But while this perhaps inevitable drift does make the Land of Oz proper a less hazardous place than it is in
The Wizard
, it never strips the world of the Oz books of sinister elements. There are no stories in a perfect world, and in the later books, the strange lands surrounding Oz (through which the protagonists often have to travel to reach the Emerald City at the end of the book), as well as forgotten pockets of Oz itself, retain characters and themes that are, to say the least, disturbing. My sense is that while they're often thought of as anomalies and outside Baum's generally utopian vision, these darker elements may actually give us a key to Oz's continuing allure.
Lurie recounts how the critical reputation of the Oz books— which is at the moment probably the strongest it's ever been— has varied widely from decade to decade, often because their subversively feminist and pacifist elements scandalize the Christian Right. But almost since the books first appeared, Oz's credibility has also had a more serious charge to contend with, one that for want of a better name might be called the "Narnia Problem," after a typically mainstream attack on Baum that recently appeared in the on-line magazine
Salon
. Feeling that Oz is "infinitely less compelling" than C. S. Lewis's Narnia, the article's author, Laura Miller, tells us that
The Wizard of Oz
"has nothing scary or even unsettling in it" and that "the main characters are never in mortal danger.… There is wickedness in Oz but no evil; badness is simply a disagreeable temperament certain people have, not a terrible force in the world, certainly never a temptation to any of the heroes." Miller ends with the charge that "Baum never wrote a deft sentence, while Lewis excelled at them."
7
Since the subject here is the deeper themes of the books, I'm going to dismiss the attack on Baum's style somewhat airily by submitting that, despite much talk to the contrary, style is still only style, and it's not necessarily the most precious tool in the writer's box. Imagination rates higher, and not only in writing for children. Poe's style was so tabloidishly liberal with adjectives and even adverbs that I doubt whether he'd pass the average freshman creative writing class. But he had Tool Number One, and while there's no shortage of deft sentences in the world, there is always a shortage of imagination.
Which is what, though? Our estimate of a writer's imagination depends not just on the novelty of a writer's inventions, but on their special quality, their "rightness." C. Warren Hollister, in an essay called "Oz and the Fifth Criterion," posits something he calls "three-dimensionality," a quality specific to the fantasy genre— not quite "imagination" as we know it, but whatever it is that makes it possible for the reader to project himself into an unlikely situation, the quality that makes a creation seem for the moment almost possible, solid, memorable, and "right."
8
Baum's plain-speakin' prose would seem to be just the thing for this job, since anything more highfalutin can easily lead to reader resistance, especially from young readers who as yet have no middlebrow pretensions. And beyond that, as Cory Panshin insightfully observes in a letter on the Miller piece,
9
Baum's writing has a directness especially suited to being read aloud— as opposed to Lewis's, which is often oblique and confusing— and this is not quite so easy to achieve as many people think.
But it's the charge that Oz is "sanitized" that does the least justice to Baum's work. It's true that by the last few books in the series Oz has become a near-utopia, and that even writers most sympathetic to the series tend not to mention the country's darker pockets, or to dismiss them with an aside. Ray Bradbury is typical of these, calling Oz "the land of midnight sun, where the day never stops, where noons persist or if they darken briefly, reburst themselves with pure delight." And Baum, in his introduction to
The Wizard
, did profess to have written a "modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out."
10
But, as many critics have pointed out, even a quick glance through the first book yields any number of images that show how far Baum fell short of his professed goal: the Kalidahs, "beasts with bodies like bears and heads like tigers" who nearly slash Dorothy and her friends apart before they are "dashed to pieces on the sharp rocks,"
11
the armless Hammerheads, who butt people with heads that shoot out on stalklike necks, or the melting Wicked Witch falling down in a "brown, shapeless mass" and spreading over the floor. James Thurber— possibly more in touch with his child-self than Bradbury— remembers: "I know that I went through excruciatingly lovely nightmares when the Scarecrow lost his straw, when the Tin Woodman was taken apart, when the Saw-Horse broke his wooden leg (it hurt for me, even if it didn't hurt for Mr. Baum)."
12
Regarding temptations to evil, while it's true that Oz is, usually, a forgiving place, it's a long way from a no-fault zone. In
The Tin Woodman of Oz
(1918), the antepenultimate book of the series, our heroes— this time the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and a new "meat" character named Woot the Wanderer— escape from a band of balloon-like inflated creatures called Loons, who, assuming all creatures to be of their own anatomical type, had attempted to deflate Woot and his companions with long thorns.
"Every one of them ought to be exploded," declared Woot, who was angry because his leg still hurt him.
