Reading The Cowardly Lion of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Cowardly Lion of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

I continue to be fascinated by what differences Ruth Plumly Thompson introduces to Oz storytelling. In both Baum and Thompson books, characters often have to get from point A to point B, and on the way keep bumping into what some Oz fans call IEs (which I think stands for "irrelevant enclaves"): random weird communities that the characters briefly interact with, and then leave, but which don't affect the actual plot of the novel. (I kind of reject this characterizations of "IEs," and thus the concept of them, but that's not really my point here.)

Originally published: 1923
Acquired and read aloud: June 2022

They each handle this basic concept very differently, though. In a Baum book, the characters will usually travel sedately for a bit, come to a community, interact with its inhabitants, then leave and travel sedately some more until they come to the next one. Road to Oz, Emerald City, and Lost Princess are all good examples of Oz books that use this format. In a Thompson novel, though, the characters plunge from place to place; it's very manic. You might escape one, but on a vehicle you can't control, so you're immediately in another, and then another, and then another. And the people in each community almost always want to do something to you: slam doors on you, throw you off the edge, put you into jars. In a Baum book, you would visit three communities in three days; half a Thompson book can take place on a single day in which the characters visit three communities. It's a very different tone, and sometimes I felt like my son struggled to keep up with the action in this one. I don't know that it's a problem per se, but it gives Thompson's Oz a less peaceful tone: at any place you visit, there's liable to be something dangerous you need to get away from.

On the other hand, this approach lets her do what I am realizing is one of her key moves: the bonding through adversity. This was at the forefront of both Cowardly Lion and Kabumpo, and it's there to a lesser extent with Sir Hokus in Royal Book. But let me step back a bit. Despite the title, the initial protagonists of Cowardly Lion are two Americans: Notta Bit More, a circus clown, and Bobbie "Bob Up" Downs, an orphan from Philadelphia. When a magic Oz rhyme pops into Notta's head, both he and Bob are whisked to the country of Mudge, a desert community in a corner of the Munchkin country. The king of Mudge, Mustafa, is mad for lions, but Ozma has forbidden his people from leaving Mudge because they steal too much, on pain of losing their heads. (I guess this isn't as bad as it sounds when you remember no one in Oz can die.) Every lion in Mudge has been captured, so Mustafa uses his magic to force Notta and Bob to travel to the Emerald City and capture the Cowardly Lion for him. The first several chapters thus chronicle their adventures.

Meanwhile, the Cowardly Lion is having one of his period bouts of self-doubt over his cowardliness; I liked the comparison to the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. (The Lion is always afraid but never runs; the Soldier is never afraid because he knows he can always run—and he always does!) Scraps makes a joking suggestion that if he ate a brave man, he'd have a lot of bravery inside him, so he runs off to the Munchkin country to find a brave man to eat. In a complete coincidence (though honestly it didn't bother me very much), he runs into Notta and Bob. Notta and Bob keep secret that they intend to capture him, but the Lion keeps secret that he almost ate Notta, and they all go adventuring together. Eventually, though, they meet Nick/Snorer, the bird with the telephone beak, and Notta confesses the truth to the Lion, and they have to come up with a plan to escape that fulfills the requirements of the magic Mustafa has placed on them. It's through their adventures that Thompson portrays a real sense of bonding between the group, especially when the Lion must fight dozens of Feathermen to prevent Notta and Bob from being tossed of the "skyle" (a sky isle) of Un in what is really a tremendous sequence showing how courageous the Lion is despite his ostensible cowardice. As I said when I reviewed Royal Book, I think Thompson has a great handle on the Cowardly Lion.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. The excursion to Un is good; I particularly liked a very belabored set-up for a very bad pun about a dog they meet in the sky. Some commenters don't seem to like Notta, especially his habit of wearing weird disguises (across the course of the book, he disguises himself as a lion, a bear, a hunter, and a fish, and it's always the wrong disguise for the situation), but it seems to me that it plays into a theme of embracing who you are: Notta finds in Oz a place where he can be a clown all the time, and everyone likes him for it, while the Cowardly Lion comes to realize that the only way to not be afraid is to not be alive. Both have to be who they are.

This latter bit, though, I felt could have been handled slightly better; another character forces the Lion to become a statue so that he will no longer feel fear, but I think it would have been stronger if the Lion had chosen it, and then found out that he didn't actually want what he thought he wanted. Instead, he's reached this realization sort of anticlimactically earlier, and then he gets turned into a statue.

Like Sir Hokus at the end of Royal Book, Notta and Bob find a place where their very oddness means that they fit in perfectly. (Unlike Sir Hokus, though, I don't think Notta and Bob ever appear in any other Oz books, though, even though the narrator tells us Bob became good friends with Button-Bright.) I liked that Thompson remembered the Wizard had been a circus man himself, and it's a very charming conclusion as Notta establishes Oz's first circus. 

Even if you don't otherwise like the disguise aspect, it's all worth it for a part where Notta decides that the people of the Emerald City are so magic that they won't accept him unless he's magic, so puts on a witch disguise before entering the city. In a humorous sequence, Dorothy is the first to see him and promptly dumps a bucket of water on his head!

My son wanted to know why Notta disguised himself as a wicked witch, not a good one, and I explained that in most stories, the only witches are wicked, and so Notta didn't know about good witches. He said he would give Notta a copy of Wonderful Wizard so he would know about good witches. When I reminded him that even in the first book, Dorothy didn't know about good witches, he said he'd give her one too; I pointed out that she knew all about them now, so he asked what kind of book she needed. I suggested that since she's lived in Oz over a century, she might benefit from one about our world, and so his idea is to give her a book about Florida. "Do you know what my book about Florida is called?" he asked my wife as I retold her this story. "No," she said. "It's called Florida," he said proudly.

We've also had good fun reciting the magic rhyme that can be used to send yourself or other people to Oz: "Udge! Budge! / Go to Mudge! / Udger budger, / You're a Mudger!" Though then he wanted to know why it doesn't work when we do it!

Cowardly Lion of Oz entered the public domain in 2019, and none of the major Oz publishers have done an edition of it. The best extant edition (short of paying $150+ for a vintage Reilly & Lee, which my wife vetoed for some reason) was I able to find was from SeaWolf Press. SeaWolf has done print-on-demand editions of the first nineteen Oz books, which they confusingly and inaccurately call the "Illustrated First Editions." The text is reset (so my edition of Cowardly Lion runs 199 pages as opposed to the original's 291), but it purports to contain all the original illustrations; the color plates are reprinted in black and white. I think the text was probably sourced from Project Gutenberg, and there are occasionally some errors when it comes to turning Gutenberg's "straight" quotation marks into “curly” ones. In addition, one picture is included twice, and there's one spot where there's a random blank line between paragraphs. (Plus, there are typos, but given there are often a lot of typos in the actual Reilly & Lee books, these may be "accurate" in a sense!) So it could be slightly better, but for a $9 copy of a book that has barely ever been reprinted, you could do a lot worse! (I do dislike that they put Baum's name on the spine, though, and not Thompson's.)

Next up in sequence: Grampa in Oz