Charles Schulz never wanted to be anything but a cartoonist, and his last strip–drawn eight weeks in advance–appeared on the day after his death. Wealthy, respected, loved, Schulz never lost a sense of being ordinary and "nothing." Based on seven years of research and interviews, David Michaelis' book sets out to explore this contradiction. (This is an older bio, and I'm not sure if it's been superseded by new info.)
His biography is driven by a central image: Schulz in 1943, returning to army camp on a troop train right after his mother died, filled with insatiable loneliness. (Like so many anxious summer campers in the strips.) He links this image to Schulz's love for the movie Citizen Kane: "Like Welles's hero, Charles Foster Kane, who 'got everything he wanted, and then lost it,' Charles Monroe Schulz would succeed on a scale beyond the grandest of his childhood dreams, and yet he would struggle to love and be loved."
I can understand wanting some explanatory metaphor, but Michaelis may be making more of a mystery than there really was. Schulz was a genius growing up in a family that didn't value learning or art, and in a milieu that put a premium on self-effacement. Are his resentments and contradictions so hard to understand? Paying more attention to the comic strips as art would, I felt, have yielded more interest than mining the strips for biography (which Michaelis reproduces generously within the text as comment and illustration). He does briefly discuss topics like Schulz's use of line and his lettering, and has some experience with artists; his previous book was on N.C. Wyeth. But I felt Michaelis ignores the alchemical transformation that happens along the way from life to art. Sometimes Michaelis' discussion seems anti-alchemical, changing gold into dross: complex characters get mapped one-to-one onto real-life figures, draining Schulz's artistic achievement.
Still, Schulz and Peanuts is very useful in explaining the origins and development of the strip. For example, we see Schulz as a kid, organizing sports and becoming team manager even while he felt like an outsider, so much like Charlie Brown. It's fascinating later on to see Schulz learning his trade by correspondence course, then becoming an instructor at the same institution. It's also interesting to follow the speed of his success and the various stages of his career.
Michaelis is also good at explaining Schulz's enormous influence. So often during my childhood, I'd take down one of the Peanuts collections from the shelf. We had others, including Pogo, B.C., and later, Doonesbury, but the Peanuts books were the ones I read over and over. For me as for so many other readers, the characters and situations felt as familiar to me as my own family. As a socially awkward kid, of course I felt a kinship with Charlie Brown; Lucy's crabbiness amused me; I felt another kind of kinship with serious Linus; and everyone loves Snoopy.
Every newspaper, in all the places I ended up living, gave Peanuts pride of place as the first strip. Schulz's characters, the Great Pumpkin, the undressing line drive, the football, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the Christmas Peanuts specials, my Snoopy lunch box—Peanuts was part of the air we all breathed.
For that reason, it's easy to forget how ground-breaking and influential the strip was. We're used now to many of the conventions Schulz introduced, especially the idea of minimalism both in drawing and gags. Michaelis explains that early strips like Pogo and L'il Abner relied on "business," full of characters and activity. Peanuts was different:
Peanuts, full of empty spaces, didn't depend on action or a particular context to attract the reader; it was about people working out the interior problems of their daily lives without ever actually solving them. The absence of a solution was the center of the story, and, as Schulz insisted at the time, "ninety percent of the humor is in the drawing."
Also new was presenting children as far more intensely real than grownups, who never appear. Using children allowed Schulz to say things he couldn't have said otherwise, to explore sorrow and depression and existential angst. We forget, too, that Peanuts back in the 50s seemed subversive:
"Nobody was saying this stuff," reflected [cartoonist Jules] Feiffer. "You didn't find it in The New Yorker. You found it in cellar clubs, and, on occasion, in the pages of the Village Voice. But not many other places. And then, with Peanuts, there it was on the comics page, and it was the truth."
At first, Peanuts was considered a strip for adults; that's hard to remember now. I appreciated Michaelis's giving us so much early context for this strip.
It would have been great if the illustrations had reproduced other strips besides Peanuts to point up the contrast, and there were many occasions when I wished for an illustration of a cartoon being discussed, but I suppose that would have been prohibitively expensive.
Originally, Michaelis wanted two volumes: the age of Peanuts, up to 1973, followed by the age of Snoopy. The book betrays this original plan, I think, in that it's extremely detailed up until the last 25 years of Schulz's life, which go by in a flash. I thought way too much time was taken up by nailing down mundane details of the early life (exact street addresses, the dimension in feet of a chapel never again mentioned), while the scantiest attention is paid to Schulz's children, who barely appear.
Here I should note that Schulz's son Monte repudiates this biography, saying among other criticisms that Michaelis wrongly portrayed Schulz as primarily cold and distant. Here also, and making allowances for Monte's hurt feelings, I feel Michaelis is overlooking Schulz the artist to a degree, and misreading the remoteness of someone in an imaginative world.
Despite the book's 600+ pages, not long after reading it, Schulz fades in my imagination beside the vigor and energy of his work. Certainly Schulz doesn't always come across as an attractive figure in this book, being mopey and self-involved, but his friends and family seem to have loved him anyway. However you assess the man, I'm sure Schulz would agree that the strips contain the best of him.
by arrec