By Cosmo Adair
James Marriott is a columnist and podcast reviewer for The Times.
The interview began with the ping of a notification: James Marriott has joined your meeting. Zooming, as we were, I can only write a head-and-shoulders portrait of James, framed by the glistening shelves of the Times’s bookroom. He wore a salmon pink shirt and a pair of large wide-framed glasses, which donnishly slipped down his nose as his conversation grew more energetic. His hair was half-messy, fine, placing him somewhere between the respectable columnist and the abstracted poet. But how to render someone’s physical presence when you’re interviewing them online? So, as I watched the recording and copied out the transcript, I scribbled brief, italicised stage-directions: As I ask this, he leans forward, rubs his eyes to tease out a thought, and then jolts up and bursts into enthusiastic speech. That captures all the reader needs to know: the charming, if unexpected, engagement and enthusiasm of a renowned writer speaking to a provincial, student magazine.
Marriott grew up just outside of Newcastle, where ‘I really didn’t want to grow up … It felt like I should have been born down south, and that it had been a cosmic mistake that landed me there.’ He spent his time reading voraciously (‘novels, poetry, all that kind of stuff,’ including ‘a lot of Dickens novels’ and ‘a lot of Iris Murdoch’) and listening to formative rants from his Nihilist father, who spoke ‘about how human beings are all just collections of atoms and that we live in this materialist universe where love was just a chemical … That’s not, you know, the most optimistic way to be brought up.’ And so he passed his schooldays, pacing about the playground as he recited Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (‘I was, unfortunately, pretentious’), and dreamed of moving south for university—his sights set firmly on Oxford, and having watched the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, ‘I’d convinced myself it was going to be, you know, befriending aristocrats and discussing poetry over port and driving around in vintage cars.’ On arrival, however, he was ‘hideously disappointed that people were normal’—in spite of which, he was resolute in enjoying it since if he didn’t ‘it would have destroyed the entire purpose of my teenage years.’
After Oxford, he hoped to ingratiate himself with Literary London since ‘at the time, it seemed like the most glamorous thing to write a book review for a national publication.’ But this took time. For three years, he worked in an antiquarian bookshop where he would ‘[sit] in monkish silence,’ cataloguing books. During this period, he sent out poems and article proposals to newspapers and magazines until The Times took him on. Still there, he is a columnist, podcast reviewer, occasional feature writer, and a regular guest on Times Radio’s flagship podcast, Matt Chorley’s “Politics Without The Boring Bits.” His interview with Calvin Robinson (‘So you wouldn’t say that Enoch Powell was a racist, I ask, my incredulity doubtless signalling to him that I am a woke liberal of the most mindlessly ovine disposition’) and his feature “How I fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg (‘To anybody who has ever regretted being born on the pallid and puritanical side of the Channel, he offers an exotic vision of what might have been: semi-permanent drunkenness, a bohemian contempt for all shirt buttons above the navel, a career of chaotic offence-giving rewarded with public adulation’) cry out expectantly for an anthology of his writings.
I’ve often found that what makes his columns distinctive is his tone. He has an excellent grasp of the ‘contemporary moment,’ all the while seeming rather uncharmed by it. He’s ‘a bit of a technophobe … sceptical that TikTok is particularly good for anybody and for people’s intellectual lives,’ and he worries about the ‘dumbing down of culture and people, and being passively accepted.’ Therefore, his columns can seem pessimistic—but isn’t that just the age? ‘The cultural atmosphere is pretty gloomy, and I know people have always thought this, but when you think Trump in America, the Environment, AI, massive tech companies, Biden losing his marbles, the Housing Crisis—it’s kind of reasonable to be gloomy.’
Fitzgerald once wrote that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence … [is to] be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.’ I think that Marriott passes this test. He might not match the intensity of Fitzgerald’s clash of embittered cynicism and wilful optimism, but he shows a persistent attention to both sides of an argument: ‘I think that whatever you’re writing, you can accept that for any opinion which can be expressed in the space of a thousand words, there’s an opposite opinion that’s equally true and can also be expressed in a thousand words.’
