Exuberance: The Passion for Life (11 page)

Toad’s dark mood does not linger long, but he uses its approximation to gull his keeper, the Rat, into abandoning guard duty. Rat is no sooner on his way to seek a doctor for his friend than the malingering and unrepentant Toad is out of bed in a hop. Straightaway knotting his bedsheets together, he slips out of his window, lowers himself to the ground, and trots briskly down the high road into his worst disaster yet. The “poop-poop” of a passing car sets him off and, before he can muster an ascertainable trace of restraint, he is caught up irremediably in the throes of his old passion and headlong ways. He is, he chants to himself, “
Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.”

Toad is also, however, a thief—having stolen the car under whose spell he had fallen—and is sentenced to prison. Alternately abject and defiant, Toad’s mood rises and falls upon the changing circumstances of his existence. Contrition is short-lived in the presence of the possibility of escape. A successful breakout from jail sends his mood and ego airborne: “
It was too late,” exclaims Rat after he catches Toad exulting over his escape, “Toad was puffing and swelling already.” Puffing and swelling build to reckless ecstasy, then to open-throated Toad Whoops and verses of self-puffery. And more disaster. By book’s end, however, after relentless deflatings by his friends, Toad is proclaimed by the other animals to be at last a Reformed, Modest, and Altered Toad.

Perhaps. Yet one cannot help but think that someday, somewhere, the bubbles will rise again and Toad, giddied by some curious and marvelous enthusiasm, will pelt off toward a new horizon
and hop afresh into utter mishap. Exuberance is nothing if not irrepressible.

Most characters in children’s stories are not like Tigger and Toad. They are not exuberant by temperament; rather, they respond with exuberance to certain external circumstances: an event may trigger it, or it may be sparked by the infectious joy of others, or some magical circumstance will set it off. Children’s authors often invoke such magic or events in order to conjure exuberance; the mood is deceptively difficult to convey through words.

P. L. Travers, like many other writers, used flight as a vehicle for provoking and portraying exuberance. Her major character, the astringent nanny Mary Poppins, flies to London’s Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane on a parrot-handled umbrella and dances down through the sky on the “heaven-end” of a kite string. When she leaves for uncertain places, to return at an unknown time, she sweeps off on the gusts of the west wind or she flies away, to a blast of trumpets, on a spinning merry-go-round that whirls upward to the stars. She flies, and with her fly Michael and Jane, the young children who are in her charge. She sweeps them off to extraordinary adventures: bobbing balloons carry the children and masses of other Londoners high up into the air, “rainbowy” and joyous over the park; they step into chalk pictures and jump peppermint-stick horses over lilac bushes and ride them home to dinner, or, perhaps, to the uttermost ends of earth. But they fly, in mood if not in fact.

Mary Poppins gives the children magical hours filled to the brim with a glimmering, evanescent, infectious, but ultimately vulnerable exuberance. The mood is delightful, but it is wide open and liable to puncture. The children and Mary Poppins visit her uncle, Mr. Wiggs, for instance, and enter a world of contagious, propulsive gaiety. When they arrive, Mr. Wiggs is sitting on air, close to
the ceiling: “
I’m a cheerful sort of man,” he tells them in greeting, “and very disposed to laughter.” If he laughs when his birthday falls on a Friday, he explains, “
I become so filled with Laughing Gas that I simply can’t keep on the ground.… The first funny thought, and I’m up like a balloon.” Mr. Wiggs’s bouncing and laughing and bobbing are completely infectious; presently, the children are “
rolling over and over on the floor, squealing and shrieking with laughter.”

Jane rises on her newly caught mood. As she laughs, she feels herself “
growing lighter and lighter, just as though she were being pumped full of air. It was a curious and delicious feeling and it made her want to laugh all the more.” Soon everyone is floating on air, clutching their sides and gasping with laughter, rolling and bobbing about, until Mary Poppins, conjurer first, and then realist, announces to the children that It Is Time to Go Home. Her statement abruptly shatters the mood, as reality will, and sends all of them bumping to the floor: “
The thought that they would have to go home was the first sad thought of the afternoon, and the moment it was in their minds the Laughing Gas went out of them.” Exuberance begets exuberance and exuberance, flight. For a while. But reality keeps enough lead in its pockets to pull those in flight back down to earth.

P. L. Travers creates a string of enchanted escapades that loop through the children’s minds like Chinese lanterns, but they usually end with the acerbic Mary Poppins sniffing indignantly at the children’s suggestion that anything out of the ordinary has happened. She casts her dazzling spells only to break them with her acid tongue or a precipitous return to home, but nearly always she leaves behind a memento of what took place—a light and bright balloon, now deflated but still suggestive of a magical flight over the park; a snakeskin belt from an astounding evening at the zoo; a small pink starfish that twinkles like diamonds, from a trip to the ocean floor—and
these tokens of magic times keep the children dotted with a “still wondering” quality: What is real? What is not? What actually happened? Will it happen again?

Mary Poppins leaves enough to the children for them to know that there are things that can be explained and things that cannot. The gift of wonder—and the joy of it—is the legacy she leaves Michael and Jane as she soars over Cherry Tree Lane for the last time: “
Where and How and When and Why—had nothing to do with them. They knew that as far as she was concerned those questions had no answers … but the gifts she had brought would remain for always.” Children need to hold on to the bits and dreams, the joys of childhood. So do adults.

