THROUGH THE TOLLBOOTH TO OZ

by Nick Campbell

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 65, no. 1 (Spring 2021), pgs. 24–28

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Campbell, Nick. “Through the Tollbooth to Oz.” Baum Bugle 65, no. 1 (2021): 24–28.

MLA 9th ed.:

Campbell, Nick. “Through the Tollbooth to Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 65, no. 1, 2021, pp. 24–28.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs that have not been reproduced here. However, typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)

 

For many who heard the news, the loss of writer and architect Norton Juster evoked not only sadness but also happy memories of accompanying the young hero of The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) on adventures in “lands beyond.”[1] Juster’s masterpiece is fifty years old this year, but its significance was spotted on publication. “Youngsters who drive through the tollbooth with Milo will probably, in the midst of their laughter, digest some important truth of life,” read Anne McGovern’s New York Times review, “and so will parents.”[2] McGovern recommended the book to “anyone old enough to relish the allegorical wisdom of Alice in Wonderland or the pointed whimsy of The Wizard of Oz,” and indeed Juster’s novel seems to answer a call made in L. Frank Baum’s first Oz book (1900) for newer “wonder tales” for “the modern child”, without overworked moral messages.[3] Still read worldwide by children, Juster’s novel bears the influence and legacy of Baum in the twenty-first century, and conveys a message of enduring relevance.

Born in 1929, Juster grew up in New York City at an extraordinary point in its history, and by all accounts, that ever-unfolding landscape of sparking, irrepressible energy is reflected in the books he enjoyed. In a feature on Reading Rockets, an online resource for children’s literacy, he said, “I read, growing up, a lot of things that I had no business to read.” Before he invented buildings and cities, he roamed freely among others’ literary collections. “I was one of those people [who], when we went to the local branch of the library, I would always be thrown out of the adult section trying to find the books that look interesting to me. […] But my parents had several shelves of […] huge Russian and Yiddish novels all translated into English […] And I would read them and have no idea what I was reading, but I just loved the language and the way you read it and how the words sounded.”[4]

Interviewed by children’s editor RoseEtta Stone, he recalled, “I used to read the encyclopaedia when I was a kid. We had a big set of them at home and I just read it for fun.”[5] As much as books for older readers, however, Juster would fondly remember a wealth of stories more oriented to young readers. He spoke fondly of folk and fairy tales, as well as “the great reading [of] the Sunday paper where my father would get on the floor with me and we would read the comics and then whatever else looked interesting.”[6] His was a childhood of radio adventure serials like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, and of trips to the cinema to see his beloved Marx Brothers movies, and of a father who loved to play with language. It was a childhood of visits to the land of Oz.

“I grew up primarily, at least my memory of it is, on all the Oz books,” he told Reading Rockets.[7] Juster belonged to a distinct generation of Oz readers before MGM’s defining adaptation, when the Tietjens Broadway Wizard of Oz had diminished prominence, alongside Oz adaptations on the radio and in newspaper comic pages. Above all, the Oz books were themselves a thriving and long-standing publishing phenomenon by then: between mass-market editions, library copies, the Ozmite Club and other promotions, this runaway train picked up new readers every year. Leonard Marcus, author of the Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, characterizes young Juster as “[reacting] compulsively to the things that captured his interest. In that regard, a long series like the Oz books was perfect for him.”[8] Juster has described his father as having no liking for fantasy,[9] so it’s likely that these books were gifts—perhaps the contribution of an uncle, Marcus suggests.[10]

Juster was born nearly a decade after Baum’s final, posthumous addition to the canon, so even the books were no longer associated with just one creative voice, a point he took pains to make in later life: “[Most] people know The Wizard of Oz, and that’s about all, but there were about 14 or 15 that Frank Baum did, and then there was a woman named Ruth Plumly Thompson who did even more than he did, and then two other people.” There’s a detectible note of relish there for an invented world outliving its original author. It’s easy to visualize young Norton, oscillating between the older works and latest tales of Oz (The Wishing Horse? The Silver Princess?), perhaps gauging the authors’ differing approaches while relishing a series that expanded with the passing years like a modern, increasingly improbable metropolis. He would have been just the right age to listen to NBC’s Wizard of Oz radio show (1933–34), and he undoubtedly saw the 1939 movie, but his reference to later authors is dismissive. “By that time,” he said, “I had stopped reading them, but [up until then] they were magic for me.”[11]

