“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.”
—Ann Patchett, “To the Doghouse”
Charles Schulz hated the name Peanuts. “It has no dignity and it’s not descriptive,” the cartoonist, whose iconic comic debuted seventy-five years ago this week, told an interviewer in 1987. “What could I do? Here I was, an unknown kid from St. Paul. I couldn’t think of anything else. I said, why don’t we call it Charlie Brown and the [newspaper] president said, ‘Well, we can’t copyright a name like that.’ I didn’t ask them about Nancy or Steve Canyon. I was in no position to argue.”
Three-quarters of a century and 17,897 published strips later, Schulz sits comfortably within the pantheon of American artists, not solely for his timeless illustrations or by turns tender and incisive humor, but for cultivating a rich literary microcosm in the unchanging suburban world of Snoopy and friends. “Here on the tiniest of stages we find illuminated the ongoing human business of friendship and love, anger and frustration, fantasy and heartache—and pretty much everything else,” writes editor Andrew Blauner in his preface to The Peanuts Papers, Library of America’s tribute gathering dozens of writers’ reminiscences and reflections on Schulz’s monumental creation.
The Peanuts Papers
Name notwithstanding, Peanuts was serious business, and Schulz regarded it as his life’s work. “It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was,” he recalled. “My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.” Often synonymous with ultra-safe humor and aww-shucks sentimentality, the funny pages were a deceptively odd fit for Schulz’s cast of children. Adam Gopnik, in his essay “Good Griefs,” describes just how out of step Peanuts was with its four-panel brethren:
Peanuts is black humor before it is benign humor. Its inmates’ predicament is closer to Chekhov than it is to Gasoline Alley, their stripped-down landscape of one-on-one exchanges of spiritual hopelessness more like Beckett than Beetle Bailey. Each of the kids is perfectly mismated with his own ambitions—Peanuts is a mordant comedy of mismatched talents and desires, like life itself. It is not an accident that the peculiar cry of punctuation in the strip is “Good grief!”
The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage.
This bleakness, world-weariness, and stoic wisdom is, to Gopnik’s mind, a direct product of the strip’s adult-free universe (in the beloved TV adaptations, the peremptory parental voices are reduced to squawking off-screen trumpets). Ironically, the outcome is not a kids’ comic, presenting an unbridgeable gulf between childhood imagination and grown-up conformity, but a universal story in which the ages (and even species) of the characters seem to recede. Charlie, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, and Schroeder are all people we know well; we may even be them ourselves.
The first Peanuts strip, published October 2, 1950 (© Peanuts Worldwide LLC)
“It was reading Peanuts, lying on the floor beneath the piano in my parents’ suburban home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, that I first saw evidence of the terrible truth: my adorable parents resided in a cartoon universe,” writes Jennifer Finney Boylan in her essay “You’re Weird, Sir.” “It was Charlie Brown and his friends—children who lived in a world defined by unrequited love—who resided in the real one.”
None other than Umberto Eco, the Italian polymath and author of decidedly unchildlike novels like Foucault’s Pendulum, agreed: “The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage.” Seen in this clinical light, Charlie whiffing the kick or Lucy dispensing psychiatric counseling from behind her lemonade stand doesn’t look so lighthearted anymore.
Schulz drawing Charlie Brown in 1956 (Public Domain / Library of Congress)
On the day the strip first appeared in syndication, one of Schulz’s friends visited a newsstand in Minneapolis and asked if they had a paper with Peanuts in it. “No, and we don’t have any with popcorn either,” the owner replied. The confusion confirmed the cartoonist’s worry about his comic’s name, and until the end of his life he never stopped second-guessing the title others had appended to his masterpiece.
Just as its school-age protagonists contain multitudes beyond their years, so too does the beauty, humor, and heartbreak of Schulz’s opus belie the tossed-off simplicity of its anodyne name. Summing up the strip’s fifty-year run, from 1950 to 2000, Maclean’s called it “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being.”
Hardly peanuts, in other words.
