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December 20, 2007
I GOT A ROCK
I’m halfway through Charles Schultz’s biography. It is at once fascinating and frustrating, more the former than the latter certainly, but somewhat irritating nonetheless. Like most biographies, the author has done such extensive research that he feels authorized to play absentee psychiatrist for a person who is no longer with us – hence there are all kinds of Oedipal overtones that I’m extremely skeptical of.
Most biographers labor very hard to tie their subject into some kind of archetypal meta-narrative (someone should write about this, if they haven’t already). A few years back, I was thoroughly bored by a Nick Drake biography that mystifyingly compared his trajectory to the sinking of the Titanic. David Michaelis chooses, for some inexplicable reason, Vikings. One of his chapter titles is “The Dawning of the Age of Snoopy.” Don’t get me wrong: I prefer this to the alternative, where the intellectual biographer makes no attempt to make his subject’s life relevant to anyone who might not have a passion for him/her.
Also, it is 300 pages too long – did we really need to 20 pages of details about Schultz’s cousins? And I seriously doubt that Schultz really spent years thinking he was a failure (as Michaelis implies), when by 30 he was already becoming the most successful cartoonist the world has ever known. This seems like a melodramatic addition.
Yet the biography remains interesting despite these extraneous details mainly because of the Schultz’s complicated neuroses and relationship to his success. Did you know, for instance, that:
- There really was a little red-haired girl? Her name was Donna, and when Schultz knew her she was dating another dude as well. And she kept telling them she was going to choose between them, and in the end did not choose “Sparky” (Schultz) – telling him on her front porch.
- Schultz worked at one of those correspondence art schools that advertise on the inside of matchboxes?
- Schultz hated the name Peanuts and spent most of his grand artistic career bitter about the arbitrary title?
- In one of those wonderful, iconoclastic “Road Less Taken” moments that ultimately shaped the landscape of newspaper comics, Schultz turned down an opportunity to work for Disney, then at the height of its powers, and decided to do his own strip.
- Peppermint Patty was based on his tomboyish cousin, but Schultz kept this private this due to the fact that P.P. became a lesbian icon?
- The real Charlie Brown (whose name was Charlie Brown) was not “the real Charlie Brown” because, according to Schultz, he took the name and not the personality. But “the real Charlie Brown” was not only a shameless opportunist who seemingly blamed Schultz for his troubled life. A similar thing happened to the “Real George Costanza.”
The one thing I absolute agree with Michaelis about is the assumption of Schultz’s genius. I agree that Schultz tapped into the zeitgeist of a culture and wrote of on its defining texts. Peanuts stands up to anything written in this century, and should be studied by those wishing to understand amorphous ideas of identity in any decade in which Schultz was alive and drawing. It reflects that uncanny mix of post-war disillusionment and prototypically American idealism that hangs like a fog over the history of the mid-1900s. Michaelis as literary critic is convincing (though with me he’s preaching to the converted) in elevating Schultz to some level of literary pantheon. Here is a typical passage:
“Again and again, he presented himself to the public on these terms: born into the world as ‘just an ordinary person from the Midwest,’ but possessed of intelligence and native talent, which he had the wit and will to harness, he had come to intuit his destiny at an early age. No one in his upbringing had the vision or sensitivity to grasp the extraordinary of his quest – except for his silent sidekick, a wildly uncontrollable dog.”
So on that level, I appreciate the work and I really appreciate Schultz. I’m interested to see where it goes from where. For instance, I wonder how Schultz felt about the cartoons with their wonderful Vince Guaraldi scores. Also I’m curious how he reacted to the political comic satire of BLOOM COUNTY and DOONESBURY, or the birth of the astonishing popularity of the only comic character to share the level of Charlie Brown – Garfield.
A good Christmas read.
| By Andytown | 12:07 PM
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Comments
I've not read the book, but I distictly remember that Shultz's family was very angry upon its release, due to the potrait of Shultz as a depressed, self-loathing man who considered his whole life a failure, which they said was ridiculous.
By the way, I think you mean "The Real Kramer." The Real Costanza would be Larry David, who is still enjoying what the show brought him.
Posted by: Sean at December 21, 2007 08:32 AM