"I Felt a Funeral in My Brain": The Fragile Comedy of Charles Schulz

I was never a devoted follower of the Peanuts comic strip, yet I'm moved by the news of Charles Schulz's death. Here was a man in love with his work and the characters he'd created. In a career that lasted nearly fifty years, he never missed a daily deadline. . . . Last night, on the eve of publication of his final strip, he died. His work and his life ended on the same day. . . .

Despite his success, Charles Schulz struggled all his life with depression and anxiety. "I suppose I have always felt apprehensive and anxious," he once said. "I have compared it to the feeling that you have when you get up on the morning of a funeral."

--"Sy Safransky's Notebook"

My own reaction to Schulz's death was similar to Safransky's. The Peanuts strip was not something I followed particularly, but I found myself upset for days when Schulz died. Partly it may have been that I was reeling from the recent, unexpected death of my sister and felt, as I've read in a poem somewhere, that the door to my brain had been blown open. My defenses were down. And maybe I was sad because I recognized that his were too, always, that he was suffering just as we were, and keeping the faith. Perhaps that is one reason why we loved him, because, as Linus says, he was the "Charlie Browniest," the most vulnerable, because he lived in a psychic universe in which he woke each day to a funeral, and out of that depression and anxiety, he drew his wonderful strip.

By most measures, Schulz's life was a great success story. He had a reasonable childhood with loving if restrained parents. His father, like Charlie Brown's, was a barber. His strip was early on appreciated, and his work grew steadily. He married and had children. He got divorced, but then he married again and had a happy relationship with his second wife. He had a daily and a Sunday strip, and he collaborated with like-minded souls (Bill Melendez, Lee Mendelson, Vince Guaraldi) to make videos that were faithful to his low-key sensibility. Peanuts artifacts proliferated throughout the country; he made many millions of dollars, and every day, until a few months before his death, he did what he loved: he drew his strip. "You don't work all your life to get to do something," he told his biographer, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, "so that you can have time not to do it" (41).

The defining trauma of his life seems to have been the loss of his mother. She died of cancer in 1943, shortly after he was drafted into the army. Her illness was protracted and painful, and the last time he saw her was on a weekend pass during basic training. She told him that they should say goodbye because they would probably not see each other again, and she died the next day (Johnson 51). Although he spent most of his tour of duty in Kentucky, in 1945 he was shipped to Europe where, moving across France, Germany, and Austria, he participated in the liberation of Dachau, Munich, and Berchtesgaden. Another loss, less tragic, but still weighty to Schulz, was his rejection by the young woman who became in the strip Charlie Brown's unrequited love, "the little red haired girl."

Lucy would say, "Get over it." But what kind of therapist is she? And why is she the therapist to begin with? Perhaps because, despite the hip surface of the strip, therapy is not the route to salvation in Peanuts. Schulz's characters do not get over great losses. They do not change. In The Gospel according to Peanuts, Robert Short suggests a view of life that was probably more congenial to Schulz, which is that we are flawed...