Indomitable Spirit: Andrew Blauner on Charlie Brown and the Genius of 'Peanuts'

"Before 'Peanuts,' comic strips were populated by adults who acted like children. 'Peanuts' is populated by children who think and talk like adults. The strip talks about real problems."

WHY THE CLASSICS?

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Why would we feature Peanuts in Why The Classics? The better question might be, how could we not? The comic strip, which ran for 50 years, contains multitudes, with meditations on unrequited love, philosophy, psychology, the status of outsiders, and so much more. Beloved by presidents and read by 350 million people at its peak, Peanuts inspired the most-produced musical in history and has recently been reincarnated on Apple TV. At a time when the world seems particularly dark, we decided that now might be a good moment to share our interview with Andrew Blauner—a literary agent, anthologist, and the editor of The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life.

Wagener Paintings Gallery

Octavian Report: What inspired you to create The Peanuts Papers?

Andrew Blauner: The origin story—aside from having the plush toys and watching the holiday specials as a kid—is that I’m a literary agent representing other people’s books. I was working on an anthology called Our Mothers’ Spirits: Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men. I was watching A&E’s Biography and it was about Charles Schulz, whom I knew at the time didn’t give a lot of interviews and when he did he was rather stoic and didn’t get emotional. When he started talking about his mom—and if you’re obsessed with Peanuts, you know Schulz and his mother had a very loaded, intense relationship; she was very ill when he was young and died—there was something in his affect that made me think, “Well, maybe I’ll take a shot and write to him.”

I sent a letter expecting a nice form-letter declination. Instead I got a personal note, politely-as-humanly-possible declining to write for that book, but saying if I ever found myself in Santa Rosa, California, please stop by. Next thing I knew I was in his office talking to him, and he couldn’t have been nicer.

What I do—not for a living, but as labors of love—is to put together collections of writing on topics that are near and dear to me. It can be baseball or brothers or Central Park or coaches or Boston. I’d read David Michaelis’s biography of Schulz and I thought there was something still to be said and to be written about Peanuts and its place in history and our culture and our minds and our hearts.

OR: Why do you think Peanuts is so powerful? Why has it stood the test of time?

Blauner: There’s a piece in The Peanut Papers by Chris Ware, who’s a great cartoonist in his own right but also writes incredibly well. And the question came up: is Peanuts dark? And he said: “No, it’s real.”

That’s part of it. He also pointed out that before Peanuts, comic strips were populated by adults who acted like children. Peanuts is populated by children who think and talk like adults. The strip talks about real problems. Like unrequited love. Everyone has been in love with someone who didn’t love them back.

OR: What were some of the more surprising insights into Peanuts that you found among the contributions?

Blauner: Ann Patchett essentially says that she wouldn’t have become a writer had it not been for Peanuts. Jennifer Finney Boylan writes about Pigpen and Peppermint Patty and Franklin and being an outsider. But perhaps the biggest revelation for me was that I went into the project feeling some apprehension about the book being monotonous or homogeneous. I thought: “Everybody loves Snoopy and everybody is going to want to write about Snoopy.” Well, not everybody loves Snoopy! A lot of people think he’s sort of a narcissist. A lot of people really love Charlie Brown or really identify with Linus. Schulz himself was on record saying that of all the characters, the one who had the best chance of leading a happy, healthy adult life would be Linus.

OR: Do you agree with the critics of the strip who say it lost something when Snoopy became more prominent?

Blauner: I never thought that way before I worked on this project. But as a result of immersing myself in it and going back and looking at the strips, I’ve come around to that way of thinking: that the halcyon days probably were the 1960s.

It was revelation to some people that Schulz hated the name Peanuts, that it was foisted on him by the syndicate. He always thought the strip should be called Charlie Brown or Charlie Brown and His Friends. If you asked him what he did, he would never say he drew Peanuts. He would say, “Oh, I drew Charlie Brown and Snoopy and their friends.”

He never wanted to go on record about things. He was a lifelong Republican who said he regretted not voting for Kennedy, but otherwise—though Barack Obama loves Peanuts, and Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Richard Nixon all loved it—he never got into politics. Anything he had to say, he said through his characters. When he announced that he had to stop drawing the strip because of his health, he died within 24 hours.

We are now 70-some years out from the strip starting, and 20-some years since there was a new strip. Yet there was a new Peanuts movie. Apple TV launched a new Peanuts channel. There was a new float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There was a new national tour of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which is the most produced show in American musical history at close to 40,000 productions. Are we having a new Peanuts moment? Or has it just been one 70-year-long moment?

