The Wizard Behind Harry Potter
by Tim Bouquet (Reader's Digest, December 2000)
"I can't wait! I can't wait! I can't wait," exclaims nine-year-old Alula Greenberg-White, hugging herself in expectation. It's 9 a.m. outside a large bookstore in north London, and Alula is at the front of a line of 100 excited children and parents. They peer through the windows at big stacks of a thick new novel, eyes searching for the small strawberry-blond Pied piper who ahs brought them here--and to bookstores around the globe--and who is somewhere inside nursing a coffee.
"I'm really not a morning person," admits J. K. Rowling as she flexes her fingers in preparation for another marathon signing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth volume of a publishing phenomenon.
Children in more than 30 countries are just wild about Harry, their bespectacled hero who discovers on his 11th birthday that he is a wizard. For the few who don't know: Harry Potter inherited his magical powers from his parents, who have been slaughtered by the evil wizard Lord Voldemort.
Harry, who bears a lightning scar on his forehead (also Voldemort's handiwork), then hasa series of white-knuckle adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This is housed in a remote Scottish castle where mail is delivered by to pupils by their owls.
Rowling has so enchanted children with her imagination and a vivid cast--redoubtable Hermione Granger and plucky Ron Weasley, Harry's sidekicks, along with sinister Professor Snape and Hagrid, the endearing gamekeeper who likes a drnk and has a passion for hatching dragons--that the first four stories in the series have taken up permanent residence at the top of the best-seller lists. To date, they have sold an astonishing 41 million copies.
On July 8, the day Goblet of Fire was released in the United Kingdom, the book sold 372,775 copies in hard-back. In America--where Rowling has held the top four slots on the New York Times best-seller list of children's books since the list was created in July--a nation of bleary-eyed children stayed up for the midnight launch to snap up 3.8 million volumes.
In this digital age when it is said kids don't give a fig for teh printed word, Joanne Kathleen Rowling has turned more children on to reading than any other living author. And with a film of the first book in production and a range of Harry merchandise ready to ride into stores on its back, she has one of the highest profiles on the planet.
Yet the reality is a soft-spoken, birdlike 35-year-old, who shifts on the sofa as she considers the question: what is it about Harry that captivates in all languages and cultures?
"Magic has a universal appeal," Rowling begins. "I don't believe in magic in the way that I describe in my books. But I'd love it to be real," she continues, picking up speed like the Hogwarts Express, which at the beginning of every term takes the children to school from platform nine and three-quarters at London's King's Cross station.
"The starting point for the whole of Harry's world is: What if it was real? And I work from there."
She has never had a market in mind. "I started writing these books for me, but I really like my readers. They are very likeable people." She glances at the queue outside, which must now be 300 strong.
"Children are a writer's dream," she goes on. "They are not interested in sales figures. They want to know why the plot works a certain way. They know the books back to front, and talk about the characters as though they were living, mutual friends of ours." Her readers mirror Rowling's own feelings perfectly.
But aren't her tales of boarding-school antics just a bit too British? Indeed not, says the author. "Wherever I go, children seem to like the Britishness of the stories, even if they are probably getting a very rosy picture of what school in Britain is like!"
The story of J. K. Rowling's near-magical rise to fame is almost as well know as the characters she creates. She was born in 1965 at Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire--a fitting birthplace for someone who loves strange but believable names. A writer from the age of six, with two unpublished novels in the drawer, she was stuck on a train in 1990 when Harry walked into her mind fully formed. She spent the next five years constructing the plots of seven books, one for every year of his secondary-school life.
Rowling says she started writing the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, in Portugal, where she was teaching English and had married a journalist. The marriage lasted barely a year, but produced baby Jessica.
Leaving Portugal, she arrived in Edinburgh in 1993 to stay with her sister Di, a lawyer. She had just enough money for a deposit on a flat and some baby equipment.
"I was depressed and angry. Angry that I had messed up my life and let my daughter down." She went to visit a friend of her sister's who had a baby boy. "His bedroom was full of toys," she recalls. "Jessica's toys fitted into a shoe box. I came home and cried my eyes out."
The tears did not last. In her books, Harry's bravery strikes a chord with children because he is full of anxieties but gets by on luck and nerve. Rowling agrees that she is much the same. "He has the will to get through," she explains, "and I never lost that. When you are really on your uppers, you don't sit there and cry. You try and get out of it."
However, stories of an impoverished single mother living in a rat-infested studio apartment, working as a substitute teacher and scribbling her way to wealth in an Edinburgh coffee shop, are journalistic inventions. "I am a single mum. I did and still do write in cafes, and I was broke," she says. "But the early stories neglected to mention that I come from a middle-class background, I have a degree in French and classics, and that working as a teacher was my intended bridge out of poverty." And the studio? It was a mouse-infested two-bedroom flat.
At first, nobody wanted to publish Harry Potter. "The fact that it was set in a boarding school was very un-PC as far as most publishers were concerned," Joanne explains. She was told that the plot, like her sentence construction, was too complex. "That unnerved me. I knew it was going to be the shortest book of the series!" Refusing to compromise, she at last found a publisher, Bloomsbury, and, armed with a $12,000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council, ploughed into book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
In 1997 Rowling received her first royalty check for Sorceror's Stone and quickly banked it, not knowing when, or if, more would follow. Until then, she was "a happily obscure person." By book three, fueled by word of mouth and some astute marketing, she had skyrocketed to the top of the publishing world. A row of zeroes appeared on the author's bank balance, and her life was turned upside down. Day and night she had journalists knocking on the door of her small flat. Success, orso it was reported, had turned J. K. Rowling into a paranoid recluse.