"No," said the Tin Woodman, "that would not be just fair. They were quite right to capture us, because we had no business to intrude here, having been warned to keep away from Loonville. This is their country, not ours…"
13
Miller's charge that Baum's protagonists are never tempted to do wrong is simply untrue; in fact, in this case, Woot is tempted to exterminate an entire species (if that's the right term). This sort of temptation doesn't happen only in the later books. In
The Wizard
, the temptation theme goes beyond the Cowardly Lion's famous appetite for Toto; more centrally, the Wizard himself (who is hardly even an antihero, but at worst a "swing character") is a good person tempted by power to resort to "humbug," or fakery— one of the cardinal sins in the ethos of Oz.
The most one could say is that, in general, Baum makes an effort to cage or sublimate his demons while still keeping them on display. Often this process is more subtle than simply creating villains who are easily overcome. Baum said that as a child he was troubled by dreams of being chased by animated scarecrows, and that since then he had "taken revenge" on the figure of the scarecrow for the "mystic feeling he once inspired."
14
His revenge, though, was transforming this hollow, dead, vegetal, Eliotesque specter into the benevolent leader of Oz's pantheon of nonhuman protagonists. Many if not most of these are equally the stuff of nightmares declawed: the Cowardly, nonanthropophagous Lion, the ax-wielding tin robot who is actually rather meek, or, in
The Marvelous Land of Oz
, the positively Brueghelian figure of Jack Pumpkinhead, whose head is a grinning saw-toothed jack-o'-lantern teetering atop a tall, gaunt wooden armature, but who serves Tip, the hero of the book, as loyally as the more famous trio in
The Wizard
serves Dorothy.
15
Like, I suppose, all young fans of the series, I tended to imagine myself living in the Emerald City, away from Oz's dangers. But at some point I realized that what I kept coming back to in the books were the sections involving more mysterious elements, a host of strange and grotesque threats to the benign order. Unlike Thurber, I don't remember any nightmares, but I do still remember unique feelings of apprehension and dread. What's most significant to a child's mind is not whether a story is scary enough to be a functional nightmare, but rather in what ways it remains nightmarish. The telling quality of a nightmare is not how obviously it's about danger or death, but its take on life, the specifics of its own particularity— in a word, its originality.
Even the obvious examples above show that Oz is not peopled by the standard dragons and stepmothers that have done duty from the Grimms through Narnia and into the Harry Potter era— what Baum called "the stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy"
16
— but by more unexpected constructs. One feels it might almost take a real child to come up with some of them: the Flatheads of
Glinda of Oz
, for instance, who carry their brains in cans, or the characters who accompany Ojo, the hero of
The Patchwork Girl of Oz,
on his own journey to the Emerald City: a Glass Cat, the Patchwork Girl, a living Edison phonograph machine, and the cubistic Woozy, a large, hairless, uniformly rectilinear dog. This sort of whimsy isn't all that far from Lautréamont's famous proto-Surrealist simile of the beauty of a "chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table."
17
The same qualities extend beyond the cast to the structures of the Oz books. While the standard fairy tales of the Western canon tend to observe a stately progression, usually with clusters of three characters or events in ascending order of magnitude, Baum's scenarios are less predictable, often organized in ways that could be said to be more representative of real nightmares— with disjunctive changes of scene, inexplicable conflations of character, and an arbitrariness that seems suspiciously purposeful.
In Baum's day this quality was called "nonsense," and its paradigmatic creative genius was of course Lewis Carroll, whom Baum naturally admired.
18
Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World are bleaker and more overtly nightmarish than Oz, so much so that lately the general consensus seems to be that while their reputation among adults continues to grow, Carroll's books are less a favorite among real children than was previously assumed. But I believe that while Dorothy is indeed a less lonely and beleaguered heroine than Alice, much of the oddity she attracts can be compared to Carroll's in its capacity to disturb. There are signs of a dark and secretive genius in Oz, of something that could almost be called evil.
3. THE SITTING BULL EDITORIALS
Like all Oz fans, I'd had only good feelings about Baum the person until I heard about an incident in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where, in 1997, a coalition of Oglala Sioux demanded the cancellation of a planned L. Frank Baum Conference. Their complaint was that when Baum was editing a newspaper in Aberdeen, in 1890 and 1891, he'd written a pair of editorials advocating a genocidal policy against remaining Indians. Since the hate-mongering passages are even more painful when taken out of context, it might be best to quote these editorials in full. The following was printed in Baum's
Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer
on December 15, 1890, shortly after Sitting Bull was assassinated by the Indian Police, a U.S. Army regiment:
Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead.
He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies?
The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.
We cannot honestly regret their extermination, but we at least do justice to the manly characteristics possessed, according to their lights and education, by the early Redskins of America.
19
The second editorial, following the Wounded Knee Massacre— which was naturally then called a battle— appeared on January 3, 1891:
The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.
The PIONEER has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands.
Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
