A wonderful wizard of children’s literature
A century since the death of Oz creator L Frank Baum, Charlotte Runcie explores his brilliant, bizarre, troubling life and legacy
We think we know The Wizard of Oz.
The Technicolor 1939 film starring Judy Garland as the wide-eyed Dorothy alongside wicked witches, ruby slippers, rainbows and munchkins is often called one of the greatest films of all time, a family favourite at Christmas and a rich source of excellent songs. It’s a children’s fable about dreaming, the importance of home and heart, and knowing which talents you already have.
But with May marking 100 years since the death of L Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books on which the film was based, how much more is there to the magical story we love? The books have a political complexity that goes beyond the magic of the film. And the world of Oz and the man who created it were to have a deep influence on the children’s and fantasy literature that followed, from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien to JK Rowling and George RR Martin.
The film was a success but not a sensation when it was released at the box office. It wasn’t until it was broadcast on television in Britain and America in the Fifties that it became popular. The vivid colours of the picture, the scale of the imaginary world and the special effects used to create it, along with the musical numbers, made it instantly memorable.
And the film’s story – of a teenager growing up in a drab traditional family, feeling as if she should be part of a more colourful world – was particularly meaningful to
LGBT communities. In the United States military, homosexual soldiers identified themselves to one another in code as “friends of Dorothy”. And the international gay pride flag is a rainbow.
It’s hard to know what Baum would have made of that particular legacy. He was a staunch Republican who grew up in the 19th century and died two decades before the film’s release. And
although the books are bursting with imagination and a colourful alternative world, it’s the film that’s always been treasured by gay audiences. Baum was an author for children, and it would be unthinkable in 1900 for a children’s author to include overt homosexuality in their writing.
Baum wrote 14 books in the Oz series, and was also a prolific writer of short stories and poetry. He spent his twenties breeding poultry, particularly the Hamburg chicken, and at 30 published his first book, a nonfiction guide to the subject: The Book of the Hamburgs.
Soon afterwards, he moved from New York to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he turned to journalism, editing the local newspaper and beginning to write stories for children, influenced especially by the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. After partnering with illustrator WW Denslow, Baum published the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz, in 1900. It became a phenomenon, and Oz was famous long before the making of the film (a silent 1925 version starring Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman – as he is known in the books – was quickly forgotten).
An early New York Times review called it “a book that rises far above the average children’s book of today… the story has humour and here and
there stray bits of philosophy that will be a moving power on the child’s mind and will furnish fields of study and investigation for the future students and professors of psychology… it will indeed be strange if there be a normal child who will not enjoy the story”.
Baum’s ambitions for his fantasy creation went far beyond the books. He loved theatre and there was soon a stage musical, but this was also the early days of cinema, and he already saw the potential for the story on screen. In 1908, he toured The Fairylogue
and Radio-plays, an experimental motion picture based on the story, which mixed actors, live readings from Baum, vivid handcoloured slides and original film score. It was far too expensive to produce and folded after two months, very nearly bringing Baum to financial ruin.
Some of Baum’s plans and pronouncements were so outlandish that it’s difficult to work out how real they were. In 1905, he claimed in a Chicago newspaper to have bought a place called Pedloe Island off the coast of California to turn it into a dreamlike Oz-themed amusement park, but this never happened and the very existence of a Pedloe Island is in doubt. Baum was good at tall tales.
A strong current of politics runs through the books. Some early critics wondered if the whole fantastical creation of Oz was a dense analogy for contemporary American politics, with each character supposed to represent some politician or another, and the yellow brick road a metaphor for the American gold standard. Baum himself brushed off these suggestions, saying he just wrote for children. But there were causes that he and his books openly promoted.
Baum’s wife, Maud Gage, was an active feminist and campaigner for women’s suffrage, and her mother, the noted suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, also lived with the family for a while. Baum shared their values. He published prowomen’s suffrage pieces in his newspaper, writing that “from the moment a woman’s hand is felt at the reins of government will date an era of unexampled prosperity for our country”.
In the Oz books, Baum gives women power. In The Marvelous Land
of Oz, the second in the series, a female revolutionary army wielding knitting needles stages a coup against the men and makes the husbands of the kingdom do all the household chores. (In the end, the husbands prove to be unbearably bad at cooking and the women voluntarily reclaim the task.) The book ends with a female leader, Queen Ozma. “The Wonderful Wizard was never so wonderful as Queen Ozma,” the people said to one another, in whispers; “for he claimed to do many things he could not do; whereas our new Queen does many things no one would ever expect her to accomplish.”
Anyone ready to proclaim Baum a straightforward hero of enlightened and liberal thinking, though, shouldn’t get too excited. In The Woggle-bug
Book, much comedy is made out of comparing racially stereotyped characters, and one of the great stains on Baum’s reputation has been, outside of his fiction, his apparent support for the extermination of Native Americans, writing in his newspaper that “the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation?” For a writer with such strong threads of morality running through his work, his blindness to his own violent prejudice and racism is surprising and obnoxious.
And yet, Baum’s impact on literature has been deep. The moral pontifications peppered through his books were part of a style that contemporary and subsequent children’s authors, including Enid Blyton and PL Travers, also employed in their work (and Blyton and Travers, too, have had their share of criticism for racism). Baum’s books were part of a new kind of moralising in children’s books that would echo in the Christian fantasy world of CS Lewis’s Narnia.
Oz is a world that contains power, war, revolution, just and unjust rulers, and all the complexities of justice and kindness. The books aren’t particularly violent, but war and conflict are recurring themes painted on a large canvas, and that’s something you’ll also find in much-loved books by the authors that followed him. The Oz books showed that a fantasy world could be bright, dark, and on an enormous scale – and that it can have just as rich and complicated a political landscape as our own.
In the second Oz book, a female army wielding knitting needles stages a coup against the men