Good Grief! Out of the mouths of babes...

Deciding what to write about in the very first post of an avowedly nostalgia-oriented blog feels like something pretty momentous. I am basically in a position where I am having to publicly decide what I feel is the most memorable thing in my life, that feature of my life that I will never forget, that ghost of my past that will presumably be first in the train of thoughts that flashes across my brain as the final curtain begins to descend.

And yet I find that I have very little hesitation in choosing that topic; because this is a blog about memory and expressions of its behaviour, and because of all the authors I have read that reference in their works memory, nostalgia and the tricks they play upon us, none have expressed it better I think than Charles M. Schulz - and that, remarkably, within the constraints imposed by the medium of a daily cartoon strip.

My affection for the Peanuts strip (I understand that Schulz himself hated that name but it serves well as a label) is old and deep, and my affection for its creator as a result very strong. I believe it was my elder sister who first introduced me to the strip. After she left home to join the army in early 1973 she would invariably, when she came home on leave, arrive with a Coronet Peanuts book or two for my brother and me. Coronet, an imprint of the Hodder & Stoughton publishing house active from the late 1960's onwards, seemed to print all of the paperback collections of US newspaper strips - Peanuts, B.C, The Wizard of Id - that were published in the US, with identical names and format but different binding, by Fawcett. They were small secondary collections of strips, compiled seemingly at random from the larger primary reprint collections that I always dreamed of owning but never seemed to be available anywhere. These days Fantagraphics have reprinted the entire run of Peanuts strips from 1950 to 2000 so owning the older reprint collections is no longer a dream, but I will always have fond memories of those old Coronet books.

The first two we ever got were entitled All This And Snoopy Too - the titles were rarely very imaginative - and Slide, Charlie Brown, Slide. The latter in particular caught my imagination due to the pathos of the title story; Charlie Brown, on third base during a baseball game, decides after much agonising to 'steal for home'. Being Charlie Brown, he makes a spectacular hash of it and spends the next several strips lying on his back emitting cries of anguish that keep the whole neighbourhood awake. Like most British kids back then I had never played - had scarcely heard of - baseball and had no idea what 'stealing home' was, but the humiliation of Charlie Brown's situation was so palpable that I couldn't but feel for him, and I went on feeling for him for years, as the humiliations and the Coronet books piled up.

Cries of anguish after Charlie Brows fails to steal home - whatever that was all about

Belly laughs were always few and far between in Peanuts - it simply wasn't that kind of strip - although they were always there. Schulz was capable of hilarious flights of fancy, such as the sequence when Linus Van Pelt's security blanket developed a sentience and began to stalk his sister Lucy who had always been determined to cure Linus of his blanket habit. Or that where Charlie Brown is forced to wear a sack over his head to hide a strange and embarrassing baseball-type rash covering his head - he goes to summer camp still wearing the sack and as the mysterious Mr Sack develops a mystique and a charisma that results in his being elected camp president. These surreal stories were always delightful, but to me the main attraction of the strip was its warmth and generosity of spirit. Never in the slightest mean or unkind even while one or two of the characters had their rough edges - Lucy Van Pelt and her various ways of tormenting Charlie Brown spring to mind - the Coronet books were an oasis to me during a childhood that, for all that I hanker after it now these many decades later, had its moments of bleakness. When an alcohol-fuelled row between my parents was beginning to spark it was my custom to grab a book and find a quiet corner somewhere where I mightn't be noticed, and the book in question was as often as not a Coronets Peanuts volume.

The strips that I found most appealing even back then, and which stick with me the most now, are the ones where the characters discuss the effects of the passing of time. It seems odd that a strip featuring children, and what's more children who never age, might have the power to express thought-provoking, even haunting, views about time, memory and loss, but of course the Peanuts kids always had a wisdom beyond their years. There is a strip I remember where Charlie Brown goes to consult with Lucy in her psychiatrists booth. He tells her that he is worried about his Dad, who has started spending most of his time sitting in the kitchen eating cold cereal, reading his old college yearbook and sighing a lot. Lucy asks how old he is, and when Charlie Brown replies that he is 42, she tells him don't worry, he is right on schedule (5 cents please!) We would be disconcerted if a child Lucy's age was aware of the midlife crisis, but of course this is Schulz expressing his own knowledge of life experience through one of his more worldy characters.

The strips I am thinking of are a triad of Sunday strips which were published quite close together in time. The Sunday strips were slightly longer than the daily ones and so had a bit more space to develop the characters' thoughts more deeply. I found the whole format of the Sunday strip oddly comforting; because some syndicated newspapers only had the space to show two rows of panels and the Sunday strip had three, the top row of panels was always designed to be inconsequential, a setting of the scene only, containing no story development necessary to the understanding of the strip. It felt like a lull, like the intake of breath you make when you have just finished a hectic task and are starting to relax. It is the unchanging world of Peanuts at rest and as such it was deliciously reassuring.

