Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with Times columnist James Marriott. 04/10/2023
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the deep values, the driving principles of those who shape our common life. Every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or platform, some kind of influence over the rest of us. And I try and get a sense of what is sacred to them in my language, by which I mean the deep values that they are trying, but of course, sometimes failing to live by, and their vision for the work that they’re doing. I speak to people from lots and lots of different perspectives, political, ideological, religious, people from a wide range of different professions. The point is to listen deeply, not argue with anyone, but really just seek to understand what might be driving them. And I hope that in so doing, to grow in empathy and curiosity about people different from myself and who I might disagree with. It seems in our divided and polarised times something worth doing.
In this episode, you’ll hear me speak to James Marriott. James is a columnist of The Times newspaper. He works across culture, ideas and society, and also is a book reviewer. We spoke about his sacred value of literature, we spoke about what it is that kind of a book critic, or critics in general, are trying to do. And we spoke about how he thinks his father’s nihilism that he was raised in, how that shaped him. There’s some reflections from me at the end, and I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? James Marriott’s answer
James, we’re going to jump in the deep end, having had a bit of time to think about it, to reflect on what is sacred to you, the kind of driving values in your life: what bubbled up?
James Marriott
Yeah, it was really interesting to me to think about that. And it made me reflect on my childhood, understand that I’d been basically raised as a nihilist, I think. I was recalling the conversations I had with my dad – often in the car on the way to school – and the sorts of things that he told me. He is very philosophically inclined. Every morning in the car on the way to school, we’d have some conversation, which might encompass the nonexistence of freewill. I remember him telling me about the “classes demon”: the idea that if you could predict the location and the forces acting on every atom in the universe, then you could predict them in the next moment, which proves that freewill didn’t exist. He was very keen on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, the idea that we’re just the products of our selfish genes, working them out through our lives. Very keen on atheism. So yeah, I understood to be a nihilist, which I hadn’t really thought about before. But reflecting on every single thing I’ve been told in my childhood about the universe, and about philosophy, it all tended towards the idea that we’re all just bunches of atoms driven by evolutionary forces. With one exception, which was literature. And the other sort of slightly odd, and I think probably quite anachronistic thing about my childhood and the way I was raised, was the essentially sacred attitude to literature that I had growing up. So yeah, stuff I hadn’t thought about. We used to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday every year. My dad would bake a cake. I don’t think we actually sort of sat around reciting speeches to celebrate, but it was a very big deal. I was always told that poetry and literature were by far the most important things in life. I remember my dad saying, “Literature tells us what it is, or might be, to be human”, which was an idea that I never seriously thought to question and probably haven’t really ever not believed in since then. And I suppose I sort of grew up waiting to get into the wide world and discover all the other people who agreed that literature was the central pillar of life and explained everything. That hasn’t quite happened yet. I think I’m still waiting to discover the social sphere in which that’s a consensus. But yeah, I think a strange mixture of nihilism, and worship of Shakespeare was the atmosphere in which I was raised.
Elizabeth
I’m fascinated. It is an unusual parenting philosophy. I feel like for those people, for whom that’s where they land – philosophy – on the big question about what life means, most of them would have some hesitation in framing it quite so boldly with the children. How do you think that formed you?
James Marriott
It’s interesting, because when you start writing opinion columns every week, you begin to unconsciously reveal little parts of yourself to yourself, and you notice that certain themes recur. I hope it’s made me sceptical in lots of ways, and suspicious of things that sound too good to be true. And suspicions of illusions. I think it’s made me, for better and for worse, probably quite unideological, suspicious of political enthusiasms and political affiliations. There’s always this little thrum I think in the back of my head of “you haven’t been told there’s all meaningless”. And that’s certainly a part of my character that I regret, I think. You know, I was never a youthful communist. I never got excited about going to protest or some exciting world changing project. And I think that’s because I had this little kind of voice implanted very early into the back of my head saying, “Oh, we’re all atoms. Free will doesn’t exist.” And that has perhaps made me a little too… I didn’t know, I was worried that maybe that’s maybe at times a little too sceptical and a little too cynical.
Elizabeth
So I don’t know if you noticed, but I asked you, “What was sacred to you?” And you answered the second question I usually ask, which is, “What were the big ideas in your childhood?” Do you have a sense of something that is sacred to you? Or do you think that your mind is getting away from that concept or something that you don’t feel drawn to?
