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.
In charting Schulz's life and career, Michaelis does a wonderful job of showing how both the Peanuts strip and its characters evolved. He notes that unlike Pogo and Li'l Abner, which were dense with "business," Peanuts was full of empty spaces and "didn't depend on action or a particular context" to hold the reader's attention. Rather, it "was about people working out the interior problems of their daily lives without ever actually solving them."
He observes that Charlie Brown developed from a somewhat cocky kid into a "stoical Everyman" ("a decent person," as Michaelis puts it) in response, in part, to the growing aggressiveness of Lucy, who evolved from a cute little girl into a domineering force of unreason "in the lineage of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen and James Thurber's controlling wives."
Snoopy, the beagle with Chaplin-esque moves and Quixote-like dreams, took the longest to develop fully. He started out as a smart but ordinary enough dog who walked on four legs and lived in an ordinary doghouse and became an exuberant creature who "often treated Charlie Brown and his friends as if he were their intellectual superior" while tolerating the foolish human things they did.
Snoopy skied, he surfed, he played tennis and golf, and he wrote (or at least started) a novel. His doghouse came to be furnished with a pool table, books, records and a van Gogh, and he would spend more and more time battling the Red Baron in his trusty Sopwith Camel.
At the same time his internal monologues increasingly came to reflect his creator's own musings and confusions. As Schulz's long first marriage began to unravel, Snoopy wondered about love and loss, and when Schulz became enamored with a young woman, Snoopy fell in love with a girl beagle at the Daisy Hill puppy farm. Both Schulz and Snoopy also developed crushes on the skating sensation Peggy Fleming.
By the late 1980s Peanuts had become a worldwide phenomenon, a merchandising empire generating more than US$1 billion a year and spreading "tens of millions of plush Snoopys the world over from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Congo to Togo, Norway to New Zealand, Cameroon to Canada." One of the first comic strips to deal with its characters' inner lives, a strip built upon its creator's own anxieties and losses had become, Michaelis writes, the "most widely syndicated cartoon on the planet, read by five percent of the world's literate population."
In December 1999, Schulz addressed a letter to his hundreds of millions of readers, announcing that he was going to retire; no one would succeed him in drawing the strip. Two months later, on Feb. 13, 2000, "the Sunday paper carrying his last cartoon arrived with the stunning news that Charles Schulz had died in his sleep of complications of colon cancer," Michaelis writes. "Just hours later the final Peanuts strip appeared in newspapers around the world. To the very end, his life had entwined with his art. As soon as he had ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be."
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