sunday strip, gleefully informs her brother Linus while he settles down to watch Kane for the first time) – a precious childhood object that haunts the rich and bloated Charles Foster Kane, a memory and symbol of innocence lost, of the uncorrupted past, of a psychic lack that can never be made good. By life’s end, Schulz had also achieved success almost beyond measure, yet in numerous interviews he spoke surprisingly candidly of his prolonged melancholy, his loneliness, his fear of travel and strangers and public scrutiny; and, above all, of an often crushing sense of unhappiness that no amount of fame or adoration could ever dispel. Like Kane, he too looked to the past as a source of solace, saying “There are times when I would like to go back to the years with my mother and father – the times when I could have them bear all my worries.”

Michaelis mostly avoids singling out one particular ‘Rosebud’ moment as the source and cause of all this adult torment, and even before the cataclysmic death of Schulz’s beloved but emotionally distant mother in 1943, while he was serving in the army, he was already an excessively shy and fearful child. For the whole of his adult life, Schulz remembered, nurtured, every perceived slight and disappointment from his formative years, every past romantic rejection or bitter moment of unthinking, adult indifference. Most comic fans reading this biography will feel a hot flash of recognition with Schulz’s immersion in the comforting, formally regulated world of the newspaper strip, and in the solitary pleasures of drawing.

Throughout his teenage years he found it nigh-on impossible to make friends (“I never was very friendly. I never had any friends”) or express his feelings, romantic or otherwise. In later life he generally shied away from close physical contact, even with members of his own family. A non-drinker, Schulz was ill at ease amidst the beery, leery world of his fellow pros, and always stood apart from them, morally and emotionally (and later financially, when his earnings put him in the same league as Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg.) He was clear-eyed enough to recognise that his shyness went hand-in-hand with a raging egotism, and Michaelis persuasively suggests that Schulz always had the sense that he was special and singular, marked out for greatness. Deeply competitive (and in private often harshly critical of his creative contemporaries and successors, despite his generous support for younger cartoonists), the commercial triumph of Peanuts proved him right, inarguably, globally, forever. His great regret was that his mother never lived to see it.

There’s no doubt that many lives, when subjected to prolonged scrutiny, end up looking messy and unresolved, but as a biographical subject Schulz is an especially twisty knot of oppositions, and Michaelis often struggles to impose straight and regular borders around the freeform panels of Schulz’s inner life. At every turn, the biographer finds that his subject could be humble or arrogant, plain-spoken or evasive, wishy-washy or exceptionally strong-willed, friendly or aloof, loving or distant.

More contradictions: Schulz was, for much of his adult life, deeply religious, yet he always opposed prayer in schools and ended up describing himself as a ‘secular humanist’. The father to five children, he claimed not to care much for the young (“Children are not innocent at all. Children are cruel.”), and found it difficult to talk to them, even through the medium of comics – as far as he was concerned, Peanuts was a comic strip for adults. He was a student of the function and form of the newspaper comic strip, a fan of Segar, Herriman and Crosby, who over time himself became a master of line, space and form. Yet his work also marked the decisive shift to a simpler, less crowded drawing style that, unwittingly or otherwise, directly inspired the factory-like functionality of Cathy, Garfield and Dilbert, and with them the diminishing of newspaper space given over to the comics (as the entire newspaper industry continues to decline and the audience fragments, Schulz now seems like the last of his kind, an already remote and improbable figure, ‘the world famous cartoonist’ of the pre-internet world). He disdained Disney – “Walt Disney was a producer, I’m a cartoonist” – and famously refused to hire assistants to work on the strip, yet somehow allowed Snoopy and the gang to be buried under a swaying heap of merchandising and product endorsements that, however much he protested otherwise, could not help but damage the integrity and hard-fought for unity of his work. His humour was often low-key and bittersweet, rooted in real human feelings and situations unlike the inhuman, machine-gun gag attack of a contemporary like Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker, yet Peanuts was also filled with fantasy, wild flights of fancy – children who talked liked adults or worshipped a pumpkin, dogs that wrote novels, trees that ate kites, school buildings that spoke. A largely self-taught modernist, familiar with the currents of 20th century fine art and literature, his work was amongst the first to articulate post-war American feelings of alienation and anomie, with Peanuts very quickly and enthusiastically endorsed by college students, cellar club hipsters and ‘New York Jewish Intellectuals’ such as Jules Feiffer. Yet throughout his career, Schulz was inclined to shrug off any of the claims to philosophy or deeper meaning made for himself and his comics. He projected the image of himself of an honest, unpretentious craftsman, an ordinary working guy who was never happier (relatively speaking, of course) than when sat at the drawing board. He worked long and hard to reach and please the widest possible audience, and indulged his sentimental, folksy side with such vapid ‘gift book’ bestsellers as Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

