Bio: SCHULZ AND PEANUTS

[7/4]

October 14, 2007

Good Grief!

Reviewed by CHARLES McGRATH

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS

A Biography.

By David Michaelis.

Illustrated. 655 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.

Toward the end of his life Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” wished he were Andrew Wyeth. What Wyeth did was fine art, he grumbled, while he was just a newspaper cartoonist, a draftsman, whose work would surely not last. In fact, “Peanuts” is still read, in anthologies and compilations, by many more people than ever looked at a Wyeth, and Schulz’s was arguably the greater talent. He transformed the newspaper cartoon strip, busy and cluttered by the time he turned up in the late ’40s, by flooding it with white space, and by reducing his childish characters to near abstraction — huge circular heads balanced on tiny bodies — he rendered them far more expressive than their cartoon peers. The strip was able to register grown-up emotions, like anxiety, depression, yearning, disillusionment, that had never been in cartoons before. Instead of the “Slam!” “Bam!” “Pow!” sound effects that were the lingua franca of the comics, it employed a quieter, more eloquent vocabulary: “Aaugh!” and “Sigh.”

“Peanuts” was beloved by everyone: by hipsters and college kids (in the ’60s especially); by presidents (Ronald Reagan once wrote Schulz a fan note, saying he identified with Charlie Brown); by the Apollo 10 astronauts, who named their orbiter and landing vehicle after Charlie and Snoopy; by ministers and pastors, who read moral and theological lessons into the strip; by the suits in Detroit, who paid Charlie and the gang a small fortune to shill for the Ford Falcon. At its peak the strip reached 300 million readers in 75 countries; 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. The various animated TV specials continue to top the Nielsen charts whenever they’re broadcast, and the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” after selling out for four years off Broadway, is now a staple of high school and amateur theater productions — the most-produced musical ever.

The success of the strip, together with its spinoffs and an almost unending flood of cheesy “Peanuts” ware — calendars, bedsheets, wastebaskets, lunchboxes, “Warm Puppy” coffee mugs and the like — made Schulz an immensely wealthy man, rich enough to build his own ice rink. In the ’80s he was one of the 10 highest-paid entertainers in America, right up there with Oprah and Michael Jackson. In fact, if by artist we mean someone who paints or draws, it’s no stretch at all to say that Charles Schulz was the most popular and most successful American artist who ever lived. He was also, to judge from David Michaelis’s new biography, one of the loneliest and most unhappy.

We should have guessed, for as Michaelis points out, “Peanuts” was almost transparently autobiographical. There really was an unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl. Her name was Donna Mae Johnson, and she jilted Schulz in July 1950; he nursed the rejection, along with all the other slights he suffered from wished-for girlfriends, for the rest of his life. Charlie Brown, wishy-washy, disillusioned, but also secretly ambitious, was the artist himself, of course; and so were Linus, the oddball; Schroeder, meticulous and gifted; and, above all, Snoopy, with his daydreams, his fantasies, his sense of being undervalued and misunderstood. Violet, with her mean streak; and Lucy, bossy, impatient and sarcastic, were all the controlling, withholding women in Schulz’s life, especially his mother and his first wife, Joyce. Michaelis also goes in for a certain amount of psychologizing, but once you have the key it hardly seems necessary.

Michaelis’s last book was an exceptionally good biography of N. C. Wyeth (Andrew’s father), and his task here is both easier and harder. Wyeth was the practitioner of a dying, minor art form — he was the last of the great painterly illustrators — and if that earlier book had a weakness, it was that Michaelis barely bothered to explain why he deserved a full-length treatment. In the case of his Schulz biography, the importance of the subject almost goes without saying (though the author is at frequent pains to remind us, even so). Schulz was what so many lesser figures are carelessly said to be: a genuine American icon, who in his unassuming way deeply imprinted our culture.

On the other hand, N. C. Wyeth lived a large, big-themed life, with a tragic, Dreiser-ish subplot for good measure. (In his 60s, he became obsessed with one of his daughters-in-law and died in a railroad-crossing collision — probably by accident, but possibly by intention — with her son, his grandson, at his side.) Schulz’s much longer life (1922-2000) was, by comparison, bland and eventless — or at least the part that wasn’t lived inside his head, and except for the strip, he left few clues as to what was going on in there. Though he was one of the first to introduce psychological themes into cartooning, with Lucy and her sidewalk psychiatric-help booth, he was himself stubbornly unanalytical. His nature was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. “It took me a long time to become a human being,” he told a magazine interviewer in 1987.

People who knew Schulz always called him Sparky, the nickname given him at birth by an uncle, who shortened it from Spark Plug, the name of a woebegone race horse just recently introduced into the popular Barney Google comic strip. It was an almost comically inappropriate handle — there was nothing in the least scintillating about the young Sparky, who was small, shy, geeky — and also a fateful one, linking him to what from a very early age he determined to be his life work: to produce a syndicated daily comic strip.

Not that there were many signs he had a gift for it, or for anything else. Schulz was born and — except for a weird and awful two-year stint the family endured in the California desert — grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. His father, who was born in Germany and grew up with German-speaking parents, ran a barber shop (just like Charlie Brown’s dad). His mother, who never got beyond third grade, came from a clannish, depressive, hard-drinking Norwegian farm family and was one of those people who feel inadequate and superior at the same time. According to Michaelis, she could be distant, cool, even mocking and scornful, and he blames her for most of Sparky’s woes, especially his lifelong feeling of being insufficiently loved.

