Finding the influences that formed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author

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This article was published 28/06/2009 (6301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Finding Oz

How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story

By Evan Schwartz,

Houghton, Mifflin, 400 pages, $35

 

THE book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,  published in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, was North America’s first real fairy tale and remains its most famous and best-loved, just as the movie starring Judy Garland that was made from the book in 1939 remains one of the world’s famous films.

This biography of Baum by Evan Schwartz, a former editor at Business Week, can be plodding in its telling and is usually pedestrian in its prose. Schwartz’s style can be described as businesslike.

It does offer, however, an interesting, if sometimes far-fetched look at the times that made the man who made the book.

The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was driving America at full throttle towards its complete nationhood, the spirit of limitless opportunity was palpable and unbridled entrepreneurship inspired everyone from robber barons like John D. Rockefeller to chicken farmers like L. Frank Baum.

Baum was a chicken farmer once — he failed at it. It was part of a long list of occupations he tried out unsuccessfully before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

As well as a chicken farmer, he was variously an actor, a playwright, a bottler and distributor of oil for axles, a storekeeper, a newspaperman and a travelling salesman.

In the course all this activity, he hauled his unusual family all across the country pursuing his opportunities. Baum’s wife, Maud, was apparently a very patient woman. Maud was also the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of America’s best-known and fiercest, most uncompromising feminists who thought that he was not nearly good enough for her daughter.

Matilda frequently lived with the Baums, which may help explain why Frank was compelled to invent the fantasyland of Oz, not to mention the Wicked Witch.

Documenting that extraordinary invention is the task Schwartz sets himself in this book. That’s perhaps a practical goal, because aside from details of personal life and a comprehensive account of his careers, we don’t know very much about Baum as a person.

He seems to have been a dedicated man, curious and intelligent but, outside the land of Oz, much like the wizard himself — rather ordinary.

He seems to have been very much a product of his time — which was turbulent, passionate and contradictory. His book appeared in 1900, only 10 years after the Battle at Wounded Knee, which itself was only three years before the great Chicago Exposition of 1893.

He may have been more liberal, more tolerant that many of his contemporary Americans, but the soon-to-be creator of Oz was still capable, in an editorial in his newspaper around the time of Wounded Knee, of supporting the annihilation of the Indian as the only way that America could achieve the peace and prosperity it deserved.

There are as many dark things in Oz as anywhere else, as readers of the books know.

Schwartz’s deconstruction of Oz, his analysis of characters, setting and events as related to Baum’s life and time are not entirely convincing.

It may well be true that the yellow brick road that leads to the Emerald City was inspired by a real yellow brick road that led to a military school that Baum attended as a boy.

It might be the case that the Emerald City itself was inspired by the White City of the Chicago Exhibition, which had so many marvels on display. It could even be possible that the Wizard of Oz himself, with his technical skills and ability to "humbug" people, as Schwartz describes it, was in fact cobbled together in Baum’s mind from his impressions of inventor Thomas Edison and showman P.T. Barnum.

All of these things are possible, but like so much that is suggested in Finding Oz they are just guesses — or to put it more charitably, informed deductions.

Some of the other hypotheses put forward in the book draw long bows. One of most famous scenes in Baum’s book and the later film is the Field of Poppies. Anyone who tries to cross it falls asleep and never wakes up unless they are rescued, as Dorothy and Toto are by the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, who, not being human, are immune.

Schwartz suggests that the poppy field is a metaphor for America’s treatment of its Indians and for Baum’s own guilt for having once advocated their extermination.

That seems quite a stretch, as does his suggestion that the Tin Woodman represents "heartless industrial workers" and the Scarecrow the idiocy of American populism, even though, of Dorothy’s companions, the Scarecrow is the smartest and the Tin Woodman the most compassionate. (Even before he got his heart, he shed compassionate tears that tended to rust his jaw.)

Oz fans — and they are legion — can take what they want from this, but it is useful to remember that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written for kids, not adults.

It is a wonderful book, as are many of the other 39 Oz books that followed it, 13 written by Baum himself.

But they are not the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis which were written to be enjoyed on one level by children and on another level by adults and there is no indication that Baum intended them to be. It is doubtful that he was a skilled enough writer to accomplish that.

 

Free Press editorial writer Tom Oleson spent a large part of his childhood in Oz.