Charles Schulz: A Great and Good Man - 18 February 2000

A great man has died, probably the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain.

More than that, when a whole wall of the Louvre was given over to him in 1990, a French curator said: "Why not? He was after all the most famous artist in the history of the world."

You'll know, in an instant, who I'm talking about if I say that he had 355m readers around the world, appeared in 2,600 newspaper, 75 countries and was reproduced in 21 languages including three or four that I, supposedly at one time a linguistics student, had never heard of.

Charles Schulz is the man, the creator, father and protector of an immortal family of 10 kids, two dogs and a bird.

I have a problem in doing what I should most like to do, namely a full blown commemoration as I would do if it were Dickens or Mark Twain who'd died.

I don't know how one can bring alive those simply but beautifully drawn and immediately recognisable children. How to bring them alive to a blind audience?

Normally that's the great advantage of radio over television, a broadcaster - being essentially and nothing but a storyteller - enjoys the luxury of painting his pictures, the elements and the people of the story, on the imagination of a blind audience.

No distractions, such as bother him if he's telling a story on television. Nobody looking at the storyteller and thinking: "He looks so much older than I'd expected."

Before Charles Schulz, comic strips created or confirmed the regular cliches of family life: the nagging wife, the milk toast husband - remember Casper Milquestoast? He lasted for years, since timid hypochondriacal milk toast husbands afraid of everything from a mouse to a dentist are universal and have been with us for centuries. The interfering mother-in-law. And as for children they were either comically untidy or adorable or spunky naughty.

Then quietly with a sad and comic whimper in the late 40s Charles Schulz's frustrated family came into the world.

Many learned men since have called on Freud, Dostoevsky, Dickens to explain it. Umberto Eco was the last one I knew to try. Writing a preface to an Italian edition of a Schulz book of strips he wrote: "They concentrate in miniature all the neuroses of all the adults everywhere."

Schulz himself was sceptical when it came to large, literary generalisations about his work but he did once say: "Kids have to handle just the same curve balls as adults. They know it but the adults don't."

Recently he was interviewed on the most serious of our weekly investigative programmes. Most of us wouldn't have recognised him even if we'd been visiting our stepson in Santa Rosa, California, and he'd walked into the local coffee shop - which he did every morning, seven days a week for years and years, ordering the same breakfast, then going to his studio and off to work.

The $32m-a-year attributed to him might have been $32,000 for all it affected his plain living and grinding work, seven days a week. On Sunday afternoon he taught Sunday school.

So there we saw him: a remarkably well-modelled head, a handsome, clean-shaven man, younger looking than 77. A man with glinting glasses and a ready if not perpetual smile.

He smiled, he said, out of anxiety. Indeed during the same interview he said: "All my stuff comes out of anxiety or melancholy. The characters are me."

Was it Charlie Brown himself who said: "Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask: 'Why me?' And a voice answers: 'Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.' "

And Sally, Charlie's sister, was echoing nobody but her creator when she said: "Daytime is so you can see where you're going. Night time is so you can lie in bed worrying."

Schulz did that literally, more nights than he cared to count. And what he worried about was nothing but the next situation, the next crisis, what would be the next identity Snoopy the beagle might want to adopt - a racing pilot, an astronaut - and what to do with Woodstock, the scatterbrained bird they'd adopted.

Hey, why couldn't Woodstock invent bird bath hockey? - Another strip planned. Now he could go to sleep.

Mrs Schulz said that after a while when they were out driving together she gave up asking what he was thinking, she knew he was thinking about nothing but the family - the strip.

He never took, he refused to take, an idea from anyone else, just as he never hired a helping draughtsman or a writer of dialogue.

Ninety-five cartoonists in 100 do hire a writer to invent their captions. Charles Schulz, throughout 50 years, did everything - every drawing, every idea, ever line of dialogue of over 18,000 strips.