Schulz was raised in what sounds like a grim, even more isolated version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — a close-knit place ruled by church and family, where book learning was regarded with suspicion and where, far from being above average, children were discouraged from thinking too highly of themselves. Early in grammar school, Schulz was bumped ahead a grade, which guaranteed that for the rest of his school career he would always be the smallest, skinniest, most awkward kid in the class. Though a decent pickup hockey player, and a good enough golfer to play No. 2 on the school team, by the time he got to high school Schulz was so crippled with shyness he had become virtually invisible. “I wasn’t actually hated,” he said later. “Nobody cared that much.” His one chance for distinction was lost when some cartoons he had drawn for the school yearbook were unaccountably turned down — a rejection he never forgave, just as he never forgave all the girls who failed to notice that he had worshiped them from afar.

After graduation, Schulz’s shyness and insecurity rendered art school out of the question, so instead he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Inc., the kind of place that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks. (He found the instruction so helpful that he eventually joined the faculty himself and years later went on the board.) In 1942 Schulz was drafted and, heartsick and terrified, left for boot camp only days after his mother had died. But he actually thrived in the Army and came back newly confident. He even began to go out with girls — though his idea of an appropriate dating present was a Bible. (All his life Schulz was the straightest of arrows: he didn’t smoke, swear or drink, on the grounds that neither did Jesus. The wine at Cana, the young Sparky used to claim, was nonalcoholic.)

In 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, a 22-year-old divorcée with a young daughter from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage to a cowboy. He arranged to adopt the daughter, Meredith, and afterward always insisted she was his, even when the teenage Meredith began to poke around and ask nosy questions. To some degree it was probably a marriage of convenience on both sides, but for a while it was happy enough, and the Schulzes went on to have four children of their own. Sparky was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband, though, because, self-absorbed and secretly harboring immense ambition, he was really married to his work. After a lot of rejections and false starts, he finally landed a weekly strip, called “Li’l Folks,” with the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and it was syndicated in 1950 by United Feature, which insisted that the title be changed to “Peanuts.” Schulz hated the name but went along, adding this to his ever-growing list of grudges.

Schulz had initially dreamed of an action strip but began drawing children because that’s what seemed to sell. The earliest strips hit what now seems the authentic Schulzian emotional tone — “Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown. ... How I hate him!” — but it took a while for the drawing to evolve, for the heads to enlarge, the limbs to shrink.

“Peanuts” grew slowly at first; caught on hugely in the ’60s, when almost by accident it seemed to speak to everyone who was experiencing the generation gap; and then almost drowned in a licensing binge and flood of tchotchkes. Schulz said yes to everything, no matter how kitschy — toys, cards, books, sweatshirts — until even his fans began to complain he was selling out.

What saved “Peanuts,” Michaelis suggests, was the elevation of Snoopy into a main character in the late ’60s, and the way his boundless, almost surreal fantasy life frequently took over the strip, which at the same time was being pared down to a visual minimum: a scarf, a helmet, a doghouse indicated by just a few horizontal lines. Another thing that didn’t hurt was the gradual souring of the Schulz marriage. The family was living in Southern California by now, on a sort of private Disneyland with its own stables and miniature golf course and the ice rink (where Schulz like to hold court in the Warm Puppy snack bar) nearby. Despite his success, Schulz was prickly, lonely, depressed and increasingly subject to panic attacks; Joyce felt overburdened and underappreciated. Their feuds, their long bouts of coldness, inspired some of the most Thurber-like stretches of “Peanuts” — the strips where Charlie and Lucy seem to be locked in the eternal struggle of male and female, with the latter always wielding the upper hand.

As Schulz grew into middle age, he filled out, stopped wearing his hair in a buzz cut and discovered that he was actually attractive to women. He had one full-fledged affair, and in 1973, a year or so after divorcing Joyce, he married Elizabeth Jean Forsyth, 16 years his junior, whom he had met — where else? — at the ice rink. This second marriage was happier, in large part because Jeannie, as she was known, saw it her job to make it so. Schulz was often moody and withdrawn nevertheless, and was also compulsively flirty. The evidence suggests that his was essentially an arrested sensibility, locked in adolescent longing and self-absorption. But for a certain kind of artist this is not such a bad thing. Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse suffered, or benefited, from much the same condition: like Schulz, they were truly happy only when transported by their work. Schulz said once that if it weren’t for cartooning he’d be dead, and indeed he died within days of resigning from the strip because of ill health.

In another way, though, Schulz’s is a classic American story: the lonely, misunderstood genius who clings to his dream, finds riches and fame, and discovers that they don’t make him happy after all. He was like Gatsby or Citizen Kane. That he chose the comic strip as his medium links him, on the one hand, to such gifted, pioneering and equally misunderstood figures as Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat’s George Herriman; and on the other, to current practitioners like R. Crumb, Chris Ware and the graphic novelist who goes by the name Seth, who is currently editing “The Complete Peanuts” for Fantagraphics (and who illustrated this review). These younger artists have a far warier relationship to popular success than Schulz did, but they share his themes of loneliness, of loss, of being unable to connect. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is in many ways Charlie Brown grown, while still an adolescent, to a premature old age. And Crumb offers a window onto what Schulz might have been like if only he had let the anger out.

Michaelis, who had the cooperation of the Schulz family, tells this story brightly and engagingly, if not always succinctly and without repetition. There is rather less than one might expect about the rich tradition of newspaper comics that spawned Schulz, and more than some readers might prefer about, for example, the patterns of metastasis in cervical cancer (the disease that killed Schulz’s mother). Throughout the book Michaelis maintains affection for his subject without losing sight of how exasperating and narcissistic he could be. And the smartest thing he has done is to pepper his pages with actual strips from “Peanuts,” dozens of them, usually without comment or footnote or even date: an appropriate strip just turns up in the middle of a paragraph that happens to be talking about something similar. Sometimes it’s an illustration, sometimes a wry comment. The effect is to continually remind us of why Schulz matters in the first place, and of the potential not just for humor but for feeling and eloquence in the odd and oddly persistent art form where he made his home.

Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.

