BEFORE I could say “Happy birthday, Charlie Brown and Snoopy”, their creator, Charles Schulz, had a question for me. Did I know Margaret Drabble? It was lucky I did. Later he told his entourage that “this weird person from London” (me) would join them for lunch. “But she knows Margaret Drabble so that’s all right.”
He once plucked up courage to ring Drabble and they briefly met. (She was thrilled.) Now he has found another British woman novelist. “Her first name starts with A, her last name with B” (these days he says he has trouble remembering War and Peace); then he recalled it was Anita Brookner. Should he ring her, too? “She might not like me,” he said. “She might say, who is this dull person?”
This Charlie Brownish anxiety about being liked comes from the world’s richest cartoonist (says Forbes magazine) with 90m readers (Guinness Book of Records). He is world famous, yet unknown; happy not to venture far from Santa Rosa in northern California, where he owns an ice rink next to his studio at 1, Snoopy Place.
But he came to Los Angeles last Tuesday where the Natural History Museum launched an exhibition of Schulziana, 40 years to the day since his first strip was published. The exhibition has everything from pencils to solid gold Snoopies from Cartier. But such baubles have little to do with the real appeal of the work of Schulz, who still draws a strip every day.
Schulz — “Sparky” to his friends — is tall, lean, modest. Like Charlie Brown he was the son of a barber who loved comics. Charles, an only child, was nicknamed Sparky after Spark Plug, a horse on a strip called Barney Google, popular in 1922.
He enrolled in a $170 art correspondence course. Like Jude the Obscure, a favourite novel, he pursued self-education. He took an evening class in English literature and the literary references are part of Peanuts lore — even Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night”, from Bulwer-Lytton.
One day his first wife, Joyce, came in and told him the local ice rink would close. He at once decided to build “the world’s most beautiful ice arena”. This became the Redwood Empire, not just for skate-mad Schulzes but also “for the community”. His daily routine starts there. He drives from the secluded hills down to the rink at 7.30am and has breakfast in the Warm Puppy cafe.
His wife Jeannie (they met at the ice rink) says: “The act of going out, having his breakfast table, with people around who say hello, helps him get off his central depression and get his day going.” He also has tennis courts (where he plays with Billie-Jean King) and a baseball diamond.
But most days he is at the drawing board. “All this,” says Schulz, gesturing to the keyrings, lunch boxes and designer doll Snoopies, “is irrelevant. The most gratifying thing is still the drawing, getting the exact expression straight onto the paper.
“I draw a comic strip for the same reason someone else plays Chopin all alone. Not to make other people happy.”
Schulz still letters every word, draws every tiny line of Woodstock’s birdspeak, with a hand that at 67 is shakier than it used to be. The pen he likes is no longer made so he bought all known stocks. People who seek original drawings are told: “Mr Schulz does not care to have his artwork sold.” He does not even send originals for publication.
A recent biography, entitled Good Grief, emphasises the glooms and depressions that punctuate his life. Is it any more than a sensitivity to life’s little ironies, the essential Charlie Brown-ness of things? Jeannie Schulz says: “I spent the first few years of my marriage trying to work this out, saying who is this person? But I don’t even know how seriously he takes his own glooms.”
Umberto Eco, the writer and professor of semiotics, reveres Schulz as part of American cultural history. “I guess he just likes comic strips,” says Schulz (who finds Eco’s novels hard to get through).
Intellectuals may dwell on the profounder significance of Peanuts. But nothing can shake Schulz’s modesty. “I’ve been invited to speak at Cambridge,” he says, flattered but daunted. “What would I do with my dog Andy?” (He has a plaster on his hand where Andy scratched him while seizing a biscuit.) “Andy needs me. He’d miss me. And all these clever people — they’d be way over my head.”
Charles Schulz died in 2000, aged 77
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