The Haunted Wood, page 47
But Harry Potter – orphaned, impetuous, rebellious, fearful, courageous – is also one of the literary horcruxes among which J.K. Rowling partitioned her soul. Joanne was fifteen when her mother Anne was diagnosed with the incurable and progressive disease multiple sclerosis. Over the following decade the disease steadily and cruelly went about its work, leaving Anne – who had worked as a lab assistant at her daughter’s school – jobless and wheelchair-bound. She died in 1990 at the age of forty-five. The original premise of the Harry Potter books, their emotional core, the reason that Harry is – in Rowling’s shiver-making phrase – “The Boy Who Lived” is a mother’s love. “I know why you couldn’t kill me,” Harry tells voldemort. “Because my mother died to save me.” When Harry looks into the Mirror of Erised, which shows the onlooker the “deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts,” it’s his dead parents he sees, waving to him.
As her mother’s health declined, the bookish child went through a fragile adolescence – in the course of which she shed her Hermionelike nerdiness to take up smoking, rock guitar and a gothy style. “Home was a difficult place to be,” she told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs.† Yet she did not neglect her schoolwork; she became head girl and narrowly missed out on a long-shot place at Oxford, going instead to Exeter to study modern languages.
Rowling, as a young woman, drifted. After leaving university in 1987 with a middling degree, she lived in London and then, following a university boyfriend, in Manchester. She did a succession of bitty jobs – a secretarial course, temping work, a stint in an entry-level position at the charity Amnesty International. It was while looking glumly out of the window of a train from Manchester to London, on the way back from a flat-hunting trip, that the idea for the story that was to make her name came into her head:
All of a sudden the idea for Harry just appeared in my mind’s eye. I can’t tell you why or what triggered it. But I saw the idea of Harry and the wizard school very plainly. I suddenly had this basic idea of a boy who didn’t know who he was, who didn’t know he was a wizard until he got his invitation to wizard school. I have never been so excited by an idea.*
It was 1990: seven years before the book would make its way into print, and just a few months before her mother’s death between Christmas and New Year. It was an inflection point. Her life in Manchester came unrooted, the relationship with the boyfriend ended, and the tin hat was put on her situation when she lost several precious mementoes of her mother in a burglary. She did a geographical, answering an advertisement in the Guardian for people to teach English in the Portuguese city of Porto.
This new start brought the second crisis in her life. The Bluebeard part: dark materials. Five months into her time in Porto, Rowling met a young Portuguese man, Jorge Arantes, and soon fell pregnant. They lost the child to a miscarriage, but they decided to try for another baby and to marry. She was pregnant with her daughter Jessica when they married. Though she didn’t speak extensively about that period in her life until years later, she included a sour private joke in Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. The divination teacher Professor Trelawney (usually a comical character) has a vision: “That thing you are dreading – it will happen on Friday the sixteenth of October.” Rowling’s wedding day in 1992 was Friday 16 October.
The marriage lasted little more than a year. Arantes was violent and controlling toward Rowling, refusing to let her have her own house key and using the manuscript of her book (by this stage she had the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone written and the rest in draft) as leverage in case she tried to leave him.
“He knew what that manuscript meant to me because at one point he took the manuscript and hid it and that was his hostage,” she said in 2023. She took steps to preserve it, and would take “a few pages of the manuscript into work every day – just a few pages so that he wouldn’t realise anything was missing – and photocopy it[…] gradually in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew and grew, because I suspected that, if I wasn’t able to get out with everything, he would burn it or take it or hold it hostage.”*
In November 1993, Arantes beat her and threw her out of the house into the street at five in the morning. The following day, she returned with a policeman – “Officially the police could not do anything but I convinced them to come with me. I thought they might frighten him.” – and convinced Arantes to hand over her baby daughter. She went into hiding, frightened that he’d come after her and their child. Two weeks later she fled Portugal for good and headed to Edinburgh to be near her sister.