[7/4]

October 14, 2007

Ideas & Trends

You’re a Good Prop, Cruel Muse

By RANDY KENNEDY

THE cult of the suffering artist, that gaunt, rheumy-eyed creation of Romanticism, was all about introspection and isolation, so it didn’t exactly bequeath a handbook.

If it had, a few artists probably would have been cited as examples to emulate. Van Gogh, of course, as the depressive in chief. “The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher,” he wrote shortly before the earlobe incident, “so much more am I an artist.” Rimbaud, with his description of the artist as he who “exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences,” would have been included. And even such late entries as the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who wore his artistic hair shirt extra scratchy, piling up miseries and misdeeds: bankruptcy, depression, incarceration, agoraphobia and infidelity (with his wife’s sister, no less). He described his youth as a period of “moral torture.”

To make room on this list for Charles M. Schulz, hugely wealthy and long famous creator of a beloved bunch of cartoon kids and their zany beagle, might seem like a stretch, or a gag from “Peanuts” itself. But since Mr. Schulz’s death seven years ago — in fact even while he was alive — the image of him as an unhappy, lonely and bitter man who drew deeply on his discontent to create his comic strips has gained ground. And with the publication this week of a highly anticipated biography by David Michaelis, “Schulz and Peanuts,” that examines seemingly every disappointment and slight (real or perceived) in Mr. Schulz’s 77 years, his reputation as tormented creative soul seems poised only to grow.

The book was written with the cooperation of Mr. Schulz’s family, but in the weeks leading up to its release, some family members have criticized it, saying that it overemphasizes his melancholy and chilly side at the expense of other aspects of his personality — his generosity, his sense of humor, his love of family and, in many ways, his resolute normalness.

“It’s not a full portrait,” Jean Schulz, his second wife, told The New York Times last week. Monte Schulz, his son, called it “preposterous.” Mr. Michaelis has defended himself, saying that after years of research and hundreds of interviews with those who knew the cartoonist best, “this was the man I found.”

Such arguments are nothing particularly new in the world of biography. Writers and loved ones often end up staring each other down across a big chasm separating substantially different versions of a subject both claim to know intimately. But in the case of Mr. Schulz, the dispute seems to bring up a more fundamental question, whether almost two centuries after outlaws like Byron and Chateaubriand linked suffering and creativity, a connection that probably would have baffled Shakespeare or Swift, we still have a deep-seated need to believe in the idea of the tortured artist, to think that the only enduring ones are the really unhappy ones, even if we’re talking about syndicated cartoon-strip artists.

While Mr. Schulz took pains to say that he did not see his cartoons as serious art, critics and writers have tended to disagree, some comparing his career to that of Balzac in scope. The short-story writer George Saunders has said that “Peanuts” prepared him for Beckett. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the man behind that work was a Balzac or a Beckett, or more than a very talented and insightful popular entertainer. And this is the ground in which Mr. Michaelis has gone to work, depicting Mr. Schulz as a much more self-aware and autobiographical artist than has been understood previously, a conduit for his times and the timeless subjects of art: longing, love, heartbreak, disappointment, distrust. (One strip, drawn when Mr. Schulz’s first marriage was breaking up and his wife, suspicious of an affair, was questioning his phone bills, shows Charlie Brown yelling at a lovesick Snoopy: “And stop making those long-distance phone calls!”)

Looked at simply as a narrative problem, it is not hard to see why any biographer would want a strong framing device in trying to tell the story of Mr. Schulz. He was a homebody workaholic whose passions, other than his strips, were golf and hockey. He was a Sunday school teacher who was not only a teetotaler but disdainful of drinking and those who did it. His favorite ice cream was vanilla. A woman who knew him at the height of his early fame described him as a “genius at becoming invisible.”

In trying to mine the sources of a lifelong gloom it’s not easy to figure out where his demons might have come from — except a naturally oversensitive and crabby personality.

He had, by conventional measures, what George Plimpton (speaking of himself) called a “non-unhappy childhood.” His father, an industrious barber in St. Paul, had work throughout the Depression. His mother could be aloof and withholding and died when he was 20. But it was she who took him to his first comics show; she knew he was smitten.

Stacked up against the sundry misfortunes that were courted by or fell on the heads of history’s best-known tortured artists — prostitute mothers (Jean Genet); drug addictions (Coleridge); physical deformities (Toulouse-Lautrec) — those that Mr. Michaelis describes in Mr. Schulz’s youth sound tame and sometimes a little silly. His father used to give him funny haircuts; he had to sleep in a room with his grandmother, who snored; he was afraid of girls and had a crushing Norwegian sense of humility; he was terrorized by schoolyard bullies, though those who knew him at the time can’t remember an instance of him actually being walloped by any.

Patricia Hampl, a memoirist and poet who grew up in St. Paul and teaches at the University of Minnesota, suggested that our desire to think of good artists as fundamentally troubled stems from a need even now — perhaps particularly now, in the age of entertainment’s dominance — for art to be something separate from our quotidian lives, something almost spiritual.

“People don’t want to believe that someone like them could just sit down at a typewriter or a desk and create something great or timeless,” she said. “It’s got to be the product of a lot of misery and angst.” She compared the impulse to that of conspiracy theorists and their reluctance to believe in the banality of evil: “It’s hard to accept that a guy could just go up into a building and shoot the president.”

Morris Dickstein, a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said he believed that despite the cliché of the suffering artist, pain still deserved a whole lot of credit as a catalyst for creativity. “People who have always had a happy life and lived on an even keel and haven’t had a lot of misfortune really don’t tend to be creative people,” he said. (Though of course there are many contemporary examples of successful writers and artists who seem to have gotten by with fairly contented lives: John Updike? Jeff Koons?)