James Marriott
No, I think, certainly, literature is the thing that’s sacred to me. And I guess I answered that question that way to kind of try to explain how much it stands out. Everything I was ever raised to believe was meaningless, apart from literature, which is the one thing that I was really brought up to worship and still probably do worship in a slightly less interesting, anachronistic, old–fashioned kind of way.
Anachronistic childhood: Oxford, Iris Murdoch, and starting in an antiquarian bookshop
Elizabeth
That really helps. Thank you for helping me understand that. Did you have another parent who was around? Did they share those kind of nihilistic approaches to life?
James Marriott
No, my mum is much less philosophically nihilistic. She’s certainly a pessimist in the way that I think I am, but probably less extravagantly philosophical in her pessimism, and more just kind of suspecting in an everyday kind of way that things are about to go wrong. No, there were no great optimists in my family. I’m not sure they ever have been. I can’t think of any relative who doesn’t live in a sort of atmosphere of “Oh God, everything’s getting worse.” I think it’s probably to do with a lot of my family being from Yorkshire. There’s probably a lot of dour Yorkshire men in my family.
Elizabeth
And you grew up in Newcastle. These Yorkshire influences: could you just paint a word picture of you as maybe a young person and a teenager, what was the world like that you were operating in?
James Marriott
Yeah, again, probably quite an anachronistic one. You had a slightly strange upbringing. Not entirely strange, but for example, it was quite a long time before we got a TV. I never really had a phone. I didn’t get a laptop or computer till quite late. So I was really living in a world surrounded by books basically, in a way that perhaps I think is probably becoming increasingly unusual. In that that was just the main thing I did with my time was read. And it didn’t seem odd to me that that was how I spend my time. Everybody else seemed odd to me. And I thought, “Haven’t they understood that this is the priority, that we should all be reading Thomas Hardy and Dickens and stuff?” I was very idealistic about literature, and that was probably also slightly a kind of conscious decision. I’ve inherited this idea that this was a thing that I just had to devote my time to. I mean, that’s the main thing that stands out. I was pretty unhappy as a child. My parents divorced. I had a real sense, I think, of just waiting to get out of Newcastle, waiting to get out of that slightly, often very unhappy family situation. And I was really fixated on getting down South, especially obsessed with going to Oxford. This stuff loomed really large in my mind. And I think, in a strange way, actually, other of my friends who also grew up in provincial towns, had those adolescents is where they slightly felt like the lives were waiting to begin a bit, said the same thing. They kind of felt like their adult personality was a project which was being postponed until they ended up in a more congenial place. And I think I did feel like that a lot. I was quite shy, I was quite unhappy. And I’d really sort of fixated on the idea that I was going to go to university. Embarrassingly, I really had decided I was going to go to Oxford. And that then, I was sort of begin the project of myself but I think I really viewed myself as “larval” – is that the word? You know, not that I ever thought I was going to become a butterfly, but I was in my sort of chrysalis phase, I think. And it’s only in hindsight, I realised how incredibly dangerous that approach is, that you’ve basically decided to postpone your personality until a future event, which you imagine will be marvellous. And then that’s going to solve all the problems of your life. But fortunately, I did have a good time at university. So it wasn’t crushingly disappointed and realise that my postponement of my personality had turned out to be an appalling idea, and I should have got started earlier. I think it’s probably not an uncommon feeling. A lot of people have an adolescence. I think it was especially pronounced for me. I really kind of viewed myself as a kind of work in progress.
Elizabeth
It’s very familiar. I think those of us who lean “bookish and nerdy” can feel quite unseen until all of the bookish nerds gather in one place and throw our arms around each other. I wanted to ask: what was the first book, the first novel that you remember reading that felt like it really connected with your values, but I guess that felt somehow true about the world in a way that you’d not yet understood?
