Ok. Well, further to taking the post down, and after some email exchanges with de Botton, he has suggested I put back the original post and our email exchanges. In the interests of transparency, as well as perhaps putting some important arguments about class, work, the 'responsibility' of writers and that sort of thing on the table, I figure why not. I have to say I am surprised that such an obviously humorous short polemic provoked such a strong response. I'm also a bit sorry that this argument took place over a blurb for a book, rather than something more substantial, but there you have it. Perhaps it'll generate more interest in de Botton's book and/or I'll never get work in this town again, or perhaps nothing will come of it (my, erm, preferred outcome). My final word on this is something like the following:

1. There are serious economic and class issues about who gets to write. These have obvious implications for the time available for people to take up such projects and the content of these projects. It is not surprising that people care about and take note of such things, and are suspicious of nepotism, cultural elites, trust fund kids and so on.

2. Work for the majority of people sucks in many, many ways. Not least the very fact of having to sell one's labour in the first place. Most people do; very few people are in a position not to. Treating work as something exotic is not a luxury most people can afford.

3. Writing obviously unfair, vicious polemic is something to be defended, and not just for its occasional comic value. We may well be bastard children of Mr Agreeable, Viz, Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris, Stewart Home, Whore Cull and so on, but there is something serious at stake in acts of dark linguistic violence that goes beyond any laughter they might elicit. There are truthful things that can only be said effectively in this way. And besides, a world that consisted entirely of praise would be a meaningless world. I fully expect to be torn to shreds a million times over - it happens all the time, especially if you have a job.

ALAIN DE BOTTON's FIRST (angry!) EMAIL:

Your latest blog makes my blood boil. You haven't read my latest book and already you've decided:
a) what it's about
b) that it's awful
Then what's more, knowing nothing about me, you reach a set of extraordinary conclusions about my background, my motivations and my state of mind. Just to finish it off, you decide to add a quote from Charlie Brooker at the Guardian pointing out I lost my hair.
This sums up possibly the most depressing intellectual climate any writer can imagine: a self-appointed critic so implacably opposed, he or she has already condemned something to death without even laying eyes on it - and apparently chiefly on the basis that the author's father once ran a financial services' company. On that kind of basis, you'd better slash and burn most of Western art and literature. Why don't you crucify Tolstoy right now because the guy had a country estate and a fucking title?
I don't know what you think you're doing writing such blogs other than adding to the not already inconsiderable sum of human misery. If you've got any honesty or sincerity, you'll take the post down immediately and if you've got a trace of courage, you'll reply to this email and confront me as one person.
Yours sincerely,
Alain de Botton

IT'S RESPONSE:

Dear Alain,

More than happy to correspond. Several things to say: I am familiar with lots of your writing, most particularly your writings on travel and love, as well as your television series on happiness. I admit I am not fond of the lines that I think you pursued in these: that philosophy is a form of self-help, that love reveals more about the lover than the loved and that travel is first and foremost an opportunity for introspection. I also remember seeing you on TV once on the jury for some book prize stating that no one had time to read all the books that the writers had submitted. This seemed unfair, but perhaps you had been busy. You will probably not agree with my reading of these things, but perhaps this is part and parcel of being in the public eye. And as unpleasant as they might sometimes be, would you not in fact defend the right of 'ordinary citizens' to write about those in the public eye freely, online or otherwise?

That's an interesting phrase that you use in your email, in fact - 'self-appointed' - as opposed to what? Nepotistically smoothed in? Appropriately selected? I am sick to death, in fact, of the same kinds of people pretending that they're not 'self-appointed'. 7% of people in Britain go to fee-paying schools and yet close to 50% of people who write for newspapers and magazines are graduates of private schools. How does that happen, exactly? Is a private school education just that much better, that much more literate? I doubt that very much. Some of the most stupid, inarticulate, posh people I've ever met have ended up with writing jobs when some of the brightest people I know (the kind of people who would indeed read Proust and it genuinely change their life) are doing jobs seemingly designed to perfectly crush the human spirit. You may very well wish to dismiss this as some sort of class resentment or personal bitterness - and fine, do so if you wish, it's not like a random comment on a blog, or a random email, is going to make any difference to you, let alone change the state of the world.

Despite what I say in the above paragraph, I've no doubt that rich people can do, write and say interesting things. Sometimes. My point was perhaps a more specific one about work. While I took the perhaps unwarranted leap of assuming that family fortunes confer specific benefit on its members, there was a lot about the blurb for your book, which you may or may not have had anything to do with, which was open to criticism. Only someone not at the hard end of working life could approach wage-labour with such mock-innocence and naive wonder, and the idea that contemporary work is something decided by our 16-year-old selves is just bizarre. If the blurb is not reflective of the book then I'm sorry but you might want to take it up with the publishers.

I do, however, apologise for requoting Charlie Brooker's line - I hadn't even noticed the bald bit. I'll take that down. I like Brooker's prose-style but it was unnecessarily ad hominem, certainly.

If indeed the email I received really was from the real Alain de Botton, I'm very surprised that you would be bothered by such a post, let alone write to its author! I promise I will read the book on work without prejudice when it comes out.

Best,

I.T.