Perhaps in today’s era of acute awareness of our depressions and neuroses, Mr. Schulz’s, as mild as they might have been, were simply enough to qualify him for membership in the modern miserable artists’ club. Or, as Mr. Dickstein suggested, maybe there wasn’t a need for a monumental amount of misery but for just enough to fit the funny pages.

“It got filtered into a medium that we don’t think of as deep,” Mr. Dickstein said, “and certainly not as being dark.”

And yet in its own way “Peanuts” could make a bit of newsprint as forlorn as a set for “Waiting for Godot” (with a kite, of course, caught in the naked tree and a doghouse somewhere in the distance). As Mr. Schulz himself summed it up: “All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away.”

[7/4]

October 8, 2007

Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family

By PATRICIA COHEN

David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.

But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.

“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”

His sister Amy Schulz Johnson felt the same. “The whole thing is completely wrong,” she said from her home in Utah. “I think he wanted to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family.”

“We were all really excited thinking we were going to get to say things about our Dad,” she said, complaining that the children play a very small role in the book.

Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some members of the family were, but that “to their children fathers are always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that paterfamilias.” After interviewing hundreds of people, going through every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive research, Mr. Michaelis said, “this was the man I found.”

“Did I get the story right?” he asked. “Absolutely. No question.”

Mr. Michaelis referred to numerous interviews throughout Charles Schulz’s life in which he talked about his own “melancholy” and anxieties. “I have this awful feeling of impending doom,” he said on “60 Minutes” in 1999. “I wake up to a funeral-like atmosphere.” Many portraits of Schulz pick up the same theme. Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s 1989 biography, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,” similarly describes him as depressed and plagued by panic attacks, despite a large family and mammoth financial and critical success. Nor does it seem that Mr. Michaelis made a secret of his perspective. He wrote an appreciation of Schulz in Time magazine in December 2000 after his death at 77 in which he clearly laid out the thesis he expands on in his 655-page book, sometimes word for word.

Mr. Michaelis’s biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” which HarperCollins is releasing next week, is one of the most anticipated books of the fall publishing season. Schulz’s cartoon panels are interspersed with the text, and Mr. Michaelis uses them as revelations of the artist’s emotions.

“He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’”

“A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said.

Biographers often find themselves at odds with the friends and families of their subjects. Clearly a loved one is not necessarily objective, a family may want to protect a reputation or may be unaware of hidden events or aspects of someone’s character. Janet Malcolm, in a well-known provocative essay, offered another analysis, describing the relationship between a journalist and a subject as innately deceptive and the journalist as “kind of a confidence man.” Elements of all these explanations have been invoked.

Jean Schulz, Charles’ second wife, said she read about three-quarters of Mr. Michaelis’s third draft. She didn’t disagree that her husband, whom friends called Sparky, was “melancholy,” but she said that was only part of the story: “It’s not a full portrait. Sparky was so much more. Most of the time he loved to laugh.

“Part of what puzzles people about Sparky was that he talked about the actual physical sensation that he had from being anxious, the ‘sense of dread’ when he got up in the morning. But he had a Buddhist acceptance of life and its ups and downs. He functioned perfectly well.

“David couldn’t put everything in,” she said, but added, “I think Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the football: “Happiness is not funny.”

What particularly disturbed her, she said, were Mr. Michaelis’s judgments. “Every artist has to take a point of view,” she said, “but if David is going to say that Sparky is a consistently mean man, then you need to back it up.”

“The attribution is very vague,” she said, mentioning anonymous quotations.

Mr. Michaelis’s source notes for each chapter are organized by subject, so it can be difficult to attach a particular quote to a particular source.

Jean Schulz said that she had found factual errors, many of them trivial, like whether a Redwood tree was dug up, but that “it just makes me wonder about other things in the book.” Mr. Michaelis “obviously took notes,” she said, but some things were clearly “mistranscribed or misinterpreted.”

Monte Schulz cited a number of small inaccuracies, including a mention of a housekeeper serving dinner after she no longer worked for the family; an incorrect reference to his father hearing him lecture at a writer’s workshop; and what Monte said was a ridiculously low estimate for building an ice-skating rink, which made it seem as if there were a more than a 1,000 percent cost overrun.

He said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being portrayed as an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said, “I am not talking to anybody about anything.” Meredith Hodges, who grew up as one of Schulz’s five children, only discovered as an adult that he was not her biological father. She describes him in the book as “cold,” “distant” and “afraid to love,” and she wrote in an e-mail message, “No comment.”

Mr. Michaelis in his biography describes Schulz as extremely generous, devoted to his children, modest and funny, and Joyce as energetic, capable and vibrant, but those traits do not get nearly as much space. Amy Schulz Johnson, who described Schulz as “the most amazing Christ-like father,” complained that Mr. Michaelis played up the negative and left out the positive. “We all got deceived,” she said.

Still, Jean Schulz is sympathetic to the notion of a writer’s or artist’s creative vision, pointing to her own husband. “David is writing this for himself,” she said. “He’s got to be satisfied.”

[JSngry]

Good grief!

[Free For All]

Schulz PEAnuts!

Schulz PEAnuts!

[BruceH]

Looking forward to reading this.

[BFrank]

Don't need to read the book. After a couple of reviews, I feel that I've already read it.

I read the strip religiously as a kid, but got burned out when the characters became too commersh. As one of the reviewers mentioned, he started selling the rights uncontrollably at one point, which ruined any mystique that the comic had.

[7/4]

Big fan when I was a little kid, but I grew out of it. Obviously I must have related to it.

as a comic reader and cartoon watcher and a relatively younger person let me say i hate peanuts. the antics of charlie brown and snoopy et al always made me want to kill myself.

Go visit Lucys booth.

