THE LATER YEARS OF L. FRANK BAUM

If there was an aspect in which L. Frank Baum became a victim of his own success it was that his name has become so synonymous with the first Oz book that his voluminous work outside of the Oz cannon has largely been forgotten and, for that matter, so have many of the later books set in the Land of Oz. This proved a chagrin for Baum who by the late 1900s was ready to branch out from Oz and into other series he had developed. But much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who had to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after an outcry from the fans, Baum had to reopen the Oz series in 1913 with The Patchwork Girl of Oz, undoing the ending of its predecessor, 1910’s The Emerald City of Oz, in which the fairyland was sealed off from contact with the outside world (Baum’s way of gently explaining to children why he was unable to write about it again). Baum found a timely way to undo the dilemma, however, when it was obvious his popularity was left behind with Dorothy and her friends. He noted at the start of Patchwork Girl that he could now communicate with Dorothy thanks to the wireless telegram! Be that as it may, Baum’s other work is worth exploring if only because it is so distanced from the fantasy world he created. In particular, his Aunt Jane’s Nieces series offers a revealing glimpse of his increasing dedication to the suffragist movement. Those books are grounded in the real world and its problems. While the series makes for light fun reading, his venturing into more grown-up fiction prompted Baum to disguise his name with the nom de plume Edith Van Dyne. This was likely not motivated by politics as the Oz books had a socio-political undercurrent of their own, but simply because the books were more Little Women than Dorothy. When Baum did return to Oz for the Patchwork Girl story it was with a subtly darker tone and a couple of surviving illustrations of a chapter deleted at the behest of his editors at Reilly & Britton show the book could have been darker still with a passage about carnivorous plants growing a human garden. In the same year in which The Patchwork Girl of Oz was published the Aunt Jane’s Nieces series reached its eighth book, Aunt Jane’s Nieces on the Ranch, a tale of mystery and racial strife set upon an orange farm in California. Despite Baum’s determination to disassociate the two worlds he may have inadvertently given a clue in the latter book to an enduring mystery in Patchwork Girl of Oz. In that book, the Patchwork girl and her friends set off to find some magic ingredients scattered throughout the Land of Oz to break a magic spell gone wrong. On their journey they come upon a mysterious house with a disembodied voice offering the travelers shelter for the night. Given the parallels between this episode and that of the invisible family in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, who likewise welcomed wayfarers into their home, a backstory is expected here but it never comes. What does happen is that the chatty Patchwork Girl wears out her welcome and is thrown out of the house for the night by the unseen presence. When her companions catch up with her the next morning she recounts having seen a wolf approach the kitchen window three times. Upon hearing this Ojo, the protagonist, makes an offhand remark expressing his confusion since there was enough food on the table, and then the matter is dropped never to be brought up again. At first, Ojo’s remark confounds the mystery even more since there being enough food on the table is likely the reason for the wolf’s appearance and Ojo’s believing it to be instead a deterrent can only be read as humor. But Ojo’s very confusion is the answer, confirmed with a bit of knowledge of archaic expressions. To “keep the wolf away from your door” meant to keep hunger and poverty away. Walt Disney would revive the figure of speech twenty years later when the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from The Three Little Pigs became something of a morale booster during the Depression. Therefore, the presence of the wolf (symbolizing destituteness) in a house with plenty to eat is inexplicable to Ojo. It was a play on a figure of speech, plain and simple and further evidence that the line was ruminating in Baum’s mind at the time can be found in Aunt Jane’s Nieces on the Ranch. Here the saying is delivered straight, maybe because Baum realized that returning to the Oz books was a way to keep a wolf away from his own door.