Foreword by Jonathan Franzen

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958

Was Charles Schulz‘s comic genius the product of his psychic wounds? Certainly the Schulz depicted in Rheta Grimsley Johnson‘s authorized biography, Good Grief (1989), was a mass of resentments and phobias that seemed attributable, in turn, to emotional traumas in his youth: his unpopularity at school, his skinniness and pimples, the rejection of his drawings by his high school year book, the death of his mother on the eve of his inudction into the army, the little red-haird girl’s rejection of his marriage proposal, and so on. The man who became the best-loved artist on the planet was increasingly prone to attacks of depression and bitter loneliness. (“Just the mention of a hotel makes me turn cold,” he told Grimsley.) Although he left his native Minnesota, he replicated its comforts in California, building himself an ice rink whose snack bar was called “The Warm Puppy.” By the 1970s, he was reluctant even to get on an airplane unless someone from his family was with him. Here — the armchair psychologist might think — was a classic instance of the pathology that produces great art: wounded by adolescent traumas, our hero took permanent refuge in the childhood world of Peanuts.

But what if Schulz had chosen to become a toy salesman, rather than an artist? Would he still have lived such a withdrawn and emotionally turbulent life? I suspect not. I suspect that Schulz the toy salesman would have gutted his way through a normal life the same way he’d gutted out his military service. He would have done whatever it took to support his family — begged a Valium prescription from his doctor, had a few drinks at the hotel bar.

Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life — to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this — is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason that Schulz‘s early sorrows look like “sources” of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them. Almost every young person experiences sorrows. What’s distinctive about Schulz’s childhood is not his suffering but the fact that he loved comics from an early age, had a gift for drawing, and was the only child of good parents.

This is not to say that the depressive and failure-ridden Charlie Brown, the selfish and sadistic Lucy, the philosophizing oddball Linus, and the obsessive Schroeder (whose Beethoven-sized ambitions are realized on a one-octave toy piano) aren’t all avatars of Schulz. But his true alter ego is clearly Snoopy: the protean trickster whose freedom is founded on his confidence that he’s lovable at heart, the quick-change artist who, for the sheer joy of it, can become a helicopter or a hockey player or Head Beagle and then again, in a flash, before his virtuosity has a chance to alienate you or diminish you, be the eager little dog who just wants dinner.

On page 183 of the current volume you will find a strip in which Snoopy grabs Linus’s blanket in his teeth, swings Linus round and round in the air, sends him flying skyward, and reflects: “I’m the first dog ever to launch a human being!” This strip probably refers to the Russian space dog Laika, who was launched in November 1957, but it could also serve as a description of the volume as a whole. In the 1960s, Peanuts would break free of gravity altogether — achieve a degree of popularity for which there was not remotely any precedent, abandon all pretense of depicting realistic children and animals, and attain the stylistic escape-velocity at which an artist is no longer shadowed by any precursor himself. What launched the strip to such heights was, above all, the character of Snoopy. The years 1957 and 1958, which this volume covers, find Snoopy being transformed from a cartoon dog into the I-am-what-I-am of later years. These are the years when his snout reaches maximum extension, double or triple its original length. He still sheds fur, fetches balls, chases birds, and licks people for no reason; but now, for the first time, he does things that aren’t conceivably doglike; he stands on Schroeder’s piano and plays a violin; he suits up for baseball. Meanwhile, the children’s personalities are settling into their now-familiar contours, and Schulz is developing the longer narrative sequences and archetypal gags (Linus’s blanket, Charlie Brown’s kite, Lucy’s competition with Beethoven, Charlie Brown’s “pencil pal,” the baseball sequences) that characterize his breakthrough work.

One long-running gag, given treatment in multiple strips for the first time in 1958, is Charlie Brown’s yearly failure to get any valentines. In Peanuts, A Golden Celebration, published shortly before his death, Schulz told a Valentine’s story from his own childhood. When he was in first grade, his mother helped him get valentines for everybody in his class, so that nobody would be offended by not getting one; but he felt too shy to put them in the box at the front of the classroom, and so he took them all home again to his mother. At first glance, Schulz‘s story recalls a strip on page 97 of this volume: Charlie Brown peers over a fence at a swimming pool full of happy kids, then he goes home and sits by himself in a bucket of water. But Schulz, unlike Charlie Brown, had a mother on duty — a mother to whom he chose to give his whole basket of valentines.

A child deeply scarred by a failure to get valentines would probably not grow up to draw lovable strips about the pain of never getting valentines. (A child like that — one thinks of R. Crumb — might instead draw a valentine box that morphs into a female body part that devours his valentines and then devours him, too.) Beneath the conventional narrative of Schulz‘s childhood failures is the story of a happy young man oversupplied with parental love. His little family’s closeness gave him strength; its closedness probably helped estrange him from the world. Love feeding art feeding estrangement feeding forgiveness: the gifts Schulz was given became his gift to us.

The Complete Peanuts is the place to find out more about the collection and its publication in the UK. Subscribe to our RSS feed.

Previous: Foreword by Matt Groening · Next: Foreword by Russell T. Davies