Could Harry Potter rescue the Eminent Columnist?

Who would have expected William Safire to make such a big ol' boo-boo?

The New York Times columnist, writing about recent English literary awards, committed one of the cardinal sins of writing about books:

THOU SHALT NOT OFFER AN OPINION ON A BOOK THOU HAST NOT READ.

In "Adult fare Harry Potter is not" (reported in The Roanoke Times on Jan. 30), Safire was praising the Whitbread prize committee for giving its top award, Book of the Year, to Irish poet Seamus Heaney rather than to Harry Potter's creator J.K. Rowling. Heaney's new translation of "Beowulf "also won the poetry prize, while Rowling's was named Best Children's Book.

Heaney won £21,000 plus another £2,000 for the poetry prize. Rowling won £10,000. Safire congratulated the committee, despite the fact that he admitted he hasn't read the Rowling book in question, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." Safire said he HAS read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," Rowling's first book about the young wizard. I don't know whether he read Heaney's "Beowulf "or not.

I'm more than a little surprised at an eminent columnist's willingness to assess the value of a book he has not read. If a person argues that he likes A better than B, it seems reasonable to expect that he has met both of them.

I don't mean to suggest that we can't talk about literature we haven't read. I have students who do it regularly. The people who make Cliffs Notes expect us to want or need to talk about works we haven't read. Often, we find out what we WANT to read from discussing works we haven't read with people who have.

Of course, in those conversations, it's only fair that we make our ignorance apparent: "I haven't read that book, but it's my understanding that . . ." or "Although I haven't read one myself, I heard that Rowling's books are . . ."

Not that this admission would get Safire off the hook. He does confess to have ended his reading of Harry Potter's adventures with book one. To go on to offer an assessment of the THIRD book in the series seems like just drawing a big red circle around his ignorance.

But the eminent columnist's transgressions go deeper than a mere boo-boo.

In his "relief" that the Whitbread committee avoided the "pressure" to give its top award to Rowling, Safire displays a common prejudice toward children's books -- that they are deserving of "lesser" prizes. He calls Rowling's first book "a nice deployment of the standard tricks" and says that her work is about as valuable as Looney Tunes. "Prizeworthy culture it ain't," he says, "and more than a little is a waste of adult time." Now there's a textbook example of circular reasoning: a children's book can't be a really valuable book if adults don't read it.

For many adults, the literature they hear or read as children and what they read in school are all the literature they ever read. Many of us, especially professionals, like to think of ourselves as readers, but one of the sad facts of adult life is that our occupations and preoccupations squeeze out our reading time. A friend who's a college administrator said to me this week, "I'll bet I don't read as much in a year now as I used to read in a week." Those of us who are lucky enough to make literature as a part of our job descriptions or who simply make reading time a high priority are, I suspect, the exception rather than the rule. Often in a full waiting room, I'm the only person reading a book. Most everyone else skims a magazine, watches television, or stares at the ground.

If I'm right that many people abandon reading when they aren't forced by teachers or parents to do it anymore, then what they read during their formal education takes on all the more significance. The fewer contacts we have with books, the more important each one is.

Of even greater relevance is psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg's theory that children make their greatest strides in moral development between the ages of 10 and 18. If Kohlberg is right, I don't see why their reading material would be secondary to what adults read. It seems to me it would be MORE important. After all, one of these days, I'll be a senior citizen, and those who are now Harry Potter's age will be running the world. So I take the literature aimed at that group pretty seriously. I'm concerned about what ideas are going into their heads and what behaviors they imitate.

Not Safire, who heartily endorses another writer's warning that giving top literary prizes to Harry Potter books would mean "the infantilization of adult culture, the loss of a sense of what a classic really is." Never mind that Harry and his chums move fairly briskly along Kohlberg's developmental scale, encouraging young readers to move along with them.

Perhaps if the eminent columnist had read Harry Potter as a young man, he'd serve up his opinions with less vinegar. In Harry, he would have found a boy who is loyal to his friends, sensitive to outcasts and underdogs, respectful of his teachers -- when they deserve his respect -- aware of the moral dimensions of a decision, and capable of realizations that move him along toward adulthood. It seems to me that any "infantilizing" of our culture is more likely to come from the fascination with professional wrestling and violent movies and video games than from the Harry Potter books.

Could Harry Potter save Mr. Safire from his own narrow view of children's literature? I don't see why not. Harry has saved friends, villains and magical creatures. Given a fair chance, I'll bet he could rescue an eminent columnist.