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I wrote a post yesterday about the philosopher Alain de Botton. I said that I thought he played intellectual games. Then, to my shock, he replied:

I’m confused by your line of argument. I should reassure you that I’m entirely uninterested in intellectual games. For me, writing is an utterly sincere pursuit, where I try to gain insights into certain areas and also cogently capture feelings.

I’ve written a long comment replying to de Botton (you can read it under the original post). Hopefully it explains my thoughts with more grace than I managed the first time. But while the ideas are fresh in my mind I wanted to record some reflections on the experience - my first - of being read by those you write about.

1. To my mind, blogging always seems particularly like it exists in a vacuum. When I write reviews for newspapers I am careful to consider the feelings of the writer. Perhaps it’s because I have access to the viewing stats (so-called) for this blog, but I’ve never really considered than anyone I write about might read it. For me, therefore, this episode is a much-needed reminder that this is a public forum. Overall, I suppose I was lucky - I might have been caught being really rude about someone.

2. I decided in the end to reply publicly to de Botton, because that’s what I’d do to anyone else. I also believe in the principle of public debate of public works. But I have said things in reviews that I would never have said to the individual had they been standing in front of me: that’s the difference between public and private interactions. When de Botton replied I suddenly found that this line, which I had been straddling so confidently, had become very blurred. To write, we have to carry on as if there is a clear distinction between public and private. In some very real sense, it isn’t.

3. I can only guess what it must feel like to read yourself being called an intellectual game-player by someone you’ve never met. When I wrote that, I referred directly to AdeB, but of course I wasn’t really talking about him - I was talking about the notional him that I know through his books. Again, the line between public and private is blurred to the point where it vanishes entirely. Perhaps that’s what de Botton meant by commenting: to remind me that he is a real person, with real feelings, and not just a literary construct.

4. In his blog today, Alistair Campbell writes interestingly about the experience of being portrayed in films. He’s referring to the adaptation of David Peace’s The Damned United, which many people who knew Brian Clough have objected to strongly. I haven’t seen the film, but I have read the book, and it seems obvious to me that Clough’s friends and family would be upset: they’re comparing the fiction to the reality, and they’re bound to find things that aren’t quite right. What’s impossible for them to understand is the way in which Peace’s book makes Cloughie real for us - and that by reading about him in this way we come to feel the kind of affection for him which a factually correct hagiography could never inspire.

Sometimes, criticism can be most sincere act of appreciation. But if it were me or my father under the lens, I doubt I’d feel like that.

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