Schulz and Peanuts
By David Michaelis
Harper, 655 pages, $34.95
The day after U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, his widow, Ethel, expressed through a friend a wish for drawings of Snoopy and Charlie Brown to help comfort the Kennedy children. Charles Schulz sent 10 originals of his characters, which Ethel later replied were thought of as members of the family.
The Kennedys were not the only ones to consider Schulz’s big-headed children and the ebullient, novelizing, Sopwith Camel-flying dog as family, although they were one prominent marker of the “Peanuts” comic strip’s cultural reach. In 1969, Schulz’s “Peanuts” had 90 million readers, which grew to 100 million over the next two years. The Apollo 10 moon mission named its command module Charlie Brown and its lunar module Snoopy, and when its crew flashed an image of Snoopy to Earth, NASA estimated it was seen by a billion viewers worldwide.
And Schulz’s comic strip itself was but the fountainhead. As we learn in David Michaelis’ fascinating dual biography of Schulz and the “Peanuts” phenomenon, the stage property “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” is the most-produced musical in American theater history (with more than 40,000 productions), and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (in which Schulz forbid a laugh track but allowed a jazz score, and insisted on Scripture in the text against the wishes of his producer and the network) is the longest-running animated Christmas special on TV.
Furthermore, collections of the strip into books had 36 million copies in print by the end of the 1960s, placing Schulz fourth among all 20th Century writers. “Sparky,” as Schulz was known, had an annual income varying from $26 million to $40 million during the 1990s, from “a merchant empire, spreading tens of millions of plush Snoopys the world over, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Congo to Togo, Norway to New Zealand, Cameroon to Canada, growing fastest in Europe, Latin America, and the Far East,” Michaelis notes, on every continent second only to Disney products. Schulz reached a larger audience than any other American artist, and at least as of the early 1980s was the only modern cartoonist given a retrospective by the Louvre.
All this from a man who tended to describe himself as a cipher, whose life seems to have been two parts Horatio Alger, one part Rodney Dangerfield.
Just as Schulz’s father was a barber, so was Charlie Brown’s, and Michaelis makes an effective case that when the cartoonist died in 2000, “he left behind fifty years of clues about his life embedded in his cartoons.” (The New York Times, in its obituary, went further, calling the strip and the cartoonist’s life “completely intertwined.”)
Schulz himself endorsed that general idea, saying, “‘If somebody reads my strip everyday, they’ll know me for sure — they’ll know exactly what I am,'” although how direct a reading he had in mind remains an open question. Michaelis interlaces strips from Peanuts throughout his book, sometimes suggesting a one-to-one correspondence between the characters’ interactions and the out-of-view events of Schulz’s life, sometimes not. Reducing the panels to a semaphore signal to a select few — a romantic partner or Schulz’s ex-wife, for example — seems alternately plausible and not, but Michaelis outlines his reasoning in each case, making for engaging contemplation on the reader’s part.
Since this is a double biography of a cartoon strip and its creator, we have before us the cultural context of cartooning in general and the physical context of life in the Midwest and California, over years spanning the Depression, World War II, the Eisenhower ’50s, the Benjamin Spock-inflected ’60s and the following decades as well. As a result, the sum is greater than its parts: While “Schulz and Peanuts” delves into the paradoxes of the man and the psychology of his artwork, it reveals much about American life collaterally as well when detailing the circumstances of extended families over time (farms going bust, generations crowding together in small apartments) and considering the relation of the strip to the temper of the times (for example, whether to come out directly against the Vietnam War).
By the end of his life, Schulz was “both owner and possession; the system possessed him and yet he was unquestionably an owner, or perhaps manager, of America — one of the hundred or so people who had a grip on how the nation imagined and projected itself,” Michaelis asserts. His influence is still palpable. ” ‘My career is all his fault,’ ” Garry Trudeau has said, and suggests that beyond his own “Doonesbury” there would be no “Garfield,” “Far Side,” “Mutts” or “Simpsons,” no “Seinfeld” or “South Park” or “Family Guy,” which can be seen as ” ‘a kind of joyous unleashing of the weird, retentive genius of Charles Schulz.’ “
Retrospectively it is easy to see “Peanuts” as tame, perhaps even tepid, but that is testimony to how radically the strip altered the comic frame. Walt Kelly, famous for his strip “Pogo,” credited Schulz with creating, in his long-running face-off of Charlie Brown and Lucy, ” ‘a perfect parody of what American life is supposed to be — the ineffectual male and the domineering female.’ ” Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, referring to the uneasy truths coming from the mouths of Schulz’s cartoon children, said:
” ‘Nobody was saying this stuff. … You don’t find it in The New Yorker. You found it in cellar clubs, and, on occasion, in the pages of the Village Voice. … And then, with Peanuts, there it was on the comics page, and it was the truth.”
