Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read online

  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.

  Snoopy has an extraordinary capacity for celebration. He leaps for joy; he dances with delight. “To those of us with real understanding,” he says, “dancing is the only pure art form.” A frame or so later, he continues, “To live is to dance, to dance is to live.” Snoopy’s mind is a different dance of life, but a dance all the same. He is his own Balanchine. No occasion need pass unmarked by dance: There is a First Day of May dance, which differs only slightly from the First Day of Fall dance, which differs also only slightly from the First Day of Spring dance. In fact, he admits, “even I have a hard time telling them apart.” There is a Suppertime dance, which doesn’t always work, and a Rain dance, about whose success we know very little. The Be Kind to Animals dance, Snoopy is quick to point out, “symbolizes the last days of ‘Be Kind to Animals Week.’ ” There is no Third of May dance, although there is a Second, and he has a special dance he performs for Lucy, the “Haha you have to go to school and I don’t dance.” The critical difference between the Second Day of Spring dance and all others, he explains, is in the action of the toes.

  Snoopy’s glee as he dances is infectious: it is impossible to look at his outstretched arms, twirling ears and spinning feet, and not feel delight in his energy and pleasure. “Snoopy has the freedom to express uncontrolled joy,” observes Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist’s widow, who is wonderfully exuberant in her own right. “Snoopy doesn’t have to have any controls.… Sparky [Charles Schulz] always said that when Snoopy began to walk on two feet, his whole personality opened up, that after that the character took on a life of his own … the exuberance grew out of Sparky’s pen.”

  In the television classic It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, who has become separated from his friends in a department store, comes upon a stack of brightly colored Easter eggs. He picks up an elaborately decorated one and with one eye closed peers into an opening at the end. Inside the egg there is a diorama of bunnies in a colorless landscape. (These bunnies are the famed Bunnie-Wunnies, stars of Snoopy’s favorite books. Snoopy, who has a bunny coloring book as well, “loves bunnies” more than almost anything else. They are among the most affectionately held of his passions.) Suddenly the dull landscape changes to vibrant greens and daisies and colored Easter eggs. The bunnies link paws and break into a Matisse-like dance. Snoopy leaps into the diorama, the world within the egg, and joins the bunnies in their dance. Ears sailing, they all twirl together for a while and then Snoopy breaks into a wildly exuberant solo—ears extended and flying out from his head, he pirouettes and kicks out his feet in a Russian folk dance. It is a moment of complete magic, one that draws the viewer into a private world of unrestrained rejoicing. “On with the dance!” Byron had written: “Let joy be unconfined;/No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet/To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet.” Snoopy’s feet are not perhaps those imagined by Byron, but no one’s dancing and joy could be more delightful or unconfined.

  Snoopy’s bliss comes not just from dance. He revels in recreating himself, delights in the absurd, and takes endless pleasure in playing with ideas and seeing where they go. He is well-read, although not as much as he might have been, perhaps slowed down by his tendency to move his lips when he reads. He is enchanted by the esoteric. “Dragonflies sew up your lips so you can’t eat, and you starve to death,” Snoopy tells Woodstock at one point. “If you chew wintergreen candy in the dark, it makes sparks!” he exclaims elsewhere. He exchanges philosophical musings with a fruit fly, who has a lifespan of twenty-four hours, and learns that the fly has only one regret: “I wish I knew at nine o’clock what I know now,” he confides to Snoopy.

  Snoopy is a sensitive observer of nature, and his joy in life is reflected in his sorrow at its passing. He finds the falling of leaves almost unbearably sad. He watches one leaf as it falls to the ground and says, “Well! The first falling leaf of the season … The first leaf to make the courageous leap! The first leaf to depart from home! The first leaf to plunge into the unknown … The first leaf to die!” Later, he looks up as a leaf falls from the tree and says to it, “Don’t stay here … They’ll come and get you with a rake.” “Nobody ever tells them about the guy with a rake,” he adds. Snoopy has a child’s capacity to wonder and exult, but his exultation is tempered by an adult awareness of the inherent sadnesses of life. His imagination is part child, part adult. It improvises, spins, and revels in its fancies.

  “The man’s true life, for which he consents to live,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “lies altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading another life, plying another trade from that they chose.… For no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls.” Snoopy, dining by candlelight on the top of his doghouse, with his stained-glass window and van Gogh below, would agree.

  “All children, except one, grow up,” wrote James Barrie in Peter Pan. “They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother.… Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know that after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”

  The one child who never grows up is, of course, Peter Pan: “I ran away the day I was born,” he explains, “because I heard father and mother talking about what I was to be when I became a Man.… I want al
ways to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies.” That Peter cannot and will not grow up is at the heart of Barrie’s play: Peter is guide and master of the magical Neverland, but he can never be a part of the more completely human world from which the children he enchants come, to which they return, and where they grow up. Peter is almost always at play and joyful, but his play and joy go nowhere, cannot move beyond childlike pleasure into the complexities of human relationships and life. Peter’s world, that of childhood imagination, is unbounded, yet it is also hemmed in by an inability to keep up with the expectations of life. Peter’s joys are real, but ultimately unsustaining. The children he beguiles with his exuberance and with the magic of Neverland move on, but Peter does not.

  Peter leaps buoyantly from adventure to adventure, from the Mermaids’ Lagoon to the Pirate Ship, with little or no memory of where he has been and what he has done. He is captivating, but thoughtless and capricious. He teaches Wendy, John, and Michael how to jump on the wind’s back and to fly—“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air”—and he leads them, “Second to the right, and straight on till morning,” to Neverland. But, tellingly, Peter forgets to teach the children how to stop, and while he goes off to have adventures they are left to struggle with their new powers: “He would come back laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to say for certain what had been happening. It was really rather irritating.” Wendy raises the disquieting possibility: “If he forgets them so quickly, how can we expect that he will go on remembering us?”

