Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for nearly half a century, and the comic strip became a touchstone for the baby boom generation: an epic meditation, at once rueful and barbed, about the disappointments and existential quandaries of life, a funny-sad-wistful portrait of a recognizable world in which love goes unrequited, baseball games are always lost and the Great Pumpkin never shows up.
The ever hopeful, ever rejected Charlie Brown; his cynical, rage-filled nemesis, Lucy Van Pelt; the philosophical and self-possessed Linus; the fanatic pianist Schroeder and Snoopy, that bumptious beagle with the extraordinary fantasy life: These were characters who resonated with a generation that came of age during that perplexing period of transition as the country lurched from the somnolent 1950s into the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s. And they were characters, as David Michaelis observes in his revealing new biography, deeply rooted in their creator's own life. It's not just that Charlie Brown embodied Schulz's own melancholy temperament and insecurities; it's not just that Lucy represented his first wife's bossy impatience. It's that all the characters represented aspects of the deeply conflicted artist himself. As Michaelis writes, Schulz "gave his wishy-washiness and determination to Charlie Brown," his sarcasm to Lucy, "his dignity and 'weird little thoughts'" to Linus, his "perfectionism and devotion to his art to Schroeder," his sense of "being talented and unappreciated to Snoopy."
It is Michaelis' achievement in these pages that he leaves us with both a shrewd appreciation of Schulz's minimalist art and a sympathetic understanding of Schulz, the man. He shows us how Schulz's sense of vocation as a young child, fueled by a fierce ambition, led him to the career he'd always wanted, and how he gradually assimilated a host of influences to find a voice that was inimitably his own. He also shows us how Schulz constructed an anomalous fictional world that captured the public imagination, eventually reaching readers in some 75 countries, 2,600 newspapers and 21 languages.
At times the author's prodigious research may overwhelm the casual reader, who may well wonder if we really need to know about all of Schulz's unrequited crushes, all his panic attacks and spasms of self-doubt. But Michaelis, who had access to Schulz's papers, has done a fluent job of weaving the many facts and anecdotes he's collected into an engaging narrative that underscores how the artist's solitary childhood in Minnesota - as the only child of a father preoccupied by work and a withholding, erratic mother - shaped both his insecurities and his will to succeed.
This shy, dutiful, painfully insecure boy was nicknamed Sparky (after the horse Spark Plug in the comic strip Barney Google), and beneath the Charlie Brown self-doubt he harbored an almost magical sense of destiny. From early on he was always doodling and drawing; by the time he was a teenager, he was studying how-to-draw-cartoons books and taking a correspondence course in illustration.
Two nearly simultaneous events - the death of his mother from cancer and his induction into the US Army in 1943 - would abruptly end Sparky's sheltered childhood, heightening his fears of abandonment and loss of control. These very same emotions would fuel his characters' struggles, just as they would shape Schulz's willful self-sufficiency - his determination (maintained to the very end of his life) to draw "every single one of the 17,897 strips" without assistants. No doubt they also explain his fascination with Citizen Kane, a movie he would watch "perhaps as many as 40 times," identifying with Orson Welles' hero, who succeeded on a scale beyond the grandest of his childhood dreams and yet struggled to find love and security.
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