‘All Along the Watchtower’ Comment by Rowling Suggests Her Real Reason for Going to Portugal in 1991

I think literary history and personal experience both tell us that everyone has a critical juncture in their lives, call it a nigredo if you want, perhaps ‘chrysalis’ is better,  in which everything falls apart and a new person emerges, one shaped by that crisis or series of calamities. For writers, Dickens is the prototypical example; each critical biography of the greatest English novelist I own — and I have a shelf — focuses on his time as a young man when he worked in a boot black factory while his father and family were in debtors prison. The wickipedia summary of that experience:

To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”.

I counted up in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf how many of Dickens’ novels featured suffering children. The final tally?

15 novels, 16 leading role characters without surviving parents or parents known to them, 2 novels feature title characters with only one parent, and only Dickens’ first book, an ad hoc collection of stories, does not feature an orphan or a neglected and estranged child.

If there was a creature in Dickens’ Lake of inspiration, it came to life in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. I don’t think he was unusual in this, if the severity of his experience was remarkable; similar cases could be made for Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among artists, and, lacking such dramatic events, what Freud called the “family romance” of every child is as formative (that is always ‘there’ in everyone’s psyche).

Our task here at Hogwarts Professor is to begin the ‘Fourth Generation’ of Rowling Studies, the one in which we shift from Shed focused literary interpretation exclusive of Lake concerns to one that includes Rowling formative experiences. Which means identifying as much as possible both her “family romance” and the life-and-mind pivotal moments that inform as inspiration her imaginative work.

The death of Rowling’s mother Anne in late December 1990 is almost without exception (and rightly) referred to in the very few biographies of the writer available today as a defining moment in her life as a writer. She described it as a “depth charge” that blew up her life, the nadir of her “year of misery,” and the primary impetus of her November 1991 departure from the UK to teach English in Portugal. That led, of course, to her meeting, marrying, having a child with, and divorcing Jorge Arantes, another formative relationship that is the foundation of her depression and latent PTSD.

Last week in my post about the latest internet meme meant to defame J. K. Rowling, ‘It’s the Mold!’ Rowling Twixter Cameo Shots Launch Bizarro Theories, I used a picture taken in September 2020 of The Presence in her home library. I used its relatively clear image of the back wall to explain that the “mold” supposedly growing floor to ceiling in her library is almost certainly very tasteful wallpaper with a Japanese block print image on it.

That picture came from a 2020 interview on the Version’s ‘Tracks of My Years” show; celebrities on this popular program are asked to share “tracks” in the “song” sense of that word and explain the meaning it has for them. If you follow that link to read Rowling’s answers and song selections, you find what I described in that post as a potential “key to unlocking the central mystery of Rowling’s life.” Find out what I’m guessing that is after the jump.

To cut to the point, as sad as Anne Rowling’s death was, she had been suffering from MS for ten years and her demise was a question of “how soon” rather than whether she would recover or not. I do not think Rowling’s “year of misery” turned so much on her death as on the decline and final break up of her seven year relationship that she had with a man named “Michael” she had met at Exeter. That relationship and the break-up were the Blacking Warehouse in which Harry Potter was inspired, I suggest, and it remains the great mystery of Rowling’s life, the one her critical biographers will focus on once it is revealed.

What do we know about “Michael”? Next to nothing, frankly. We’ve learned  only recently that his name is “Michael.”See The Rowling Library piece in June 2023 on the auction for a copy of Philosopher’s Stone that was autographed along with a note to Michael’s parents, a couple with whom she was still in touch. This relationship is mentioned in the Sean Smith biography and even Rowling’s wickipedia entry, but always as a “by the way” rather than the pivotal event. Rowling is in large part responsible for this emphasis. In her interview with Ian Parker for his ‘Mugglemarch’ New Yorker piece, she described her exit to Portugal this way:

 “It was total fight or flight,” she said. “I’d had a terrible time. Several things happened at once. My mother died, which was obviously the huge one. A long relationship I’d been in ended—and a couple of other things,” including being made redundant from an office job in Manchester.

Again, I think she is practicing misdirection here. Mom’s death “was obviously the huge one” and the end of the “long relationship” just one among the “other things” that went wrong that year. I think it is as credible that her mother’s death acted as a catalyst to the critical event, the break-up with Michael, with whom, after all, she was living in Manchester, whence the job agonies there, and the struggles of that relationship were the environment in which the original inspiration for Harry Potter occurred before Anne Rowling’s death.

She describes in her “Tracks of My Years” interview the song that she suggests was playing when she decided to find “some way out of here” after a “bad break up.” We only know of one “bad break-up” in Rowling’s life that led to flight and that is her departure for Portugal in late 1991, almost a year after Anne Rowling’s cremation in Gloucestershire.