“I knew two or three people, and I was incredibly lonely. I was really angry,” she later said. “I never expected to mess up so badly that I would find myself in an unheated mouse-infested flat, looking after my daughter. And I was angry because I felt that I was letting her down.”† The following year, Arantes appeared unexpectedly in Edinburgh. She was frightened enough of him that she applied for, and was granted, a restraining order – which was made permanent in 1995. That summer, she filed for divorce and started the struggle to get her life back on track, studying toward a PGCE – and working on the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The first three chapters of that manuscript found their way to an agent, Christopher Little, whose name Rowling had found in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. Little’s office junior Bryony Evens by chance plucked it from the reject basket, started to read it, and was impressed. She showed it to a freelance reader, who in turn – after writing to Rowling for the full text – brought it to Little’s attention. Though he didn’t as a rule represent children’s authors, he saw something in it. Twelve publishers turned it down before Bloomsbury’s children’s publisher, Barry Cunningham, made an offer. The rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which would go on to be the third best-selling book of all time, went for £1,500. And, at her agent’s urging, Joanne Rowling became J.K. Rowling (the K was for Kathleen, her grandmother’s name).
The book was published to little fanfare, in an edition of just 500 copies. The second stroke of luck came three days after the UK publication, when Rowling heard that an auction was being conducted for US rights. Scholastic paid $100,000 for it – and at once, the single mother from Edinburgh became a person of interest to the media on both sides of the Atlantic. The legend was in place.
If you were writing a Whig history of children’s books, you could see the Harry Potter stories as a natural terminus. Not only did their success transform the reception of children’s writing in this country and around the world, but the writing of them deftly combines the most attractive elements of what has gone before. They are a fantastically adept mash-up of some of the most enduring tropes and genres in children’s writing. Those who criticize them as unoriginal, or have sneered at Rowling’s unambitious prose, have, it seems to me, missed the point.
Originality isn’t, and never has been, the vital ingredient in children’s writing. It’s welcome when it’s there, of course, but many if not most of the greatest children’s books consciously and openly lean on their predecessors. They repurpose fairytale motifs, they namecheck or adapt writers of the generation with whom their authors themselves grew up – Kipling in Nesbit; Nesbit in Lewis – and they swim happily in the great torrent of school stories, portal fantasies, pirates and witches, and explorers that lead up to their publication.
Rowling is emphatically a writer of that kind: steeped in, and determined to amalgamate, the long traditions of fantasy and school stories. A.S. Byatt, around the launch of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), paid Rowling the (backhanded) compliment of calling the nascent Potterverse “a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature.”* That’s surely right; though she points in my view to a central strength of those books rather than a weakness. Rowling is one of the great magpies.
For a start, she took the boarding-school story – a genre that until then seemed to have had its last gasp around the middle of the twentieth century – and put it right back at the center of the contemporary canon. She did this in a very trad way. Hogwarts, with its grand halls and suits of armor, its arcane rituals and oldfashioned clothes, resembles an early modern boarding school more than it does a twentieth-century one. Even in the Muggle world, Harry Potter’s universe is one seemingly untouched by mobile phones, the internet, modern brands, or celebrities.
As I mentioned in a previous chapter, Rowling tips the cap to the Molesworth stories in borrowing “Hogwarts” and “Scrimgeour.” Probably by chance – the shape of the mythological set-up – it also echoes the X-Men: what, after all, is Hogwarts but another version of Professor xavier’s school for gifted youngsters, the divide between mutant and human echoed in the divide between wizard and Muggle? Other predecessors include Jill Murphy’s series set in a school for witches, starting with The Worst Witch (1974) and (an acknowledged influence) T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. Harry, like Wart, is a weedy and isolated figure who comes to discover that fate has marvelous and painful things in store for him, and who grows to his full powers under the tutelage of a kindly and eccentric wizard. Rowling learned too, I fancy, from White’s ability to turn on a pin, tonally: as I’ve written, White’s retelling of Malory is distinguished by its swerving from one paragraph to the next between epic grandeur and screwball comedy. J.K. Rowling makes the same swerves. And like every school story ever, it has sporting rivalry, swots, mean teachers and kind ones, rule-breaking adventures, pranks and larks, a tuck-shop, and – in the weaselly form of Draco Malfoy and his thuggish sidekicks Crabbe and Goyle – bullies.
