Hard Road (31 page)

⁵²
), is an itinerant showman nearing the end of a long line of semireputable gigs that recalls Baum's own peripatetic career. Baum was an actor, producer, salesman, pitchman, entrepreneur, window-dresser, purveyor of popular but critically ignored stories under a half-dozen different pseudonyms, a loving but never settled family man forever hosting parties for his children and their friends, staging magic-lantern shows and puppet plays and carving wooden geese for his soon-to-be-sold beach house. But it's not just that the Wizard's character and history may reflect those aspects of Baum's own that he had doubts about. The Wizard's favorite turns also recall Baum's characteristic fictional operations. As I've mentioned, Baum only rarely lets us see his process of bricolage in action, but in
Dorothy and the Wizard
he does show the Wizard performing what turns out to be a sleight-of-hand version, pulling a live piglet apart into two live piglets, and then three, and so on, until he has nine piglets, which he then recombines. As a rather run-of-the-mill bit of close-up that nevertheless impresses Dorothy, the assembled Mangaboos, and even their Sorcerer just as much as the "real" magic all around them, this could be a figuration of writing itself.

 

 

At the end of
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
, the Wizard is more or less redeemed and comes again to reside permanently in the Emerald City. Eventually, Ozma even allows him to learn a bit of "real magic" to supplement his usual flimflam. But throughout the series, the increasingly kindly and respectable Wizard always retains the hint of something unsavory, a touch of the outcast or even of the sacred executioner. It's clear that he's from a different and more degraded world, and unlike Dorothy and the other children who have been made permanent guests, the Wizard has been worn by it. Certainly he's one of the very few characters in Oz, and the only main character, who is visibly old. And when something unpleasant needs to be done, it's often the black-suited Wizard who for one reason or another ends up with the job— as he does at the end of the encounter with the Gargoyles. Here the Wizard is distinctly less generous than Woot's friends in their escape from the Loons:

 

 

…when Jim finally alighted at the mouth of the cavern the pursuers were still some distance away.

 

 

"But, I'm afraid they'll catch us yet," said Dorothy, greatly excited.

 

 

"No; we must stop them," declared the Wizard. "Quick Zeb, help me pull off these wooden wings!"

 

 

They tore off the wings, for which they had no further use, and the Wizard piled them in a heap just outside the entrance to the cavern. Then he poured over them all the kerosene oil that was left in his oil-can, and lighting a match set fire to the pile.

 

 

The flames leaped up at once and the bonfire began to smoke and roar and crackle just as the great army of wooden Gargoyles arrived. The creatures drew back at once, being filled with fear and horror; for such a dreadful thing as a fire they had never before known in all the history of their wooden land.

 

 

Inside the archway were several doors, leading to different rooms built into the mountain, and Zeb and the Wizard lifted these wooden doors from their hinges and tossed them all on the flames.

 

 

"That will prove a barrier for some time to come," said the little man, smiling pleasantly all over his wrinkled face at the success of their stratagem. "Perhaps the flames will set fire to all that miserable wooden country, and if it does the loss will be very small and the Gargoyles never will be missed."
⁵³

 

 

Does the Wizard's tone in this passage seem quite up to the usual Oz standards? Maybe not. But the sad fact is that Oz is not really so different from the real world. There is, often enough, an "other" in Oz. But after all, isn't it all the fault of the Gargoyles themselves, or rather simply of what they are? The Gargoyles were waiting, long before the book began, for someone from our own world to come along and to eradicate them and their world with the flick of a match.

 

 

Ultimately, then, the issue is not whether the Gargoyles are metaphors for Indians, or even whether they recall Baum's notions of Indians, but rather that the Wizard treats them like Indians, using language that chillingly recalls Baum's statement that "History would forget these latter despicable beings": "[T]he loss will be very small and the Gargoyles never will be missed."