James Marriott
That’s a really interesting question. My great teenage passion was for Iris Murdoch, the philosopher novelist who wrote between the 1950s and, I think, early 1990s, she stopped writing. And I have slightly reneged on my Iris Murdoch enthusiasm because I now feel I like those books for slightly the wrong reasons. So Irish Murdoch novels are full of… There’s a famous Martin Amos review, where he says that everybody in an Iris Murdoch novel is called Julian, or Hillary, or Hillary and Julian. And they all have this sort of implausible sounding job teaching philosophy, or working the civil service, and spending their weekends reading Plato. And I was really convinced this is how my adult life was going to be. And I always really kind of thought, “I’m going to move down south and read Plato at the weekends. My entire life will be navigating complex, but enjoyable, emotional entanglements and debating everything with reference to Plato.” And I think this all seemed incredibly true and incredibly important at the time. In hindsight, I think I was motivated more by pretension than genuine intellectual enthusiasm. I mean, my first literary passion is for poetry, not for novels. And I think, kind of weirdly, the book that made the biggest impression on me it was I remember finding a copy of the weirdly “The Collected Poems of Alexander Pope” that was being chucked out of my school library, which was being turned into a ‘learning resource centre’, and picking that up and reading poems like “The Rape of the Lock” and “The Dunciad”. And I’m not sure if those poems particularly spoke to me, or told me something that I felt was true about the world, but I suddenly had this sense that literature was this thing that I could just go out and find, and anyone can. The great thing about literature as an art form: there’s no real bar to entry, anybody can pick up this kind of dusty old book in a library and access a world that I guess struck me as really important, really old, much more profound than anything that I had sort of experienced in my day–to–day life; which in hindsight, struck me as perhaps slightly odd things to have projected onto the poetry of Alexander Pope, who obviously was a great cynic. But that was the really formative book for me. I loved Iris Murdoch, but I was probably always slightly aware that those were entertainments and it was poetry that was the thing that seemed really important to me.
Elizabeth
I don’t think there’s such thing as an opposite of a nihilist, but Iris Murdoch, she has a very strong, I think, vision of meaningfulness and an orientation to the good.
James Marriott
Exactly. And I was thinking about this beforehand: that’s what strikes me as so odd, that she is the person I should have discovered and fixated on. I mean, I think it’s probably not uncommon for one’s adolescent enthusiasms to be slightly shallow. Mine certainly were. I wasn’t particularly thinking about those contradictions. I probably only had the vaguest sense of the way that her philosophical Platonism informed the novel’s. Obviously, I’ve never really believed in the kind of abstract existence of a free–floating Good, which she is so keen on. I just really was experiencing and probably in quite a shallow way enjoying stories of very cultured people who are having exciting lives, which was the kind of existence I aspire to.
Elizabeth
Yeah, and that’s the joy affair. I think they work on all those levels.
You went from university to a brief foray into antiquarian books. Tell me about how that chapter started.
James Marriott
I’ve been slightly scathing about my time in antiquarian books, and now always slightly worried that I’ve pissed off my former colleagues by being rude about their trade. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do after university, and a university tutor obviously spotted that I was sort of a bookish, unworldly, slightly old–fashioned person, who put me in touch with a bookshop called Bernard Quaritch Ltd., where I worked for three years cataloguing books and manuscripts, mainly from the 17th and 18th centuries. In hindsight, I can see it’s a wonderful job. I remember someone coming into the bookshop, which very, very rarely ever had visitors – it was by appointment only – and looking into the office where I worked, where I was kind of hunched over this huge pile of dusky 18th century novels, and saying, “Oh, my God. That looks like the perfect life,” which struck me as deeply ironic, because at the time, it was absolutely not my perfect life. I think I’d begun to think that I wanted to be a journalist. And I really kind of felt like this was not taking me forward in any kind of way that I wanted to be going forward. But I’m able to understand in hindsight, that that is, as first jobs go, that is really not a bad first job. And I’ve gotten lots of trouble, I think, on Twitter once for sort of writing some piece saying how unfulfilled I found it. And actually, I always say plenty of people do worse things out of university than go and sit in a dusty corner of a bookshop, cataloguing 18th century novels.
Elizabeth
Yes, they do. But I think it’s legitimate to express our own experience of our own lives. Yes, we will leave aside the vagaries of social media. So the image that came to my mind, as you were speaking was of a kind of monastic scriptorium. I went to a monastery on Patmos recently, and then the monks have a library that normal people are not allowed in, and I sort of stood longingly outside.
The highest form of literature: reviewing books, the weight of responsibility, and championing the new
You’ve made the distinction previously between book reviewer and book critic, and I’d like to hear more about that, but certainly kind of writing about books for other people. I’d love to hear your sense of what it is you’re doing. What is that role for? And how do you conceive of it?
James Marriott
Got that’s an interesting point. I wonder how much I’ve ever really thought about it. I think you probably have to be relatively humble as a book reviewer, somebody writing quite short reviews for a newspaper, not long, critical essays for the LRB. That your fundamental job is to tell people whether or not a book is good, and then they will decide whether or not to buy it. And it’s a kind of do they call it “service journalism”, where you’re saying, “This is worth buying. This is not worth buying.” You know, it’s not a million miles removed from you know, someone reviewing toothbrushes in a magazine, or that kind of thing. So I think you have to remember, that’s your fundamental job, I guess. What’s my other role? Hopefully, making people excited about books, bringing things that are good to their attention, explaining why certain people are worth reading and why other people aren’t. And just hopefully kind of communicating a bit of excitement about books and the people who write them.
