A Life in the Funny Pages

This review recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography
By David Michaelis
Harper, 688 pp., $34.95

In a “Peanuts” strip reproduced in David Michaelis’ commanding new biography of Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown is demonstrating one of his dog’s tricks. When he gets the go-ahead, the dog erects his floppy ears into two black discs, widens his ink-dot eyes and spreads an inane smile across his muzzle.

“Frightening, isn’t it?” Charlie Brown says of Snoopy’s imitation of Mickey Mouse.

Frighteningly prophetic, too. When this particular strip appeared in 1955, “Peanuts” had been around for only five years, and appeared in only 100 newspapers. Snoopy was still trotting around on four legs, not yet perched atop his doghouse, dreaming of battles with the Red Baron in his Sopwith Camel. But for baby boomers, he would become the iconic rival to Disney’s mouse.

“By 1989,” Michaelis tells us, “annual revenues from Peanuts’ global worldwide merchandising empire topped $1 billion. … On every continent, Snoopy made Peanuts second only to Disney in the sale of merchandise: clothing (30 percent of sales), books (15 percent) toys and accessories (15 percent), greeting cards and other Peanuts items (40 percent). Schulz proudly told visitors, ‘He is the most recognized character in the world, much more so than Mickey Mouse.’ ”

As for Schulz, he was on Forbes magazine’s list of the nation’s highest-paid entertainers, a distinction he has maintained even after his death in February 2000. On the magazine’s roster of the top ten highest-earning dead celebrities, he keeps post-mortem company with Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley and John Lennon.

Pretty good for a man whose father, a Minneapolis barber, “equated achievement with egotistical display” and inculcated in his son – in Charles Schulz’s own words -- “the fear of being ostentatious.” The German-Scandinavian Minnesota in which Schulz was raised, Michaelis says, was “a culture in which it was impertinent to express one’s uniqueness and talent … a tall-poppy culture that struck the heads off its brightest flowers.”

“Poetry,” wrote T.S. Eliot, meaning all of the arts, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” “Sparky” Schulz desperately wanted to escape from them, and he found a way to do it that made him rich and perhaps more famous than he had bargained for.

The irony here is that Schulz would always claim to have no personality, that he was, as Linus once said of Schulz’s self-doubting alter ego, “of all the Charlie Browns in the world, … the Charlie Browniest.” But for all his modesty and self-effacement, Schulz had a healthy, hungry, ambitious ego. As Michaelis notes, Schulz admitted at the height of his international celebrity, “I suppose I’m the worst kind of egotist, the kind who pretends to be humble.” Shyness and narcissism are two sides of the same coin.

Michaelis has done a masterly job of assembling the often puzzling and even contradictory pieces of Schulz’s life into a convincing whole, at understanding the boy who was one of the smartest kids in school but almost flunked out, the quiet loner in high school who could be punishingly aggressive on the playing fields, the man who once faithfully gave a tenth of his income to an evangelical Christian church but later turned away from all organized religion.

Schulz’s first wife, Joyce, was the dominant partner in their marriage – she was the one who engineered their move to California, supervised the development of the property they bought in Sonoma County and created the elaborate Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa. Always fearful of travel and encounters with the world – Michaelis posits that he suffered from a kind of agoraphobia – Schulz retreated into his studio and settled into domesticity, adopting Joyce’s daughter from a brief previous marriage and fathering four children of his own. His comic strip was full of subtle insights into the world of childhood, and he created Snoopy, beloved of children around the world. But he was always uneasy around children, and his own recalled that their father never kissed or hugged them. “Somehow we knew he loved us,” one of them said. He also slyly caricatured Joyce as the termagant Lucy, and eventually he slipped away for an affair with a woman 23 years his junior, to whom he wrote, “Like Gatsby I am pursuing the green light.” The affair entered the strip as Snoopy’s dalliance with a “girl-beagle” with “soft paws.”

Michaelis, whose earlier books include a biography of the artist N.C. Wyeth, psychologizes without psychobabble – he recognizes that he’s writing a biography, not a case study. He’s certainly no prose stylist – his style is best described as “serviceable” – but even if he were, it would have been unwise to try to match the cleverness of the “Peanuts” strips that illuminate the points he has to make about Schulz’s life. The book contains 240 of them, and they have been brilliantly chosen. The task of culling the appropriate ones out of 50 years of daily cartoons must have been daunting.

The trouble with almost all biographies is that however much they tell us about the life and the career, they never tell us quite enough about the imagination, about the mysterious creative spark and process that in this case brought a world to life in the most minimalist of formats: a four-panel newspaper comic strip. We may wonder how Schulz developed such an elegant economy of image and word, how he brought forth the blanket-clutching philosopher Linus, or the Stein and Toklas of the funny pages, Peppermint Patty and Marcie, but the deepest sources of that inspiration lie hidden to Michaelis, and to us.

For some critics, the massive commercializing of “Peanuts” has tarnished Schulz’s achievement. Michaelis’ book may do a little to restore the lost radiance. In any case, it makes a strong argument that, like Charlie Brown, Charles Schulz deserves that highest of encomiums: a good man.