However, the "and Peanuts" portion of the book is mostly pretty interesting. On the one hand, Michaelis does this thing that literary biographers love to do, which is to find real-life models for an artist's fictional characters. Mostly that sort of thing bores me, and mostly it bores me here. But when it comes to analyzing each character's contribution to the Peanuts strip, on the other hand, and when it comes to explaining the biographical and historical significance of the principal characters, Michaelis is really quite good. He's especially good on Snoopy.
Here's the story behind Snoopy. When he was a little boy in Minnesota, Charles Schulz had two dogs: one named Spike, the other named Snooky. Spike was a crazy dog who ate watches and things (if I'm remembering correctly), and he seems to have planted the seeds for the character that later became Snoopy. (Snoopy, of course, would later have a cousin named Spike, who lived in Needles, AZ - where Schulz himself lived as a boy.) When Schulz was first developing the dog character, its original name was Sniffy, but it turned out that another comic strip had a dog of that name, so Schulz had to change it. Just before she died from cervical cancer (the details of which Michaelis devotes far too much attention to), Schulz's mother had said that if the family ever had another dog, they should call it Snoopy. So Snoopy it was. And here's where Michaelis earns back some of my goodwill: he remarks that in adopting that name, Schulz had found a way to stay connected to his beloved, deceased mother.
Which is precisely what Snoopy does for those of us who loved Joey.
If you want to get technical about it, I was the first of the Doyle brothers to display a particular affection for Snoopy. When I was little, before I even had a brother, I developed a strong attachment to a plush Snoopy toy that I carried everywhere, like Linus and his blanket. Then, at the age of three, I lost it on an airplane. One of my strongest early memories is of the grief I felt upon realizing he was gone - I don't remember where I was or who else was there, but I remember the grief. My parents did what any parents would do. They bought me a new Snoopy, and, if I loved this substitute Snoopy any less than I had his predecessor, I didn't show it. I have him still. He's sitting behind me on a bookshelf, his nose dangling by a few black threads and his white fur matted and begrimed by my own juvenile hands. His ragged appearance demonstrates just how much I didn't mind making do with a second Snoopy.
I imagine most children love Snoopy. For kids of my generation and Joey's, our first exposure to him was through the Peanuts holiday specials and other forms of merchandise and advertising, rather than through the Peanuts comic strip itself. By the time we were old enough to read the comics, we already had a longstanding relationship with Snoopy; indeed, we knew and had opinions about all the Peanuts characters by then. Moreover, the comic strip was not exactly meant for us, although we could certainly be amused by it. Like all the best children's entertainment - Sesame Street, say, or the Muppets - Peanuts worked on at least two different levels: there was the surface level wherein funny-looking children (and their dog) did amusing things, and there was a more elevated level of existential despair, absurdist humor, literary references, and other adult in-jokes that gave the strip a great deal of artistic heft. It is only as an adult that we realize how truly funny Peanuts can be. I know, because Kate and I recently watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," and we laughed harder at Snoopy's prolonged, bizarre fight against the Red Baron than we ever had as children. Kate admitted that the whole sequence simply baffled her when she was young (how does Snoopy's doghouse get those bullet holes in it?), and I remember feeling pretty much the same way.
My point is that, after our youthful dabblings, children of my generation have to rediscover Peanuts in comic-strip form to really appreciate it. That's what Joey did. As a boy he didn't have any special connection with Snoopy or the others, although of course they were always around, but as he became an adult he came to love the comic strips. We both did. The Daily Oklahoman ran Peanuts in full color every day - the entire comics page was in full color, the only worthwhile thing about that paper, we both felt - and when we were home Joey and I both made a point of paging through the newspaper looking for Peanuts. If we were home together, whoever got to Peanuts first would usually snicker and then pass it to the other. We were both discovering that Schulz shared our sense of humor: dry, understated, a little self-deprecatory, funnier if you gave it a minute to sink in than it often seemed at first.