The world was changing, but Juster’s transition to adulthood seems to have been made by a man confident of his destination. The study of architecture—his father and brother’s profession—lead to roles as a civil engineer and then with an architectural firm. The love of books and writing persisted, however, and he soon won a grant to write “a children’s book about urban aesthetics, how you experience and use cities.”[12] Disappointingly for Juster, this project turned out to be a miserable slog and, as a distraction, he began to write a little story about a boy called Milo:

. . . Who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered. Nothing really interested him—least of all the things that should have.[13]

The children’s book on urban aesthetics never arrived, and instead the world was given The Phantom Tollbooth—or rather, Milo got the tollbooth (“EASILY ASSEMBLED AT HOME, AND FOR USE BY THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER TRAVELED IN LANDS BEYOND”)[14] and readers followed him through it, down the road toward Expectations, getting lost in the Doldrums, enjoying a banquet of words in Dictionopolis and embarking on a quest to the Mountains of Ignorance, stopping at a dozen other places.

As the names suggest, Milo’s adventure is in the tradition of John Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), but its tone is one of pleasure and wit, with wordplay on every page—particularly puns, a favourite of Juster’s father as well as Baum. Another clear antecedent is Lewis Carroll’s Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, and Through the Looking-Glass, 1871) and her conversations about logic, language and philosophy with various mad beings, though Juster claims not to have read about her before he started writing about Milo.

The influence of Oz is there in Tollbooth’s outline: the earthly child hurled by unearthly means into a world of fantasy, where they journey to the country’s capital, discover a wrong to be righted, and bravely head off to confront beings of darkness. The protagonist gathers friends along the way, unlikely and childlike heroes who succeed by banding together. Tock the Watchdog recalls Dorothy’s faithful dog Toto but also, being dependent on clockwork, Tik-Tok the mechanical man. As Marcus also posits, both Juster and Baum’s books are thematically interested in “exposing sham authority figures,”[15] and both writers seem concerned with how power is administrated, both rationally and metaphorically. Perhaps Juster was still writing that children’s book on cities after all; there is a sequence on life in illusions versus reality that feels particularly concerned with urban living. The queens that Alice deals with are mere symbols, whereas Juster’s Mathemagician and King Azaz, as with Baum’s Wizard, have a responsibility toward governance, and the loss of Princesses Rhyme and Reason has pitched their world into conflict.

Here, perhaps, the influence of Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) can also be felt, with its tale of civil war in the absence of a divine female ruler. Rhyme and Reason, like Princess Ozma, are ostensibly parentless (“abandoned in a basket under the grape arbour”)[16] and unchangingly good and beautiful. The twin princesses, one “grave and quiet . . . and the other . . . gay and joyful” even recall the usual pairing of Ozma with Princess Dorothy.[17] The Princesses have been spirited away and, as in the case of Ozma, their return to governance is so sweetly rational that it more or less guarantees peace and contentment in the land.

Milo is also accompanied for most of the book by “a large beetle-like insect dressed in a lavish coat, striped trousers, checked waistcoat, spats and a derby hat,” with a propensity for self-important pronouncements and overwrought vocabulary.[18] This is the Humbug, who makes no claims to be thoroughly educated—unlike the Spelling Bee, with whom he engages in a fiery altercation—but assumes authority and intellectual superiority at every juncture. Like Baum’s Professor Wogglebug, however, Juster’s Humbug is an endearing figure, though absurd: in this, he also recalls “The Great and Terrible Humbug”[19] that is Baum’s Wizard himself.

This tonal similarity is, perhaps, more significant than mere narrative tropes. Both the realm beyond Milo’s Tollbooth and the land of Oz are essentially benevolent places, nothwithstanding the occasional demon or Nome. Juster even gives us Faintly Macabre, the not-so-wicked Which, whose greatest crime has been a miserliness with words. Other characters encountered by Milo—the Whether Man, the Doctor of Dissonance, Alec Bings—have the self-contented character of hermits like the Musicker or the Braided Man. There are memories of Thompson’s Oz books too, such as the Dodecahedron, who speaks continuously in rhyme, and the city of Rith Metic. In the overall structure of the book, Milo’s travails on behalf of Rhyme or Reason are subordinated to an overtly Baumian travelogue structure. For all that the journey is made by car in the ultra-modern 1960s, it is still the case that the journey is more important than the destination.