It was their belief that Michaelis had ignored any of the warm puppy glow of Schulz’s life and personality that brought members of the Schulz family into conflict with the biographer. Michaelis is certainly not alone in emphasising shade rather than light when talking about the life of Schulz – just as the dominant critical image of Schulz the creator is, nowadays, as a poet of melancholy, a master of unremitting bleakness, the spiritual daddy of every heartsick modern cartoonist from Chris Ware to Ivan Brunetti. And while there’s something pleasing, even shocking, about the thought of the ‘world’s most popular comic strip’ being nothing less than a vehicle for misanthropy, disillusion and depression, it is by no means the whole story. Even Michaelis acknowledges that, following Schulz’s second marriage in the early 1970s, Peanuts generally became lighter, happier, more antic, with Snoopy and Woodstock by far the dominant characters. As the complete Fantagraphics reprinting of Peanuts rolls on to the end of the seventies, past the consensus golden age of the 1960s, it will be interesting to see if, or how, the last three decades of the strip will be re-evaluated.

Reading over an interview with Michaelis conducted shortly before the book’s publication, I was struck by the revelation that nearly half of his original manuscript had to be excised in order that the work could be published as a single, manageable volume. This helps to explain both the rather hurried feeling of the book’s final third (after a slow, ponderous build-up, covering in exhaustive detail Schulz’s family history and formative years) and also some of the text’s more obvious omissions and lacunae. In spite of its title, Schulz and Peanuts actually gives the comic strip’s content rather short shrift. We learn little about how and when major characters were introduced or phased out, or about the process of daily creation, from idea to syndication. Most of the strip’s major storylines go unmentioned. Instead there are lengthy, tedious digressions on the interior decoration of Schulz’s 1960s home, the economics of building ice rinks, the politics of pre-war barbering. Schulz’s relatively brief extra-marital affair, while undoubtedly significant to the life, is given excessive treatment at nearly 30 pages, and frankly brings out the worst in Michaelis as a writer, tipping his prose over into breathless cliché (a sentence such as “In the hills over Monterey they found a hotel with a homey atmosphere, and he took her to bed – their first night together, a happy, rousing night” can’t help bring to mind memories of Snoopy’s own dark and stormy nights…)

Michaelis came to Schulz as a professional, authorised biographer rather than as a panelologist, and sometimes that really shows. Art Spiegelman, in a wonderful strip tribute cum memoir entitled ‘Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy’, manages to say more about Schulz’s formal innovations and narrative strategies in three pages of cartoons than Michaelis pulls off in 600 pages of Chip Kidd-designed text. In the same way, Seth’s design and endpapers for the Fantagraphics reprint series better capture the way that Schulz used near-abstract images – tufts of grasses, screen doors, sidewalks, pumpkin patches, blobs of snow and lines of rain – to create a vivid sense of time and place. (In fairness to Michaelis, his extended consideration of the way that Schulz’s character designs departed from any previous depiction of cartoon children in terms of shape and proportion was good enough to leave me wanting much more of this kind of thing.) Nonetheless, in terms of fulfilling the basic function of narrative biography – showing us the way that the life of a creative person illuminates their work – Schulz and Peanuts is exemplary. Again and again, Michaelis demonstrates that Schulz’s deepest, most personal feelings and experiences made their way directly into the speech bubbles and thought balloons of Charlie Brown, Linus, Pigpen, Franklin, Peppermint Patty and the rest. In particular, he totally convinced me that Schulz’s sometimes stormy relationship with Joyce, his first wife, mirrored the complex duel between Schroeder and Lucy and by extension, the way that white, relatively affluent American men and women related to one another in the second half of the 20th Century.

Schulz understandably grew weary, even a little tetchy, whenever journalists suggested that Charlie Brown was his alter ego: “I think of myself as Charles Schulz, but if someone wants to believe I’m really Charlie Brown, well, it makes a good story.” In truth, there was something of Schulz in all of his characters – yes, his dad had been a barber, he yearned for a little red-headed girl, he never got any valentines, his stomach often hurt. But he was also Linus the thoughtful dreamer, Snoopy the trickster fantasist, Schroeder the blinkered artist, Peppermint Patty the realist, Marcie the follower, Pigpen the happy slob – weren’t we all? There are many valid and varied reasons to account for the success of Peanuts, but this very personal sense of identification with the characters, passed on to the reader via an immaculately streamlined cluster of iconic symbols and signifiers – comics almost at degree zero – seems absolutely key to me. The Prince Valiant artist Hal Foster, one of the giants of American newspaper strip illustrative realism, perhaps got as close to expressing this as anyone when he told an interviewer: “I don’t know why it is that some fellows can draw a little kid like, what’s his name, Charlie Brown, with just a round head, a round nose, and no particular body, and yet give the thing a personality. I still can’t understand that, and where the little things he says, and the funny little illustrations, are more real than some of the best drawn strips.”