A Dark and Stormy Life

Schulz had very real tragedies in his life, especially early on. He was deeply dependent on his mother for love and protection but received little of it. In one outing, she shooed him off to play with his loutish cousins, who pelted him with corncobs. His father was a corner barber, and the family's occasional poverty made a lasting impression: when Charlie Brown asks little sister Sally what would happen if their father lost his shop, she says, "We'd probably starve to death." The insecurity was more than theoretical. As his mother lay dying an excruciating death from cervical cancer and no longer had the strength to shop or cook, Schulz sometimes went hungry. "Security," he later wrote in a strip, "is knowing there's some more pie left."

Like most artists, Schulz found grief more inspiring than happiness, but in his case he saw through a glass much more darkly than it really was. He constructed a legend—or a myth—of himself as a loser, as "dumb, dull [and] meek," Michaelis writes. "To what degree he had actually been recognized for his talent or skills … he was not about to give a strictly honest accounting … He knew that hurt, and the anger that sprang from it … was the taproot of his life's work. He must do anything to protect, conceal, and maintain its sources." To concede that teachers admired his talent, or that he had friends and was deeply loved, would have destroyed that taproot.

In one telling incident, Schulz submitted drawings to his high-school yearbook, encouraged by a teacher-adviser who championed him and his work. The yearbook's student staff, however, was not inclined to reward a boy who gave off an air of superiority (stoked by the teacher's patronage) and never attended meetings. Worse, Schulz had submitted drawings of contemporary student life for a yearbook whose design motif was archaic-looking silhouettes. The drawings were not published. Rather than attribute the rejection to these mundane, and arguably reasonable, reasons, Schulz turned it into "his first major intellectual grudge," Michaelis writes, and remembered it for decades. Schulz "thought of himself as a thwarted innocent, a lonely, misunderstood, good-hearted kid who wanted only to earn a little recognition" for his drawing. The conviction that he never got what he deserved provided "an energizing sense of injury"—and the inspiration for Charlie Brown.

From early childhood Schulz doodled on any paper he could get his hands on, and said that his ambition "from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip." After high school and service in World War II, he began sending off cartoons to Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post; the magazines rejected every one. Disney told him he was unqualified to work as an animator. But in 1947, while supporting himself as an art instructor at a correspondence school in Minneapolis, Schulz sold a four-panel strip he called "Sparky's Li'l Folks" to the Star Tribune; it was soon running weekly. From the first, Charlie Brown was Schulz's stand-in, lamenting in one strip that no one loves him; when Violet tells him that she and Patty do, he fires back, "But nobody important loves me."

The objects of his unrequited affection included Donna Mae Johnson, the redhead who worked in the art school's accounting department. She dated Schulz at the same time she was seeing another boy, whom she eventually chose over Sparky. After he got the news from her one day on her stoop, Schulz returned a few hours later to ask if she'd changed her mind. That wasn't the end of it. Schulz "was determined never to put [the rejection] to rest," Michaelis writes. Schulz told friends that Johnson rejected him because her mother disliked him, but in fact the decision was Johnson's alone. She wanted only a "plain, decent Lutheran life" as a housewife, something marriage to a rising cartoonist did not exactly promise, and she married a machinist who had no higher ambition than to take a firefighter exam. For the rest of his life, Michaelis writes, Schulz "would pose as the unappeasable Gatsbyesque lover of the golden—or, in his case, red-headed—girl." Schulz's wistful recollection of Johnson decades later made his friends feel sorry for his wife.

Schulz married Joyce Halverson, a newly divorced mother whose sister Schulz had dated, in 1951, telling her on their honeymoon, "I don't think I can ever be happy." It wasn't so much a prediction as a choice, Michaelis argues. Joyce told him Sparky liked to be depressed: "He said he wouldn't go to a psychiatrist because it would take away his talent" (shades of Lucy's 5? psychiatry practice). Misery became a strategy, for happiness, as Schulz said, "is not funny at all." ("I have deep feelings of depression," Charlie Brown confides in a 1959 strip. "What can I do about it?" "Snap out of it," Lucy replies.)