[7/4]

Sparky from St. Paul

A biography of Charles Schulz.

by John Updike October 22, 2007

New Yorker

There is much to enjoy and admire in “Schulz and Peanuts,” a biography of Charles Schulz by David Michaelis (HarperCollins; $34.95). The basic story, of how a not conspicuously gifted but very determined barber’s son from St. Paul, Minnesota, rose to become the richest cartoonist of all time, warms the heart in traditional American fashion. Michaelis, whose previous biography concerned the dynasty-founding illustrator N. C. Wyeth, never met Schulz but has interviewed almost everyone still alive who brushed against the lonely, self-contained creator of “Peanuts,” and has taken good advantage of the superabundant interviews that the cartoonist, jealous of his privacy though he was, gave to reporters:

Charles Schulz’s commitment to newspapers was second only to cartooning itself. He saw it as his obligation to give an interview to every editor who sent out a reporter, no matter how large or small or distant the paper. Across five decades he spoke through the press about his life and Peanuts, and in answering what were often the same old questions week after week, year after year, he charted major and minor shifts in his beliefs and opinions, all the while accumulating a vast treasury of commentary about his personality and character.

His character was made in Minnesota, and Michaelis has an evocative feel for such period Americana as the ecclesiastical profile of a mid-century Midwestern city:

Veterans coming home to any midland city found the principal Christian denominations clearly marked: the Episcopalian parish church evoked Anglican tradition in its lavish half-timbering; the Catholic cathedral’s domed basilica proclaimed its place in a universal order; Lutheranism showed its stolid presence in brick churches quietly displaying modest, useful banners announcing bingo and bake sales, their pinnacled bell towers culminating in tall Gothic spires; the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, the one built of stone, the other of wood, each thrust a tall white steeple over opposite corners of a well-tended thoroughfare, invariably Church Street.

Amid all this denominational pomp, Michaelis goes on to say, “the Church of God had no defining style or architectural tradition. It barely announced itself.” It was to this colorless permutation of Christianity, founded in Indiana in 1881, that the young Schulz attached himself, becoming a tithing pillar and part-time preacher. In the raffish, New York City-centered brotherhood of cartoonists, he was an antisocial, teetotalling, non-smoking oddity. He had never gone to an art school, learning his trade as a student at and then instructor for a Minneapolis learn-by-mail outfit called Art Instruction. “Peanuts” was launched, in 1950, in a squat, space-saving format and under an enigmatic title imposed, to Schulz’s lifelong indignation, by the syndicate heads. That same year, his nomination to the National Cartoonists Society was blocked by Otto Soglow, the membership-committee chairman, on the ground that no member—not even his nominator, Mort Walker, of “Beetle Bailey” fame—had ever met him. In 1954, while “Peanuts” was taking off with the public and setting new standards of minimalist subtlety and quiet daring, Schulz came east to the society’s awards dinner on the rumor that the coveted Reuben, already bestowed upon Walker and “Dennis the Menace” ’s Hank Ketcham, would go to him. Instead, the sports cartoonist Willard Mullin received it. Schulz left without a word of farewell to his tablemates and claimed, back in Minneapolis, that he had been treated like “someone’s poor relative.”

The pervasive magic of syndicated cartooning in the twentieth century is knowingly sketched by Michaelis, not only in historical terms, from “The Yellow Kid” and “Happy Hooligan” on up through “Gasoline Alley” and “Blondie” and “Joe Palooka” and “Li’l Abner” and—the first strip to captivate intellectuals—“Krazy Kat,” but as experienced by the aspiring young Schulz. Born in 1922, he doted on the comic pages, copying “Popeye” and “Tim Tyler’s Luck” on his father’s shirt cardboards. When, in the Depression years, he earned nine dollars a week as a grocery-store clerk, he was enabled “to work with Bristol board and Higgins India ink and Craftint doubletone.” The arcana of the cartoonist’s trade were dazzlingly displayed, Michaelis relates, in a 1934 exhibition of comic-strip art at the St. Paul Public Library:

Here hung several hundred lengths of layered illustration board stroked in dense ink more purely black and warmly alive than the engraving process allowed for. . . . Outside the panels, cryptic instructions had been penciled in the margin; sky-blue arrows aimed to catch an editor’s eye. Inside the panels, there were unexpected traces of effort: accidental blots, glue stains and tape bits, strips of paper pasted to correct mistakes in lettering, unerased letters, registration marks, residues of white gouache, pentimenti reversing all kinds of slips and false starts—a whole unseen world of reasoning and revision had passed over the drawing board before mechanical reproduction reduced and tightened the lines.

And yet, for all the biographer’s animation of the professional and geographical environments that shaped Schulz, he remains somewhat blank and hard to like, with a “cold, untrusting side.” An only child, he was a second-generation American on both his German father’s side and his Norwegian mother’s. Though he signed his strips simply “Schulz” and inherited his father’s work ethic, neatness, and devoted pride of profession, he said, “I always regarded myself really as being Norwegian and not German.” Yet his mother’s hard-drinking, violent-tempered brothers frightened him at Sunday family get-togethers. While German immigrants gravitated to the cities and brought cultural institutions with them, the Norwegians, according to the Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis, “brought nothing new”; they clung to their family farms and clannishly intermarried. Neither ethnic group offered much encouragement to artistic aspirations, or lofty aspirations of any sort: “Don’t get a big head” was a mantra of the upper Midwest; the big-headed tots of “Peanuts” emerged as a defiance. Nor was display of the heart prominent; there was not much touching, Michaelis notices, in family photographs or in Schulz’s memory. When Sparky—as he was called all his life, nicknamed in infancy after the racehorse Spark Plug in the comic strip “Barney Google”—returned from the Second World War, in which he had seen overseas combat, he entered his father’s barbershop and the haircut in progress continued. “No one gave me a hug,” the young veteran recalled. “We didn’t have any party. . . . That was it.” In turn, Schulz was gingerly with his own children and shied from physical affection; his cousin Patty testified, “Hugging him was like hugging a tree—he never moved.” At the outset of his wartime service, in 1943, he came home on a day pass to say goodbye to his mother, who was painfully dying of metastasized cervical cancer. In Michaelis’s telling: “He said he guessed it was time to go. . . . She turned her gaze as best she could. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘good-bye, Sparky. We’ll probably never see each other again.’ ” A bleaker deathbed blessing has seldom been recorded.

