Intellectually Brilliant and Impossible to Dislike - What the Guardian thinks about me. Or does it?

I had the best belly-laugh I’ve had for months on Monday, courtesy of The Guardian.  My Mail on Sunday Colleague had written an article for the left-wing daily, attacking my views on ‘addiction’.

 

You can read it here, but before you do, you should know that this online version is interestingly different from the one that was published in the newspaper itself (where I first read it, on my Monday morning train to London).

 

Here’s the link  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/drinking-habits-collective-denial-alcoholism

 

As I composed a letter in response ( published here http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/06/fashionable-fiction-addiction-as-disease ) I turned to the online version to check a quote.

 

And as I did so I was struck  (who wouldn’t be, if they were me?) by Melissa’s paragraph beginning: ‘It was infuriating to witness an intellectually brilliant man like Hitchens insisting that addiction is not an illness when our streets are full of men and women who have drunk so much they can no longer walk.’ I have rather naughtily emphasised the words which were in the online version,but not in the paper.

 

It wasn’t Melissa’s logic I liked (it’s not very good) but it warmed my heart to be called ‘Intellectually brilliant’, in The Guardian!  Next thing I know they’ll renationalise the railways and reintroduce grammar schools all over the country.

 

I wondered how I could not have noticed this flattering passage when I had read the print version.  Normally I can spot my name in a page of print from 400 paces, however small the type. Well, I hadn’t noticed it because it wasn’t there. There are a number of other minor changes in the printed text, all of which are plainly matters of length and minor editing. The only difference between the print and the online version that radically alters the meaning of the original is the removal of the words ‘an intellectually brilliant man like’, just before the word ‘Hitchens’.

 

The curious contradiction interested the London Evening Standard, which yesterday printed this diary item

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/the-two-sides-to-peter-hitchens-9044184.html

 

 

Actually, I’m inclined to agree with the Guardian, on the simple matter of fact. I would never describe myself as an intellectual, and once specifically disowned the appellation 'intellectual' ('private' or ‘Public’) in the introduction to a book (‘The Rage Against God’).

 

I’d rather read Tintin than the Times Literary Supplement, I am foxed by academic economics and by most philosophy, can’t see the point of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,  greatly prefer Dickens to Thackeray, let alone Thomas Hardy, can’t bear Jane Austen at all and share H.G. Wells’s view of Henry James , that ‘he chewed more than he bit off’. I play chess badly, and am hopeless at cryptic crosswords.  I even like quite a lot of Kipling and Tennyson.  I’m not particularly well-educated, judged by my own standards, and my school and academic records after I went off the rails (by my own wilfulness), aged 15,  were poor. I’m still amazed that the University of York gave me a degree, after three years spent on the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism (in which I was not examined). My 37 years in remedial classes at the University of Fleet Street (a  fine school) have taught me a lot, but I still can’t stand English Linguistic Philosophy or literary criticism . I think suburbs are a good thing. As for being ‘brilliant’, I think that’s a bit much, really.

 

But that’s not the point here. The point is that Melissa Kite wrote that as her honest opinion, in a  piece that was mostly hostile to my beliefs. This was a civilised thing to do, and something that broad-minded and thoughtful people often do when they are attacking someone’s ideas – to make it plain that the attack is not personal, and that they believe disagreement need not involve enmity.

 

Aged about 11, I realised that this wonderful state of mind was possible – to disagree without being hostile or angry. The quarrels I’d seen (and taken part in) until then had been personally bitter. I have never got over the sense of pure joy I experienced when I grasped that the bitterness wasn’t necessary. At last, one could have the pleasure of debate without the anger and resentment.

 

So the words were an integral part of her argument, and strengthened it. If she’d just been another of the people dismissing me as a stupid thoughtless oaf, then her disagreements with me would have mattered less. Cutting it out was, in my view, wrong. Leaving the other (presumably original)  version online was worse. It was a mistake.

 

I hope eventually to find out who took it out. And I’d love to know what their justification for doing so will be.

 

Hilariously, the online comments on the online version  contain many objections from Guardian online readers, perhaps the meanest-minded Internet ‘Community’ you could find, jabbering and shouting in rage and incredulity that such a thing could be said about me.

 

Something similar happened when Decca Aitkenhead unwisely remarked , in an article about me, that she found me ‘impossible to dislike’ after our long lunch in the Groucho Club. They wrote in, in large numbers, to say that they (not having met me, and so no doubt better qualified than Decca, who had) did not suffer from this problem.  One day I shall recount another experience I had with the ‘Guardian’, which illustrated rather well the severe tension between its intellectual (?) desire to be fair and inclusive to persons of all opinions, and the feral rage which some members of its staff feel towards ‘Rightwingers’ (their expression) such as me. It’s quite sweet, really.