As ever, the truth is prosaic. She's really not paraniod, just weary of the constant attention. And she gets out plenty, although writing four books back-to-back leaves little time for anything else--especially when things go wrong. For example, it took her three months to fix a massive flaw in the plot of Goblet of Fire, delaying delivery of the manuscript. "I am not an editor's dream!" she says with a laugh.
She claims she never reads what is written about her, and is fiercely protective of Jessica, now seven. On the child's first day at primary school, excited 10- and 11-year-olds surrounded her, clamoring to know about Harry and his creator.
"At first she liked it. She's a feisty little thing, my daughter." But when the attention didn't ease off, the girl's mother went to school and asked the older children to please lay off a bit. "She's very young and she can't answer your questions, because she hasn't read the books." In return, Rowling did a reading and a question-and-answer session with the two top classes. "It was fun adn solved the problem."
Jessica is now a fully fledged Potter fan, but like every other child she has to wait to find out what Harry does next.
A broomstick's hop away from the bookstore, Annie Williams, deputy head of Christ Church Primary School in down-at-the-heels Camden, swears by Harry. "When I read Sorceror's Stone to a class of thirty 11-year-olds, ten of whom have special needs, they were so inspired that I prepared work sheets based on the book to help them with grammar." Soon they were writing newspaper articles about the book and composing postcards from Hogwarts. "Their written work has improved dramatically."
So what has Rowling got that other writers haven't? "Potions, intrigue, magic, and what happens next," says Williams. "Exactly the formula Shakespeare used."
Rowling may write about wizards, ghosts, elves, and the hippogriff (half horse, half eagle), but her books are driven with all the suspense and twists of detective novels. Perhaps that's why Harry is also hugely popular with adults. Stories of parents muscling in to read each new volume ahead of their children are common.
"I love a good whodunit, and my passion is plot construction. Readers love to be tricked, but not conned," she says. "The best twist ever in literature is in Jane Austen's Emma. To me she is the target of perfection at which we shoot in vain."
And now Harry, like Emma, is making the transition to the movies. Directed by Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire director Chris Columbus, Sorceror's Stone is already in preproduction at Pinewood Studios and boasts a predominantly British cast, much to Rowling's relief.
"When I first met screenwriter Steve Kloves," she recalls, "the fact he was American made me spiky. I felt he was going to mutilate my baby. But as soon as he said his favorite character was Hermione, I melted, because she is very close to me. I was very like her at that age."
Kloves, who wrote and directed The Fabulous Baker Boys, loves Rowling's characters just the way they are. From the first page of book one, he says, "she had me. There's a genuine edge and darkness to it, and one reason it's so popular with children is that there's no pandering whatsoever."
While the death of a well-loved character in book four is upsetting, Rowling believes that only by letting children experience the real consequences of evil actions can they understand Harry's moral choices.
For months the role of Harry was not cast, although more than 40,000 hopefuls had vied for the honor of playing the world's most famous wizard. Finally, when Rowling saw the screen test of British actor Daniel Radcliffe, she knew the 11-year-old was perfect for the part.
Rowling's quality control is legendary, as is her obsession with accuracy. She is thrilled with Stephan Fry's taped version of the books, and outraged that an Italian dust jacket showed Harry minus his glasses. "Don't they understand they are the clue to his vulnerability?"
One person who is not there to see and share her success is her half-Scottish, half-French mother, who died of multiple sclerosis in 1990 at the age of 45. She had no idea that her daughter had started writing about Harry Potter.
In a moving scene in Sorceror's Stone, Harry stares into a magic mirror that lets him see what he most craves in life. In it he sees his dead parents seemingly alive. It is a rare autobiographical insight into Rowling's feelings about her own loss. "I miss her daily," she says. "I still hear her voice. It's very painful..." For the first time she stutters to a halt and stares at the floor, as though searching for a lost thread.
"My father, a retired aircraft engineer, is immensely proud," she says. "He would have been proud whatever I'd succeeded at. But books were my mother's passion. Having a daughter who was a writer would have been a very big deal, even if I'd only sold three copies."
She's sold a few more than that, of course. But this unpretentious woman with a loud percussive laugh has only recently learned to admit she enjoys being rich (she's rumored to be worth around $30 million). "I bought a house in London," she says. "That's pretty extravagant! The biggest luxury is that it stops you worrying. Not a day goes by when I am not thankful for that."
Back in the London bookshop, the doors burst open. Flash guns blaze. Quicker than a game of Quiddithc, the aerobatic broomstick basketball at which Harry excels, the roped route to the signing table is twitching with young autoraph-seekers.
Just before they descend, Rowling takes a moment to ponder life after Harry Potter. "I never forget A. A. Milne," she says, pen in hand. "When he wrote for adults, every review he ever got referred to Pooh, Tigger and Piglet. What appeals to me is sending in manuscripts for other books under a pseudonym. Anonymity was a nice place to be."
But when she sees young Alula's smiling face, she relaxes visibly, happy to be popular children's author J. K. Rowling. "Hi, how are you?" she asks as though greeting a long-lost friend.
In seconds the two are huddled, in cahoots about the latest adventures of the boy wizard. Afterward, as Alula's mother joins the line of other parents standing at the cash register, Alula says her heroine has surpassed her expectations. "She's so friendly--and she answered all my questions!"
While others try to fathom Rowling's success, this nine-year-old knows what magic works. "Because it's exciting." Spills and spells. It really is that simple.