The “Peanuts” empire early and late included bound volumes of the strips, and for some of them, notably the wide-format “Peanuts Jubilee” (1975), Schulz provided, in an economical, unassuming prose, pieces of autobiography between selections of reprinted “Peanuts.” His own version of his mother’s farewell reads slightly softer than the version above: “Yes, I suppose we should say good-bye because we probably never will see each other again.” In another spot he dips into his uncanny childhood sense of himself:

When I was small, I believed that my face was so bland that people would not recognize me if they saw me some place other than where they normally would. I was sincerely surprised if I happened to be in the downtown area of St. Paul, shopping with my mother, and we would bump into a fellow student at school, or a teacher, and they recognized me. I thought that my ordinary appearance was a perfect disguise. It was this weird kind of thinking that prompted Charlie Brown’s round, ordinary face.

Later in the same section, he writes, “Charlie Brown has to be the one who suffers, because he is a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning.” This from a man who was making four million dollars in 1975 and was to receive, in the twenty-five years ahead, as much as sixty-two million a year, from the proceeds of the world’s most widely syndicated strip and of shrewdly managed licenses for merchandise (clothing, books, toys, greeting cards), advertising (cameras, cars, cupcakes, life insurance), translations (Arabic, Basque, Malay, Tlingit, Welsh), animated television specials, and the musical comedy “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” which went through forty thousand productions, involving two hundred and forty thousand different performers. Behind the bland face a fiercely competitive spirit blazed; as Snoopy challenged Charlie Brown for the starring role in the strip, his creator bragged, “He is the most recognized character in the world, much more so than Mickey Mouse”—a gratuitous put-down of his mightiest predecessor in multimedia self-exploitation, Walt Disney.

Though short and slight as a boy, Schulz was a passionate athlete, living for after-school baseball games and ranking second on the high-school golf team. As an adult he held a low handicap (Michaelis, an apparent stranger to the terminology, calls Schulz “a scratch golfer, with a five handicap”) and played in the Crosby Invitational until midlife agoraphobia curtailed his travels. In an attempt to re-create Minnesotan pleasures in Northern California, Schulz and his first wife, the enterprising Joyce née Halverson, constructed an elaborate skating rink, the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, and there, while Schulz was playing on a hockey team opposing that of his son Monte, “Monte danced away from Sparky during a play, whereupon father slashed son across the backs of his legs so hard that Monte had trouble walking to the locker room.” Still mentally smarting years afterward, Monte told Michaelis, “He really injured my leg—an unbelievable welt,” and did not recall “that his father apologized until two days later.” Nor did Sparky, in Michaelis’s account, “express remorse, or show sympathy” when, in 1970, Joyce discovered, through a telltale phone bill, his affair with Tracey Claudius, a twenty-five-year-old employee of the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation who had tagged along on one of Schulz’s innumerable interviews. Interviewed herself years later, Tracey delivered a thoughtful appraisal of her former lover: “He . . . never got over himself. I guess no one had made him the center of the world, so he became the center of his own world.” His own self-appraisal put it, “It took me a long time to become a human being.”

“She’s something and I’m nothing,” Charlie Brown says of the object of his hopeless romantic longing, the Little Red-Haired Girl. The young Schulz was invincibly chaste and shy. In 1941, when he was nineteen and working long night hours in an alcove in his parents’ attic at gag “roughs” that Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post faithfully rejected, his mother, earthy, vivacious Dena, suggested that his gags perhaps weren’t “smutty” enough. He later confessed, “I couldn’t have drawn a ‘smutty’ cartoon if I had tried.” He couldn’t even say “damn” or “hell,” as his prim father occasionally did. “Maybe there’s some kind of a fatal flaw,” he speculated. When, in 1950, a red-haired girl did stir him to pursuit and proposal, she married a virgin. Joyce herself had married before, at the age of nineteen; her first groom was a New Mexico cowboy who got her pregnant and deserted her so promptly that the child, a girl, was born back in Minneapolis. Michaelis writes, “When Sparky met her at the party, Joyce was twenty-two years old, divorced, with a baby and a curfew.” Both she and his second wife, Jean, are still alive, so they are glimpsed through a mist of discretion. He and Joyce divorced in 1973, after twenty-two years and four more children; from start to finish, she was characterized by friends as “the dynamo of the duo”—brassy where he was wispy, venturesome where he was stay-at-home. She got him, against his inclinations, out of St. Paul—first, abortively, to Colorado Springs, and then, lastingly, to California—which was likely to the good, since he then had to reimagine his childhood instead of merely relive it. (Joyce’s explanation of why they returned from Colorado after only nine months was that “Sparky couldn’t handle being away from his dad.”)

Joyce lives in his comic strips, Michaelis claims, as Charlie Brown’s relentless tormentor Lucy Van Pelt. An Art Instruction colleague of Schulz’s is quoted: “She and Sparky were a fun couple . . . but there were times when she was pretty nasty to him.” To be fair, his passivity and his preoccupation with his strip might have been maddening. Both wanted more than they were getting. In the years of their marriage, he had become a handsome man—slim, fit, silver-haired—as well as a hugely rich national celebrity, and women were beginning to pick up signals. Jean Clyde, sixteen years younger than he, took her daughter to the arena three times a week, and strode through the coffee shop called the Warm Puppy (“Happiness is a warm puppy”), where Schulz, informally separated from Joyce at this point, daily had his breakfast. Jean—“intelligent and, among the women in Charles Schulz’s life, comparatively well educated”—was the daughter of English parents; she had been brought up by her mother on a Southern California avocado ranch, and was the wife of a guitar-playing journalist who had turned to dealing in real estate. Though married to others when they met, Schulz and Jean were divorced and wed within the next year. They moved into what had been a bishop’s residence, complete with prayer grotto.

