Return to Oz

For my current project, which features a Wizard of Oz fan as its main character, I've been rereading several books in the Oz series written by L. Frank Baum. (Baum wrote thirteen sequels to his bestselling hit novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After his death, the series was continued by a few other authors. Even today, many hopefuls to the title Royal Historian of Oz continue to pen Oz sequels.)

One of the wonderful things about re-reading these books, which were written over a span of twenty years from 1900 until the author's death in 1919, is seeing the development of a writer over time, emotionally as well as stylistically. The first book was never intended to launch a series. Indeed, Baum wrote other stories about magical two-letter lands, like The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi or Ix. Yet somehow the lands of Mo and Ix never made the same mark on the culture as Oz.

When Baum began writing his sequels to the original book, he tried to get around the problem of returning to the same territory by setting several of his books outside the land of Oz, telling stories about characters who traveled through other magical lands (including another two-letter country, Ev) to get to Oz. Finally, in 1910, with his sixth entry in the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum announced that the land of Oz was forever cut off with the rest of the world and so he could no longer receive news of the latest Oz happenings to report in future Oz books. The series was therefore concluded.

For a few years, Baum wrote other fairy tale books, none of which approached the success of the Oz books in terms of sales, even when he tried to import a couple of Oz characters into his non-Oz stories. So in 1913, he "discovered" that he could resume communication with the land of Oz via the telegraph, and he wrote one Oz book a year from then on.

What accounts for these books' enduring charm? Baum certainly has his moments as a writer, particularly in the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, in which his masterful interweaving of plot, character, setting, and word choice is as good as anything ever produced in American letters. Baum also has his weaker moments when he relies on a series of literary tics that get increasingly annoying with their repetition in each new book. Food is often "smoking hot." Trees are always "stately." Rooms in fairy castles are often scented with sprays of perfume and lit with a soft glow from an unknown source. He tends to do much better when he's tackling the flat landscape of Kansas than the enchanted halls of castles in the Emerald City and beyond. His characters can also seem to lack much variation. They're usually a combination of lucky girls like Dorothy, vain, silly, arrogant talking cats and villainous queens, good-hearted idiot savants like the beloved Scarecrow, resourceful, calm, unruffled boys, and villains whose silliness always seems more genuine than their cruelty.

At the same time, Baum tells his stories with remarkable sincerity, so much so that it's hard to believe that Oz is not a real place. He writes about his favorite characters as if they're good friends, and describes magical encounters with genuine wonder, as if they'd occurred to him rather than been invented by him. As a child reading these books, I used to dream of finding just the write cyclone to whisk me away to Oz. As an adult going back to them, I was surprised by how quickly the same longing recurred and how difficult it was for me to shake it off.