BECAUSE OF THE WONDERFUL THINGS HE DOES (1999)

No, not the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

But the wonderful wizard who birthed the Wizard.

L. Frank Baum, who has filled our century from one end to the other with naïve joys and unthinking delights.

And what, you ask, are the reasons why.

The Wizard of Oz will never die?

Let me set you a task and make you a test.

Place two books on a table, Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Then blindfold any friend, steer him (or her) across the library and ask him, with some hesitation, to drift his hand down to touch one of these books.

How will the blind choose?

Is there a temperature there, an ambience that sifts upward to one’s as-yet-unselective fingers?

There is. And how to describe it?

From Wonderland: a winter landscape, where as the characters speak, you see their breath.

From Oz: a bakery air, the land of the midnight sun, where the day never stops, where noons persist or, if they darken briefly, reburst themselves with pure delight.

From Alice’s friends, the contemptuous sneer.

From Dorothy’s, laughter or, at least, a smile.

The Red Queen’s “Off with their heads”?

Or Ozma’s merest sweet-tempered word?

Alice’s oysters eaten, every one?

Or the Oz quadlings, in a later book, who, when they hurl their heads as projectiles, still get them back with promises of no more headlong cannonades?

Tweedledum and Tweedledee to help you get lost at the fork in the road?

Or the Shaggyman, in still another book, with his love magnet luring you to innocent passions?

The hand hovers and descends.

Choosing Alice, are you then a cynic, a skeptic, or just a disillusioned dropout?

Choosing Dorothy, are you the impossible optimist, the happy warrior, the convivial far traveler who runs his own lost and found to be always found?

Choose.

I don’t claim that we can judge readers by such choices. There must be travelers, like myself, who can go a-journeying through both countries, dark and light, and come forth intrigued, insightful, and happy. Wonderland may be fog and drizzle, but Alice stands as a beacon in its midst, stays sane, comments, and survives.

One might almost recommend a dose of Alice’s fog midday, a jolt of Emerald sun at midnight.

Indeed, some of us can traverse both lands with equal enjoyment.

After all, you suffer a culture shock when you shift climates and characters. Addressing a snide caterpillar is not quite the same as oiling a reconstructed Tin Woodman, who remains happy though once he was flesh and blood whose limbs were chopped off for tin replacements. Imagine such a Tin Man lamenting his fate rather than running Dorothy, happily, on the Yellow Brick Road.

Or imagine the Scarecrow fallen out of his field to confront not Dorothy but Alice. How long before the Looking Glass crows ripped his muslin, seeking corn?

To freeze or to bask, these are the alternatives offered by these forever contradictory books. And it is our business here to bask in the light of the road adventures of that eternal boy-child, L. Frank Baum, who could have hot-footed that Deadly Desert that encircled Oz and survived intact, flesh and soul, innocently pronouncing the trip a lark.

Yet another way to look at it is your choice of houses to live in. If you unlocked the door of a desolate mansion minus central heating, a proper hot-water bath, and a kitchen, all knives and no spoons, you must certainly find Alice’s Janus friends, two-faced but mostly facing north, pleased by blizzards and bloodless tantrums. Your slumbers would be one long glide off a glacier into a lake of cold soup.

That old baseball rhyme might serve as finale. There is no joy in Mudville, mighty Casey has struck out. Even a slight win might raise the temperature but five degrees.

Conversely if you moved into the Emerald City, best take along fans, sunburn lotion, and a wolf pack to circle your basking hounds, for if you bask too long, someone crying wolf might cry the truth. Summer people are grand fodder for winter sneaks.

Best, then, for the intelligent reader to engage in self-contested tennis, striking the ball and leaping to catch one flight in shadow, one in the lie that says it’s noon. For both sides fudge the truth to estimate the climate of mankind at unequal times.

Neither can be proven, both must be experienced, despite the imbalance.

It seems only correct that many of the Oz books were written in a make-believe country where nothing was or ever will be real: Hollywood. Oz could well have been born on the back lot at Universal Studios or indoors on Lon Chaney’s Opera Phantom stage. For the back lot is façade lacking back porch and roof, while the Phantom’s theater is haunted by flickering ghosts of ideas that bombard our sight without drawing blood. Even murder, in Hollywood, is a falsehood told in full trump, signifying nothing. Lewis Carroll’s cast of characters would have died here of saccharine or run back to hide behind the cold glass. Baum settled in, delighted with bright nothings.

And as for the illustrations? I began with W. W. Denslow in my Aunt Neva’s Oz collection, as a child of three. I moved on, with equal love to Jno. R. Neill. And now find much room for Michael McCurdy.

Baum, in forever’s day, handed multitudinous metaphors to artists who knew how to shut their eyes and see clearly. No match, of course, to Moby Dick, whose Melvillean Richard IIIs, Lears, and Hamlets seized lightnings and sank in ten dozen different illustrated White Whale editions.

But Baum with less, does well. This is not the last readaptation of his metaphors by a cadre of illustrators. McCurdy is not Denslow, nor is he Jno. R. Neill, but he is indeed McCurdy. More than sufficient for this new repaving of a road well taken and a harvest of characters well met.

McCurdy is the most recent, but more will follow in the twenty-first century. If the Wicked Witch is truly dead, it is because L. Frank Baum landed on her with his Boys’ Life Forever Sunkist philosophy. No witch could survive Baum, even today when witches beam themselves up. Cynics and skeptics scatter at his happy cry on what might have been a doomsday afternoon.

Alice and her misfits will survive beyond the millennium, oh, yes, but should Alice ever melt out through the cold glass or escape the Rabbit Hole, she will surely head for the forever-August Emerald City.

So there you have it. Two books, two countries. Two roads taken or refused. Chill your eyebrows, warm your cockles, or stand between, a Twilight Zone of one and much room in your head and heart for both. Down the Rabbit Hole into the Deadly Desert. Over the rainbow to drop your house on the Red Queen? What a fascinating, lovely mix.

Yours to start one journey now.

Tomorrow go stare in Alice’s polar Looking Glass, to see if anything human stares back.