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Music Cues: Charles Schulz
December 18, 1999
When Charles Schulz announced this week he will soon cease to draw his
comic strip, Peanuts, to devote himself to treatments for colon cancer, many
people seemed to feel grief. Not so much for Mr. Schulz, who, at the age of
77, will hopefully regain his health and prosper. But grief over ever losing
the daily companionship of Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, Woodstock,
Peppermint Patty--and Charlie Brown.
For almost 50 years, Charlie Brown has been struggling on the pitcher's
mound of life: losing game after game, longing for the little girl with
curly red hair, taking care of his wry and urbane dog, and absorbing the
taunts and onslaughts of Lucy who, a reader senses, loves him most after all
anyway. The four-panel form Charles Schulz perfected often seemed to deliver
its' final punch with a subtle gesture, rather than a punchline. Charlie
Brown tells Linus, "My dog has only obeyed one command in his life. . . I
once told him to "stay" and he never went home." Two small bubbles rise
above Snoopy's head as the dog muses, "How embrarrassing. It sounded like an
invitation."
For fifty years in Peanuts, Mr. Schulz has been delivering what amounts to a
great, sustained comic performance. But unlike comedians, playwrights, or
actors, Mr. Schulz couldn't change roles, cast off characters, or create
more than a few new ones. "A cartoonist," he once said, "is someone who has
to draw the same thing, day after day, without repeating himself." You
probably cannot achieve the persistent empathy and gentleness of Peanuts
without being a hard, strong artist.
In his 1985 book, YOU DON'T LOOK 35, CHARLIE BROWN, Charles Schulz wrote,
"When you're a professional, creativity should not require certain moods. .
. but despair or even lonliness seem, strangely enough, to produce good
humor." He says that people often feel like, quote, "the dog we see running
frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being
left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in
his limited understanding he is being left alone forever and he has to run
and run to survive. It is no wonder that make terrible choices in our lives
to avoid loneliness."
This week, I remembered Snoopy, atop his doghouse, musing to Woodstock, the
small bird: "Is it July already? I can't believe it. My life is going by too
fast." And then, in the last panel: "I hope we can go into overtime."
The good musical made from the Peanuts characters has become newly popular
on Broadway this year. But the work Charles Schulz has given us by his own
hands has stood, for so long, as so intricate and carefully, assertively
gentle, it evoked for us the lines of a Sondeheim song: Anyone Can Whistle.
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