The Story of O

The Story of O
No, silly, I'm talking about a children's book.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, May 17, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

As a rule, it's good to keep your files neat. But now and then a certain disorder can yield up its own unexpected treasures. That happened the other night, when global events sent me looking through a mess of old papers on the sins of the International Monetary Fund. What I found there, buried among the congressional transcripts and annual reports and polysyllabic pronouncements of prolific pooh-bahs, was something truly different: a copy of James Thurber's "The Wonderful O."

It happens to be one of the best children's books ever written. No, it is not about the IMF; I must have stashed it with those files in some chaotic and forgotten moment. Nor is it a pornographic tract or a sex manual--though James Thurber in the 1920s was a co-author, with E.B. White, of a rich satire of psychoanalytical fashions of the day, called "Is Sex Necessary?"

"The Wonderful O," published in 1957, is a tale for children, and a reminder for adults, of the joys of love, liberty, language and, not least, humor. It has pirates and treasure and magic and a message that especially in complacent times must not be forgotten. The book is out of print, a sorry situation in an age in which hunger for enchantment has lofted Harry Potter into the best-seller stratosphere. It can be read as a parable for the ways of political repression, as a celebration of words by a linguistic grandmaster or just as a terrific story. It is the tale of what happens when wicked men deprive people of the right to use something simple but vital--in this case, the letter O.

Thurber (1894-1961) is best known for his many years as a contributor of stories and cartoons, including some of the 20th century's finest humor, to The New Yorker magazine. Less known is that he was also a passionate defender of individual liberty. This children's book, 72-pages including pictures in my paperback Dell Yearling edition, belongs right there on the shelf between George Orwell and Mark Twain.

"The Wonderful O" opens in a tavern, with the meeting of two sinister, seafaring men, Black and Littlejack. Black has a ship, and Littlejack has a map he thinks will lead to treasure. Together with their piratical crew, they sail to the far island of Ooroo, where they expect to find a trove of jewels. Instead, they find an island full of ordinary people, going about their daily lives.

Enraged, Black and Littlejack order their crew to ransack Ooroo with their axes, spades and cudgels, looking for the fabled sapphires and emeralds and rubies, "but all they got for their sweat and pains was the stones that towers are built of, and the sparkle of fountain water."

And so begins the real destruction. Black, as it happens, despises the letter O; his ship is called the AEIU. Black explains to Littlejack that his O-phobia has to do with the vowel's shape: "I've had a hatred of that letter ever since the night my mother became wedged in a porthole. We couldn't pull her in and so we had to push her out."

To punish the islanders for the absence of jewels, and to avenge themselves against other offenders like portholes, Black and Littlejack set out to remake Ooroo and its inhabitants. They ban the hated O, first from books and signs, then from musical instruments, games, tools and on and on until almost no one can practice a trade and almost nothing makes sense anymore. The island of Ooroo becomes the island of R and coats become cats and poets become pets. "Books were bks and Robinhood was Rbinhd . . ., it was impossible to read 'cockadoodledoo' aloud, and parents gave up reading to their children, and some gave up reading altogether, and the search for the precious jewels went on."

In desperation, the people of Ooroo start meeting in the woods, seeking an answer. Eavesdropping on their powwows (or is that pwwws?) is an evil lawyer named Hyde, who argues that there is no cause for distress, because with O forbidden, "we shall all have an equal lack of opportunity." He even notes that "O-lessness is now a cult in certain quarters, a messy lessness whose meaninglessness attracts the few, first one or two, then three or four, then more and more. People often have respect for what they cannot comprehend."

Eventually, a beautiful maiden named Andrea leads her fellow islanders toward the answer, telling them: "There are four words with O. You mustn't lose them. Find out what they are and learn to use them." Everyone agrees that the first three words are valor, love and hope. But it is only when they discover, finally, the fourth and greatest word that they are saved, Black and Littlejack are driven forth and O returns to its rightful place in their language and lives. The word, the island's true treasure, is freedom. They overthrow the pirates, who leave behind a parrot that regains its "freedom of screech."

But--and this is also part of Thurber's wisdom--when Oorooians come to take their freedom for granted, they lose sight of its importance. The islanders build a monument to the letter O. A few generations later, the children of Ooroo look at this memorial and wonder why their forebears built a statue of zero.

Unfortunately, and I'd suggest it is very much a sign of the times, a similar obscurity is now overtaking Thurber's book itself. "The Wonderful O," now five years out of print, is fast becoming lost to America's younger generations. "We've tried in hundreds of ways to revive interest," says a spokesperson for Random House publishers, which now includes Yearling books, which in 1992 brought out "The Wonderful O" in paperback, but dropped it four years later for lack of sales. (Audible.com offers an audiobook version, narrated by Melissa Manchester, for a $4.95 download.) Teachers, parents, librarians--a crowd that in the aftermath of World War II knew this was something special--have stopped asking for it.

Perhaps part of the problem is that not everything in this book is politically correct. An old man at one point laments that without an O, "power is pwer, and zero zer, and worst of all, a hero's her." Thurber describes his heroine, Andrea, as a "maiden," before he moves on to the danger that the tyrants of Ooroo might banish her entirely because of the O in her status as a "woman." There's also the potential controversy over which O-word is the greatest. The Ooroo islanders themselves wonder for a while if it might be something like "imagination" or "religion" or "wisdom," before their predicament finally forces them all the way back to first principles.

Nor does Thurber's delight in language conform to the Pop-Tart pleasures of most modern entertainment. To love this book requires some active, if pleasant, appreciation of true wit (something I think children might still enjoy, given half a chance). So careful was Thurber to get the language and the story exactly right that The New Yorker itself never published "The Wonderful O," according to Thurber biographer Neil Grauer. Thurber refused to approve the magazine's abridged version.

In an era in which we censor even the surviving classics among children's books, dumb literature down in the hope of mass appeal, and too often trade away our own freedoms on the theory that government knows best, "The Wonderful O" is a book worth finding, wherever you can, and reading to whomever you can. Especially, it is worth reading to children, who might someday need more urgently than most modern life allows to understand the value, as one character says, of such things as "The O, lest we forget . . . in freedom."

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."