  The children’s adventure is only an imaginary one, a glorious way station on their journey to the rest of their lives, but Neverland is Peter’s past, present, and future. Because of this, his life is tantalizing to the children, but his own emotions are arrested. He learns from life even less than he remembers of it, and Barrie fates him to experience over and over again the same events, each time anew, with the generations of children he seduces away to Neverland, where time is very odd and “all the four seasons may pass while you are filling a jug at the well.”

  Neverland as imagined by Barrie is an unforgettable, forgotten place of personal adventure and memory, and one of the most wonderfully construed ideas in children’s literature:

  There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on; and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.…

  On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

  Like Toad in The Wind in the Willows, Peter moves heedlessly from engagement to engagement: “He was fond of variety,” writes Barrie, “and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him.” He is a genius at make-believe but unlike the other boys, who know the distinction between truth and invention, Peter does not. Nor does Peter learn from friendship or adversity in the same way that most others do. “Peter,” his creator tells us, “had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all.” And Wendy remarks, “Fancy your forgetting the lost boys, and even Captain Hook!” “I suppose,” she says on reflection, “it is because you have so many adventures.” Fun leads to more fun, but nowhere else. There is much joy but no learning, much exuberance but no wisdom.

  When Peter duels Captain Hook—who, the playwright reminds us, has eyes as blue as the forget-me-not and long curls “which look like black candles about to melt,” speaks with elegant Etonian diction, and “is not wholly evil; he has a Thesaurus in his cabin, and is no mean performer on the flute”—most who have seen the play remember the verbal exchange that takes place when Hook asks Peter: “Pan, who and what art thou?” and Peter crows back exultantly, “I’m youth, I’m joy.” But a different side of Peter’s nature is revealed in a fight he has with Hook, for it gives an unimpeded look into the limitations of never growing up: “[Peter] saw that he was higher up the rock than his foe. It would not have been fighting fair. He gave the pirate a hand to help him up. It was then that Hook bit him. Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter.… No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it.”

  Peter moves neither forward nor backward in his dealings with himself and the world. He repeats his mistakes as he repeats his adventures and, accordingly, advances not at all in his knowledge of himself or others. The promise of joy compels him, but the joy he finds is fleeting, unremembered, and put neither to good nor particular use. Not surprisingly, James Barrie confided many years after he had written Peter Pan that “its true meaning came to me—Desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.”

  The imagination of children has its limitations, as does the exuberance that accompanies it. The nature of both must change if a child is to live resourcefully in a world that changes. The characters in children’s stories stay as they are, of course, caught in time—Christopher Robin and Pooh, for instance, go off together, and “wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”—and they remain there, waiting for new generations of children: unforgettable for the worlds they open up, and irreplaceable for the facets of human nature they reflect. They serve us well, and in different ways, as we negotiate youth and then take our leave of it.

  Youth is moved away from only to be missed, of course. Answer-ability to the tasks of life fosters a more circumspect kind of exuberance, which inevitably is accepted but rued. As the years pass, greater pains are taken to recapture youth’s vehement joys. “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more,” wrote Joseph Conrad, “the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim.”

  Yet Robert Louis Stevenson, better able than nearly anyone to capture the lost lands of childhood and adolescence, spoke as forcefully of the easements of getting older: “The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable,” he wrote. “What we lose in generous impulse, we more than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers.… We take our pleasure differently.”

  It is possible for some, but not for most, to hold on to the heat of life and, although they take their pleasures differently from when they were young, they continue to take them with a full measure of joy.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “The Champagne of Moods”

  (photo credit 5.1)

  Improbably, the English invented Champagne. Decades before French winegrowers produced their first bottle of sparkling wine, Christopher Merret described to the Royal Society in London the methods being used by English wine-coopers to make brisk and sparkling wines. The addition of vast quantities of sugar and molasses to a finished wine, he reported in 1662, provoked a second fer
mentation, which created bubbles. This process, according to the Champagne historian Tom Stevenson, made the English wine not just lively but “unequivocally sparkling.” Merret’s contemporary the great French wine master Dom Pérignon, far from cultivating bubbles in his wines, spent a great deal of time and energy attempting to annihilate them.

  The bubbles won out. Every second around the world seven bottles of Champagne are uncorked. This, at 250 million bubbles in an average bottle, is a gloriously unimaginable amount of bubble and fizz. Champagne launches ships and marriages, marks the race won, the examinations finished. It is uniquely the wine of celebration, of joy, and of elegance. When Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in Gatsby’s gardens “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” only “champagne” could evoke the mood he wanted. Champagne is a mood, an austerely beautiful signifier and creator of moment and emotion. Dom Pérignon, despite his initial misgivings, is said to have exclaimed when he first tasted it, “Come quickly! I am tasting stars.”

  Champagne is coolly and joyously incandescent. Evenings gain from it in vivacity, and its pleasures spread among those in its presence. Desire sharpens. “Hardly did it appear,” wrote an eighteenth-century drinker of Champagne, “than from my mouth it passed into my heart.” Its bubbles generate an intoxicating gaiety; indeed, one wine authority believes that “Champagne should laugh at you.” The bubbles, he contends, should be “extremely animated and persistent: When the glass is held to the light, it should be possible to spot them forming right down near the stem and watch them rocketing upwards like balls in a juggler’s hands.” Champagne, in short, is exuberant.