Schulz’s own religiosity seems to have quietly faded in the California sunshine, though he continued to contribute a cartoon panel to the Church of God magazine and for a time taught Methodist Sunday school in Sebastopol. His manifold newspaper interviews trace a gradual withdrawal: “I’m not an orthodox believer, and I’m becoming less of one all the time.” Robert Short, the author of the immensely successful “The Gospel According to Peanuts” (1964), admitted, “Sparky . . . could sound like the conservatives, but . . . there was always this very humanistic liberal strain that was beneath the surface.” In Schulz’s strip, the Great Pumpkin episodes verge on travesty if not blasphemy, and in his life he diffidently accepted his children’s lack of interest in Sunday school. His daughter Amy, who eventually became a Mormon, complained, “He never read [the Scriptures] to us kids and he never took us to church. He didn’t share it with us.”

Jean turned Schulz from a golfer into a tennis player. Where Joyce had worked off her leftover energy by going on building sprees (she married their contractor a day after the divorce came through), Jean flew airplanes with her mother and travelled the world with her two children by Mr. Clyde. She saw her new, aging husband through a quadruple heart bypass in 1981 that momentarily left Schulz’s precise, dashing pen lines slightly shaky, and then through the colon cancer that carried him off, early in the year 2000, at the age of seventy-seven. His obituary appeared in Sunday papers the very same day as his last strip. “In the moment of ceasing to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be,” Michaelis writes. For almost exactly fifty years, he had produced the strip alone—its ideas, its lettering, its every mark on Bristol board were his. Even the mechanical-appearing bars of Beethoven that appear behind Schroeder at his toy piano were hand-drawn by the cartoonist. “I work completely alone,” he insisted. Amy recalled, “Were we his everything? No. His strip was his everything.”

Michaelis secured permission to reproduce two hundred and forty images from the 17,897 “Peanuts” strips to illustrate how often they were closely derived from Schulz’s life. Charlie Brown’s insecurity, his longings, his baseball games, his barber father all go back to St. Paul. Snoopy is closely based upon an abnormally clever dog from Schulz’s childhood called Spike; as Dena was dying, she said that if they ever had another dog they should name him Snoopy—snupi being a Norwegian term of endearment. The beagle’s fantasies of the French Foreign Legion and of being a First World War flying ace were based on thirties movies that Schulz had imbibed as a boy in St. Paul’s Park Theatre. Closer to adulthood, his affair with Tracey Claudius left blatant traces in the strip. Snoopy, typing away on the roof of his doghouse, parodied Schulz’s own feverish love letters. In one of them, he wrote Tracey, “Dark hair and a perfect nose. Soft hands that are sometimes cool and sometimes warm”; Snoopy, lying dreamily on his doghouse roof, thinks, “She had the softest paws. . . . * sigh *.” Joyce’s discovery of his surreptitious phone calls showed up, Snoopyized, in the strip, as did Schulz’s receipt of the summons in the divorce case she subsequently initiated. Snoopy, as Michaelis points out, is a grownup, with a sex life—at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm—and adult possessions, including a pool table, a stereo, and a van Gogh, somehow crammed into his doghouse. Episodes involving him come to reflect the psychedelic sixties and are relatively free of the backbiting and unrequited love sadly common in the strip’s population of children. Snoopy acquires a set of disreputable relatives based upon the male Halversons, and there are desert intervals (reminiscent of “Krazy Kat” ’s surreal habitat) derived from the Schulz family’s brief, ill-fated attempt to transplant itself, in 1929-31, to Needles, in the Mojave region of California.

“Peanuts,” of course, was more than a running autobiographical tease, as the reader can reassure himself by leafing through the lavish “Peanuts Jubilee” or its less lavish, rather jumbled successor, twenty-five years later, “Peanuts: A Golden Celebration.” The elegant economy of the drawing and the wild inventiveness of such pictorial devices as the towering pitcher’s mound and the impossible perspective of Snoopy’s doghouse keep the repetitiveness, talkiness, and melancholy of the strip a few buoyant inches off the ground, and save it from being fey. With the introduction, in 1970, of Snoopy’s friend the tiny yellow bird Woodstock, Schulz gave himself access to a whole fresh realm of tenderness; a sort of parenthood at last crept into the strip, where human parents are invisible. And yet, in the end, it was the woeful personal undercurrent—the frozen memory of a grade-school loser’s unshakable existential angst, a child alone behind his unrecognizably bland face—that set “Peanuts” apart and attracted the devoted loyalty of millions, including future celebrants like the artists Chip Kidd and Chris Ware and writers like Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Franzen. As Schulz said, most of us are better acquainted with losing than with winning. “Peanuts” was a unique creation, a comic strip at bottom tragic. ♦

[Teasing the Korean]

This reminds me: It's almost time to start spinning A CHARLIE BROWN XMAS!

[MoGrubb]

I'm probably the only one on the planet that never cared for the Peanuts strip.

Edited October 17, 2007 by MoGrubb

[Randy Twizzle]

I'm probably the only one on the planet that never cared for the Peanuts strip.

Not true. There was a guy in Fond du Lac Wisconsin who also didn't care for the strip.

Edited October 17, 2007 by Randy Twizzle

[BruceH]

I'm probably the only one on the planet that never cared for the Peanuts strip.

Not true. There was a guy in Fond du Lac Wisconsin who also didn't care for the strip.

