"Farmer,.Phillip.Jose.-.A.Barnstormer.In.Oz" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

"Not Kansas," he said. "South Dakota. Kansas is further south than South Dakota."

"What has South Dakota, whatever that is, to do with this?"

Stover sighed, and he said, "I wished I could sail a straight course. But we're going to be wandering through the Unexplained Seas."

"South Dakota?" she said firmly.

"What I have to explain is that an Earthman, an American, wrote a book about Dorothy's adventures here," he said. "But it was fiction or purported to be. Actually, much of it was fiction. And the parts that were true were bowdlerized. They had to be because he was writing a book for children."

"Bowdlerized?"

"Censored. Expurgated."

He had a hard time finding words which were the equivalent of censored. Finally, he gave up and defined the term.

"Mother was gone for six months, but, in the book this man, Lyman Frank Baum, wrote about her, she was here for only a few weeks. This man Baum was a fiction writer but at the time was the editor of a newspaper in Aberdeen. He heard about the little girl whom everybody thought had been carried off by the tornado. Her body was searched for but not found. People thought that she'd probably been dropped into a ravine or woods many miles from Aberdeen. Maybe the coyotes had eaten her.

"Then my mother showed up with a tale of having been transported to some unknown land beyond the desert in the Arizona Territory. At least, that's where she then thought she'd gone to. Of course, nobody believed her story about talking animals and people no taller than an eight-year-old child and an animated scarecrow and a woodman made of tin and witches and flying monkeys and all that. They thought that she was either lying or crazy."

26

Philip Josd Farmer

"And so your mother quickly realized this and claimed that she had been delirious. Or something like that."

"How did you know?"

"Your mother was an extremely tough and adaptable child. Very matter of fact. She would have understood the best course to take once she saw that she was not believed."

"That's Mother all right. Rough and ready. A loving and sympathetic heart but very little sentimentality or soaring imagination. A brain as quick and tenacious as a wolf trap. Her attitude is: This is the way the world is, no matter how strange and unjust it seems, and I can handle it."

"An excellent character analysis," Glinda said. "But then what happened?"

"Baum heard about the child's story and went out to the farm to talk to her. Though he did notЧprobablyЧbelieve her, he pretended to. He took notes after his three conversations with her, but he did not print a word of it in the newspaper. That would have embarrassed Dorothy and her aunt and uncle and caused even more ridicule and doubt about her sanity or veracity. But he did not forget her fantastic tale, and, later, he used his notes as the basis for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

"It was very successful, a best seller," Stover said. "Mother was very surprised when she read it and also angry because of the liberties Baum took with her story. She thought about writing him and telling him so. But she cooled off quicklyЧ Mother is very stableЧand she decided to ignore it. After all, what else could she do? She did not want publicity. She wouldn't like it nor would her husband and his parents, and she'd be accused of being insane. So she did nothing about it."

Dorothy did, however, read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to her son when he was five. He was entranced by it, and, when the sequels came out, he read them over and over again.

"When I was eight, my mother told me that she had been to this world and that she was the Dorothy in Baum's books. At least, that she was the child on whose adventures Baum had based his first book. The sequels were all fictional, of course, except for a few items like personal and geographical names. I was both stunned and delighted to find this out,

A BARNSTORMER IN OZ

27

though I was disappointed, frustrated, because she'd made me swear never to tell anyone about her revelation."

Though he was often tempted to tell his playmates that his mother was the Dorothy of Oz, he did not. Then, when he got older, he lost his belief in the existence of Oz. He decided that his mother had been fantasizing. But he was not sure. She was not the joking kind nor would she have lied to her child. To anyone, in fact.