The week before last I blogged on “Peanuts.” Not the most august subject, I know. But there’s something about that comic strip that haunts me, that continues to mystify me. So I’m returning to it today.
In my earlier post, I wrote that for the last three decades of the strip’s existence the spirit was gone. Charles Schulz just imitated himself over and over, hardly ever striking an emotionally authentic note. But there’s an exception. I remember one episode from sometime in the 1990s where the feeling was exactly right—not the same feeling “Peanuts” had in the 60s, but something just as true, that ran just as deep. Three years ago, reading David Michaelis’s brilliant biography Schulz and Peanuts, I hoped he might discuss the episode, where it came from, what it means. I was disappointed. Michaelis doesn’t even mention it.
Here’s what I recall:
Charlie Brown goes to dancing classes, hoping to find relief from his loneliness. There he meets a lovely little girl whose name I remember as Emily. The two glide about the floor in each other’s arms. Not his unattainable “little red-haired girl”; plainly she likes Charlie Brown a lot, and he’s smitten with her. Dancing with her, he’s in heaven. Lying in bed that night, he muses: “I like to think about good things that have happened to me during the day,” and the ensuing frames recall the joys of dancing with Emily.
The next day he goes back to the dance studio to find her. She isn’t there. Nobody there has ever heard of any Emily. In the last frame of the strip Lucy, who’s been observing Charlie Brown’s bafflement, says something like: “Poor Charlie Brown. He doesn’t understand …”
Huh? Understand what? What has Lucy realized, that Charlie Brown—along with myself—has been unable to grasp? That Emily never existed, that she’s a figment of his yearning imagination? But in the strips where they dance together, there’s no clue she’s any less real than Lucy or Linus or Charlie Brown himself, or that these strips depict anything other than the “consensus reality” of the “Peanuts” world.
I was baffled, yet deeply moved, when I read these strips. I’m still baffled. The sudden appearance of this cryptic, evocative episode, amid the dreary waste of banality, repetition, and gimmickry that was the later “Peanuts,” points to something powerful, perhaps transformative emerging within the soul of its creator. I have no notion what.
Michaelis, who probably knows Schulz and his work better than anyone, provides no enlightenment.
Suggestions, anybody?
I love this post, and it just convinced me to register for your all day workshop at the NC Writers’ Conference……thank you.
Re: what it might mean, I too am a Peanuts fan. I had a 3 panel strip visible to me for several years and I still think of it. Charlie Brown stands with a baseball bat, looking identical in each frame. Frame one, no ball in sight. Frame two, ball whizzes past. Frame three, he says simply, “The ball was right over the plate. Why didn’t I swing?”
Perhaps the sequence you mention is a reflection on the constant human grasping after happiness experiences as if it can be “held.” Maybe Lucy’s comment (though I’m sure to her it was something like “That blockhead doesn’t understand she never really liked him and hit the gas as soon as he disappeared”) is a tool for pointing out that CB is still seeking after something he already has or had — a perfect evening that can never be taken away from him. He takes it away from himself by pursuing it until it disappears, and that is why he struggles to find that contentment.
I look forward to meeting you!
Thanks so much for that thoughtful comment, Elizabeth!