If you want to get rich from writing, Don Marquis once suggested, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves. Marquis had rock-steady sights and, once, this remark would have thudded home clean and true. But no longer. If we have learned anything from JK Rowling, Britain’s most celebrated typist, it is that if you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that ends up as a plastic action-figure buried deep inside a Happy Meal.
What remains a mystery, though, is why, having shown a queenly disregard for her readers’ time and stamina, Rowling has now decided to stop. Perhaps it’s performance anxiety: a tin ear cannot by definition rust, but it can corrode. Perhaps she had simply run out of quaint, hollow names, and had got halfway through plotting the arrival of the wicked Malvolix and his army of Snagbags when she realised that she was producing stool water and desisted.
But the most likely answer is that she just can’t be bothered any more; and why should she be? When Forbes magazine last pinged her vault with its fiscal sonar, it emerged that she is worth roughly £500-million. If she keeps it in a bank, and pays tax, and doesn’t go to the salon too often as part of her ongoing quest to look like a hybrid of Ellen Barkin and a pony, she should be getting about £15-million a year — £30 a minute — in interest. Motivation and self-discipline are always going to be tricky when you make £120 by looking at the pictures in Hello while sitting on the loo.
Whatever her reasons, though, one is immensely grateful that she has stopped, and cautiously hopeful that the cultural and social retardation of a generation can still be reversed, that millions of twentyÂÂsomething teenagers can still be taught how to stay at the table right the way to the end of the dinner party, or to make eye contact with adults when spoken to, or to read a book that isn’t moving the lips of an entire culture as it reads to itself.
When it was reported that Rowling’s publishers expect more adults than children to read the final instalment, a meathead explanation was offered by more than one commentator: the 24-year-olds queuing in their pointy hats and wiping their sweaty palms on their robes are the 14-year-olds who fell in love with the very first Potter book in 1997. Presumably these pundits are similarly charmed by 24-year-olds who have retained other 14-year-old tastes, such as throwing spitballs into the hair of pretty girls in order to signal desire.
Indeed, listening to the outÂÂpouring of admiration for a book that exalts everything in the West that is infantile and derivative, one wondered if anyone had recently stumbled across a bestseller of another era, a dense little read about someone’s son, also something of a magician, who dies at the end, sort of. ”When I was child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Certainly, the folks at the Chicago Tribune don’t seem to have come across that one lately. Or any book, in fact. Ever. That’s what one had to conclude from a column about the cascade of plot leaks that saturated the web in the weeks before the release of the final Potter. Publishing these spoilers was, in the words of the Trib‘s columnist, ”literary terrorism”. One would have thought that Americans would be more careful, and more adult, about asserting what they understood terrorism to be, but of course the article’s indictment was more than politically flawed: in order for the leaks to have been ”literary terrorism”, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows first needed to be literature.
Likewise another American broadsheet, similarly self-righteous in its condemnation of what was really nothing more than journalistic chutzpah and a refusal to self-censor, called the spoilers ”a grubby footnote to a literary phenomenon”. It was a snooty jibe, but one that betrayed a mediocre intellect, for it demonstrated that in the current zeitgeist there is now no distinction between a literary phenomenon and a publishing phenomenon. At last, the media and its corporate handlers have got one hand on the Holy Grail of Dumb: removing the boundary between what is good and what is popular.
Tens of millions of children will be sad to see the end of Harry Potter, and one sympathises. Losing the friends who inhabit the books of one’s childhood is an anxious moment. But what pleasures lie ahead, once the little hand has been let go, the far-fetched caricatures set aside, the childish things put away! Once upon a time, for all time, and happily, happily, ever after.