The Real Scar Of Harry Potter
The Age
Saturday July 14, 2007
The earliest of brushes with the boy wizard still haunts Tom Adair.
HARRY POTTER ENTERED MY LIFE NOT ON A broomstick but with a whisper.Apart from J. K. Rowling herself, back then, few people had ever heard of Harry's existence. It was the era before Harry Potter filled the firmament, a time when Rowling could walk down Edinburgh's Princes Street without fear of a second glance.Back then - in January 1997 - I was chairman of the Scottish Arts Council's writers' bursaries committee.Twice a year we sifted through pleading applications (many from writers already published), asking for money to buy them time to write their "great" work.Among these in 1997 was Rowling's application describing her circumstances, her hopes, and enclosing, in typescript, the opening two (or perhaps three) chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.I remember reading them, at home, in the dead of night in the glow from a coal fire, snowflakes ticking against the window pane, hearing the voice of Joanne Rowling waft off those pages with a magical assurance.It kept me amused, it kept me reading to the end, which was not the end, of course but the start of something phenomenal. Those earliest gripping chapters were pretty much exactly as published eight months later. They had the polish of well-weighted sentences ready to read. No effort required. It later surprised me that so many publishers and agents (more than 20 my sources inform me) turned her down.At the subsequent Arts Council meeting on February 7 - among an erudite bunch of people more commonly used to discussing poetry and literary fiction than children's stories - there was some measured disagreement about the merit of Rowling's work and about how much she should be granted.In the end we awarded Rowling the highest bursary of the day - #8000 ($A19,000).Of course those documents - all those pleading applications from needy writers - were confidential. The job of officials was to gather them up at the end of every meeting and destroy them. So all the papers were duly collected. Or so it was thought.I, however, had been so engrossed in conversation about some controversial business due to come up at a later meeting that I had forgotten to hand in my file. I only discovered this some days later when, in my writing room at home, I unearthed the booty from my briefcase.It is a moment I sometimes revisit in bouts of masochistic indulgence. For, there they were, those A4 pages neatly typed, along with the other applications: Harry Potter, the earliest scribblings!What did I do? I did not hesitate. I fed them into my shredder, every last page. A London bookseller recently offered for sale an unsigned first edition of that novel at #20,000.How much would those pages have fetched, if sold in today's crazy Potterabilia market? I've no idea. Nor do I care. (Believe me! Believe me!) I had done the only decent, ethical, justifiable thing. And, as you've guessed - in the deathly hallows of my mind it has left no scar.Tom Adair is a regular contributor to The Age books pages. The final Potter book is published next Saturday.
© 2007 The Age