 

 

Oz's "messages" are, broadly speaking, good ones, and as an instance of the standard admonition "don't give up," the Gargoyle episode is as good as any other. But if its message includes the notion that you can take care of all your problems with a can of kerosene, we may have a real problem. So far as we know, the Gargoyles had never harmed anyone before our friends' trespassing visit. It's only the introduction of the Wizard and his band into their world that brings suffering, just as the Wizard's opportunistic fakery in the famous first book took advantage of the innocent citizens of Oz proper. Baum's rather disturbing description of his putative alter ego "smiling pleasantly all over his wrinkled face at the success of their stratagem" suggests that he was aware of this, and that, whether or not he ever thought again about his noxious editorials, he may not have been entirely at ease with his self-image. Is there even a submerged wish here that Indians, like (presumably) the Gargoyles, might truly be incapable of feeling pain? Certainly there is at least a hint that it's just not the occasional instances of malevolence one encounters around Oz, but the solutions to them— technological, magical, or simply a bit too easy— that are truly horrific. The childlike powers of imagination breed both good and bad in such proximity that separating them may not be possible. Humbug is not the Wizard's only sin, and the dark places in his character figure a submerged but ever-present evil in the Land of Oz itself.

 

 

 

NOTES

1. "John Estes Cooke" (L. Frank Baum),
Tamawaca Folks
(USA [Grand Rapids, Michigan, n.d.]: The Tamawaca Press, North Dakota [1899, reprinted 1907]), p. 21.

 

 

2. Ibid., pp. 144–45.

 

 

3. Salman Rushdie,
The Wizard of Oz
(London: BFI Film Classics, 1992), p. 57.

 

 

4. Gore Vidal, "On Rereading the Oz Books,"
The New York
Review of Books,
October 13, 1977, pp. 38–42; reprinted as "The Oz Books" in Gore Vidal,
United States: Essays 1952
–
1992
(New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 1094–1119.

 

 

5. Suzanne Rahn,
The Wizard of Oz: A Reader's Companion
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), p. 79.

 

 

6. Alison Lurie, "The Oddness of Oz,"
The New York Review of Books
, December 21, 2000.

 

 

7. Laura Miller, "Oz vs. Narnia,"
Salon
, December 28, 2000, np.

 

 

8. C. Warren Hollister, "Oz and the Fifth Criterion,"
Baum Bugle
(Winter 1971): 5–8. Also in Hearn, 1983, and Rahn, 1998.

 

 

9. Cory Panshin, letter,
Salon
, January 10, 2001, np.

 

 

10. L. Frank Baum,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
(Chicago and New York: George M. Hill Co., 1900), Introduction, np.

 

 

11. Ibid., p. 60.

 

 

12. James Thurber, p.5.

 

 

13. L. Frank Baum,
The Tin Woodman of Oz
, p. 64.

 

 

14. Baum, interview, 1904, in Hearn, p. 64.

 

 

15. See Tim Burton's 1993 film
The Nightmare Before Christmas
for a more intentionally frightening use of the same image.

 

 

16. Baum,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, Introduction, np.

 

 

17. "Le Comte de Lautréamont" (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse [1846–1870]),
Poesies
, 1890.

 

 

18. L. Frank Baum, "Modern Fairy Tales," 1909, in Rahn, p. 28.

 

 

19. L. Frank Baum, editorial,
Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer
, December 15, 1890.

 

 

20. L. Frank Baum, editorial,
Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer,
January 3, 1891.

 

 

21. "Planners and Anticipated Participants in the L. Frank Baum Conference for Aberdeen, South Dakota, Planned in 1997," "Apology and Pledge," np. ("Note: The Baum Festival went on as planned in the summer of 1997. Because of conflicting opinions, the Apology and Pledge were not, in the end, part of the program that took place in the town of Aberdeen." —J. S. Dill, March 11, 1998.)

 

 

22. Martin Gardner, "The Royal Historian of Oz," in Gardner and Russel B. Nye, eds.,
The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was
(East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1994), p. 30.

 

 

23. L. Frank Baum,
The Road to Oz
(Chicago: Reilly and Buitton, 1909), pp. 108–10.

 

 

24. Gardner, p. 36.

 

 

25. See Michael O'Riley,
Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum
(University Press of Kansas, 1997), pp. 147–48.

