Writing can sometimes be ruff
Bestselling author Ann Patchett explains how Snoopy became her unlikely mentor.
I first found Snoopy in Paradise, Calif., the tiny town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada that was erased by fire last fall. As a child in the late 1960s, my sister and I spent our summers there with our grandparents.
I was an introverted kid and not a strong reader. My grandmother had a stock of mass-market Peanuts books she’d bought off a drugstore spinner. Titles like You’ve Had It, Charlie Brown and All This and Snoopy, Too were exactly my speed.
Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when the heart and mind are fully open. I imagine that for Henry James, for example, the extended European tour of his youth led him to write about American expatriates.
I, instead, was in Northern California being imprinted by a beagle. I was more inclined toward To the Doghouse than To the Lighthouse, more beagle than Woolf. I did the happy dance, and it has served me well.
My formative years were spent in a Snoopy T-shirt, sleeping on Snoopy sheets with a stuffed Snoopy in my arms. I was not a cool kid, and Snoopy was a very cool dog. I hoped the association would rub off on me.
Not only was Snoopy a famous First World War flying ace who battled the Red Baron and quaffed root beer in the existential loneliness of the French countryside, he was also Joe Cool on campus. He pinched Charlie Brown’s white handkerchief to become a soldier in the French Foreign Legion and was a leader of the Beagle Scouts, a motley crew of little yellow birds. He was a figure skater and hockey player in equal measure, an astronaut, a tennis star, a skateboarder, a boxer and a suburban pet whose doghouse contained a van Gogh. This wasn’t just a dog who knew how to dream, this was a dog who so fully inhabited his realities that everyone around him saw them, too. Snoopy heard the roar of the approving crowd as clearly as he heard the bullets whizzing past his Sopwith Camel. Having ventured fearlessly into the world, he could come back to the roof of his doghouse and sit straight-backed in front of his typewriter, to tap out the words that began so many of his stories: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Wait, am I seriously discussing Snoopy, a cartoon dog, as a writer? Am I believing in him as he was drawn to believe in himself ?
Did I want to be a novelist because he was a novelist?
I am. I do. I did.
Snoopy worked hard up there on the roof of the doghouse. He typed: “Those years in Paris were to be among the finest of her life. Looking back, she once remarked, ‘Those years in Paris were among the finest of my life.’ That was what she said when she looked back upon those years in Paris ... where she spent some of the finest years of her life.” Which was followed by the thought bubble, “I think this is going to need a little editing ...”
Snoopy didn’t just write novels, he sent them out. Snoopy got far more rejection letters than he ever got acceptances, and the rejections ranged (as they will) from impersonal to flippant to cruel. It wasn’t as if he’d won all those tennis matches he played in. The Sopwith Camel was regularly riddled with bullet holes. But he kept on going.
He was willing to lose, even in the stories he imagined for himself. He lost, and he continued to be cool. He was still himself in the face of both failure and success. I would be hurt and I would get over it. That’s what the strip taught me. Snoopy walked me through the publishing process: ignoring reviews, being thrilled and then realizing the thrill doesn’t last.
“It’s from your publisher,” Charlie Brown tells Snoopy. “They printed one copy of your novel ... It says they haven’t been able to sell it ... They say they’re sorry ... Your book is now out of print.”
It was painful, yes, but Snoopy loved his job.
“Joe Ceremony was very short,” Snoopy types.
“When he entered a room, everyone had to be warned not to stand on Ceremony.” At which point Snoopy falls off his doghouse backward, cracking himself up, only to climb up again and look at his typewriter lovingly. “I’m a great admirer of my own writing.” Oh, beagle, isn’t it the truth? That moment when you write a single, perfect sentence is worth more than an entire box of biscuits.
I probably would have been a writer without Snoopy. I know without a doubt I would have loved dogs, though my love for writing and dogs might not have been so intertwined.
Of all the Peanuts Zen koans I live by, the one that contains the deepest wisdom may well be “Happiness is a warm puppy.”
Thanks to Snoopy, I have ascribed an inner life to all the dogs I’ve known, and they’ve proved me right. I have lived with many dogs, but I’ve never been able to name a dog Snoopy. It’s a recipe for failure, because no matter how great your dog is, his ears will never turn him into a helicopter. I did, however, name the dog I have now for Charles Schulz, whose nickname was Sparky. Life could have been different. I could have cut my teeth on The Portrait of a Lady. I could have been stuck reading Archie comics. Fate and circumstances stacked the deck in my favour, leaving me to be influenced by a cartoon beagle. It turned out to be exactly the guidance I needed.
Patchett is the author of eight novels, including The Dutch House, coming in September. This essay is adapted from one that will appear in the collection The Peanuts Papers, edited by Andrew Blauner, to be published in October. For The Washington Post