J K Rowling and her Cloak of Invisibility

I was intrigued by J K Rowling’s recent flirtation with her cloak of invisibility. There will be plenty of people – particularly publishing folk – who will dissect and analyse her motives, as well as sniffing out a cynical marketing exercise that will of course, in time, make money.

I do have to be honest – the industry that Rowling began has given me my house and the food I eat. My ex other half worked on Potter for ten years and it was fascinating, but more so for the tactile talent it stirred up amongst designers and artists, who had a vision that was spurred from a reasonably-sized book. The creativity of crafting wands and Rowling’s early involvement with drawings and notes was genuinely exciting. But talk of it was forbidden at home - it grew so big that it was too overwhelming at times. I went to a few Potter parties and again, if I’m honest, I was bored. Actors are lovely but they ‘are’ rather than have vast and complex things to say that have not been written for them. Film folk too sometimes have a hard edge or they live in a rarified world where the veneer is important, but nothing is deep. So when I finally got to talk to Rowling – a fellow writer - I felt a sense of relief.

She has been typecast so much – so many have built a sense of romantic poverty about her life. People flutter around her, waiting for their good fortune to arrive from a touch of her hand. So what did I ask her? About Wales of course. She went to school in Chepstow and grew up in that area. I was a Tintern teenager and although the valley is lovely, I can fully understand the need to create worlds of your own, to cloud-dream lying on your back in a field. The penultimate film recreated the forest in the Severn Valley and so I asked her if she missed Wales. I had a lot of champagne inside me and she had more – but the joyful way she talked about Wales was real, very passionate.

But I didn’t ask her about the name Hermoine. My mother – who had an antique shop in Tintern, not far from Chepstow, had her name across the shop front. Her name is Hermoine – not Hermione – my grandfather spelt it incorrectly on the birth certificate. But I often wondered if J K Rowling made the connection. Yet I never want to know – to be disappointed, perhaps.

But drunk or not, she struck me as intelligent, mischievous and playful. In some ways, it’s sad that people can only see her as money as a ‘standard’ for writers. ‘You can be the next J K Rowling’ is the most vulgar and depressing thing I hear from non-literary folk and even, shame on them, some bookish souls. Money is important of course – it cushions you from some pain – but literary excellence is better, surely?

So I understand why she wrapped herself in Gaibraith (which means ‘stranger’ but also is a Scottish estate agency.) For a moment she could walk in the world with a moustache and a big hat pulled down over her face and people would still say ‘Handsome fellow.’ Writers are about words, the quiet internal worlds. But successful writers – where we know their faces and every aspect of their lives – invite huge amounts of criticism and some jealous sneering. Many attack the work as sport and it often goes beyond literary criticism. So the production of this work quietly let her know that she can write, that other writers rate her without all the baggage of the Rowling name. She has broken out of the typecast and instead of the main part in the panto, she was for a while the back end of the horse, watching the audience from a hole in the cloth.

Many discussions will be made and now of course, like people who forensically analyse the darkness in pop songs, meanings will be made for her Cuckoo. But a cuckoo too is of course in disguise and the over-grown nest baby and by the time it is revealed, it is too late. I’m sure that there was lots of playful knowing symbolism that made her chuckle when she was writing the book.

She is not the first writer to write under another name and if you can afford to experiment as a writer, then why not? It worked for the wonderful George Eliot in a sexist age. When writers become a clumsy and monstrous brand – they surely crave some delicacy and impartial judgment of the words they spill on the page? Let’s love our writing – be the best we can and stop being jealous of those who actually get off their backsides – or should that be settle down on their backsides – and write! Not to be the next Rowling, not to copy any particular voice or see gold in the print. Just to write because you have twitchy fingers and some tiny little fictional people keep matchstick-poking your brain to smear their lives on some paper.