by Gore Vidal
April 11, 1966: So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery. Did not wish to be considered a man of letters; it did not satisfy him to be thought a master of letters: it did not satisfy him to be thought a master of English prose. He wanted to be a duke…
Beaton and Waugh had known each other at school. Each was a social climber; and each was on to the other. Yet Beaton appears to have got a good deal of pleasure out of his nimble run up the ladder, as opposed to Waugh, who huffed and puffed and “would suddenly seem to be possessed by a devil and do thoroughly fiendish things.” It is a pity that there is no present-day writer able to do for this pretty couple what Max Beerbohm did for a similar pair in “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton.”
As might be expected, the book is full of obituaries. Outliving contemporaries is always a joy, up to a point. Beaton usually gets the point. Of the Duke of Windsor, he “had never shown any affection for or interest in me.” Beaton also notes that the Duke “was inclined to be silly.” That is putting it mildly. The Duke’s stupidity was of a perfection seldom encountered outside institutions. Of James Pope-Hennessy, he “had ‘quality,’ was intelligent, and intellectual and serious and yet good company.” Beaton is a bit wary of intellectuals. He is better at describing figures like Chanel. He is also good on performers, noting the odd but illuminating detail. Alan Bates
has invented an original sense of humor. It takes a while to realize what he is up to….He has grown his hair very shaggily long. This is obviously to compensate for the width of the neck which has now become almost inhumanly large.
Much of The Parting Years will be mysterious to those not intimately acquainted with the theatre and High Bohemia. Even those who have some knowledge of the terrain will get lost from time to time. First names appear without last names. And last names without first names. It is often hard to figure out just who is who. There is one most intriguing encounter, set in New York. I quote the scene in its entirety. “Truman came back with me to the hotel. We talked over whiskies and sodas until I realized that by English time it was 7.30 in the morning.” That’s all. What, one wonders, did Beaton and the former president have to say to one another? News of the Queen? Of course. But that wouldn’t go on until 1:30 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time). Lady Juliet Duff’s failing health? Yes. But one illness is much like another. Music? That must be it. The thirty-third president loved to play the piano. They talked of Horowitz. Of young Van Cliburn who played at Potsdam for Truman and (“Uncle Joe”) Stalin. But then, surely, Truman must have mentioned President Johnson. What did he say? For once, Beaton is too discreet, unlike his earlier diaries.
I was in Switzerland when Beaton’s revelations about his “affair” with Greta Garbo were published in a German magazine. The only comment that I heard her make was glum: “And people think that I am pair-annoyed.” But it is the nature of the dandy to flaunt brilliant plumes. In this, Beaton resembles the kingfisher, a bird that flies
so quickly that by the time one says “Look!” they have gone. This most brilliant metallic bird is said to have such an unpleasant smell for other birds that it is solitary and safe.
The Greek word for kingfisher is “halcyon”—born of the sea. For two weeks at the winter solstice the kingfisher’s nest is supposed to float on a tranquil sea until the eggs are hatched. Twice Beaton uses the word “halcyon” to describe days in summer. But halcyon can refer only to calm and peaceful winter days, of the sort that this bright kingfisher deserves for the pleasure that he has given to all those who for so many years have watched (“Look!”) his swift, pretty flight.
New Statesman
MARCH 17, 1978
The Oz Books
“I have just seen a number of landscapes by an American painter of some repute,” wrote John Ruskin in 1856; “and the ugliness of them is Wonderful. I see that they are true studies and that the ugliness of the country must be unfathomable.” This was not kind. But then the English of that day had no great liking for the citizens of the Great Republic. Twenty-four years earlier Mrs. Trollope had commented without warmth on the manners and the domestic arrangements of United Statesmen (or persons, as we must now, androgynously, describe ourselves). Twelve years earlier Charles Dickens had published Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens had found the American countryside raw. The cities ramshackle. The people gasping, boastful, even—yes, dishonest. This was not at all kind. But then how could these British travelers have known that in a century’s time the barbarous republic beyond the western sea would not once but twice pull from the flames of war (or “conflagration” as they say in Hollywood) England’s chestnuts?