Elizabeth
Yes, I mean, there’s one way of developing – sorry, this is just how my mind works – that kind of monastic scriptorium… Basically, you’re the first person I think I’ve ever spoken to over nearly six years, whose sacred value is so strongly linked to what they’ve ended up doing for a job. And so, it is fascinating to me, whether it is in some ways almost a sort of priestly role, if you’re thinking of literature as sacred. A kind of offering, or a teaching, or connecting people with this gift that you want to bring to the world when you read perhaps a piece of criticism or review that you think “Oh, Gosh, that was amazing”. What is it that it’s doing?
James Marriott
Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I mean, it really depends. Some criticism is very moving. Some is just brilliantly clever. I really like ideas. But I guess that maybe, if I’m willing to be pretentious, I suppose, if literature is a temple, book reviewers are the people down by the door, sort of like the “bouncers of literature” saying who can come in, and who can come and who can’t come in. Or really aspire to be the bouncers of literature. And plenty of people get in without book reviewers, telling them they don’t really belong. They’ve not let in plenty of people who really should be inside.
Elizabeth
I want to quote you something that might be too highbrow for you. I don’t know if you’ve come across. It is, I think, one of great pieces of art about creativity and cultural gatekeeping, and who gets to offer their gifts to the world. And it’s called Ratatouille. And in it, there is a critic called Anton Ego. Have you seen the film? It is genuinely… I’m joking, but I think Pixar’s animations are absolutely packed with profound ideas dressed up as kids films. But there is a restaurant reviewer who is very snobby about who can cook and who can’t. And at the end, he has this kind of ‘mea culpa’ monologue about the role of the critic. And he starts with something along the lines of that famous quote that Brené Brown is always talking about: “It’s not the critic that counts. It’s the Man in the Arena. It’s a person who is making things,” and starts there. And then he says, “I think what a critic at their best can do is make room for the new, to find and champion the new, and take the public by the hand and say, ‘I know this is scary. I know this is not what you’re used to. But I promise you, if you give it some time and attention, you will see its value.’” Do you ever feel like that kind of almost treasure hunting instinct in yourself?
James Marriott
Yeah, I think that comes naturally to me, which is why it’s not probably a surprise I’ve ended up being a book review. I’ve always got excited about new books, wanted to go and tell people about them. I guess maybe I am slightly wary of… I think there’s a view of some novelists, and some actors and stuff, and filmmakers who view critics as basically parasites who can’t do what they can do. And therefore resentfully standing outside the industry trying to tell people how to do it when they could never do it themselves. I guess, if I’m sceptical about my own book reviewing, I think criticism is an art in its own right. There’s a really good, very Martin Amis thing, where he ranks all the different types of writing in terms of difficulty, and I think he goes: bottom – film scripts, then writing plays, then writing novels, then writing literary criticism, and then the highest one is poetry. And I think actually, there is a point to be made that literary criticism at its best, it requires extraordinary feats of intelligence and accomplishment on the on the part of the person doing it. You know, you have to be aesthetically sensitive. You have to be a good reader. You have to be able to write superbly yourself. You have to be open to ideas. You have to have historical knowledge. I think people who write the very highest form of literary criticism are writing some of the highest forms of literature because it demands so much of the critic. And I do think it’s true that sometimes critics are working harder than novelists. But I wouldn’t put myself into the ranks as one of those critics, I don’t think. My role is more like your guy in Ratatouille.
Elizabeth
Do you ever feel the weight of responsibility, if you know that you’re holding the fate of a book that’s been sweated, and cried, and wrestled with for years, in your hands? Or do you try not to imagine the writer who’s going to read the review?
James Marriott
Yeah, well, it dawns on you more, the longer you do. I mean, when I started – I think all people who start book reviewing kind of go in thinking, “Oh, I’m going to trash this, and I’m going to say the truth and be rude about all these established literary icons. And that’s going to be so cool. And no one’s ever done that before,” which is probably a slightly kind of childish way to think. But I think also, it is born of a feeling that nobody could really possibly care what you think. I started writing book reviews when I was 23/24, and I remember thinking, I’d never really occurred to me that anybody could care what I thought particularly or take my opinion that seriously. And I remember once giving a very good review to a particular novel which I won’t name, and then waking up the next morning, and receiving a message from the guy who’d wrote it saying, “Oh my God, this is the happiest day of my life. It’s 11 in the morning and drunk. I just read a review of my novel, I’m never going to be happier. This is incredible.” And I was sort of thinking, “Oh, God, don’t take me that seriously. I’m just some 24 year old guy living in a room in a shared flat in London.” And that was a very salutary lesson, because that made me think, “Actually, people do take book reviews seriously.” As soon as it appears in The Times or The Literary Review, or something, people probably take it even more seriously. And I think that was a point at which I grew up somewhat as a writer and started being a bit more responsible.