It is hard to imagine anyone more brilliantly able to capture the joys of childhood and to bridge the worlds of adult and child than cartoonist Charles Schulz. Umberto Eco describes Schulz’s comic strips as “
interrupted poetry”; Art Spiegelman puts it somewhat differently: Schulz’s work, he says, has the “
simplicity and depth charge of a haiku.” Garry Trudeau states that for himself and his fellow cartoonists Schulz is the “
gold standard.” (The public’s enthusiasm is reflected in numbers; before Schulz’s death in 2000,
Peanuts
was syndicated to nearly three thousand newspapers, published in seventy-five countries, and translated into more than twenty-five languages; it reached an estimated audience of 350 million people.) These tributes are importantly true, but Schulz also had an almost unerring genius for portraying the anxieties and delights of childhood; he felt, then drew, the elemental association between the emotions of children and those of adults.

There is, in
Peanuts
, an underlying and profound sadness which reflects not only Schulz’s own struggles with depression but his sensitivity to the quiet terrors of human loneliness. “
The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few,” Schulz said. “I compare the panic in this kind
of loneliness to 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 this heart-stopping poignancy which gives indisputable credibility to Schulz’s work. The great artists, wrote the poet Edward Thomas, have seen what they have imagined. Surely this is true of Schulz.

But there is an essential exuberance in Schulz’s work as well, a combative hopefulness that wins the day over sadness. Nowhere is this joyfulness more fully manifest than in the mind of Snoopy, the imaginative beagle born at Daisy Hill Puppy Farm and introduced to the world in October 1950. (The character of Snoopy was based on a dog Schulz had had as a boy. “
He was the wildest and smartest dog I’ve ever encountered. Smart? Why, he had a vocabulary of at least 50 words. I mean it. I’d tell him to go down to the basement and bring up a potato and he’d do it.”)

Snoopy is a seriously exuberant animal. He is also independent, quirky, debonair, keenly intelligent, selfish, mischievous, and an incurable romantic. His observations on life reflect the wide-ranging interests of his creator, who loved Tolstoy, Scott Fitzgerald, Dostoevsky, and Flannery O’Connor. Like them, Snoopy is subject to a certain world-weariness and now and again needful of a newly imagined life.

Whimsy and an irrepressible joyousness serve Snoopy well in his Walter Mitty imaginings. He spins his fantasies with the inventive energies of a child and elaborates them with the delicacy and detail of a Venetian glassblower. He appears to have inherited from his creator an infinitely playful mind. “
I wonder why Snoopy is willing most of the time to simply lie on the top of that doghouse,” Schulz asked once, apropos of seemingly nothing. “Why doesn’t he roll off? I remember a veterinarian telling me once that when
birds fall asleep sitting on a limb of a tree, their brain sends a message down to their claws telling the claws to stay clamped on the limb so the bird doesn’t fall off and land on his head. So, I justify this by saying that perhaps it is the same with Snoopy’s ears. I think when he falls asleep, his ears clamp onto the top of the doghouse.” Schulz asks the kind of question a child would ask, and answers it with the delightful absurdity that a child understands and loves.

Snoopy, like Delmore Schwartz’s little girl who exclaims, “Each morning I am something new.… I will always be me, I will always be new!” embraces and becomes the open-ended possibilities of life. His exuberance and inventiveness not only entertain him, they stave off a tendency toward ennui. Snoopy, according to Schulz, “
has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don’t envy dogs the lives they have to live. They’re trapped living with families that they never knew anything about.”

Snoopy is far from trapped. He lives in a doghouse, seen only in side view, that contains a pool table and a television set, stained-glass windows, carpeting, a cedar closet and a potted philodendron, paintings by van Gogh and Andrew Wyeth, and a picture of Tiny Tim. He rows his canoe in the birdbath, occasionally into coastal fog, and sleds down snow slopes in his food bowl. He poofs dandelions. He dines by candlelight on top of his doghouse and sleeps there with the moon as his night light (although now and again he panics that the moon will fall on his head). He loves eggs Benedict, doughnuts, chocolate chip cookies, root beer, and silver-dollar pancakes. He blows bubbles, and he skates better than Peggy Fleming. He served not just honorably in World War I but as a flying ace in his Sopwith Camel, taking on the Red Baron from the top of his doghouse.

He is an astronaut who goes to the moon, a yet-to-be published novelist, and a sometime truffle hunter. He is everything his imagination
can create: an anteater and a partridge in a pear tree, a Scott Fitzgerald hero, a piranha, Hucklebeagle Finn, Mickey Mouse, a fierce snow snake, a Riverboat Gambler, Dr. Beagle and Mr. Hyde, an authority on dragonflies. He gives kisses sweeter than wine and travels to the Sahara and France. He is a devotee of the absurd but he is unjaded. He believes that as long as you can see the moon you can never be lost in the woods. You will be facing west, he explains. The moon “is always over Hollywood.”

“
Life for Snoopy is just such a fantasy,” says Judy Sladky, a five-time U.S. national skating champion and the person Charles Schulz chose to portray Snoopy off the ice as well as on. “If reality isn’t what he likes, he changes it around to suit him. He thinks of things and does them.” When Sladky puts on her forty-pound Snoopy costume and assumes his personality, she says, “Snoopy just takes over. I have done things I have never done before. Backflips, for example. He wears me out. He exhausts me. He can do anything.” Sladky believes that “exuberance is where Snoopy starts from. I have to get into the mood, then the action follows.” Acting exuberant, she says, creates exuberance, although she believes that the energy and joy come at a cost. “After the exuberance is over then there is a cliff, exhaustion, depression.” Snoopy “lives in a place to go somewhere else. At the end of every wonderful thing Snoopy does, he falls down, gets shot down.” But then, of course, he always gets back up again.