The Oddness of Oz

Abstract

The Oddness of Oz* Osmond Beckwith (bio) Twenty Years After In 1950, a father wanting to read to a young daughter, I bought with other "children's classics" The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Later, drawn by curiosity, I also bought most of the remaining Oz titles by Baum (for this series so popular with children had not been allowed to die with the author's death in 1919). In my own childhood I had known Baum only from his Ozma of Oz, a book I seem to remember having found in our school library: odd if true, for schools consistently denied shelf space to Oz as to most ephemeral or "fad" books which children read to the exclusion of anything else. In my fatherly reading and re-reading I discovered—if what seemed so obvious could be a discovery—the material for an article on the unconscious in children's literature like that of an earlier study by an English novelist on Elsie Dinsmore. (If now known only to specialists, in their day the "Elsie books" were a juvenile series as frantically popular and endlessly extended as Oz. Of all such series, Oz seems the only one to please successive younger generations.) I researched Baum in the New York Public Library, discovering nothing about Oz of the kind I feared; more oddly, since Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion were apparently firmly fixed in American public imagination, almost nothing in print about their creator. Of the few brief adult Oz-appreciations then extant, the best and longest—itself brief enough—was still the earliest, that of American editor and anthologist Edward Wagenknecht in a 1929 chapbook. I intended my Baum article for Neurotica (1948-51), a little magazine edited by G. Legman, author also of the magazine's most sensational and influential article, "The Psychopathology of the Comics," also in its way a study of children's literature. It was Legman who made the rather mortifying suggestion that my interest in [End Page 74] Baum was a name-fatality: "Oz," that is, because of Osmond or "Ozzie." (For whatever such name-fatalities may be worth, my daughter's as well is a variant of Dorothy.) Later Legman told me, "If you're going to write about Baum there's a man you ought to meet." And so to Oz I owe my introduction to Martin Gardner, who needs no introduction as a writer and critic of children's literature. Among his numerous avocations at that time, he was, I think, contributing editor of Humpty Dumpty's Magazine. My Baum knowledge shrank when faced with Martin Gardner's, his collection of Oziana and rarer Baum titles, his friendships and correspondence with other Oz-buffs. Martin prophesied truly that the forthcoming expiration of the Wonderful Wizard's copyright (in 1956) would spark new interest in Baum. In anticipation he was then trying to place his own Baum-biography, "The Royal Historian of Oz," with a large-circulation magazine such as the Ladies Home Journal. He showed me the manuscript, which I examined nervously, expecting on every page to find myself anticipated. But to my relief it was straightforward biography in his usual lucid style. In turn I showed my manuscript, which Mrs. Gardner began reading. Then and later its first two sentences ran: "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, America's most popular juvenile fantasy, originally appeared in 1900, a little more than ten years after the death of Louisa May Alcott. Like Miss Alcott, Oz-author L. Frank Baum made his appeal especially to young girls." At which point Mrs. Gardner stopped reading and demanded immediately, "Martin, is that true?" "I'm afraid it is," he replied. In our subsequent discussion I don't remember that we read any more of my manuscript. Time passed. "The Royal Historian" did not appear in a magazine of large circulation, but in two 1955 issues of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Neurotica was long defunct before I finished the thirty-second revision (a conservative estimate) of my article. That saw print finally (1961) in Kulchur, another little magazine, as "The Oddness of Oz." Twenty years later...