Review of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis (Harper, 2007)

I did not read Peanuts avidly when I was young—I’m not a Sunday or daily comics sort of guy. Partly because I never understood why it was called “Peanuts” in the first place. (This book answers that question, by the way.) But I did start to pay attention to the ongoing themes of adolescent angst as the TV specials started to accumulate, and felt the strange sense of despair that emerged from the panel by panel indignities of Charlie Brown. Who is this lad, and why does he hurt so much?

When my children were growing up, I watched the specials with them. As much as I could. I suffered through many VCR repeats of Snoopy, Come Home (“No dogs allowed!”). However, I do not believe I was in the original audience for the startling 1967 CBS debut of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” as in my family I was taught that Christmas was not to be celebrated as a religious holiday. But it became emblematic to me later in life, however, since Linus’s annual network reading of the Christmas Story came to assert itself as the “real meaning” of Christmas.

As an adult, I came to dread the seasonal TV treatments of the life and birth of Christ—by which I mean His erasure from public consciousness through Rudolph and Frosty except on avowedly religious channels, the Sunday morning TV ghetto, or the annual Christmas special of this or that Hollywood star or recording artist. Peanuts was the exception. Here was the unabashed declaration on network TV that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and was the savior of the world. Who was this Charles Schulz, and why was he so courageous, sentimental, devout?

Why cite this particular item, which is narrated in a pivotal moment by David Michaelis in his finely wrought but curiously unmoving biography of gifted but perpetually gloomy cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz? Because it identifies a central paradox in Schulz’ character, and his audience’s perceptions of him and what made his art compelling. It turns out that by the end of the 1960s, in some ways through no fault of his own, the public persona of Schulz was that of a conservative evangelical, subtlely using his entourage of diminutive characters to communicate God’s acceptance and the need to heal by forgiving each other our foibles and failures. (This was due in part to a popular 1960′s book by Robert Short called The Gospel According to Peanuts.)

In point of fact, Schulz’s Christian faith was ever-dwindling by the mid-1960′s, and fiercely fading by 1970, as he worried over the public identification of him with the more judgmental of Christian churches. This the case, even though, post-war, he had found comfort, companionship, and enduring relationships amidst the Church of God, one of hometown Twin Cities’ most conservative denominations. An active Sunday School teacher and Bible reader, Schulz perfected his character as well as his characterizations of the “Peanuts Gang” under the tutelage of several pastors who helped him reach adulthood seemingly with a sense of wholeness and perspective. But that was only on the surface, and Schulz lived a life of elusive happiness pitifully in need of constant reassurance.

Schulz grew up in “Germantown,” urban Minnesota (i.e., Minneapolis-St. Paul), son of a barber and doting mother, and learned to draw—more specifically, learned to cartoon—through the proverbial Art School Correspondence Course. He had doodled well during his stint in the Army, and came home looking to be credentialed and employed. Though a fierce competitor on the ice as a hockey player, his thin stature did not make him an athlete–and it was his sketches that advanced his ego. But do girls fall in love with artists who draw oddly proportioned, large-headed children?

As Schulz became known for his “Li’l Folks,” and their adult dilemmas, first locally, then regionally, and finally, internationally, his series became the most syndicated (and most lucrative) cartoon series in history. (Peanuts was the alternate title his publisher imposed when a trademarked cartoon known as “Little Folks,” was discovered. It was coined from the “Peanut Gallery,” the children’s audience arrayed in a popular live children’s show (somewhat the stranger forerunner to PeeWee Herman), called “Howdy, Doody.” Each show began with the strange greeting to the 40-some kids assembled in the studio audience by Chief Thundercloud, “How, Peanuts!” Schulz in fact hated the name, and endured years of people asking “Who, or Which One, is Peanuts?”)

His serial panels were among the first to be collected in book form and his characters first to be spokesmodels (Ford Motor Co.; Met Life) or merchandised in/as calendars and journals and coffee cups (“Happiness is a Warm Puppy”: imagine being the conveyer of that trademarked phrase, each imprint representing an expansion of a cartoon empire that rivaled that of Walt Disney, whose employ he once earnestly sought.) What happens between his humble beginnings, rise to fame and acclaim, and incredible wealth, and the close of his muted, subdued life is that good ol’ Charlie Schulz does become Charlie Brown. Or perhaps the reverse.

That’s no insight there—since many (too many for him) times in countless interviews he addressed the question (or accusation), “So you’re Charlie Brown?” Yes, he said, with no irony or subtlety. They lived inside each other. He had used the cartoon medium to express and relive his aging recollection and recreation of adolescent anxieties as well as his adult angst.

Each character had his or her special significance in his life, but Charlie Brown continually illustrates Schulz’ lifelong sense of being underloved, if not unloved, despite an apparently happy marriage with adoring children—as his ferocious pursuit of the “little red-headed girl,” rises in prominence in the 1980s. The latter came to be a real post middle-age preoccupation, as Schulz had an extra-marital affair fueled by a constant longing for younger admirers, addressed through incessant flirting and embarrassing love notes. This dalliance eventually led to the end of his first marriage, and animated his march toward a second, unto a woman whose break-up to which he directly contributed.

Michaelis’ work effortlessly and briskly traces Schulz’s life and times, illuminating 1950s culture and how Peanuts helped to reflect as well as shape the tentative “Silent Majority” of Americans who, to hear Charlie Brown tell it, lived always on the edge of disappointment and despair. Charlie Brown exemplified the “Peter Pan syndrome” later discussed in the 1970s—the predicament of the American male who never grows up, and never wants to grow up.

That Schulz could write and rewrite that tale is explained well by Michaelis as a choice made to identify implicitly with the rejection of being the “blockhead,” elevating shyness and agoraphobia to thematic catharsis whenever Lucy Van Pelt, the Doctor, was “in.” Which was always. The unanswered question to me was, why kick that football Charlie Brown again, when you could have been playing hockey? (Late in his career and before his divorce, the voice of Lucy had become the voice of Joyce, his first wife; indeed, he documented (boldly? cowardly?) their long, real-life harangues and his softly-spoken replies on the pages of this comic strip.)

Schulz’ legacy is to teach us that self-pity does not equate to goodness, and that lifelong preoccupation with security blankets insures a dysfunctional outlook. Snoopy, his greater alter-ego, the war hero, ladies man, rebel, and debonair canine, is his opposite, but also shallow in his own Walter Mitty way. Schulz saw extremes and no in-between.

Just as Charlie Brown was a boy who should have become a man, Snoopy was a pet who should have learned to fetch his master’s sticks. In a cartoon universe wherein a mute dog has the most to say, something has gone very wrong with the human population. Sorry, Charlie.

 
Posted in Books, TV, Vintage TV by Bruce Edwards

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