Charles M. Schulz: How I lost (and miss) my Charlie Browns

Many people I admire have shared their Charlie Brown stories in print or online. For example, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, wrote a balanced review of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis. Watterson says Charles M. Schulz's cartoons have remained “terrifically funny and edgy, even after all these years.” But even more, they had “real heart” despite Schulz’s “failings as a person.” Jonathan Franzen is another Charlie Brown fan. In “Two Ponies” (from his memoir, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History), Franzen asks, “Was Schulz’s comic genius the product of his psychic wounds?” He concedes that Schulz as a middle-aged artist must have tapped from childhood traumas and adolescent insecurities to produce Peanuts. As the artist got older (and his comics got more famous), Schulz became more vulnerable to depression.

Franzen writes:

Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life — to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this — is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason that Schulz’s early sorrows look like “sources” of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them.

That’s a great trio of gifts that any artist — or anybody — can have. Talent + resilience + humor. I’m not sure if my own Charlie Brown story exemplifies any of those three. Let’s just say the middle-aged adolescent in me has often panicked about the prospects of getting stuck in a ten-year-old’s library of lost books. How’s that again? Here’s how.

When I was ten years old, I had two Charlie Brown pocketbooks. They were displayed in a glass-fronted bookcase in our guest room, which, oddly, also served as “study room” and maid’s quarter. I don’t remember the titles anymore. All I know is that they were slim full-color volumes featuring the famous Peanuts characters created by Charles M. Schulz. One day relatives came to visit, and my cousin Lily (not her real name) and I played in the guest room. I must have been showing off my Charlie Browns or just playing the gracious host, so I couldn’t say no to her request to borrow my books. (Or had I volunteered to lend?) So by the time my cousin was gone, I had sent her off with souvenirs from my little library.

As Lily and her family waved goodbye, their car speeding off, I told my mom that I had lent my Charlie Brown books. She snapped at me like I had committed some atrocious blunder: “Why did you do that? Do you think you’re ever going to get your books back?” I was shocked by her rage. I felt guilty and confused that I could cause her such dismay. I didn’t know which was more difficult to comprehend — her fury (her disdain at how stupid I was) or the idea that there were people who’d borrow your books and not return them. I had let my mother down. She had bought those books for me. She was infuriated that her oldest child could be so gullible, so eager to please. And I felt betrayed. I lost my Charlie Browns to people I had trusted.

My mother was right. I never got those books back. But why didn’t she or I do or say anything to retrieve them? Because it was not polite to do so? Because the cultural expectation or the tacit family rule was that the owner should be generous or gallant enough to let go of what he had entrusted to others? It wasn’t proper to demand to have your possessions returned to you? Perhaps we didn’t want to seem petty. Or perhaps time passed and we just forgot — or chose to ignore — the issue. Besides, who knows what my cousin would have done to those books? Assuming she'd even recall where she had dumped my CBs, imagine the extra grievance I would have borne at the sight of books returned but smudged, crumpled, mangled.

And so I learned to be very hesitant about lending my books. Unless I was certain that the borrower would be kind or decent enough to return them. Unless I knew I would not have any compunction about reminding a negligent loaner that I’d need the book back for some official (or made-up) reason. As an adult, I’ve bought four Charlie Brown/Peanuts books: The Gospel According to Peanuts, A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition, Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, and The Charlie Brown Dictionary, Vol. 1. They’re all shelved in the same glass-fronted bookcase, which now stands right outside my room. Now I can buy any other CB, and I’ve found other comic pals and alter egos, such as Calvin and Hobbes. But once in a while I still think of those two Charlie Brown pocketbooks I have lent and lost.

I don’t resent my mother anymore for the way she reacted to my book-loaning shortcomings. I understand now that she wasn’t being harsh or selfish. She just knew more than I did about how things worked outside the pages of comic strips. A few years ago, she told me that Lily had died of cancer. I hadn’t seen my cousin in decades. Her family and mine hadn’t kept in touch. She and I had never been close, yet I was deeply saddened about the news. Once again, I was shocked, guilty, confused — and scared. I was that ten-year-old again rudely awakened to something that wasn’t quite right with the world. Time passed, people passed away. If it could happen to them, it could happen to me or anyone I loved. Of course, one way or another, it certainly would. In the end, no one gets to keep anything. I used to think that Lily had taken my two Charlie Browns, the only ones I had when I was a kid. These days I’d rather think I had freely given them away.

[Photograph by Earl Seubert, 1958. Thank you, Washington Post.]