Good grief!

[BFrank]

I'm probably the only one on the planet that never cared for the Peanuts strip.

Not true. There was a guy in Fond du Lac Wisconsin who also didn't care for the strip.

... and I heard of an entire family in Barstow, CA that refused to read it.

[Alexander]

I grew up reading the strip, and in my opinion, it's probably (along with "Pogo" and "Krazy Kat") one of the greatest strips ever drawn. I still read the reprints daily and I collect the books (haven't gotten any of the recent hardcover "complete" books). I absolutely adore it, always have. My daughter's bedroom is all decorated in Snoopy. Both she and my wife are both die-hard fans.

I love everything about the strip, although I admit that it lost some of its lustre by the 80s and 90s. For me, the golden age is the mid-to-late 60s through the 70s. Every story Schulz did in those days was absolutely brilliant. One of my favorites was the time Linus and Sally's class was taken on a field trip...to a field! They stood around in the field for about a weeks worth of dailies before something happened. It was like a Beckett play!

[BruceH]

I grew up reading the strip, and in my opinion, it's probably (along with "Pogo" and "Krazy Kat") one of the greatest strips ever drawn. I still read the reprints daily and I collect the books (haven't gotten any of the recent hardcover "complete" books). I absolutely adore it, always have. My daughter's bedroom is all decorated in Snoopy. Both she and my wife are both die-hard fans.

I love everything about the strip, although I admit that it lost some of its lustre by the 80s and 90s. For me, the golden age is the mid-to-late 60s through the 70s. Every story Schulz did in those days was absolutely brilliant. One of my favorites was the time Linus and Sally's class was taken on a field trip...to a field! They stood around in the field for about a weeks worth of dailies before something happened. It was like a Beckett play!

Alexander, I heartily recommend those Fantagraphic hardcover "complete" books. For a long time I was frustrated that Peanuts, for all its popularity, was so oddly ill-served by book reprints. This series finally fills that longstanding need for a truly complete, well-researched, meticulous, and decently produced set. The only criticism I would venture is that some of the intros are lame, but so what? If you're a big fan you should check these out.

[MoGrubb]

moregrubb, as i said, i didn't like it either. not at all.

Maybe we're the only two on the planet then.

Hello, it's nice to meet a kindred soul.

[Alexander]

moregrubb, as i said, i didn't like it either. not at all.

Maybe we're the only two on the planet then.

Hello, it's nice to meet a kindred soul.

I personally can't see how anyone could dislike "Peanuts," but to each his own.

Incidentally, my top ten cartoonists/strips would be:

1. George Herriman - Krazy Kat

2. Walt Kelly - Pogo

3. Charles Schulz - Peanuts

4. G. B. Trudeau - Doonesbury

5. Bill Watterson - Calvin & Hobbes

6. Windsor McCay - Little Nemo in Slumberland/Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

7. R. Crumb - Various titles (Fritz the Cat, My Troubles with Women, etc)

8. Art Spiegleman - Maus/Raw/In The Shadow of No Towers

9. Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth/The Acme Novelty Library

10. Bill Griffith - Zippy the Pinhead

My favorite newspaper cartoonists who are still working include Stephen Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) and Darby Connelly (Get Fuzzy). I despised Johnny Hart when he was still in the paper. B.C. has to be one of the worst strips EVER.

[MoGrubb]

moregrubb, as i said, i didn't like it either. not at all.

Maybe we're the only two on the planet then.

Hello, it's nice to meet a kindred soul.

I personally can't see how anyone could dislike "Peanuts," but to each his own.

Incidentally, my top ten cartoonists/strips would be:

1. George Herriman - Krazy Kat

2. Walt Kelly - Pogo

3. Charles Schulz - Peanuts

4. G. B. Trudeau - Doonesbury

5. Bill Watterson - Calvin & Hobbes

6. Windsor McCay - Little Nemo in Slumberland/Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

7. R. Crumb - Various titles (Fritz the Cat, My Troubles with Women, etc)

8. Art Spiegleman - Maus/Raw/In The Shadow of No Towers

9. Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth/The Acme Novelty Library

10. Bill Griffith - Zippy the Pinhead

My favorite newspaper cartoonists who are still working include Stephen Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) and Darby Connelly (Get Fuzzy). I despised Johnny Hart when he was still in the paper. B.C. has to be one of the worst strips EVER.

I usually had to reach to get the humor, after I got it, it wasn't worth the effort.

One of my fav strip of all times was Calvin and Hobbs.

[BruceH]

moregrubb, as i said, i didn't like it either. not at all.

Maybe we're the only two on the planet then.

Hello, it's nice to meet a kindred soul.

I personally can't see how anyone could dislike "Peanuts," but to each his own.

Incidentally, my top ten cartoonists/strips would be:

1. George Herriman - Krazy Kat

2. Walt Kelly - Pogo

3. Charles Schulz - Peanuts

4. G. B. Trudeau - Doonesbury

5. Bill Watterson - Calvin & Hobbes

6. Windsor McCay - Little Nemo in Slumberland/Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

7. R. Crumb - Various titles (Fritz the Cat, My Troubles with Women, etc)

8. Art Spiegleman - Maus/Raw/In The Shadow of No Towers

9. Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth/The Acme Novelty Library

10. Bill Griffith - Zippy the Pinhead

My favorite newspaper cartoonists who are still working include Stephen Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) and Darby Connelly (Get Fuzzy). I despised Johnny Hart when he was still in the paper. B.C. has to be one of the worst strips EVER.

Great list. I would add only Cliff Sterrett with "Polly and Her Pals" off the top of my head.

[7/4]

Yeah, a nice list. I was a Peanuts fan as a kid, but a Crumb fan as a teen & post-teen.

I'd recognize Wares work, but am not very familiar with it. I have a WFMU t-shirt by him.