All the greatest hits of children’s writing through the ages have a place, among them the encyclopedic info-dump qualities that are such a central part of the appeal of children’s books since Orbis Pictus. The natural history facts and figures, and the practical knowledge, we find in The Water-Babies and Willard Price’s Adventure stories are, in Harry Potter, applied to a wild bestiary of mythic creatures. You learn, along with the book’s protagonists as they go lesson to lesson, about the ingredient list for a Polyjuice Potion, the safe cultivation of mandrakes, the care and feeding of dragons and blast-tailed skrewts, and how to clear a garden of gnomes (you pick the little brutes up, whirl them till they’re dizzy and throw them lustily over the hedge).
Does she skimp on the mouthwatering depictions of food? She does not. Perhaps the archetypal instance – Kenneth Grahame’s Joycean picnic of coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkins- saladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonade-so-dawater” has its echo in the regular feasts at Hogwarts. When Harry first arrives at wizarding school, the tables groan with “roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup […] apple pies, treacle tarts, chocolate eclairs and jam doughnuts, trifles, strawberries, jelly, rice pudding…” Her punctilious attention to what the children were eating, though, Rowling has said, wasn’t directly inspired by Grahame so much as by Elizabeth Goudge, whose The Little White Horse (1946) she has described as “more than any other book a direct influence on the Harry Potter books […] The author always included details of what her characters were eating and I remember liking that.”*
On the fantasy side, Byatt discerned echoes of Roald Dahl, Star Wars, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Ursula K. Le Guin, as Pottermania took hold of the world, grumbled publicly that “when so many adult critics were carrying on about the ‘incredible originality’ of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled.”† She herself had told the story of an alone-in-the-world boy wizard discovering his true powers at a wizarding school in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), complete with a scar that throbbed in the presence of dark forces and a Malfoy-like school rival.
Harry Potter isn’t so much a portal fantasy as a portals fantasy: the rabbit-hole at King’s Cross station, Platform 9¾, is one of a whole plethora of magical apertures in the books to be discovered and unlocked – from the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets in Moaning Myrtle’s neglected bathroom to the password-locked portraits leading to the house dormitories in Hogwarts or the network of fireplaces accessed through “floo powder.” But where Rowling follows Cooper, Garner, and the Kipling of Puck of Pook’s Hill is that the wizarding world isn’t a separate universe you access through a wardrobe or a magic rail platform; it is an older, deeper, magical order of things that invisibly overlays our own. Events in the magical world impinge on the disenchanted world of the Muggles. They share a geography. As a reader, you can fantasize that the world of Harry Potter would be all around you, were you only able to see it.
The Harry Potter books, then, are not just a tale of a set of magical shenanigans. They are a fantastical vision of Britain itself. The Dursleys – “respectable,” cruel, repressed, and socially snobbish – are one version of Middle England, one model of an English family; the Weasleys – scruffy, boisterous, poor but happy – are another. Their home in the Devon village of Ottery St Catchpole is in the direct lineage of Bilbo Baggins’s hobbit-hole and Badger’s comfortable home in The Wind in the Willows:
It looked as though it had once been a large stone pigsty, several storeys high and so crooked it looked as though it was held up by magic (which, Harry reminded himself, it probably was). Four or five chimneys were perched on top of the red roof. A lop-sided sign stuck in the ground near the entrance read The Burrow. Round the front door lay a jumble of wellington boots and a very rusty cauldron. Several fat brown chickens were pecking their way around the yard.
