The Perils and Pleasures of Biography

L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz, by Katharine M. Rogers. New York: St. Martin's P, 2002.

Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter, by Alison Lurie. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

For the climber who maps a new route up Everest or K2, actions may speak louder than words; and more than any account he or she may write afterward, what we value is the accomplishment. In that regard, Katharine Rogers's new biography of Frank Baum is an accomplishment; she has read all of Baum's nearly 100 books, examined all the letters, and (it would seem) spent decades on this labor of love. There may only be a handful of others who know as much about Baum as she does; and for this, she is to be admired and honored. Regrettably, however, the applicable criterion in a review of this kind is not "Actions speaker louder than words," but something more along the lines of "You shall know a tree by its fruits." In this, Rogers's book is a disappointment.

Pity the poor biographer. For years and years, he or she collects the minutiae of a life, accumulating a sea of facts on index cards. It can be overwhelming. Then comes the U-turn in the project, the moment when inhalation must become exhalation. When the writing begins, choices have to be made. Here, fortunately, a principle of selection is manifest: in the critical biography of a writer we are primarily interested in the writing; we are interested in the author's life insofar as it influenced the writing; our curiosity about other matters (the writer's spouse, for example) is likely to be more limited since we are keen to know about these only in a tangential way; finally, in all likelihood, there are things we won't be interested to learn at all (for example, about the hairdresser of the author's spouse). In fewer words, a biographer needs to keep his or her eye on the ball.

In this, Rogers's biography disappoints. She has been unwilling to give up all the hardwon facts of her research. Two examples will have to suffice. To get an understanding of Baum's "boosterism," it may be important to know that while he lived in Los Angeles he was an enthusiastic member of an organization called the Lofty and Exalted Order of Uplifters; but is it important to know that this group was founded by "Harry Marston Haldeman" and—even more, or rather less to the point—that Mr. Haldeman was "a pipe company executive" (183)? Here is another representative item:

On February 1, 1886, Maud [Baum's wife] gave birth to her second son, Robert Stanton, in their new house on Holland Street, where they had moved the year before. The childbirth was difficult and caused abdominal infection; Maud contracted peritonitis and almost died. In the days before antibiotics, it was remarkable that she pulled through at all. As it was, she was bedridden for months with a drainage tube in her side.

(18)

It may or may not be interesting where and when Maud gave birth to their second son, and the same might be said about it being a difficult childbirth which caused her to be bedridden and for how long. But may I suggest that in a biography of Frank Baum, his wife's clinical diagnosis (peritonitis) is an unnecessary specificity and that the "drainage tube" is (in several senses) an appendage that leads nowhere.

Multiply this habit exponentially over several hundred pages, add a second half of the book that largely consists of three-paragraph summaries of Baum's voluminous output interleaved with biographical comments and passing commentary, and what you have is more an archive than a biography. Of course, spending weeks in an author's archive will give you a sense of him or her. But that "sense" is something we wish for straightaway from a biographer. To save others...