In 1856 the United States was a provincial backwater. The eruption of energy that was to fuel the future empire did not begin until four years later when the Civil War broke out. By war’s end the United States was a great industrial power with satanic cities every bit as ugly and infernal as Birmingham and Manchester, with a vast flat interior that was peculiarly susceptible to those drastic changes in weather (and so fortune) that make farming an exciting occupation, with a somewhat thin civilization that has not to this day quite got off the ground in the sense that Europe’s nation-states were able to do in those dark confused centuries that followed on the death of Charlemagne, and Christendom.
Yet during 1856 a number of interesting things happened in the United States. Mrs. Carl Schurz opened the first kindergarten at Watertown, Wisconsin. In Chelsea, Massachusetts, the Universalist Church observed, for the first time anywhere, Children’s Day. In New York City the big theatrical hit of the season was a pantomime (from London) called Planche, or Lively Fairies. The year’s most successful book of poems was J. G. Whittier’s The Panorama and Other Poems, a volume that included “The Barefoot Boy.” People were unexpectedly interested in the care, education, and comfort of children. It is somehow both fitting and satisfying that on May 15 of the first American Children’s Year Lyman Frank Baum was born.
Like most Americans my age (with access to books), I spent a good deal of my youth in Baum’s Land of Oz. I have a precise, tactile memory of the first Oz book that came into my hands. It was the original 1910 edition of The Emerald City. I still remember the look and the feel of those dark blue covers, the evocative smell of dust and old ink. I also remember that I could not stop reading and rereading the book. But “reading” is not the right word. In some mysterious way, I was translating myself to Oz, a place which I was to inhabit for many years while, simultaneously, visiting other fictional worlds as well as maintaining my cover in that dangerous one known as “real.” With The Emerald City, I became addicted to reading.
By the time I was fourteen, I had read Baum’s fourteen Oz books as well as the nineteen Oz books written after his death in 1919 by a young Philadelphia writer named Ruth Plumly Thompson. I remember puzzling over the strange legend that appeared on the cover of each of the books that she wrote: “by Ruth Plumly Thompson founded on and continuing the famous Oz stories by L. Frank Baum.” It took me years to figure out what that phrase meant.
To a child a book is a book. The writer’s name is an irrelevant decoration, unlike the title, which prepares one for delight. Even so, I used, idly, to wonder who or what L. Frank Baum was. Baum looked to my eye like Barnum, as in Barnum & Bailey’s circus. Was it the same person? or the circus itself? But then, who or what was Bailey? Ruth Plumly Thompson (who was always founded-on and inexorably continuing) seemed to me to be a sort of train. The plum in Plumly registered, of course. Circus. And plums. Founded on and continuing. I never thought to ask anyone about either writer. And no one thought to tell me. But then, in the 1930s very little had been written about either Baum or Thompson.
Recently I was sent an academic dissertation. Certain aspects of Baum’s The Land of Oz had reoccurred in a book of mine. Was this conscious or not? (It was not.) But I was intrigued. I reread The Land of Oz. Yes, I could see Baum’s influence. I then reread The Emerald City of Oz. I have now reread all of L.
Frank Baum’s Oz books. I have also read a good deal of what has been written about him in recent years. Although Baum’s books were dismissed as trash by at least two generations of librarians and literary historians, the land of Oz has managed to fascinate each new generation and, lately, Baum himself has become an OK subject, if not for the literary critic, for the social historian.
Even so, it is odd that Baum has received so little acknowledgment from those who owe him the most—writers. After all, those books (films, television, too, alas) first encountered in childhood do more to shape the imagination and its style than all the later calculated readings of acknowledged masters. Scientists are often more candid in their admiration (our attempts to find life elsewhere in the universe is known as Operation Ozma). Lack of proper acknowledgment perhaps explains the extent to which Baum has been ignored by literary historians, by English departments, by….As I write these words, a sense of dread. Is is possible that Baum’s survival is due to the fact that he is not taught? That he is not, officially, Literature? If so, one must be careful not to murder Oz with exegesis.
