The experience of being an Everyman—a decent, caring person in a hostile world— is essential to Charlie Brown’s character, as it was to Charles Schulz’s. The quality of fortitude (one of the seven cardinal virtues in Christianity) is at the heart of Charlie Brown. Humanity was created to be strong; yet, to be strong, and still to fail is one of the identifying things that it is to be human. Charlie Brown never quit, which in the end would prove to be a perfect description of Charles Schulz. Charlie Brown is a fighter, but a fighter in terms of pure endurance, not in terms of working out strategically how he is going to win. He simply endures; he stays longer on the baseball field than all the other kids. When the field is flooded in a downpour and only the pitcher’s mound is above water, he remains. His strategy is simple: hang on. He does not go off, as Ulysses does, to seek and make a newer world. Charlie Brown never makes it new. Snoopy, an animal, makes it new. Snoopy is somehow or other always new. Real imagination is allowed only to the non-human character in Schulz’s world. This tells us something: that the children are admirable for their human dignity and their lack of self-pity. Charlie Brown may feel sorry for himself but he gets over it fast. He is ennobled by how well he handles being disappointed. He never cries.
The moment when Peanuts became Peanuts can probably be marked at several spots on Schulz’s 1954 calendar, but nowhere more clearly than Monday, February 1: Charlie Brown is visiting Shermy. He looks on, bereft, as a smiling Shermy, seemingly unaware of Charlie Brown’s presence, plays with a model train set whose tracks and junctions and crossings spead so elaborately far and wide in Shermy’s family’s living room, the railroad’s complete dimensions cannot be shown in a single cartoon panel. Charlie Brown pulls on his coat and walks home. Finally, alone in his own living room, Charlie Brown sits down at his railroad: a single, closed circle of track, no bigger than a manhole cover. But there is no anger, no self-pity, no tears—no punch line—just silent acceptance. Here was the moment when Charlie Brown became a national symbol, the Everyman who survives life’s slings and arrows simply by surviving himself.
We recognize ourselves in Charlie Brown—in his dignity despite doomed ballgames, his endurance despite a deep awareness of death, his stoicism in the face of life’s disasters—because he is willing to admit that just to keep on being Charlie Brown is an exhausting and painful process. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a barber’s son,” Charlie Brown tells Schroeder. He remembers how it felt to see tears running down his father’s cheeks when his dad read letters in the newspaper attacking barbers for raising the price of a haircut. He recalls how hard his father worked to give his family a respectable life. By the fourth panel, Charlie Brown is so upset by his memories that he grabs Schroeder’s shirt with both hands and screams, “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE!!”
SCHULZ DID. A SHY, TIMID BOY, A barber’s son, born on November 26, 1922, “Sparky” Schulz—nicknamed for the horse in Barney Google—had grown up from modest beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, to realize his earliest dream of creating a newspaper comic strip. The only child of devoted parents, neither of whom had gone further in school than the third grade, Schulz linked the un-sophistication of his childhood home with the ideal of a dignified, ordinary life that he forever after tried to return to. “There are times,” he wrote at fifty-eight, “when I would like to go back to the years with my mother and father. It would be great to be able to go into the house where my mother was in the kitchen and my comic books were in the other room, and I could lie down on the couch and read the comics and then have dinner with my parents.”
But growing up was a dismaying process for Schulz. He felt chronically unsupported. “He always felt that no one really loved him,” a relative recalled. “He knew his mom and dad loved him but he wasn’t too sure other people loved him.”
His intelligence revealed itself in the second grade. In a class of thirty-one pupils, Charles Schulz was singled out as the outstanding boy student. Two years later, the principal at the Richards Gordon Elementary School in St. Paul skipped Schulz over the fourth grade. By the time he reached junior high school, he was the youngest, smallest boy in the class. He felt lost, unsure of himself. With no one to turn to, he made loneliness, insecurity, and a stoic acceptance of life’s defeats his earliest personal themes. At the same time, he possessed a strong independent streak and grew increasingly stubborn and competitive as life and its injustices, real and imagined, piled up.
As a slight, 136-pound teenager, with pimples, big ears, and a face he thought of as so bland it amounted to invisibility, he had few friends at school. In practically every thing he did at St. Paul Central High, he felt underestimated by teachers, coaches, and peers. No one ever gave him credit for his drawing, or for playing a superior game of golf. “It took me a long time to become a human being,” he once said. “I never regarded myself as being much and I never regarded myself as being good looking and I never had a date in high school, because I thought, who’d want to date me?”
Sensitive to slights, he never forgot the rejections of Central High. To the end of his life, he remained baffled that the editors of the Cehisean, the Central High yearbook, had rejected a batch of his drawings. At the age of fifty-three, he made sure that a high school report card was printed in facsimile in a collection of his work “to show my own children that I was not as dumb as everyone has said I was.” He projected the traumas of his adolescence far into adulthood—far enough, in the end, to see them become a crucial element in the universal popularity of his art.
Chronic rejection and unrequited love are the twin plinths of Schulz’s early life and later work. Even when he had become the one cartoonist known and loved by people around the world, he could still say, with conviction, “My whole life has been one of rejection.”
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