Hogwarts Professor

To risk understatement, I am a J. K. Rowling fan. Bum Phillips once said about Earl Campbell that the running back may not be the only person in his class but “it doesn’t take long to say roll.” I think that can fairly be said of my contributions to Rowling Studies from 2002 to the present day. As one Serious Striker wrote to me last year, one who incidentally is not currently a fan or a friend, “No one has contributed more to the understanding of J. K. Rowling’s work than you have.”

I am the “Dean of Harry Potter Scholars” and have invested what time I have in her work only because I think Rowling is a great writer and an important one. C. S. Lewis said once that the 20th Century would be known to literary historians as the ‘Age of Charles Williams’ the way that critics talk about Shakespearean England or Byron’s Era. No sign of that coming about, alas, as prescient as Lewis was; it seems much more likely and merited in terms of reach, depth, and accomplishments, literary and philanthropic, that the 21st Century will be known as the ‘Age of Rowling.’

I lay out those credentials and views in order to introduce a subject that may disturb Rowling-philes as well as her harsher critics. That subject is Rowling’s courage, and, specifically, her lack of courage, call it cowardice, on at least three points.

Courage is important to Rowling’s self-identity so a failing with this respect to this central virtue is no small thing. Remember her comments about why she admired Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., at the Ripple of Hope Award ceremony in 2019:

Robert Kennedy embodied everything I most admire in a human being.

He was morally and physically courageous, and, like Churchill, I believe that courage is the foremost of the virtues because it  guarantees all the others. He looked beyond the invisible but powerful boundaries that can insulate people of privilege from the rest of the world and he looked into those dark corners where poverty and discrimination and injustice breed. He was a man of both empathy and action and he brought about real change and he continues to inspire people beyond the boundaries of his of his own country — and I’m not sure we can ask much more of any politician or indeed of any human being.

Read RFK, Sr’s 1965 Affirmation Day speech in South Africa, the so-called ‘Ripple of Hope’ address, for a good bolt of that moral courage and daring political boldness as well. Rowling finds that selfless spirit, something akin to fearlessness, the “foremost of the virtues.” She clearly has made that a thematic golden thread running throughout her works and in her personal life as well, from the courage it took to leave a violent husband though she had no familial safety net waiting for her and Jessica back in the UK to her stand against the “transgender” and Gender Theory Extremist mobs the last five years.

But she has her blind spots and prudence points, issues about which she has not spoken because of how it would reflect on her. Join me after the jump for a look at three of those issues.

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The Rowling Library’s September issue is now available and it has four articles that I found to be remarkable reading. I urge you to download and read it (or simply read it online) when you have a moment; it rewards all the time you may invest in it, believe me.

I wrote earlier this week about ‘Rowling’s Ten Most Important Interviews‘ and today, courtesy of TRL’s September issue, I was able to download a copy of an interview Rowling gave the Scottish Book Collector newsletter in 1998, parts of which were used for two articles by Jennie Renton in different venues years later. Was it one of the most important interviews in Rowling’s twenty-five plus years of talking to the media? I don’t think it cracks the Top Ten, but, as the TRL reporter notes, the earlier interviews in Rowling’s history are the more revealing and this talk is not an exception to that rule of thumb.

I look forward to writing a post here dedicated to what Rowling said to Renton about how she writes, what scene she loved in her favorite Chronicles of Narnia book, the importance to her of Olivander’s, her feelings of “terrific fear” “inadequacy” and “helplessness” as a child, her insistence on the one hand that she doesn’t “intend to make a point or teach a philosophy of life,” while, on the other, she allows that her books have a “moral… subtext” if not “moralistic.” Sean Harris, perhaps Rowling’s closest friend, gets a shout-out as well, perhaps his first appearance in interview canon.

This interview alone makes the September TRL issue worth a download. But there’s more. [Read more…]