“Crooked”; “lop-sided”; “jumble.” This is the England of G.K. Chesterton’s “rolling English road” or Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” It is countryside not town, bricolage not planned construction: an England whose history builds up higgledy-piggledy, animated by human warmth: make-do-and-mend. It’s a nostalgic image.
The magical world is a more exciting shadow version of the workaday world around us. It’s a world in which (in keeping with Rowling’s relentless punning) you can get around on a Knight Bus, the dull state comprehensive is replaced by a Gothic boarding school with Latin tags (draco dormens numquam titillandus: never tickle a sleeping dragon), and in which – heavens-to-betsy – the postal service, thanks to owls, actually works. That world reflects our own in the proverbial funhouse mirror – allowing Rowling to comment on snobbery, racism, tabloid journalism (in the form of the dishonest and prurient Rita Skeeter), the tediousness of government bureaucracy in the form of the Ministry of Magic, and liberation politics (legal slavery is no longer an issue in modern Britain, but Hermione’s “House Elf Liberation Front” can stand in for any number of social justice movements).
Roald Dahl is also present. The books could have been written with the injunction I quoted in a previous chapter in mind: “[Children] love being spooked,” wrote Dahl. “They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.” The Dursley family, with whom the orphaned hero lives so miserably, are pure Dahl. They belong not only to Dahl’s era – the buttoned-up suburbia of Privet Drive, and the stout, moustachioed paterfamilias, could be from anywhere from the 1950s to the 1970s – but also to his idiom. They are two-dimensional adult authority figures whose physical grotesquerie echoes their moral standing. Vernon and Petunia resemble Matilda Wormwood’s parents in temperament if not in respectability, while fat-necked, spoilt, pig-like Dudley is a malign Augustus Gloop.
The father of modern fantasy is a presence in the text, too. He could hardly fail to have been. Rowling in young womanhood was a dedicated reader and rereader of Tolkien – her battered copy of The Lord of the Rings was among the books she took with her when she traveled to Portugal to work as an English teacher, and her biographer Sean Smith crisply enumerates some of the echoes or borrowings:
Aragorn, Butterbur, Mugwort, Wormtongue and Bilbo Baggins contrast [with] Aragog, Butterbeer, Muggles, Wormtail and Dudley Dursley. Both heroes […] are naive orphans with unpleasant relatives: Harry has the Dursleys and Frodo the Sackville-Bagginses. Both Tolkien and Rowling employ a friendly mentor or father figure who allows the hero to grow but is ready to step in and rescue if necessary. Harry has Dumbledore, Frodo has Gandalf. The enemy in both cases is a ‘Dark Lord’ [who] has been crippled and is coming back to power slowly. […] Both Wormtongue and Wormtail reveal their true colours as close but ultimately weak acolytes of the Dark Lord […] The Lord of the Rings has the black, hooded Ringwraiths while The Prisoner of Azkaban introduces the black, hooded Dementors.*
In the first Harry Potter book, Harry encounters the Mirror of Erised, which shows its viewer his or her heart’s desire; in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo meets the Mirror of Galadriel. And so on. Star Wars? Here is another story in which the fate of the galaxy rests on a family struggle: another Dark Lord, another orphaned boy whose origins are more portentous than he begins to understand, another process of training under a series of father figures; a final clash between cosmic forces of light and darkness. Under the skin, the books trade in deeper mythic archetypes. They are a latency fantasy: Harry, with his meagre meals of scraps and his cupboard under the stairs, is as the stories open a shock-haired, male Cinderella. Even voldemort storing the fragments of his soul in “horcruxes” has a folktale antecedent: the Russian folktale “Koshchei the Deathless” has its protagonist hide his soul in a series of nested objects (a needle inside an egg inside a duck inside a hare chained in a box on an island). By the end – in which Harry essentially gives his own life up in a sacrificial salvation, only to return – it’s not too much to see Rowling as drawing on the power of the Christian story itself.