In search of L. Frank Baum and the genesis of Oz, I have read every sort of study of him from To Please a Child by his son Frank Joslyn Baum and Russell P. MacFall to the meticulous introductions of Martin Gardner for the Dover reproductions of the original Oz editions (as well as Gardner’s book with R. B. Nye, The Wizard of Oz & Who He Was) to issues of the Baum Bugle (a newsletter put out by Oz enthusiasts since 1957) to the recent and charming Oz Scrapbook as well as to what looks to be a Ph.D. thesis got up as a book called Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land (1974) by Raylyn Moore.
The introduction to Moore’s book is written by the admirable Ray Bradbury in an uncharacteristically overwrought style. Yet prose far to one side, Bradbury makes some good points: “Let us consider two authors” (the other is Edgar Rice Burroughs) “whose works were burned in our American society during the past seventy years. Librarians and teachers did the burning very subtly by not buying. And not buying is as good as burning. Yet, the authors survived.”
The hostility of librarians to the Oz books is in itself something of a phenomenon. The books are always popular with children. But many librarians will not stock them. According to the chairman of the Miami Public Library, magic is out: “Kids don’t like that fanciful stuff anymore. They want books about missiles and atomic submarines.” Less militaristic librarians have made the practical point that if you buy one volume of a popular series you will have to get the whole lot and there are, after all, forty Oz books.
Bradbury seems to think that the Oz books are disdained because they are considered “mediocre” by literary snobs (the same people who do not take seriously Science Fiction?). But I think that he is wrong. After all, since most American English teachers, librarians, and literary historians are not intellectuals, how would any of them know whether or not a book was well or ill written? More to the point, not many would care. Essentially, our educators are Puritans who want to uphold the Puritan work ethic. This is done by bringing up American children in such a way that they will take their place in society as diligent workers and unprotesting consumers. Any sort of literature that encourages a child to contemplate alternative worlds might incite him, later in life, to make changes in the iron Puritan order that has brought us, along with missiles and atomic submarines, the assembly line at Detroit where workers are systematically dehumanized.
It is significant that one of the most brutal attacks on the Oz books was made in 1957 by the director of the Detroit Library System, a Mr. Ralph Ulveling, who found the Oz books to “have a cowardly approach to life.” They are also guilty of “negativism.” Worst of all, “there is nothing uplifting or elevating about the Baum series.” For the Librarian of Detroit, courage and affirmation mean punching the clock and then doing the dull work of a machine while never questioning the system. Our governors not only know what is good for us, they never let up. From monitoring the books that are read in grade school to the brass handshake and the pension (whose fund is always in jeopardy) at the end, they are forever on the job. They have to be because they know that there is no greater danger to their order than a worker whose daydreams are not of television sets and sex but of differently ordered worlds. Fortunately, the system of government that controls the school system and makes possible the consumer society does not control all of publishing; otherwise, much imaginative writing might exist only in samizdat.
Ray Bradbury makes his case for America’s two influential imaginative writers, Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator not only of Tarzan but of John Carter in the Mars series. “John Carter grew to maturity” (in pots?) “two generations of astronomers, geologists, biochemists, and astronauts who cut their teeth on his Barsoomian beasts and Martian fighting men and decided to grow up and grow out away from earth.” A decision that would never have been acceptable to our rulers if the Russians had not put Sputnik into orbit, obliging an American president of the time to announce that, all in all, it was probably a good thing for our prestige to go to the moon.
Bradbury then turns to “L. Frank Baum, that faintly old-maidish man who grew boys” (in a greenhouse?) “inward to their most delightful interiors, kept them home, and romanced them with wonders between their ears.” Through Bradbury’s rich style, a point is emerging: inward to delightful selves. Kept them home. Romanced them. Wonders. Yes, all that is true. And hateful to professional molders of American youth. Boys should be out of the house, competing in games, building model airplanes, beating each other up so that one day they will be obedient soldiers in the endless battle for the free world. Show us a dreaming boy (or girl) at home with a book, and we will show you a potential troublemaker.