Elizabeth
I think lots of us have these, but only at sort of a very semi–conscious form: do you have a kind of rubric or a set of principles that you’re running through when you’re trying to write conscience wrestles that you go through? What are the ethical crunch points that come up for you, as you’re trying to do that part of your job?
James Marriott
I think I’ve always told the truth about books, or I told what I felt to be the truth. I think it’s useful to try not to develop too many principles. I think it’s quite hard as it is. I guess I mean, that it’s quite hard on authors to start judging against your internally developed values and ideas of how a book should be, and it’s probably better to attempt to take each book in its own terms and say whether it’s successful, according to what it seems to be trying to do. Because, you know, I think the critic James Woodson, people say of him that he’s basically judging every book against his image of what that book could be, were it perfect. I think that can be a little cruel sometimes. I try always to tell the truth. I try not to be too cruel nowadays, unless it’s somebody who is established and deserves a kick. They can take it. Although if I ever write a book, I’m sure my views on that will change. I think I just try to not go with too many preconceptions, although there are things I can always tell will irritate me if I think people are being pretentious, or fake, or saying stuff because it sounds impressive, not because it’s true. Those are the things that will get my hackles up.
The search for meaning in a chaotic world and the role of literature
Elizabeth
One of the things I really value about good criticism, and good columns, actually – which we’ll come on to in a second and the role they play in our public conversations – is the way they can help. I think what both people are doing is listening very hard to the public conversation, and therefore able to spot trends and themes in a way that a lot of people don’t have time for. And I’d love you to talk a little bit about the millennial intellectuals, the kind of popular literary writers of the moment, and what you think they’re telling us about that the world of ideas in which they and we are all swimming?
James Marriott
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, on this front, I’m probably increasingly out of touch. Because that phrase, “millennial intellectuals”, was I think one that I used a few years ago to describe writers like Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, Meghan Nolan, I think was in there. And I really felt like I was lucky to come of age at a time when there was a real generation of writers. Those people I mentioned probably all write in a relatively similar way, I think. There was a new outbreak of sincerity a few years ago. You know, Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People” especially was really and actually the most recent one. “Beautiful World, where are you?” Those are both books that are really unafraid of being sincere, in a way that… I think a lot of the literature that was written in the early 2000s was very ironic and posturing. People like Bret Easton Ellis, would be distanced. And I think that was what the generation of people who are writing when I first began to write myself in my early 20s were reacting against. That is something I found immensely sympathetic. I think it’s probably a product of a world that seems more genuinely dangerous and endangered than the writing of the early 2000s. People my generation coming of age at a time when it seems like the climate is doomed, democracy is fragile, a lot of things are going wrong, and that bored, sneering irony suddenly doesn’t seem like enough. And there’s real stakes in the world and the real stuff is really worth caring about. And that was really exciting. I wonder if that mood is as prevalent now as it was even five years ago. I was talking to a younger colleague, who was saying that he thought that his generation – Gen Z, I guess – were a bit more cynical, a bit more disillusioned. I think he made the point that my generation, now in their 30s, but even older, entering their 40s, we kind of had illusions to lose. And we’ve kind of grown up with an idea that we’d still believe we might be rich like our parents, and the fact that environment was really doomed was kind of news to us. We still put them out in a house and all this kind of things. And we had this sort of wounded idealism that expresses itself in that kind of characteristic sadness, and sincerity of Sally Rooney in his novels. I think he thought that his generation never had illusions in the first place, and they were sort of much more cynical, much more satirical, much meaner. So yeah, I wonder if there’s already another change going on, since the theme that I identified those writers that you mentioned.
Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s interesting and troubling. Just because of the state of the world, but also because of the state of what literature can do. At its best, obviously, it’s never telling us what to think. But the kind of ambient world of meaning in which is bringing does create a kind of set of expectations and moral universe. I wanted to ask – and again, I’m also kind of a geriatric millennial and very much shaped and formed by those kind of novels. But what I what I see and I have seen a little bit, I think, in you in some of your columns, is this wistfulness. I agree that the Sally Rooney’s early novels, some of those earlier novels, “Jia Tolentino”, there is this kind of comfort with speaking about trauma, sadness and anxiety. The kind of dominant theme of mental health, but kind of “sad girl literature”, which I definitely reached saturation point with a little while ago. But the kind of bleeding darkness, particularly in female protagonists – a lot of it did have a kind of nihilism to it, I think, in this sort of meaningless philosophical world. But Sally Rooney’s recent novel, Patricia Lockwood’s recent novel, I think, particularly, and maybe it’s just, we’re ageing, but you wrote a column not that long ago about when the long withdrawing roar of Christendom disappears, when you’re left with whatever it is that we have, don’t we need meaning somewhere? And a wistfulness for structures of meaning and belonging? Stories in which we can ground ourselves, morally formative communities? I’m kind of sensing something on the change – your Gen Z comment may indicate I’m completely wrong, but I wondered if you see any of that coming through in the fiction and the poetry and the culture that’s being produced now?
James Marriott
It’s a really interesting question. I guess society, since probably the 90s, has been much more secular. And my personal theory is that that secularism, and that absence of faith, is more comfortable in a society in which everything appears to be getting better. So if everyone’s getting richer all the time, if you feel like the future is going to be better, I think it’s quite easy not to have anything to believe in them, because you don’t really need it. That column, the the idea that your kids will be richer than you, it’s quite a profoundly existentially comforting thought. The idea that things really are going to get better. The philosopher John Grey always spoke about the idea that there was a kind of liberal faith in progress, that the idea that things were gonna get better was itself its own kind of religion. And I think that is being rapidly proved to be true. I think that was the sustaining myth of the 2000s. We thought we could do without God, we thought we could do without religion, and we were really comforted by this idea that everything was going to get richer, science was going to get better, technology was going to get better. And we’re on this sort of historical upward trajectory. Barack Obama, the rug that he had in the Oval Office, had the phrase, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” woven into it, and I think that was a really profoundly comforting subconscious thought for a lot of people. The fact the world now seems to be much more chaotic than we imagined, it has disrupted that belief in progress, and I think has left people scrabbling around for something new to believe in. And it is much harder to not have things to believe in, in a world that now seems genuinely chaotic. And I do think there will be new sets, forms of belief or systems of meaning or faith springing up. And I think we’re already seeing it. I think things like astrology, however ironic, it often is, the desire to believe that the future is predictable and that human beings have some cosmic relevance, I think, is obviously a symptom of that search for meaning. Jordan Peterson: I guess, often someone appears on the other side of the political spectrum, often for men. This whole system he sets out where you can think of your life in mythological terms, you can think of yourself as the hero, going through your life slaying the dragon of chaos. This view is the same desire for us to believe in our lives as meaningful, heroic, cosmically relevant events. And I imagine we’ll see more stuff like that. I think the argument that politics has taken, the role of religion is true. I think a lot of the vociferous and strongly held political beliefs that we see at the moment, people are interested in a sources of meaning and identity, in the way they would want to have gone to religion for those for those things. And, yeah, I suspect, the next few years and decades will be very interesting to think. We’ll probably see more stuff like that. I don’t know whether we’ll see new religions or anything remotely that formal, but I think there’ll be more strange new beliefs.
The power of WH Auden, and the unique role of poetry in tackling existential questions
Elizabeth
Given that literature plays a kind of role of something close to sacred in your life, do you think it is able to provide us with some of that existential studying? Can literally be a source of wisdom, or is that asking too much of it?
James Marriott
Yeah, it certainly is. It certainly is, for me. I mean, if I’m ever depressed or anxious, which is not infrequently, the most reliable thing I can do to make myself feel better is to take my “Selected Poems of W H Auden,” open at random, and start reading. And I can’t quite say what is so comforting about it, partly because it’s probably an ancient enthusiasm, one of the oldest enthusiasms of my life. I was reading poetry since childhood. I think also, the really concerning thought is, “Oh, my God, that’s absolutely brilliant,” and “How reassuring that another human being was capable of something so wonderful.” And that is only a happy thought, and only an extraordinary thought. And I think that is the principal consolation. I mean, there’s consolation in all art, and for me, I guess, literature is the art I love most. And that’s what I get out of it. But I’m always amazed at how reliably that works to make me feel better. I just need to grab Auden from the shelves.