I'm not sure just when or why Joey began to identify with Snoopy. Michaelis suggests that Snoopy is the only true child in the entire strip, and I think that's right. While Charlie Brown is hurling himself at Lucy's football and Linus is exploring theology, Snoopy is living in a world of wild fantasy, trying out any role that appeals to him, whether it's fighting the Red Baron, traveling to outer space, or simply sitting atop his doghouse with a typewriter, trying to become a world-famous novelist. I think one thing that appealed to Joey was the straight face with which Snoopy pursues even the most outlandish activities. Yes, he does yell and shake his fists sometimes, but more often he marches through life with a serene, silent dignity. Michaelis compares Snoopy to Charlie Chaplin, and I can see hints of Buster Keaton as well. Michaelis also compares Snoopy to Don Quixote, boldly confronting giants disguised as windmills, and I can see that, too. It is the enthusiasm and self-possession with which Snoopy lunges toward each new adventure that makes him such a joy to behold, and if Joey couldn't always attain Snoopy-like levels of self-possession, I think he aspired to. And I think he certainly wanted others to believe that he had it.
But the other thing about Snoopy is that he will spontaneously, and without an ounce of self-consciousness, stop everything and start dancing. Snoopy's dance is giddy and unrestrained, a celebration of the wonderfulness and weirdness of simply being alive, and, whether he knew it or not, Joey lived the way Snoopy danced. Joey could do silly dances, too, which were all the funnier because they burst out of such a seemingly cool exterior. People underestimate Snoopy all the time - they think that because he doesn't talk and lives in a doghouse that he's just a stupid dog, living the sort of humdrum life that everybody else lives - but Snoopy knows that his soul contains multitudes, and he'll give you a glimpse of them if you're patient, and if you'll just pay attention. Joey was like that: a big, quiet guy whom you had to strain to hear in a crowded room, but someone who was capable of sudden bursts of energy and whose placid surface concealed a wild, omnivorous love for the world.
Joey was the one who embraced Snoopy during the period of our rediscovery of Peanuts, and I happily ceded him that ground. On Christmases and birthdays we would both receive Snoopy items from time to time, but when they came to me I always felt that they should have gone to him. Several Christmases ago our aunt gave me a new Snoopy doll - recalling, perhaps, the Snoopy dolls of my youth - and I lent it to Joey to keep him company on his drive back to the east coast. He kept it, as I expected him to, but I have it now. It's sitting in our bedroom, wearing a hat patterned after the German flag, which I bought with Joey when we were in Hamburg several years ago. Kate and I take him on road trips with us.
These days Snoopy has become an emblem of Joey for those of us who loved him. Sometimes we seek him out. I recently put a Snoopy decal on our new car, which itself is white and kind of Snoopy-like, and is sometimes referred to as the Snoopymobile. I snuck a Snoopy image onto a recent PowerPoint presentation for my British history class - the topic was (what else?) the Voyage of the Beagle. My family and I frequently use Snoopy for our profile pictures on Facebook. At our wedding, we danced to Vince Guaraldi's Snoopy song (it's actually called "Linus and Lucy," but we danced to it like Snoopy dances to it). And so on.
But sometimes Snoopy finds us. At our wedding, at the B&B at which he was staying, my father spotted a doghouse with Snoopy's name painted across it. Last May, during my fevered ramble through western Oklahoma, I found Snoopy drawn in chalk on a sidewalk outside a Joeyish cafe in Woodward. A few months later, on Joey's birthday, my mother and I stumbled upon a set of Snoopy mugs just before gathering for a birthday dinner, so we bought them and distributed them as party favors.
We may even get Snoopy engraved onto the bench that we're placing near Joey's grave. If that seems insufficiently somber for a cemetery, well, that's the point. It's a way of saying that we the living will continue to dance and to fly our doghouses through the sky. We will let our lives become as big as Snoopy's, as big as Joey's, and when we go to visit him we will sit on that bench and tell him about all the wonderful things that we've done, about how we got shot down behind enemy lines and ended up dining and smooching and dancing with a charming little French girl, about our ongoing quests to become world-famous astronauts and detectives and chefs, about our tremendous ice-skating exploits and our failed political campaigns. And in between visits we will keep all these little Snoopies beside us, and we will watch Snoopy on television, and we will read about him in the newspapers, and we will just laugh and laugh and laugh.
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