Bradbury compares Baum to Lewis Carroll. This is a mistake. Carroll belongs, in a complex way, not only to our language’s high literature but to logic. It is simple-minded and mawkish to say that “Oz is muffins and honey, summer vacations, and all the easy green time in the world” while “Wonderland is cold gruel and arithmetic at six a.m., icy showers, long” (as opposed to narrow?) “schools.” Because of this supposed polarity, Bradbury thinks “that Wonderland is the darling of the intellectuals.” On the subject of Oz, he is at his best not in this preface but in a good short story called “The Exiles” (1950).
The text of Raylyn Moore is interesting. She has read what others have written about Baum. She is perhaps too impressed by the fact that the hippies (surely they no longer exist this side of the rainbow) took up Oz in a big way. She also keeps quoting the author of The Greening of America as if he were some sort of authority. Fortunately, she also quotes from those who have written interestingly about Baum: Edward Wagenknecht, James Thurber (in The New Republic, 1934), and Henry Littlefield, who demonstrates (in American Quarterly, 1964) that The Wizard of Oz is a parable on populism “in which the Tin Woodman is seen as the eastern industrialist worker (he is discovered by Dorothy in the eastern land of the Munchkins), the Scarecrow as the farmer, and the Lion as the politician (William Jennings Bryan), who as a group approach the Wizard (McKinley) to ask for relief from their sufferings. Dorothy’s magical silver shoes (the proposed silver standard) traveling along the Yellow Brick Road (gold) are lost forever in the Deadly Desert when she returns to Kansas (when Bryan lost the election).” This is certainly elaborate.
Yet Baum in his work and life (as described by those who knew him) was apolitical. He is known to have marched in a torchlight parade for Bryan in 1896, the year of McKinley’s victory. He also supported Bryan in 1900. But, politically, that was it. Only once in the fairy tales have I been able to find a direct political reference. In Sea Fairies there is an octopus who is deeply offended when he learns that Standard Oil is called an “octopus”: “ ‘Oh, what a disgrace! What a deep, dire, dreadful disgrace!’ ” But though Baum was not political in the usual sense, he had very definite ideas about the way the world should be. I shall come to that.
L. Frank Baum
was born at Chittenango in upstate New York, the son of Benjamin W. Baum, who had become rich in the Pennsylvania oil fields. The Baums came from the Palatinate and Frank Baum’s grandparents were German-speaking. Grandfather Baum was a Methodist lay preacher. Frank’s mother was Scots-Irish. There were eight brothers and sisters. Four died early.
Apparently the Baums enjoyed their wealth. L. Frank Baum grew up on a large estate called Rose Lawn, near Syracuse. In Dot and Tot of Merry land (1901) Baum describes the house’s “wings and gables and broad verandas,” the lawns, flowers, “winding paths covered with white gravel, which led to all parts of the grounds, looking for all the world like a map.” Maps of Oz were later to be important to Baum and to his readers. Oz was…no, is an oblong country divided into four equal sections whose boundaries converge at the Emerald City, the country’s capital as well as geographical center. Each of the four minor countries is a different color: Everything in the north is purple; the south red; the east yellow; the west blue. The effect, exactly, of a certain kind of old-fashioned garden where flower beds are laid out symmetrically and separated from one another by “winding paths covered with white gravel.”
At twelve Baum was sent to a military academy which he hated. He escaped by developing a bad heart. Back at Rose Lawn, Baum put out a newspaper on a printing press given him by his father. Later Baum became interested in chicken breeding and acting, two activities not often linked. Happily, the indulgent father could provide Baum not only with eggs but also with a theatrical career. Because Benjamin Baum owned a string of theatres, his son was able to join a touring company at nineteen. Three years later Baum was in New York, with a leading role in Bronson Howard’s highly successful play The Banker’s Daughter (1878). According to contemporary photographs Baum was a handsome young man with gray eyes, straight nose, dark brown hair, and a period mustache that looked to be glued on; he was six feet tall, left-handed; the voice was agreeable and in later years, on the lecture circuit, he was somtimes compared, favorably, to Mark Twain.