Elizabeth
I wonder if that’s why poetry sits at the top of your list, and Martin Amis’s list, because it’s why I often feel cheered by this recent revival of interest in poetry, which is mainly driven by Instagram, and I’m not sure it’s showing up in natural sales or poetry books, but I think poetry has permission. And we have less internal resistance to it being just straightforwardly existential, you know. That Auden can write “September 1, 1939” or whatever it is, which very much speaks to that generational thing of bleakness and terror, and what is the world? and what is my role in the world? and how do I steady myself as the forces of darkness come to wash over me? And he says, “Let me show an affirming flame.” And there is something so liturgical about poetry, about it being just not embarrassed to go, “Okay, what is life? What does it mean to be a good person?” What is it about that form that you think makes us able to get to depth in a way that we, I think, have a lot of resistance to elsewhere.
James Marriott
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I suppose probably a lot of it will just be read from cultural expectation. We accept that poems automatically start talking to us about profound things. We might roll their eyes at poetry – like, there are many poems at which I roll my eyes – but I think, primed to accept profound thoughts in that format. I think poetry, there’s an inkling of something inevitable about it. Language is so fundamental to human beings. Poetry, at its best, is the highest form of language. Well, I think it will always exist. I can imagine that virtually almost always has existed. There’s nothing… I think just arises very naturally, you know. Other art forms like opera are so strange, and why on earth does this exist? But I think it seems totally obvious that we should express ourselves like that. I mean, didn’t Seamus Heaney have these theories about the kind of primitive impulse to poetry, and about “does iambic pentameter echo the rhythms of the human blood” and all this sort of strange stuff. But I think, partly genuinely, it is a very deep human impulse. And partly, we’ve just been culturally and socially primed to expect poems to talk to us about profound things.
Elizabeth
Yeah, they’re allowed. I’ve been rewatching “Fleischman Is in Trouble” having read it a few years ago. Have you watched that adaptation?
James Marriott
I’ve not watched it. I read the book, though.
Elizabeth
I imagine it’s quite faithful, from my memory. But the end, which is this really kind of Gen X existential angst about “what is the meaning of a good life? And how do we cope with constrains choices? And what is it to grow up and fear our own mortality, and die, and suffer?” And just this, like, “What does it all mean?!” is done absolutely brilliantly. I have never seen it done better on television. And yet still, I was like, “This is quite on the nose, isn’t it?”, because the frame of a television series is that that should all be implied, rather than spoken.
James Marriott
Exactly. And I think also, there is an intimacy to poetry, you know? In a poem, we automatically accept that the poet is talking to us through the poem. A TV series is lots of different people or interpreting somebody else’s words. There’s a really good moment in Alan Bennett’s play “The History Boys”, where the history teacher, Hector is talking about a hardy poem to one of his students, and describes the experience of reading a poem as someone reaching out a hand and taking yours, which I think describes… It’s a kind of human consolation. You sort of feel that you’re in direct contact with somebody who’s had the feelings that you were having before, and that’s really consoling. Philip Larkin said that all he thought a poem could do was preserve a feeling. And I think the best poems are incredibly effective devices for preserving particular human emotions, and are making us feel very profoundly that we’re in touch with particular people in the past, and I think there’s a kind of intimacy to poetry as well, that other art forms, find more difficult to attain. You know, TV, because it’s filled with actors and people interpreting the words. Novels are filled with characters. But there’s something always very direct about poems, and that must be part of it, too.
The role of literature and complex texts in combating tribalism and fostering democracy
Elizabeth
I’m really interested in divides and tribes, and the sort of exhaustion of living in a world where we are very quick to sort people into groups that are not like us. Am I being idealistic to think that literature and poetry is part of the medicine for that? I never know if it’s just a ridiculously naive thing.
James Marriott
I mean, I would love to share that point of view. I suspect literature and poetry are art forms that are too marginal to the culture to have any significant political impact, although I don’t think that was always true. I think it probably once was politically relevant, I think another argument is that societies which are much more literate than perhaps our societies in which reading books is much more widespread in which reading long texts is much more widespread, develop a familiarity with complicated ideas and complicated arguments that is very good for democracy, very good for mutual understanding, a very good medicine, as you say, against tribalism. Because in a society as ours where we experience other points of view in the form of 140–character tweets, or TikToks, it’s very hard to get inside somebody else’s mind. But in a society in which you’re primarily experiencing other points of view or other people in the forms of complex novels or even complex essays, and columns, and newspapers, there’s a kind of slightly slower pace to it, it is less confrontational. Your political faults always require more consideration. And I think there’s certainly an argument that we’ve never really had a democracy in a society that hasn’t been deeply literate. Democracy coincided with the advent of mass literacy. We are now entering an age in which literature and texts are much less important. And I guess there’s an interesting question mark, and a slightly frightening question mark, over whether a society that is less literate, and less based on long complex texts, can still maintain a democracy and still maintain the ability of people of different political persuasions to speak to each other. Does that make sense?
