I wrote my first story in Bombay at the age of 10; its title was ”Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a dozen or so pages, dutifully typed up by my father`s secretary on flimsy paper, and eventually it was lost somewhere on my family`s own mazy journeyings between India, England and Pakistan. Shortly before his death in 1987 my father claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but in spite of my pleadings he never produced it, and nobody else ever laid eyes on the thing.
I don`t remember much about the story. It was about a 10-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon a rainbow`s beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end-zone and as rich in promises.
The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and constructed like a grand staircase. The boy, naturally, begins to climb. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley and the ”playback singers” of the Hindi movies, many of which made
”The Wizard of Oz” look like kitchen-sink realism. My bad memory-what my mother would call a ”forgettery”-is probably just as well. I remember what matters.
I remember that ”The Wizard of Oz” (the film, not the book, which I didn`t read as a child) was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of going to school in England was mentioned, it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond rainbows. It may be hard to believe, but England felt as wonderful a prospect as Oz.
The Wizard, however, was right there in Bombay. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but he was also prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon-smoke and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the great and terrible, the first Wizard Deluxe.
And when the curtain fell away and his growing offspring discovered, like Dorothy, the truth about adult humbug, it was easy to think, as she did, that our Wizard must be a very bad man indeed. It took me half a lifetime to discover that the Great Oz`s apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well-that he, too, was a good man, but a very bad Wizard.
I have begun with these personal reminiscences because ”The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, and how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies and so, ironically, grow up themselves.
The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy`s parent-substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog Toto from the marauding Miss Gulch, into a world where the people are her own size and in which she is never, ever treated as a child but as a heroine.
She gains this status by accident, it`s true, having played no part in her house`s decision to squash the Wicked Witch of the East; but by her adventure`s end she has certainly grown to fill those shoes, or, rather, those ruby slippers. ”Who`d have thought a girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness,” laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts-an adult becoming smaller than, and giving way to, a child.
As the Wicked Witch of the West grows down, so Dorothy is seen to have grown up. This, in my view, is a much more satisfactory reason for her newfound power over the ruby slippers than the sentimental reasons offered by the ineffably soppy Good Witch Glinda, and then by Dorothy herself, in a cloying ending that I find untrue to the film`s anarchic spirit. (More about this later).
When I first saw ”The Wizard of Oz” it made a writer of me. Many years later, I began to devise the yarn that eventually became ”Haroun and the Sea of Stories” and felt strongly that if I could strike the right note it should be possible to write the tale in such a way as to make it of interest to adults as well as children-or, to use the phrase beloved of blurbists, to
”children from 7 to 70.”
The world of books has become a severely categorized and demarcated affair, in which children`s fiction is not only a kind of ghetto but one subdivided into writing for a number of different age groups. The cinema, however, has regularly risen above such categories. From Spielberg to Schwarzenegger, from Disney to Gilliam, it has come up with movies before which kids and adults sit side by side, united by what they are watching. I watched ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in an afternoon cinema full of happily rowdy children, and went back to see it the next evening, at an hour too late for the kids, so that I could hear all the gags, enjoy the movie in-jokes and marvel once more at the brilliance of the Toontown concept.
But of all movies, the one that helped me most as I tried to find the right voice for Haroun was ”The Wizard of Oz.” The film`s traces are there in the text, plain to see; in Haroun`s companions there are clear echoes of the friends who danced with Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road.
And now I`m doing something strange, something that ought to destroy my love for the movie, but doesn`t. Now I am watching a videotape, watching it with a notebook on my lap, a pen in one hand and a remote-control zapper in the other. I am subjecting ”The Wizard of Oz” to the indignities of slow-motion, fast-forward and freeze-frame. I am trying to learn the secret of the magic trick. And, yes, I am seeing things I never noticed before. . .
. . .But I`ve changed too, of course. My own relationship with ”home”
has become, let`s say, more problematic of late, for reasons I have little interest in rehearsing here. I won`t deny-and will amplify the admission in due course-that I`ve done a good deal of thinking, these past three years, about the advantages of a good pair of ruby slippers. . .
Fast-forward. The Witch is gone. The Wizard has been unmasked, and in the moment of his unveiling has succeeded in a spot of true magic, giving Dorothy`s companions the gifts they did not believe they possessed until that moment. The Wizard has gone, too, and without Dorothy, their plans having been fouled up by (who else but) Toto. And here is Glinda, telling Dorothy she had to learn the meaning of the ruby slippers for herself. . . .
GLINDA: What have you learned?
DOROTHY: If I ever go looking for my heart`s desire again, I won`t look further than my own back yard. And if it isn`t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?
GLINDA: That`s all it is. And now those magic slippers will take you home in two seconds.
. . .Close your eyes. . .click your heels together three times. . .and think to yourself. . .there`s no place like. . . .
Hold it.
Hold it.
How does it come about, at the close of this radical and enabling film which teaches us in the least didactic way possible to build on what we have, to make the best of ourselves, that we are given this conservative little homily?
Are we to believe that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that she didn`t need to make such a journey in the first place? Must we accept that she now accepts the limitations of her home life, and agrees that the things she doesn`t have there are no loss to her? ”Is that right?” Well, excuse me, Glinda, but is it hell.
Home again in black-and-white, with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and the rude mechanicals clustered round her bed, Dorothy begins her second revolt, fighting not only against the patronizing dismissals of her own folk but also against the scriptwriters, and the sentimental moralizing of the entire Hollywood studio system.
”It wasn`t a dream, it was a place,” she cries piteously. ”A real, truly live place! Doesn`t anyone believe me?”
Many, many people did believe her. Frank Baum`s readers believed her, and their interest in Oz led him to write 13 further Oz books, admittedly of diminishing quality; the series was continued, even more feebly, by other hands after his death.
Dorothy, ignoring the ”lessons” of the ruby slippers, went back to Oz, in spite of the efforts of Kansas folk, including Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, to have her dreams brainwashed out of her (see the terrifying electro-convulsive therapy sequence in the recent Disney film ”Return to Oz”);
and, in the sixth book of the series, she took Auntie Em and Uncle Henry with her, and they all settled down in Oz, where Dorothy became a Princess.
So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that
”there`s no place like home,” but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
