Chapter and worse

By awarding it to King, they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling. What8217;s happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer8217;s Stone. I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character 8216;8216;stretched his legs.8217;8217; I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling8217;s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn8217;t, after all, better than reading nothing at all?

If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn8217;t that a good thing? It is not. Harry Potter will not lead our children on to Kipling8217;s Just So Stories or his Jungle Book. It will not lead them to Thurber8217;s Thirteen Clocks or Kenneth Grahame8217;s Wind in the Willows or Lewis Carroll8217;s Alice. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, 8216;8216;If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King.8217;8217; And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read Harry Potter you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King. Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex.

I8217;m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I8217;ve seen the study of literature debased. There8217;s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she8217;d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn8217;t even good nonsense. It8217;s insufferable. I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon and others who just can8217;t write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curricula across the country. Recently, I spoke at the funeral of my old friend Thomas M. Green of Yale, perhaps the most distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature of his generation. I said, 8216;8216;I fear that something of great value has ended forever.8217;8217;

Today, there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this 8216;8216;distinguished contribution8217;8217; award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There8217;s Cormac McCarthy, whose novel Blood Meridian is worthy of Herman Melville8217;s Moby-Dick, and Don DeLillo, whose Underworld is a great book. Instead, this year8217;s award goes to King. It8217;s a terrible mistake.

The author is professor at Yale University