OR: Do you think that the power comes from the writing or the art or both? Is there a philosophy in Peanuts that you think has touched people?

Blauner: Robert Johnson, a professor at Syracuse, said in the book that this was the longest-running story ever told by a single person. You’ve got people saying that Schulz was the only writer that they’ve been reading their whole life.

About what the magic is, I don’t pretend to have the answer. But I do have a newfound appreciation for the actual drawing of the strip. There’s a paradox: on one level, it’s very simple. The stories and the storytelling and the characters are simple. Charlie Brown always wears the same shirt. But these are four-, five-, and six-year-olds who have no parents. (Somebody pointed out that Snoopy is the only one whose parents ever actually appear in the strip.) This is a strip where it’s a kid’s world and just theirs, and they have real-world problems.

A lot of people come to Peanuts not as children but as grownups. Peter Kramer, who wrote Listening to Prozac and many other great books, writes about Lucy’s psychiatry stand. You’re overwhelmed by it because you start out thinking it’s sweet and charming and endearing, and then you realize how expansive and deep it is, and how much it’s gotten into your psyche and your heart.

It wasn’t for everyone, but it was for about 350 million people who read the strip at its peak in dozens of countries. I don’t know what could possibly be like that today, given how polarized the culture is.

OR: Is Charlie Brown is an alter ego for Schulz himself? Why do you think so many people identify with him?

Blauner: Both Charlie Brown’s and Charles Schulz’s fathers were barbers, but Schulz was definitive in saying that Charlie Brown was not him.

As for why so many identify with Charlie: Ronald Reagan’s favorite part of Peanuts was Lucy pulling the football away. Schulz said that he was always being asked, “Can’t you just let him kick the football once?” And he would always say, “No, I can’t. I won’t.” That riff ran for about 40 years. I remember feeling suckered into thinking maybe there was a chance. I think that will to keep fighting is what draws so many people into Charlie. Whether it was the losing streak of baseball games or flying the kite, Charlie Brown had it rough in a lot of ways, but he had an indomitable spirit.

OR: Do you have a favorite character?

Blauner: Yes, Snoopy. I realize it’s far from the case for everybody, but I’ve always loved Snoopy.

OR: Can you talk about the controversy among Schulz fans over Woodstock?

Blauner: There could almost be a Rorschach test based on: “If you were a Peanuts character, which one would you be?” It’s not a terrible idea; you can tell a lot about somebody by which character they identify with.

On Woodstock, when I saw Schulz that first time, I had two questions for him. One was: what was Franklin’s last name? My other question was: what gender was Woodstock? When I’ve told that story for the last 20 years somewhat sheepishly, people laughed at me. They just thought it was a silly question. He’s obviously a boy bird. But it wasn’t so obvious to me, and he never, ever annoyed me.

OR: Do you think that Schulz and Peanuts will be considered over time to be great literature?

Blauner:  I’ve worked in publishing as an agent and an anthologist for 25 years now, and yes, there’s a certain fungibility or fluidity to what we call different things. I’ve sometimes worked with writers and found out after the fact that they were considered an experimental writer or a science-fiction writer—and fortunately I didn’t know that, because I might not have taken them on in that case.

As of right now, is Peanuts literature? I don’t know. I hope so. Is it art? I think Schulz was of two minds about it. He always said he couldn’t take a compliment very well; he was also painfully shy and insecure. If people heaped too much praise on him, he would sometimes say “Yes, but I’m no Andrew Wyeth.” Which is why I think Snoopy had a Wyeth in his doghouse.

I remember as a kid loving the Beatles. I was a mimic and I thought, well, I could sing their songs and play like them. But you can’t. I’ve heard a lot of cartoonists say that there is a similar perception about Peanuts: you look at Charlie Brown’s head and think, “Well that’s not that hard, it’s only sphere and a few simple lines.” But it’s subtle. One of the writers in the book says, “It seems replicable, but it’s not.”

OR: When people look back at our culture, do you think it’ll be something that people take seriously?

Blauner: I think so. That feels easier to answer because, again, it’s been 70-plus years since it started. We’re more than 20 years since Schulz died. And here we are still discussing it.

But what does it mean to be taken seriously? Does it mean that it made a contribution that should be thought about? I think if you look at the contributors to The Peanuts Papers—Jonathan Franzen and Mona Simpson and Adam Gopnik—you get a sense of how elevated the conversation over Peanuts is. You asked whether in the future, people would back at Peanuts and take it seriously. I think we’re already doing that. I don’t think that’s going to change.