How rude is too rude?

When AA Gill died a few days ago, I felt genuinely sad. He had been absolutely horrible to me in print, but I still felt sad. That wasn���t because he was a great writer. He sometimes was that, and he sometimes he wasn���t. But anyway, I am not sure that great writing is a get out of jail free card. To use a quite different analogy, we wouldn���t let a racist off the hook because he had a clever way with words.

I felt reasonably OK about him because his attacks on me were in a way genuine criticism, in an old tradition of invective, and they were signed ��� there was a head above the parapet. They were also in my view wrong and nastily sexist (I hadn���t recalled that he compared me to an aborted egg, but maybe he did). And in truth Gill got told he was a nasty sexist by very many people, and his wiki entry was ransacked. It was, and I suspect he would have agreed, all fair game: give as good as you get is one of the oldest answers to invective, and probably what the deliverer of invective would expect.

I didn���t end up holding any particular personal animus against Gill. I was really cross and a bit hurt at the time, and rather shocked that someone would think (as presumably he did) that that kind of talk would find a ready audience. But in the end I suspect he had a harder time than I did out of his attack and I would have liked to shake hands and discussed what he said. And for me ��� who knows full well what the nastiness of anonymous Twitter attacks can be (where you have no one to hold to account) ��� there was someone to fight back against (which I did).

But it does raise the question of what standards we expect in public disagreement.

I must confess that I really don���t fancy living in a world in which no one is ever rude to those they disagree with. A world of unending courtesy seems, if nothing else, dull. But the questions then are: what are the limits of rudeness, when does rudeness become discriminatory or hate crime, what resources do we have for responding or rejecting, and where does the defence of ���free speech��� run aground?

As I have said before, the basic rules in literary reviewing are pretty clear to me: only say what you would say to someone���s face (and I suspect Gill passed that test��� if he did say I looked like an aborted egg, he probably would have said that face to face). But that���s not all there is to it. We wouldn���t be having any such discussion as this, if Gill���s attack had been anti-semitic or racist. So why is sexism different? (That���s an open question: about where exactly the boundaries of the unacceptable and/or the illegal, and/or the simply rude lie.)

For me, though, there is a sting in the tail of Gill���s ���wit���, for which no one can blame him at all. Since his death there have been all kinds of little compendia of Gill���s best put downs and his smartest invective. And what he said about me regularly appears there.

But somehow it���s different in anthology form. When Gill first wrote this stuff, there was a sense of dialogue about it all, a licence to disagree and fight back. By the time it���s been made into a ���greatest hits ���style of sound-bite, it���s lost that sense of partisan provisionality, imaginative invective ��� and has, sort of, become true. It���s as if I am always going to be defined by Gill���s bon mot, as an aborted egg who shouldn���t have inflicted myself on the nation���s living rooms, without recourse. Its not the worst thing that���s happened to me, but it doesn���t seem to me in the spirit of the whole exchange.

And I don���t think that Gill would have thought it was either.

BY THE WAY EVERYONE: this blog really is now migrating to the Wordpress system from Typepad. I will publish the next couple of posts in both. But you will need to go to the TLS site and find the new version.

.