PEANUTS: A Glimpse into Our Futures
I read newspapers. I love the physicality of this habit—and the memories. The Chicago Tribune, cold from the front porch, crinkling on the breakfast table. And during the years I taught high school, the daily newspaper helped me answer student questions, be alert to the latest play, film, hit record, recreational drug. If you want to relate to high school students, you have to know more than the significance of the green light at the end of the dock or the names of Willy Loman’s boys. I even taught a brief unit on Don McLean’s American Pie. If you were not up on current music, you didn’t know what the hell he was singing about.
CARTOON MAGIC
There’s a familiar phrase used by comedians and journalists, See you in the funny papers. And there was a cartoon that supplied us with more than wonderful laughs. Because some people actually SAW themselves in its characters: Charles Schulz’s PEANUTS.
Today, in the LA TIMES, Patrick J. Kiger calls PEANUTS a pervasive cultural presence, “and in some ways Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy were the graphic equivalent of the Beatles.” YES! PEANUTS was that popular. And an influencer, with no Instagram in sight.
PROBLEMS in CHARLES SCHULZ LAND: A Few of the Characters
There was Charlie Brown (Schulz’s own persona) who struggled to have the Red Headed Girl notice him. He is the player-manager of the baseball team and often its pitcher, though his team is “winless.” Charlie Brown fights against his inferiority complex. When tomboy Peppermint Patty comes on the scene, she calls him Chuck. Fans of the sitcom, FRASIER–do you see Charlie Brown in the Kelsey Grammar character? My husband does.
Then there’s Schroeder, who would rather play Beethoven on his piano, than pay attention to Lucy, who tries to make him fall in love with her, who plays the role of the bossy girl. Snoopy is a beagle whose best friend is Woodstock, a canary. Snoopy decides that he is a writer and tries to get his work published. He also has a wonderful imagination.
It’s super long, but that’s the title of a new anthology where over three dozen novelists, memoirists, cartoonists, critics and journalists talk about how their childhoods and beyond were influenced by the PEANUTS characters and how they dealt with their own problems.
Do you see yourself in any of these comments??
Lisa Birnbach, coauthor of THE OFFICE PREPPY HANDBOOK, relates that she was a timid, self-conscious third grader who wore thick glasses because of her poor vision. She identified more with Charlie Brown, but when putting on a school production of The Wonderful World of Peanuts, her teacher cast her as Lucy, and told her she couldn’t wear her glasses on stage. Lisa panicked, but once on stage the audience’s cheers liberated her. She writes: “I suddenly felt like an 8-year-old femme fatales and I also decided that I didn’t have to be Charlie Brown my whole life. I could get contact lenses.
Kevin Powell is a writer and activist who wrote: MY MOTHER. BARACK OBAMA. DONALD TRUMP. AND THE LAST STAND OF THE ANGRY WHITE MAN, talks about his single-parent household and how money was terribly tight. He referred to the image of Lucy pulling the football away just when Charlie Brown tried to kick it.
“That image served as a metaphor for my own tough life. How will we ever not be poor? Will we ever be able to leave this ghetto life? Why do I feel so close yet so far from relief, from hope?” But in Charlie Brown, Powell also saw a kindred spirit, that “I related to instinctively.”
Rick Moody, the author of the 1994 novel, THE ICE STORM, says that he read Peanuts avidly and even wore a sweatshirt with Snoopy on a surfboard. He admired the dog’s cool, his ability to fantasize, imaging himself to be a World War I flying ace. But he recalls identifying with Charlie Brown and his awkwardness which mirrored his own social struggles.
Ann Patchett, author of eight novels, spent her summers in Paradise, California where she says she would lie in the grass near the birdbath reading collections of Schultz’s comic strips. She found herself drawn to Snoopy’s witticisms rather than to Virginia Woolf. “Even when I was old enough to know better, I was more inclined toward To the Doghouse than To the Lighthouse. I was more beagle than Woolf.” Patchett mentions the closeness that many writers feel to Snoopy and his resilience after his novels were rejected. “Snoppy taught me that I would be hurt and that I would get over it.”
THANKS FOR READING. Was there a PEANUTS character that you identified with? Of course for me, the cartoon at the head of this post says it all.
Thanks LA TIMES and Patrick J. Kiger