For all their similarities, Juster’s work could in no way be mistaken for that of Baum or Thompson. It allows, in fact, a useful comparison between them. Milo, a middle-class child in an urban realm of shops and high-rises, begins the novel in a state of ennui completely foreign to his Ozzy predecessors. Milo is grappling with the philosophical connotations of education, and while his adventures may not contain a single heavy moral, readers have nonetheless received a clear message by the time he arrives home, where “there was so much to see, and hear, and touch . . . There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day.”[20] By contrast, Dorothy and her friends are usually left unchanged by their trip to Oz; at most, their eyes are opened to a world beyond the quotidian, and their appetites are sharp for more fantastical adventure in lands beyond. Introducing The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), Baum described imagination leading to “the betterment of the world”[21] through exploration and invention: decades later, Juster describes the private rewards of imagination, in a world crowded with material things. As a 2011 article in the New York Times put it, The Phantom Tollbooth is “a manifesto for the liberal arts, for a liberal education, and even for the liberal-arts college.”[22] It celebrates a post-1950s democratization in education and warns us against taking it too much for granted.

It is a high tribute to Baum and Thompson that such an ambitious—and successful— children’s novel should be patterned on their tales of wonder and escapism. Their impression upon Juster appears to have been pure and powerful: when he threw himself into writing a high-minded, intellectual book, the kind that wins funding and satisfies a certain sort of librarian, something Ozzy in him resisted and took control of his pen. Writing initially to please himself, he wrote instead about escape and fantasy, wonder and delight, wise women and ludicrous humbugs. There is even, when Milo takes to the podium and tries orchestrating the sunrise, an episode of undiluted beauty and strangeness, recalling descriptions from Baum of mist fairies, or the maidens of the Queen of Light in Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). The chapter sits oddly amid the comic tone of the novel, and Juster had to fight for its inclusion: “A lot of what [my editor] said I acted on, but finally with this one, he said, ‘Well, it’s your book.’ So we kept it in.”[23] It makes perfect sense, however, as an example of the sheer wonder that characterised Juster’s formative years, and as part of a Baumian tradition: wonder and the absurd, civilisation and wild imaginings, all part of the same journey. Sixty years on, that journey seems all the more essential for us to take.

SIDEBAR: Bugle readers who were children in the 1970s may recall the film of The Phantom Tollbooth (1970), directed by famed animator Chuck Jones. Widely known for various cartoons in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes series (especially the first twenty-six Road Runner cartoons, 1949–65), as well as the TV special Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Jones may be most famous in the Oz community for the ABC-TV anthology series Off to See the Wizard (1967–68).

Tollbooth called on the vocal talents of several Off to See the Wizard alum, including Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, and June Foray. The film failed at the box office, with author Norton Juster later saying, “It was a film I never liked.”[24]

 

Notes

[1] Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (New York: Scholastic, 1961), 12.

[2] Ann McGovern, “Journey to Wisdom,” New York Times, November 12, 1961.

[3] L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago: Geo. M. Hill, 1900), [5].

[4] Norton Juster, “Shared stories,” interview by staff, Reading Rockets, WETA Public Broadcasting, December 6, 2010, https://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/juster.

[5] Norton Juster, interview by RoseEtta Stone, Writing, Illustrating, and Publishing Children’s Books: The Purple Crayon, 2001, https://www.underdown.org/juster.htm.

[6] Juster, interview by RoseEtta Stone.

[7] Juster, “Shared stories.”

[8] Leonard S. Marcus, email to author, November 27, 2020.

[9] Laura Miller, “The road to Dictionopolis,” Salon, March 12, 2001, http://www.salon.com/2001/03/12/juster/.

[10] Marcus, email.

[11] Juster, “Shared stories.”

[12] Miller, “The road to Dictionopolis.”

[13] Juster, Phantom Tollbooth, 9.

[14] Juster, Phantom Tollbooth, 12.

[15] Marcus, email to author.

[16] Juster, Phantom Tollbooth, 75.

[17] Juster, Phantom Tollbooth, 231.

[18] Juster, Phantom Tollbooth, 53.

[19] Baum, Wonderful Wizard, 191.

[20] Juster, Phantom Tollbooth, 255–56.

[21] L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1917), [13].

[22] Adam Gopnik, “Broken Kingdom,” The New Yorker, October 17, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/17/broken-kingdom.

[23] Miller, “The road to Dictionopolis.”

[24] Juster, interview by RoseEtta Stone.

 

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