Who is to blame? An anonymous writer. Photograph: Tim O'Hara/Corbis
I'm worried about anonymity. And before anyone quips "how 18th century" (see Guy Dammann's recent blog on the fisticuffs this issue provoked between Voltaire and Rousseau), I can assure you that it's its modern manifestation that concerns me. In a Radio 4 profile last weekend of the reclusive Irish retail tycoon Arthur Ryan, someone pointed out that "anonymity was the last great luxury of the modern age". Not if you're a number on a Home Office deportation list it isn't. Not if you're waiting to be allocated a council house.
So that Radio 4 statement carries an invisible qualifier - "for the rich and powerful". Power comes in various forms, and the sort that particularly exercises me as a literary journalist is the power of the written word.
This month saw the end of a Guardian column entitled Living with Teenagers, in which an anonymous writer sent weekly despatches from the battlefield of her family life. Like so many successful newspapers columns it was duly published in book form in the spring. It was not lack of reader interest that killed Living With Teenagers but the fact that the teenagers concerned found out what their mother was up to. They were appalled, and so were quite a few of Anonymum's former fans. "I had presumed in reading it that it was an adequately bowdlerised and inter-parental compendium of experiences so as not to be in any way consistently attributable to one family," wrote one correspondent.
Having spent months of Saturday mornings trying to work out who Anonymum was by tracking the geographical references in her column, I was appalled by the suggestion that it might have been fiction all along, because that would have meant I had read it under false pretences. I was even more appalled when someone sidled up to me in the office and asked if I was the author.
"But I only have two children and Anonymum has three," I spluttered. "Well you might have invented a third to put people off the scent," they replied. To which I could only frostily reply that I'm a journalist and I'm innocent, or naive, enough to believe that, except in its clearly parodic forms, journalism should have a direct relationship with verifiable fact.
I realise that there is distinguished tradition of anonymity (Guardian contributor John Mullan has written a whole book about it) and that it extends to journalistic areas such as leader writing and obituaries. But those disciplines generate their own code of ethics: leader writers are anonymous because their personality is subsumed into that of the paper they write for. Obituarists were anonymous because it enabled them to spill more, better beans.
It's no coincidence that apart from a few teases like Joe Klein, whose anonymity looks in retrospect like a very smart marketing wheeze for Primary Colors, most of the successful recent Anons have come from the world of blogging, and have mostly been writing about sex. I don't particularly care if Belle de Jour pumps up the number of blow jobs she has administered (sex and fantasy are pretty inextricable anyway). And I think it's fair enough that, as a call girl, she doesn't want to reveal her name (just as it's fair enough for Imogen Edwards Jones to protect the deep throats who made her Babylon series possible.)
But I am worried that a lot of modern anonymity - and its wicked stepsister pseudonymy - is about having your cake and scoffing at it (think of Nikki Gemmell's Bride Stripped Bare - originally an anonymous account of the novelist's sex life as a newly-wed). It's about culturally privileged people licensing themselves to play with truth, to be nastier than they could or would be under their own name, and to write things that they know in their heart of hearts they shouldn't. The only good thing is that I have no idea who I will be offending by saying so.
