One hundred and nine years ago next month, a handsome Chicagoan with caterpillar eyebrows, a handlebar mustache and a fabulous imagination sat nervously in his home near Humboldt Park, waiting for the publication of his latest book. To calm himself, he might very well have indulged in his favorite pastime: riding a newfangled contraption known as a bicycle through the park, breathing in the scents from the formal gardens that decorated it. So fond was L. Frank Baum of the sport that he even purchased bicycles for his wife, Maud, and his four children.
Did I say “four”? That’s technically correct, but if you take the larger view, his brood eventually numbered in the tens of millions. With the release of “The Wonderful Wizard in Oz” in September 1900, the 44-year-old Baum was to become the spiritual father to successive generations of young people. It wasn’t his first book, but it was the one that put him — and Oz — on the literary map. That’s because, as Gore Vidal notes in his 1977 essay, “The Oz Books,” stories that are “first encountered in childhood do more to shape the imagination and the style than all the later calculated readings of acknowledged masters.”
Baum followed up the first “Oz” book with 13 more set in the green-tinted utopia filled with creatures such as a loquacious scarecrow, a cardio-challenged tin woodsman and a lion who’s actually a fraidy-cat — and Dorothy, the girl from Kansas. The books were instant hits. They garnered not only large sales but, more improbably, the enthusiastic approval of critics, a notoriously myopic and ill-tempered lot.
These details are set out in copious and entertaining detail in “The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum” by Rebecca Loncraine, published this month by Gotham Books. Loncraine does fans of “Oz” a great favor: Not only does she provide fascinating information about Baum’s amazing life — he was, at various times and with varying degrees of success, an actor, a salesman, a chicken farmer, a lecturer, a window-dresser for a Chicago department store, a journalist, a movie mogul — but she also manages to put the man squarely back in his own time: America in the late 19th Century, when technological progress raged at a fever pitch, when the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 was showing off its myriad marvels.
Loncraine’s book is a reminder that the “Oz” books might as well have had the Chicago skyline embossed on their covers; that’s how important the city was to Baum’s emotional and intellectual development. Chicago’s noisy, crowded streets stoked his imagination. Its lakefront was his blue muse. Baum was born in upstate New York and spent his young manhood in the Far West, but it was Chicago — the big, busy place to which people came to make their fortunes, to spruce up their brains and their hearts and their fortitude, to find a home — that gave him the oomph to create Oz.
Loncraine also presents other important aspects of life in this era, perspectives and attitudes that affected Baum’s thinking and that seeped into the “Oz” books. A craze for spiritualism — the belief that the dead can be contacted by the living — and the tragic epidemics that took the lives of many young children were lifelong influences, Loncraine believes. Baum grew up in “a tight-knit extended family traumatized by the sudden deaths of so many infants,” she writes. “His parents and aunts and uncles must have lived with an aching part of their hearts turned toward those children who were no longer with them.” It is a somber thought, and an important one, too, when contemplating the possible sources of Baum’s poignant vision of an alternative universe, a place of delight instead of sorrow.
The “Oz” books changed the world, and keep on changing it. The 1939 movie version starring Judy Garland is a cinematic staple, a fixture on cable TV schedules, and the musical “Wicked” packed ’em in. Warner Bros. has announced plans for a remake of the 1939 version; Dakota Fanning is the heavy favorite to play Dorothy. The world can’t seem to get enough of Oz, of its witches and its flying monkeys and the fact that it takes a tornado-ride to get there.
Why is Oz so appealing? Vidal notes that Baum’s stories arrived in the midst of the runaway progress — the railroads, the factories — that transformed the United States into an economic and military colossus. It was an exhilarating time. It was also a deeply unsettling one. Oz represented, in many ways, the opposite of what the nation had become. Its values were not mechanical, but imaginative. “To the extent that Baum makes his readers aware that our country’s ‘practical’ arrangements are inferior to those of Oz, he is truly a subversive writer,” Vidal concludes, adding that reading the “Oz” books makes one “tolerant, alert to wonders.”
Perhaps. It’s always fun to try one’s hand at figuring out why certain cultural products, from books to films to TV shows to advertising jingles, lay claim to our lives in unprecedented ways. It’s a game played entirely in hindsight, which means no one can really say you’re wrong.
Loncraine’s absorbing and well-paced biography, though, has a different aim. She doesn’t want to explain why Baum’s books sold so well and became cultural touchstones that have lasted into the subsequent century. She wants to explore how and why Baum wrote them in the first place. “The story of Dorothy’s journey through Oz,” she offers, “was sifted from the sediment of Baum’s deepest memories. … It came out of his experiences out west, amid drought, cyclones and rural poverty, out of the gleaming fake White City of the Chicago World’s Fair, and out of his fascination with illusions and tricks.”
He wrote the first “Oz” book after moving to Chicago and settling into a house at 1667 N. Humboldt Blvd. (The original structure was demolished long ago.) The city by the lake kept Baum’s imagination green and fertile. Then he, in turn, created a fictional world that remains forever lush, forever bountiful, even as the children who enjoy it grow up, grow old and eventually — as must all living creatures — perish.
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jikeller@tribune.com
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