Book Club / December
Peanuts cartoonist led joyless life, according to new biography
He brought joy to millions, but a biography of Charles Schulz shows he was a troubled man
Everybody feels like they know Charles Schulz, king of the funnies, after reading his musings for 30 years. Good grief! He’s the artist who brought happiness to so many as the world’s most popular cartoonist. He’s the creator of Snoopy, the incarnation of joy in beagle form and — not incidentally — a visionary of merchandising, who made the Snoopy doghouse sheets on children’s beds a possibility.
He’s the man who wrote “Happiness is a warm puppy,” launching a million awwwwwws.
Everybody knew his work, but Schulz, the muse of happiness, was actually pulling off a tour de force of public improvisation. The lasting impression left by “Schulz and Peanuts,” the biography drawn from his voluminous papers and seven years of interviews, is one of profound melancholy. Charlie Brown, his main character and alter ego, never had anything go right. But how could the man who wrote, “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt,” be the same man who said to his wife, Joyce, during their 1951 honeymoon, “I don’t know if I can ever be happy”?
That is the fundamental tension of David Michaelis’ 704-page tome: So where did he get all the funny from? While tracing, in exhaustive detail, the path of the German barber’s son whose work redefined the form, Michaelis has assembled an impressively intimate portrait of a man he never met.
Schultz and Peanuts:
A biography By David Michaelis Harper
702 pages,
$20
Schulz grew up in St. Paul, Minn., through the Great Depression, proud of his hardworking father, but craving emotional ties. His parents provided for him and cared in their own way. But Carl Schulz, a German, and Dena Halverson, a Norwegian, were emotionally parched people. The deprivation was to leave its marks on the boy that would last throughout adulthood.
In 1943, Schulz’s mother died after a long, agony-wracked struggle with cancer. He came to see her after being drafted, on compassionate leave because the end was near.
“He said he guessed it was time to go . . .,” Michaelis writes of the moment.
“ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘good-bye, Sparky. We’ll probably never see each other again.’ ”
There is no mention of tears. John Updike, reviewing the biography in The New Yorker, offered that “A bleaker deathbed blessing has seldom been recorded.”
When the timid boy went off to the war and came back to St. Paul in 1945, shaken but uninjured, his father did not stop working to greet him. He finished trimming the hair of the customer sitting in his barber’s chair instead.
Schulz put his passion to cartooning instead. He found his hard work rewarded, and promoted his work relentlessly, rarely turning down a media interview.
The artist in his element had few peers. It was only when he stepped away from the drawing table that his life faltered.
He was a devout Christian who could never say “hell” because it was inappropriate, but cheated on his wife with a young woman who interviewed him. A man rich enough to build his own ice rink, and mean enough to deliver a two-handed slash during a pickup game that left the victim — his son — hobbling for days.
With satisfying frequency, Michaelis presents a Peanuts strip to illustrate how on many occasions, Schulz simply trimmed a morsel of his life to fit the demands of a four-panel gag.
Schulz sought happiness with two wives and numerous other people but never seemed to find what he craved for so long until his 2000 death of colon cancer. He was 77.
Despite his inner turmoil, Schulz’s fierce dedication to his art gave us Snoopy as the Red Baron, Linus clutching his blanket, Lucy lining up the football of Charlie Brown yet again.
Schulz fiercely guarded the integrity of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” refusing to approve a laugh track when such measures were standard for Christmas programming. This season, his classic will move another generation of viewers, Schulz’s unhappiness outlived by his vision of joy and peace.
