Interesting article...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/books/08schu.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven
years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the
"Peanuts" comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr.
Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also
liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the
Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to
his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.
But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in
December, members of the family were shocked by the ****trayal of a
depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after
different women.
"It’s not true," Monte said. "It’s preposterous."
His sister Amy Schulz Johnson felt the same. "The whole thing is
completely wrong," she said from her home in Utah. "I think he wanted
to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family."
"We were all really excited thinking we were going to get to say
things about our Dad," she said, complaining that the children play a
very small role in the book.
Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some
members of the family were, but that "to their children fathers are
always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that
paterfamilias." After interviewing hundreds of people, going through
every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive
research, Mr. Michaelis said, "this was the man I found."
"Did I get the story right?" he asked. "Absolutely. No question."
Mr. Michaelis referred to numerous interviews throughout Charles
Schulz’s life in which he talked about his own "melancholy" and
anxieties. "I have this awful feeling of impending doom," he said on
"60 Minutes" in 1999. "I wake up to a funeral-like atmosphere." Many
****traits of Schulz pick up the same theme. Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s
1989 biography, "Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,"
similarly describes him as depressed and plagued by panic attacks,
despite a large family and mammoth financial and critical success. Nor
does it seem that Mr. Michaelis made a secret of his perspective. He
wrote an appreciation of Schulz in Time magazine in December 2000
after his death at 77 in which he clearly laid out the thesis he
expands on in his 655-page book, sometimes word for word.
Mr. Michaelis’s biography, "Schulz and Peanuts," which HarperCollins
is releasing next week, is one of the most anticipated books of the
fall publi****ng season. Schulz’s cartoon panels are interspersed with
the text, and Mr. Michaelis uses them as revelations of the artist’s
emotions.
"He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that
inner life on the page," Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. "His
anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’"
"A normal person couldn’t have done it," he said.
Biographers often find themselves at odds with the friends and
families of their subjects. Clearly a loved one is not necessarily
objective, a family may want to protect a reputation or may be unaware
of hidden events or aspects of someone’s character. Janet Malcolm, in
a well-known provocative essay, offered another analysis, describing
the relation****p between a journalist and a subject as innately
deceptive and the journalist as "kind of a confidence man." Elements
of all these explanations have been invoked.
Jean Schulz, Charles’ second wife, said she read about three-quarters
of Mr. Michaelis’s third draft. She didn’t disagree that her husband,
whom friends called Sparky, was "melancholy," but she said that was
only part of the story: "It’s not a full ****trait. Sparky was so much
more. Most of the time he loved to laugh.
"Part of what puzzles people about Sparky was that he talked about the
actual physical sensation that he had from being anxious, the ‘sense
of dread’ when he got up in the morning. But he had a Buddhist
acceptance of life and its ups and downs. He functioned perfectly
well.
"David couldn’t put everything in," she said, but added, "I think
Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more
interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness." She quoted her
husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the
football: "Happiness is not funny."
What particularly disturbed her, she said, were Mr. Michaelis’s
judgments. "Every artist has to take a point of view," she said, "but
if David is going to say that Sparky is a consistently mean man, then
you need to back it up."
Charles M. Schulz’s son Monte, left, and the author David Michaelis,
who has written the biography "Schulz and Peanuts."
"The attribution is very vague," she said, mentioning anonymous
quotations.
Mr. Michaelis’s source notes for each chapter are organized by
subject, so it can be difficult to attach a particular quote to a
particular source.
Jean Schulz said that she had found factual errors, many of them
trivial, like whether a Redwood tree was dug up, but that "it just
makes me wonder about other things in the book." Mr. Michaelis
"obviously took notes," she said, but some things were clearly
"mistranscribed or misinterpreted."
Monte Schulz cited a number of small inaccuracies, including a mention
of a housekeeper serving dinner after she no longer worked for the
family; an incorrect reference to his father hearing him lecture at a
writer’s workshop; and what Monte said was a ridiculously low estimate
for building an ice-skating rink, which made it seem as if there were
a more than a 1,000 percent cost overrun.
He said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being ****trayed as
an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said,
"I am not talking to anybody about anything." Meredith Hodges, who
grew up as one of Schulz’s five children, only discovered as an adult
that he was not her biological father. She describes him in the book
as "cold," "distant" and "afraid to love," and she wrote in an e-mail
message, "No comment."
Mr. Michaelis in his biography describes Schulz as extremely generous,
devoted to his children, modest and funny, and Joyce as energetic,
capable and vibrant, but those traits do not get nearly as much space.
Amy Schulz Johnson, who described Schulz as “the most amazing
Christ-like father,” complained that Mr. Michaelis played up the
negative and left out the positive. “We all got deceived,” she said.
Still, Jean Schulz is sympathetic to the notion of a writer’s or
artist’s creative vision, pointing to her own husband. “David is
writing this for himself,” she said. “He’s got to be satisfied.”
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