Good Grief: Peanuts and Post-WWII Ennui

I'm back from San Francisco with a backlog of ready-to-read posts that need only be written.  The first is inspired by the afternoon I spent at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California.  As I wandered its halls and read its walls, I remembered Catherine Jurca's article on Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.  (A version of this article appears as the fifth chapter of her excellent White Diaspora.)  According to Jurca, Sloan's novel about the money problems plaguing a recently returned WWII veteran "legitimates a contradictory truth for the [professional-managerial class]: its anxiety and unhappiness are inevitable components of its professional and economic well-being" (90).  This anxiety, Jurca argues, "is crucial to the achievement and preservation of middle-class economic and social privileges" (92).  While she convincingly argues her point, she shortchanges what I take to be Sloan's: namely, that the constellation of symptoms Jurca believes the "the sanctimonious suburbanite" in the 1950s exhibits is the product of the protagonist, Tom Rath, being a veteran of the Second World War.  Rath's hostility to the empty conventions of suburban life manifests most saliently during those moments in which he compares (often unwittingly) the vividness of his time as a soldier with the routine of time as a cog.  He resists the Great Machine only because his wartime experiences have tempered his soul; commonplace life becomes unbearable because there was a time when life was not commonplace but meaningful.  (Jurca is certainly correct in her contention that there's more happening in the novel than what I've sketched out here.  Contrary to popular opinion, I often openly admire the work of other scholars.  Consider this one of those occasions.)  What does this have to do with the afternoon I spent wandering the halls and reading the walls of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center? 

Schulz, like Rath, was also a veteran of WWII.  (Were I allowed to take pictures inside the museum I'd festoon this paragraph with the sketches which accompanied his letters from the front.  Brilliant satires of military life encapsulated in the space of an envelope.)  He returned from war and created a world-famous comic strip about a boy who suffered from clinical depression not necessarily because of his constitution but because of the forces militating against him.  Lucy pulls the football.  Snoopy torments him. The entire world,  in fact, works to make Charlie Brown's life more difficult than it needs to be.  Unlike the eponymous Everett True, whose outbursts are the guff of legend, Charlie Brown never throttles Lucy for pulling for the football or throws Snoopy from a train for tormenting him.  He yells "Good Grief!" with the resignation of a war veteran who long ago acquiesced to the unfair demands of the world.  In short, my argument-by-suggestion is that Sloan's portrayal of a man whose wartime experience emptied civilian life of meaning applies equally to Charlie Brown (and perhaps Charles Schulz, although that would be a far more sweeping claim). 

Comments

[Unfrozen Caveman Cubs Fan]

I think you're right about Charlie Brown as sort of the 'every man' of post-WWII America. It's interesting that, as Schulz was writing these, the baby boom and suburbanization of America was all the rage. In fact, if I had to guess I'd guess that Brown et al live in some kind of quaint suburban town - you never really learn much about their place, probably because of the lack of adults (after all, as kids, a city and a town are basically the same -- your life is limited by the bounds that your parents put on you, not the bounds that society or constitution of your locality place).

But I (and by that I mean "as someone too young to have lived through that period") think of that time as one of happiness, as epitomized by the myriad of nuclear family-centric sitcoms that bring (non-masturbatory) wistful tears to the eyes of those older than I am. But the truth is the "lost generation" comment of Gertrude Stein could just as easily apply to the post-WWII America as it did to post-WWI America, and Charlie Brown (and probably Charles Schulz as well) represented that feeling. His depression at his surroundings (and there are so many very stark early strips where the other kids just comment on how depressed Charlie Brown is, something that really didn't happen in the later years) is obvious, and you wonder whether he'll ever be able to overcome the problem and function normally within his peer group society.

If Charlie had been 25 and a single guy living in the city, I could see him and Pigpen sitting around a bar, tossing back whiskeys and lamenting their lives and deadend jobs and overbearing bosses, with Lucy as the girl at the end of the bar who never quite give in to their advances and Snoopy as the wizened bartender overseeing all of this with a detached comedic eye. Which raises another point -- as adults, we have outlets for our depression to make things better. We drink, we gamble, we screw around, we go to the nudie bar, we curse like sailors and punch strangers in bars. What do children have?

I wonder whether Charlie Brown wasn't really just someone in search of an outlet for his pain -- witness the repeated attempts to kick the ball (violence) and the repeated visits to the psychiatric booth (therapy), plus his eternal quest for self-actualization through winning at baseball -- and Schulz is telling us that sometimes a man's pain is simply his own to keep. That would certainly reflect the feelings of a lot of men coming back from war who don't think that those who weren't "over there" can ever understand what they went through. Perhaps Charlie Brown simply knows that no one can understand what makes him Charlie Brown.

(I'm a joy at parties with this kind of insight, BTW. I also do bar mitzvahs, where I perform tricks like crushing a child's dream while pointing out that older relatives will be dying off soon.)

[From elsewhere, sans math.]

[Josh]

Thanks for this, Scott. Your meditations on Tom Rath, in particular, are a welcome antidote to Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece of a while back telling us that the lesson of Wilson's novel is that war veterans and other post-traumatic types should Just Get Over It. And isn't Jurca wonderful at what she does? Even without your gloss, I found her work indispensible to my realization that Wilson's war veterans inhabit the same emotional landscape as the ones in Spillane and Highsmith.

[Ray Davis]

The last great thing I remember in MAD Magazine was "Peanuts" as adults. The concept's been done again since, but their take, being closer to the original, was closer to UCCF's.