What moved him over from a great talent to a comic genius was the fact of his own creations - the family: Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Spike, Snoopy, Marcie, Sally, Franklin, Pigpen, Peppermint Pattie (the little red-haired girl, by the way, was a transplant from reality: the love of his life who'd turned him down) - the creation of this family and the thoughts he divined in them and expressed.

We have testimony from 1m children from Japan through every country in Europe that he was their favourite artist if not writer because he knew what they were thinking and their parents did not.

There are consequently situations and phrases and thoughts that have passed into American idiom - into the folk memory, you might say - and used by many people who don't know their origin.

Linus, Charlie Brown's pal, always carries a blanket with him, he called it a security blanket - a term which decades ago passed into the vernacular for any protective device - a savings account, say - any cushion against disaster.

And there are grey-haired men in their 60s who can recite the historic date of November 16th, 1952 - the first time that Lucy held a football at arms length for Charlie Brown to kick a field goal. Just as he kicked she snatched the ball away.

She's been doing the same thing for 47 years while the decent Charlie Brown hoped one day he might score.

Charlie Brown mooning over the little red girl who ignores him - always the loser.

"Good grief Charlie Brown, what's the matter with you?"

It's gone into the language as the standard complaint of a parent who doesn't, at the moment - or perhaps ever - know what his child is going on about.

When Schulz was asked why the moon-faced, trusting Charlie Brown never won, Mr Schultz exercised - I thought, watching him - great restraint, for he was plainly talking to an interviewer who didn't seem, at that moment, to have a clue to what Charles Schulz had been all about for the last 50 years.

Gently, with a reassuring chuckle, Mr Schulz said: "Well of course, winning is great but it's not funny and there are no happy endings in my stories because happiness too isn't funny."

That's a remark that goes deep, I think, into a vein - perhaps the nerve end - of all great, as distinct from jolly or talented, humorists.

A deep feeling that the ideal really happens in life. If it seems to, the victor is really a victim who deceives himself. It's true in James Thurber, in Erma Bombeck, in the best of Dickens.

A happy Woody Allen is an impossibility. Do you remember his response to the great theological question of a quarter of a century ago?

"Mr Allen do you think that God is dead?"

"Not only," he said, "is God dead but you can't get a dentist at the weekend."

The root of sadness, of defeat, is deepest of all in Mark Twain. His readers, a humble mass of ordinary folk, got it from the beginning but the American literary critics disdained to review such trash. They looked on it - if there'd been such a thing at the time - as comic strip literature.

It took an English critic to call him the American Chaucer - the father of a new native American literature. Bernard Shaw went further, he called Mark Twain the American Voltaire.

Wrote Mark: "This country can claim to have no distinctive criminal class except, of course, Congress." Everybody roared.

Shaw said: "If his applauding audience knew that he was deadly serious they would lynch him."

So drifting up forever, I believe, from Charles Schulz's grave will be memories of Linus who between thumb suckings thinks of sister Lucy as "the crab grass on the lawn of life".

Sally Brown whose frequent change of hairdos fails to beguile Linus.

Crabby, bossy Lucy, inspired by Charlie Brown to set up a roadside lemonade stand. Lucy sneering that every kid in America does that: she sets up a psychiatric stand - a clinic - five cents a cure.

And the debonair beagle Snoopy who sees himself best as a war ace, waving a fist at "curse you Red Baron" till he falls off the doghouse.

And forever, Charlie Brown himself, eagerly looking forward to parties and hearing the greeting: "Here comes good old Charlie Brown" but knowing that his pals privately call him "blockhead".

A month or two ago when Charles Schulz was diagnosed with a very bad form of cancer he felt his drawing hand failing.

He did a series of strips and he announced that the last one would appear everywhere on Sunday February 13th.

In the middle of the night between Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th, mercifully, he died in his sleep. He was 77.

You're a great and good man Charles Schulz and your family is with us, will stay with us, in Asia and Europe and the Americas and the smallest countries so long as children and grown ups can see and read, and fail to understand each other.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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