 

 

26. Brian Attebery,
The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 104.

 

 

27. Leonardo da Vinci,
Notebooks
.

 

 

28. For a clever contemporary collection of objects that suggest faces, see François and Jean Robert's photography collection
Faces
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000).

 

 

29. L. Frank Baum,
The Tin Woodman of Oz
(Chicago: Reilly and Buitton, 1918), pp. 224–25.

 

 

30. J. Allan Hobson,
The Chemistry of Conscious States
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 91.

 

 

31. Rahn, pp. 100–101.

 

 

32. Hubert Howe Bancroft,
The Book of the Fair
(Chicago and San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1893), p. 836.

 

 

33. Ibid., pp. 450–51.

 

 

34. Ibid., pp. 445–46.

 

 

35. Ibid., pp. 371–72.

 

 

36. Ibid., p. 266.

 

 

37.
Oxford English Dictionary,
entry, "wicker"; John Dryden,
Aeneis
, vii. p. 478.

 

 

38. Stewart Cullin, "Retrospect of the Folk-Lore of the Columbian Exposition," in
Journal of American Folklore 7
(8): 51–59, quoted in Robert Cantwell, "Feasts of Unnaming: Folk Festivals and the Representation of Folklife," in
Crossroads,
Virginia.edu.

 

 

39. Bancroft, p. 636.

 

 

40. One feature Baum wrote for his own Aberdeen newspaper was a humorous serial narrative called "Our Landlady." In the installment of December 6, 1890, the eponymous heroine walks into Indian country alone to assess whether the Sioux are actually a threat, taking Cody's book with her as a guide.

 

 

41. William Frederick Cody,
The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout, and Guide: An Autobiography
(Hartford, Conn.: Frank E. Bliss, 1879).

 

 

42. W. W. Denslow, the illustrator of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
also contributed illustrations for Twain's
A Tramp Abroad
(1880)
.

 

 

43. Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
Roughing It
(Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1872), pp. 146–49.

 

 

44. Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
Innocents Abroad, or, the New Pilgrim's Progress
(Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1869).

 

 

45. Albert James Pickett:
History of Alabama
(Mobile, Ala.: 1851).

 

 

46. Henry Timberlake,
Memoirs of Lieutenant Henry Timberlake
(London: Printed for the author, 1765), p. 49.

 

 

47. William Bartram,
Travels
(Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791), p. 454.

 

 

48. See Attebery, pp. 90–93.

 

 

49. Rachael Plummer,
Rachael Plummer's Narrative of Twenty One Months Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Comanche Indians
(Houston, Tex.: 1838), np.

 

 

50. For a contemporary treatment of this theme see the 1995 Disney film
Toy Story,
which turns on the idea of abused toys, naturally coming down solidly on the side of children who never do such things.

 

 

51. Eunice Tietjens, quoted in Gardner, pp. 27–28.

 

 

52. L. Frank Baum,
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz,
p. 193.

 

 

53. Ibid., pp. 160–61.

 

 

 

 

OZ BOOKS BY L. FRANK BAUM
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
1900
The Marvelous Land of Oz,
1904
Ozma of Oz,
1907
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz,
1908
The Road to Oz,
1909
The Emerald City of Oz,
1910
The Patchwork Girl of Oz,
1913
Tic-Tok of Oz,
1914
The Scarecrow of Oz,
1915
Rinkitink in Oz,
1916
The Lost Princess of Oz,
1917
The Tin Woodman of Oz,
1918
The Magic of Oz,
1919
Glinda of Oz,
1920

 

 

TWENTY QUESTIONS IN OZ: AN OZ QUIZ

1. Oz is called Oz because…

 

 

a. O.Z. are the Wizard's first two initials

 

b. it is short for Ozmandias

 

c. it is Often Zany

 

d. its ruler's name was always Oz

 

 

2. Before they cast Judy Garland in the movie, Hollywood considered using…

 

 

a. Sonja Henie

 

b. Margaret O'Brian