Mort Walker, originator of “Beetle Bailey” and professional rival of Schulz’s, was “dismayed,” Michaelis reports, when Snoopy was accepted by the public as a pilot atop his doghouse. “‘That’s when I realized I didn’t know anything about the comic business,'” Walker said.
Starting out in postwar America, Schulz had to fight the skepticism of others who thought they knew the comic business. He had grown up an only child in St. Paul, and until he was drafted into the Army in late 1942 had spent only two nights of his life apart from his mother, suffering intense homesickness in the process. “He was a model boy — if the model is a mother’s boy,” Michaelis says near the outset of his biography, a theme he will carry through to the end.
The family was relatively private by many accounts, and Dena, Schulz’s mother, was modest but vain as well, seen as distant and reserved but “not actually unfriendly,” according to Charlie’s good childhood friend Sherman Plepler. She suffered from cervical cancer — a fact hidden from her by her husband, Carl, and the family doctor — and died at 50, just before Charlie was shipped off to an Army base on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Her bedridden final years created a “sense of doom bearing down [that] would prevail over nearly every aspect of [Schulz’s] experience, becoming a watershed in the formation of his character,” Michaelis writes, staking out one of his main interpretive contentions.
Michaelis begins his tale with Schulz’s dreary, grief-ridden train ride away from home on a troop transport, eventually bound for Europe at the end of the war, where he became a squad leader and was given charge of a halftrack also nicknamed “Sparky.” He missed the liberation of Dachau by a scant couple of kilometers but received an award recognizing engagement in active ground combat and returned from the war in what was ” ‘the high point in my life as far as having confidence,’ ” he later said.
After the war Schulz shared an apartment bedroom with his father (who failed to hug him on his return!); got involved with a non-denominational religious group, the Church of God; and began work at a correspondence art school from which he had taken lessons, called Art Instruction. (The head of the education department at Art Instruction, incidentally, was named Charlie Brown.) The church and the educational institution would be sources of friends and support in subsequent years, as he sought to sell his drawings, freelance, to publications like The Saturday Evening Post.
“Schulz and Peanuts” is stuffed with so much richness it is difficult even to summarize here. One of its best qualities is that it allows for self-contradiction. Michaelis has spoken with so many of Schulz’s former colleagues, his children, his widow, his ex-wife and friends, and mined decades of press interviews (Schulz was extremely generous there), not to mention the comic strip itself, that the harsher edges of his portrait are open to question by someone, usually a figure with first-hand experience of the cartoonist himself.
For example, Michaelis sketches essentially a passive and cold man (“He never put his own foot forward”), one who was convinced he was unattractive and possibly ugly. Certainly Schulz expressed with regularity feeling lonely or unloved, and preferred terms like “melancholy,” “fearful” and “anxious” over “depression” in self-description. Yet a cartoonist traffics in exaggeration, after all, an issue to which Michaelis seems sensitive.
Schulz was also an autodidact, a man of extreme ambition who fought a giant syndicate over control of his work and won, a multimillionaire who enjoyed wheeling about in his Jaguar but drove away from a failed marriage in a Ford Pinto and had his wedding ring (engraved “Forever” inside) hacksawed off. And he was someone who “‘had no idea how photogenic he was,'” his syndicate editor observed, and of whom the great filmmaker Federico Fellini wrote,” ‘How I liked his face.'”
So perhaps, after all, we should look to Schulz’s words as they appear within his drawings and ignore the rest. Here is how he put it:
” ‘If I talked about the things that I draw, I’d probably be a lecturer or a novelist, but I draw comic strips because somehow I have feelings way in the back of my mind that come out in little pictures and in funny little sayings.”
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Art Winslow, a former literary and executive editor of The Nation, writes frequently about books and culture.
