J. K. Rowling spoke at Harvard’s commencement this month, and as I noted in the previous post the uplifting theme of her speech was the creative imagination and the classics she read to cultivate it. But in the brief plot of her career, the classics have an antagonist: her parents.
They were poor, Rowling says, and as she grew up and pondered a vocation, they had an oppressive influence. She recalls:
“I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
“They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. . . .
“I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
“I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. . . .”
Is this not a strange drama for a wildly successful writer to recount at a graduation ceremony of the best and brightest?
The phrases “keys to an executive bathroom” and “wrong direction” make the assertion “I do not blame my parents for their point of view” sound condescending, and in light of her spectacular wealth their notion that her imagination “was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension” looks all the worse, both dead wrong and unappreciative of her talent back then. She didn’t even want to tell them about her studies, the ancient books that inspired her — that’s how anti-intellectual they were.
On the other hand, Rowling notes their poverty and lack of schooling as causes for vocational visions, and many practical parents would act the same way. Indeed, we don’t need to note how many teenage writers leave college with no marketable skills and never make it as paid scribes.
Instead, we might consider how complex and mysterious is the alchemy of experience and talent and discipline and conviction and, yes, parents that make a successful writer. Isn’t it entirely possible that if Rowling’s parents didn’t disparage her literary studies, if they didn’t discourage her writing ambitions, she wouldn’t have concocted the settings and characters and situations that make Harry Potter so popular? In Rowling’s rendition at Harvard, they play a simple negative role in her development. Surely, their role was more dynamic than that.
An added point: here is an opening for Harry Potter criticism, especially given the status of parents and substitute-parent figures in the series.
