Mari Ness - Peanuts

So I just finished reading a biography of Charles Schultz by David Michaelis. Like many of you, I grew up on Peanuts; I always grabbed for the strip when I could. My parents rarely bothered with a daily paper, but I did read the Sunday funnies, tgregoryt collected Peanuts collections which I more than occasionally stole from him, and I had three small Snoopys, even while I longed for one of those dress up Snoopy dolls, which I never got. I read Peanuts during its more mellow years; it was a bit of a shock to read the collections from the 1950s and realize how genuinely nasty the strip was in its original days, back before it mellowed it.

I assumed that like most artworks, Peanuts had its roots in Schultz's life, a thesis that Michaelis sets out to prove by illustrating Schultz's life and background with various strips. Schultz grew up in what seems to have been a rather repressed Midwestern household before heading off to World War II; he then fell in unrequited love numerous times until he met his first wife, Joyce, who, Michaelis tells us, helped inspire the character of Lucy.

I kinda have to question that one – largely because I cannot imagine living with an actual Lucy, day in, day out, but then again, Schultz did eventually divorce his first wife, and it's possible to see connections between Lucy's demand for attention from the piano obsessed Schroeder to problems in the Schultz's marriage when the withdrawn artist failed to give his wife emotional support. Michaelis seems to be on slightly firmer ground when he connects Snoopy's happiness after meeting an adorable girl beagle with soft paws to Schulz's meeting an adorable girl human with, sigh, soft paws, that he clearly fell into an utter passion for.

The biography occasionally lacks of sense of timing and sequence of events – an aside about Schulz's troubles with union workers in 1978 inexplicably appears in the middle of a narrative about 1971 events, for instance, a narrative flaw that becomes a much larger problem when Michaelis is talking about Schultz's second wife, Jeanne – although the two met while Schultz was legally married, the biography is confused on the timing, making it unclear whether they met before Schultz left his first wife, or afterwards. Given that the biography quite openly describes an earlier affair where Schultz was still living with his first wife, this seems an odd thing to be confused about. (Since many of the people in the biography are still alive, however, it's possible that some of this happened to shield the privacy of living people.) And some of the connections between the strips and events in Schultz's life seem, to put it kindly, to be a bit of a stretch.

But I sensed a deeper problem in the biography, the sense that although Michaelis had done all of the interviews, read all of the documents, studied all of the cartoons, in the end, he hadn't really understood an essential part of Schultz – the cartoonist's clinical depression and severe agoraphobia, which clearly haunted the strip and his relationships with family and friends. It reminded me of the multiple biographers who choose to write about bisexual people (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Queen Christina of Sweden, Lord Byron) while insisting, against all available evidence, that their subjects most certainly couldn't possibly be bisexual, even when they were fantasizing about/falling in love with/actually sleeping with both genders. That fundamental lack of understanding not only made the biographies frustrating, but also kept the biographers from gaining an insight, or an acceptance, into their subjects, and places barriers between the person and the readers. The same thing happens here: at the end, I felt that I knew more about Schultz from just his strip; the book had filled in fascinating background detail, but failed to understand his depression.

I'm not suggesting that writers can only write about what they know – if we did that, we wouldn't be writers. But I'm not sure that anyone who doesn't understand, really understand, clinical depression, should be writing a biography focusing on someone with clinical depression.