There are two very different characters in these strips, Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty; Patty boisterous and outgoing but insecure, affectionate and sensitive, looking always for answers, Charlie Brown awkward, maladroit and prone to misunderstanding. Why Patty should spend so much time with Charlie Brown and think him a good person to provide answers to her questions seems puzzling, but we the readers know that it's because she has a crush on him, one of those doomed crushes that, in a universe where the characters change but little, will never be fulfilled.

Patty asks Charlie Brown if he thinks that life changes as we get older, and in reply he relates to her a story his Dad told him about a theatre in the area in which he grew up. When his Dad was small the theatre seemed huge but as the years went by it got narrower and narrower. Patty, looking for more accessible answers, doesn't like the philosophical direction the conversation seems to be taking, and Charlie Brown leaves because he has a feeling that his back yard is shrinking. This to me always indicated Charlie Brown wanting to appreciate things before they are lost - he wants to take a look at the back yard now because in years to come he will remember it differently. But we are all I think familiar with that sense of the landscapes of our childhood shrinking as we age.

A very similar strip of the same period has Patty asking about whether Love is a 'now' thing or whether it has its memories. Charlie Brown again references his Dad - when he was young he took a girl to see a movie and always remembered it as having Anne Baxter in it. For years afterwards every time he saw Anne Baxter he would get sad because it would remind him of that movie and that girl. Then one night many years later the same movie came on the Late Late Show, and in fact the star wasn't Anne Baxter at all but Susan Hayward. Again this is all too deep for Patty, but Schulz via Charlie Brown's Dad is reminding us of the tricks that memory plays with us and how such seemingly inconsequential things as seeing a movie again after many years can cause a rather disturbing realignment of our more poignant memories.

The third of the trio has Patty asking about what the concept of security means to Charlie Brown, and again through his reply we learn what it meant to Schulz himself. Security is sleeping in the back seat of the car, Charlie Brown says. When you are a kid and you have been out in the car for the day with your parents, and it’s late and you’re on the way back home, you can fall asleep in the back seat without a care in the world, knowing that your parents are taking care of everything and doing any worrying that needs to be done. Of course we never had a car as kids – a bicycle would have been regarded as a luxury in our house – and our environment made it difficult to experience firsthand that gorgeous childish abdication of responsibility to the grown-ups, but even so I could easily relate to it, and fully share Patty’s appreciation of the beauty of the experience. But of course Charlie Brown can’t leave it there. This childish security can’t last; you grow up and it’s gone, you can never fall asleep in the back seat in the same way again, ever. This is a stark message and again we can share Patty’s sudden sense of panic. The age of innocence is gone; security belongs to our childish state and once we leave that state behind there is no regaining it. While the other two strips reflected upon the passage of time with humour or bemusement, this one brought, to a hyper-sensitive young teenager, a sense of loss bearing almost the intensity of bereavement. Nothing else I read as a boy came anything close to exploring these feelings with such intensity, with the possible exception of the poems we were studying at school (‘How did the devil come? When first attack?’) – but that is a topic for another time.

Peanuts itself played with my memories in quite a real way. I stopped reading the Coronet books towards the end of the 1970s and as I largely forgot about the strip for the following twenty years I imagined it standing still in time - there could be no further books after the ones I had read. I was kind of stunned to read of Schulz's retirement, followed closely by his death, at the age of 78, in 2000, and it led me to revisit the Peanuts strip and evaluate its trajectory since I had last read it. I think that the strip continued to be excellent up until the early 1980's, and that some time about 1983-4 a decline set in. The last decade or so of the strip sadly I find mostly forgettable, with too many strips about less interesting characters and few of either the interesting sequences or profound single strips of earlier decades. This is no criticism of Schulz – with the best will in the world it is impossible I think for any one person to keep putting out strips of that quality for fifty years. I am glad that none of Schulz's family were tempted to disregard his wishes about continuing the strip - it stands alone as a work of rare depth and character despite its lacklustre later years, and it would be hard to see a successor producing strips contrary to the spirit of its creator. I will always be grateful for what it has given me. There are still great cartoon strips out there, and there are cartoon strips that make me laugh out loud in a way that Peanuts rarely could, but I have as yet to come across a strip that has as much to say to me personally as the Peanuts strip did for those few years in the 1970s, and nor, one hopes, will there ever be a strip, or the need for a strip, that will provide such a safe haven in times of the deepest loneliness.