ALAIN DE BOTTON'S SECOND EMAIL

Dear IT,
Thanks very much for replying, that's very good of you indeed. I just want to make a few more points, so forgive me:
- firstly, I completely understand you might not like my work and none of what I'm saying is intended to make you think any better of me as an author. I'm an expert in every flaw in my books and I regularly hate myself more than even the angriest enemy could.
- I called you self-appointed not from a sense that someone external should appoint you, but merely because what you're doing in running a blog carries, to my mind, certain basic responsibilities which I don't feel you're keeping an eye on in this case. I don't believe that it's fair of you to whip up the reader to indignation against a caricature version of a person without going through the facts carefully, basing accusations on solid grounds, and refraining from ad hominem attacks. You say of the insults you throw at me 'perhaps this is part and parcel of being in the public eye'. So become successful at anything in any way and it's your just recompense to be insulted? I didn't elect to be 'in the public eye' like a politician might, I'm a private person (like you are) who simply happens to sell books. I'm therefore not a punchbag for the general public and I am owed all the respect that anyone in our society is owed. Why should there be one rule for most people, and then another tougher rule for anyone who has dared to do anything that might in any way attract attention from anyone. There's a dangerous tendency among bloggers to feel that what they say is somehow private, and therefore, isn't covered by the normal rules of civility. The internet is a platform like any other. Those who use it should realise they aren't just whispering among friends, they're standing with a megaphone before the world.
- in your remarks, there's a constant background suspicion that I somehow don't understand the experiences of the poorest people in society and might be unmoved by poverty and hardship in all its manifestations. I can't imagine what has given you this idea as you don't know me at all. You don't know my way of life, my friends, my experiences or my politics. All I can state is that I respond indignantly to what you're saying because I don't recognise myself in your portrait in any way; indeed it violates everything I believe in and work towards in my private life. You say that you've met some stupid inarticulate posh people. Of course you have, so have I - I've met such types at all levels of society, but does this give you the right to develop a blanket hatred of anyone you read about who may have come from anything other than a very hard working class background. You have pulled certain facts you've gleaned (presumably from Wikipedia) and come to a view of how I might or might not understand what goes on in the minds of people cleaning the offices at Canary wharf. Please allow that people have powers of empathy and imagination that stretch beyond a wild caricature, worthy of Goebbels (complete with Goebbel's favourite term 'international'! - amazing how this sort of language gets a life of its own), of what the offspring of Jewish financiers might be like.

[IT notes: I wholeheartedly and absolutely reject any accusation of antisemitism on this point, if that's what de Botton was getting at.]

- I am the sole author of the blurb of my book (publishers don't have time to write blurbs any more) and stand proudly behind every word. I am indeed full of wonder at many aspects of the working world, and can't imagine why you associate such wonder with naivety. I am not saying that everything about the experience of human beings working is deserving of wonder (no more than someone can write in praise of love without feeling that wife-beating is a good idea). Of course many jobs are hard, but this doesn't invalidate my point. Indeed, my book precisely pivots around this tension; work as a curse and work as a blessing. The pleasures and sorrows. Let's go to some working class men for a bit more data. Here is D.H. Lawrence writing about work:



Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into

Are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing

For long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely

Warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

Or read Walt Whitman's A Song for Occupations, the greatest praise of work in the history of the nineteenth century from a man who knew work in all its aspects (you say, extraordinarily, that only someone who hasn't known work at its hard end could approach wage-labour with 'mock innocence'. Please read Whitman before continuing on this line). Of course, that doesn't mean that the person writing this poem or quoting it would have no sympathy for the person cleaning the HSBC office in Canary Wharf in the early hours. You have to credit people with a little more intelligence than this, with the ability to hold a number of contradictory points in mind for a few seconds. I've spent three years researching a book which has taken me from the Royal Mail sorting office in Derby to the Sainsbury's depot in Harlow to the jungles of French Guiana to the refrigeration plants of the Indian Ocean. I imagine that by now I probably have more experience of what 'real' people do in their working lives than my correspondent.
- you say that you don't like my line that philosophy is self-help. I don't for a moment believe that this is what it is for everyone. I have read J.L Austin. I'm familiar with Deleuze. But I'm also familiar with Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who absolutely believed that philosophy was self-help, in the deepest sense. So while you may have your angle on what philosophy is, allow that others may take it differently.
- The book judging panel you saw me on was broadcast in 2000, part of a discussion of the booker prize that year. I remarked then that the members of the jury hadn't read all the books they eventually voted on. This is true and a necessary fact of judging prizes - which allows for all sorts of anomalies. I wasn't being unfair to the judges, I was rightly critiquing an aspect of the Booker process.
- You say you're surprised to hear from me. Don't be, you're running a very public blog that a lot of people see. You say 'a random comment on a blog is not exactly going to make a difference to you or change the state of the world'. Well, it matters intensely to me, and what people say in blogs does matter even in the grander scheme. Why blog if you think the activity futile? Why not live as though what you say and do matters to people? Surely part of being a responsible moral agent is to realise that your actions and words have consequences in the real world. A remark you toss out thinking no one will mind could end up delighting someone or causing someone to jump off a cliff. We all carry responsibilities for everything we say and do, especially when we choose to make it completely public.
- If you were feeling responsive to what I'm saying and responsible towards the issues, I suggest one of the following:
either that you take down the whole entry on me
OR
that you publish our correspondence at the end of it, so as to give the reader a fairer sense of where I'm coming from and how you see all this. The latter option might indeed be interesting for everyone.
Thanks
Alain

IT ADDENDUM:

The correspondence more or less ended about here. Obviously, for better or for worse, I went for option B. On a lighter note, Mr de B has agreed to go for coffee with me stating 'I won't bring my bulletproof vest if you don't bring your gun'. I'll leave the Kalashnikov at home. This time.