Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read online

  It is Rat and Mole, not Toad, who hear the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the strangely elusive and beautiful music of Pan: “ ‘O, Mole!’ cries the Rat, ‘the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear happy call of the distant piping!’ ” It is they, the more sensitive and reflective of the animals, not the swift-to-act and slow-to-think-it-through Toad, who propel themselves into action when faced with Otter’s anguish that his young son, who has swum away, might drown or perish in a trap. It is Rat and Mole who set out on a midsummer night to search river and field in order to track down the baby otter, and it is they who find—in contrast to the dust and distractions of Toad’s motorcars and the open road—a nighttime miracle on an island fringed with willow and silver birch and alder, crabapple and wild cherry and sloe. Their music is Purcell and Mozart, not Sousa.

  The reactions of other animals to the exuberant Toad and Tigger reflect the complexity of children’s attitudes toward those more energetically enthusiastic than themselves, and prefigure some of the benefits and liabilities of exuberance seen in adults: the joie de vivre and infectious, expansive (often imaginative) qualities on the one hand, and the intimidating, interfering, rash, and impulsive characteristics on the other. Milne and Grahame overdraw both sides of this ambivalence, of course, and few of the exuberant are in reality as extreme in behavior, or as impervious to reflection, as Tigger and Toad. Still, the other animals’ reactions to their bubbly friends are illuminating.

  Most are attracted to the sheer life force of Tigger and Toad, to the ebullience, adventure, and excitement they create in the wake of their enthusiasms. But the less exuberant animals are wary as well, mindful of the Right Way to do things and feeling a need for the social order. Exuberance is not entirely to be trusted or admired: it may be delightful, for a while, but it is potentially reckless and disorderly; it may lead to new places in the mind and heart, but it is not always to be taken seriously. Tigger and Toad are lively, but they are buffoons. They are enthralled with the possibilities and pleasures of life but, disconcertingly to the more restrained animals, they also tend to have a glorious time in the midst of their self-made maelstroms. Things are fabulous, until they are catastrophic. The two exuberants are intensely independent actors upon their worlds until disaster hits. Then the other animals, who are more usually overshadowed by the ebullient Tigger and Toad, gather power from the need to reestablish order and to exert moral authority. The ballasting animals act out of concern, outrage, and often a trace of envy as well. When necessary, they band together to take the erring animal in hand.

  Rabbit, for one, in the wake of suspicions that Tigger has bounced Eeyore into the river, determines that Tigger is “too bouncy.” He goes further: “It’s time we taught him a lesson.” The problem with Tigger is that “there’s too much of him, that’s what it comes to.” Eeyore, the aggrieved, is indeed offended: “Taking people by surprise. Very unpleasant habit. I don’t mind Tigger being in the Forest,” he says, “because it’s a large Forest, and there’s plenty of room to bounce in it. But I don’t see why he should come into my little corner of it, and bounce there.”

  Piglet, who is inclined to defend the affable Tigger, protests—“He just is bouncy … and he can’t help it”—but gradually he, too, is brought around to Rabbit’s plan for Tigger’s redemption: “Piglet settled it all by saying that what they were trying to do was, they were just trying to think of a way to get the bounces out of Tigger.”

  Rabbit concocts a plan for Piglet, Pooh, and Rabbit to take Tigger to a place he has never been before, to lose him, and then find him again the next morning. He will be, Rabbit assures Piglet and Pooh, “a different Tigger altogether … he’ll be a Humble Tigger … a Sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an Oh-Rabbit-I-am-glad-to-see-you Tigger.” Tigger will be deflated, unbounced, newly appreciative, and cut down to size: “If we can make Tigger feel Small and Sad just for five minutes,” explains Rabbit, “we shall have done a good deed.”

  Far from losing Tigger in the Forest, of course, Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit themselves become hopelessly lost in the mist. Tigger effortlessly finds his way out. Pooh and Piglet, after much aimless and anxious wandering about, eventually make their way to the clearing, but Rabbit remains stranded, unable to navigate back to safety. The maligned and still very much bounced Tigger bounces to Rabbit’s rescue, and into a different perspective:

  Tigger was tearing around the Forest making loud yapping noises for Rabbit. And at last a very Small and Sorry Rabbit heard him. And the Small and Sorry Rabbit rushed through the mist at the noise, and it suddenly turned into Tigger; a Friendly Tigger, a Grand Tigger, a Large and Helpful Tigger, a Tigger who bounced, if he bounced at all, in just the beautiful way a Tigger ought to bounce. “Oh, Tigger, I am glad to see you,” cried Rabbit.

  Toad is similarly taken to task by his fellow animals after exhibiting a level of rashness staggering even to those who know him well. Having obtained his fabulous motorcar, Toad speeds his way into disaster. He smashes up his car, not once but many times, recklessly forces others motorists off the road, and is put into hospital on three separate occasions. Badger has had it: “We’ll take Toad seriously in hand. We’ll stand no nonsense whatever. We’ll bring him back to reason, by force if need be. We’ll make him a sensible Toad.” As with Tigger, this is easier said than done. Certainly, verbal entreaties go only so far. Badger at first believes he has persuaded the Toad of the error of his overly exuberant ways, but Toad soon sets him straight: “I’m not sorry. And it wasn’t folly at all! It was simply glorious!”

  Badger and the others dig in, strip the backsliding Toad of his freedom and finery, and lock him up in his bedroom. His ill-advised enthusiasm for motorcars is treated as a fever that wants breaking: “It’s for your own good, Toady, you know,” says the Rat. “Think what fun we shall all have together, just as we used to, when you’ve quite got over this—this painful attack of yours!” Mole assures Toad that his money will be well looked after, not wasted as it had been: “We’ll take great care of everything for you till you’re well, Toad.” The animals settle in for a nursing siege not altogether dissimilar to the type used in dealing with manic patients on slightly more conventional psychiatric wards:

  They descended the stair, Toad shouting abuse at them through the keyhole; and the three friends then met in conference on the situation.

  “It’s going to be a tedious business,” said the Badger, sighing. “I’ve never seen Toad so determined. However, we will see it out. He must never be left an instant unguarded. We shall have to take it in turns to be with him, till the poison has worked itself out of his system.”

  They arranged watches accordingly. Each animal took it in turns to sleep in Toad’s room at night, and they divided the day up between them. At first Toad was undoubtedly very trying to his careful guardians. When his violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange bedroom chairs in rude resemblance of a motor-car and would crouch on the foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead, making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when, turning a complete somersault, he would lie prostrate amidst the ruins of the chairs, apparently completely satisfied for the moment. As time passed, however, these painful seizures grew gradually less frequent, and his friends strove to divert his mind into fresh channels. But his interest in other matters did not seem to revive, and he grew apparently languid and depressed.

  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.”