Author Jonathan Franzen examines the dark genius of ‘Peanuts’ in new book

At age 10, award-winning author Jonathan Franzen was a quiet and bookish lad. He then had, he later recalled, “an intense, private relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle.”

What shy boy wouldn’t love Snoopy? “He was the perfect sunny egoist, starring in his ridiculous fantasies and basking in everyone’s attention,” Franzen wrote.

Franzen, now 60, shared those observations in a New Yorker essay titled “The Comfort Zone” in 2004, later revised and retitled “Two Ponies,” which was included in his 2006 story collection “The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.”

Now “Two Ponies,” an insightful and personal examination of the enduring power and charm of Charles “Sparky” Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic, has returned to life in the new book “The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, and the Meaning of Life.”

Local Snoopy scholars and “Peanuts” fans can hear more about Franzen’s take on the world according to Schulz at “In Conversation: Jonathan Franzen” at 1 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 17, at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. Franzen will be joined onstage by Andrew Blauner, editor of “The Peanuts Papers,” who chose the author’s “Two Ponies” essay for inclusion in the new collection.

“Andy was putting together an anthology, and I was very happy to be included,” Franzen said by phone from his home in Santa Cruz.

“The Peanuts Papers” includes essays, memoirs, poems and even two original comic strips, with 33 artists and writers reflecting on the deeper truths to be found in the “Peanuts” comic strip, which spanned half and century and lives on in daily reprints in about 2,000 newspapers.

Contributors include Italian novelist Umberto Eco, and American authors George Saunders and Ann Patchett, as well as American cartoonist Chris Ware, creator of “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth.”

In Franzen’s view, Schulz did his best work on “Peanuts” during the first two decades following the strip’s debut in 1950.

“I have memorized the first 20 years of the ‘Peanuts’ canon. Almost every day I can quote some strip that fits the moment,” Franzen said. “Schulz was that great a talent.”

“Two Ponies,” Franzen’s essay in “The Peanuts Papers,” gets its title from a classic “Peanuts” strip in which Charlie Brown and Snoopy walk past the house of the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl, the object of Charlie’s unrequited adoration. He imagines the two of them riding ponies across the countryside.

Charlie sighs, “I wish I had two ponies.” Then he snaps at Snoopy: “Why aren’t you two ponies?”

It’s that tart, melancholy tone that gave the “Peanuts” strip its bite, Franzen observed.

The earlier strips seem superficially conventional, but harbored a satirical and even subversive subtext.

“It was his restrained rage that gave Schulz such an edge in the good years, and went into the creation of a character like Lucy,” Franzen said.

Schulz, who was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Paul, Minn., moved to Sonoma County in 1958,

“Schulz was happier after that, and not so angry,” Franzen said.

However, even though the lonely and hapless Charlie Brown reflects a side of Schulz, it would be mistake to characterize the cartoonist as some sort of tragic genius, Franzen said.

When Schulz died in 2000 in Santa Rosa, he had been writing and drawing the “Peanuts” comic strip for nearly 50 years. That’s hardly the portrait of a fragile talent.

“It’s a common misconception that genius is frail and damaged and that it’s the damage that makes that person talented,” Franzen said. “It’s really the other way around.”

As Franzen wrote, “Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of life - to grind out a strip every day for 50 years, to pay the very deep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It’s sort of choice only a tower and strength and sanity can make.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.