Talking about AI, he shows this: ‘My original take was that I think the crucial thing will be that people do care about the fact that something comes from another human being. We have these strong intuitions about art and literature coming from human beings, and the whole point of art is to connect us with human beings.’ His interview with John Gray—whom Marriott paraphrases as arguing ‘disaster looms, AI’s going to replace everyone’s jobs, we’re all screwed’—led him to a more despairing position. That was eased by a conversation with someone who had read his article who said that ‘there’s this kind of mindless optimism about what the technology’s capable of.’ Now, he thinks that ‘we shouldn’t extrapolate infinite potential from something that can just write plausible sentences.’
Despite his concerns ‘about how natural text will be to people’s experience in the future,’ he remains a passionate advocate of literature and the literary. Last year, he found himself in the somewhat absurd position of being criticised by The Bookseller for arguing that some books are better than others. ‘The thing is, I find it really hard to believe that many people do actually believe that all books are the same. I think that’s also just not true either.’ This leads to the “Culture Wars” and the recent tendency to value a literary work according to its political message as opposed to its aesthetic triumphs. But this isn’t new: ‘In the 30s there was an awful lot of incredibly pious and tedious stuff written about, like, the importance of the voices of the workers and the voices of the working class … and it’s really fascinating, as well, if you go back to 19th century Russia, there was so much stuff about, was Turgenev a Liberal, or what exactly was he? Was such-and-such a Socialist? … I guess the kind of unifying theme of those moments is that those are societies which were undergoing dramatic social and political change.’ In any case, the freedom of expression—whatever the climate—is one of his most deeply held values: ‘I think that whether or not you’re on Salman Rushdie’s side is historically a pretty good test of whether you’re a serious person or not.’
But the anxiety and self-criticism of a “Culture War” can benefit a society. ‘It is easily forgotten that the intellectual history of the West is much more turbulent than we remember,’ and that the narratives we often study of a ‘West [that] has been unruffled and triumphalist in its progress’ simply isn’t true. He discusses Isaiah Berlin’s “Three Critics of the Enlightenment,” a book which discusses Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Georg Hamann, all of whom cast doubt on the Enlightenment’s relentless progressive march. ‘From the very beginning, [they were] furious and righteous critics of all the Enlighten—, of the self-confidence of the Enlightenment, about Western Civilisation, the superiority of Western Civilisation and I think it’s—I mean, Herder, especially, can at times sound like he’s writing now [and] tweeting. [Herder says] how it’s ridiculous to think that Western Civilisation is superior to any other civilisations [since] all civilisations are fitted to this particular people and this particular place.’ Therefore, ‘doubt and self-criticism have always been in our culture.’ And whilst it’s ‘really annoying to live through it when it erupts as viciously as it does now … Perhaps it’s reassuring to think that this may just be a part of our culture in a liberal society. You know, we’re not in a Totalitarian state, we can’t impose one viewpoint on everyone. Everything will be furiously criticised because that’s what happens when you have free speech and liberal values.’
There are many on the hard right who view this doubt and self-criticism as a sign of decadence. But people have been saying this for what seems like forever—with both Gibbon in the 18th century, and Spengler in the 20th, trying to link cultural decadence with the ‘decline and fall’ of political or imperial orders. But Marriott takes a much more nuanced view, considering it to be endemic in the cultural lifecycle: ‘I do think that society does go through periods of cultural efflorescences, of brilliant innovation, followed by decadence, followed by renewal, and I think that we are all living in the aftermath of the sixties, which was one of the kind of extraordinary cultural moments in all of history.’ Referencing Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society—which argues that culture hasn’t developed since the 60s, since ‘you can still go and see the Rolling Stones, follow the same superheroes’—Marriott then ponders whether the “Culture Wars” are simply ‘a part of us throwing off that inheritance and making something new.’
As I shut my laptop and shuffled down to Greggs for lunch, I thought of how I had come away with a renewed sense of Marriott and his ideas. I found he wasn’t as much of a pessimist as he self-deprecatingly claims to be. He’s more of a sceptic, perhaps: what he distrusts, I think, is the notion that any political or cultural viewpoint is wholly correct, and that if there has ever been such a woolly thing called ‘Truth’, it can only be found in the interaction of opposites, in conversation, and—perhaps, most of all—in reading.