Elizabeth
It made a lot of sense. And it’s a very interesting thought about how much our social imaginarium of our common life and the common good relied on us, to an extent, reading from the same pool of texts. We would never will be reading the same things, but that there was enough overlap.
James Marriott
Yeah, exactly. So I guess it’s partly points about the complexity of texts, which you engage in habitually. In a literate culture, you’re always presented with a relatively complex version of your opponent’s arguments. You’re not on Twitter or Tik Tok. And yeah, you’re right. Culture is also simply much more fragmented. And it’s not only that we’re not we’re not encountering complex versions of other political arguments, but we may just not be encountering them at all. Or we may be deliberately fed the most stupid, infuriating versions of them. I think there’s a good fact that I read somewhere, I think it was in Ian Leslie’s book “Conflicted”, when he says the idea that we live in bubbles on social media isn’t quite true. He said, actually, probably most people are more exposed to other points of view on social media than they were if you just got The Times, The Telegraph, or The Guardian every day, and only read one newspaper. But he was saying, the problem is that we tend to invert it. We tend to encounter the stupidest and most evil possible form of our political opponents arguments. So you know, there’ll be a thing on Twitter where someone will say something really stupid on either side of the political spectrum, everybody who disagrees with that will start mocking it. And that one stupid or evil idea is put in front of everybody who disagrees with it, which confirms their view that their opponents are evil morons. We’re just finding the most egregious examples of what our enemies think and concentrating on those.
Column writing as a playful exploration of ideas
Elizabeth
I wanted to ask about columns, because everything you said so far speaks to someone who is comfortable with complexity, and doubt, and emotion. And confession: I basically stopped reading columns. I read your columns, not religiously – well, that would be weird – but when I see written something, I usually think “Okay, okay, let’s see what James said about that.” And a few other people, but mainly, I have completely lost faith in the form. I don’t know how much there’s a sort of synchronistic relationship with social media, and maybe it was always like this and I was just in a period of my life where I wanted ideological clarity and an argument that started in ended and made someone or something the bad guy. What are you trying to do when you write a column? And how have you managed to mainly stay away from that?
James Marriott
Yeah, it’s an interesting point. I remember somebody saying to me that once upon a time, what every journalist wants to be was a Features Writer. They wanted to go and write 3000 words about something quirky, or something interesting… This was the famous journalism, it was people writing features about following George Bush on the campaign trail and writing 7000 words about it. And the theory was that Twitter made everybody wants to be a columnist. Twitter was full of opinions, and everybody wanted their opinion to be plucked out and recognised by an institution like a newspaper as “important opinion that everybody should listen to”. And I guess I was drawn to column writing for that reason. For me, it was clearly the most prestigious thing, whereas I was told that 20 years ago columns were viewed as slightly fusty and irrelevant. I guess, you’re right, that columns can only be so complex. And every opinion I’ve written, I will always be dissatisfied with my ability to make it as nuanced as it should be. I think, I guess this is maybe a slightly idealistic hope, but I hope that people read columnists, or people read good columnists, are in this slight spirit of fun and play. There’s that thing that the word “essay” comes from the word “essayer” – to try. And I think a column really is just having a little go with an idea, trying it out. Hopefully, you believe it. But I think, there should be a little spirit of fun and play, and which is why I realised that I often contradict myself. I was actually googling myself, one of my columns written earlier today and couldn’t find it. And I realised that I’d written basically the opposite column about a year apart. I’ll find it for you to read it to you. So yeah. August 2020, “Our exam obsession is a blight on society”, James Marriott. August 2023, “Exams earn top marks for nullifying privilege”. And I think I basically believe in both those opinions. But a single opinion column is not complex enough to express, for instance, both the good and the bad aspects of exam. So I think the best readers of columns and the most intelligence readers are never automatically interpreting absolutely everything in a column as the person who’s written its final opinion and final view. And I guess part of your job as a columnist is to try and make sure that people aren’t taking you as if you’re laying down the aisle or every week, and that there’s always hopefully an element of doubt, or scepticism or play or humour or something in a column.
Elizabeth
That’s a really humane way of thinking about it, James, that’s really helped me. This sense that if you listen to someone over time, or indeed you listen to a range of people, what you’re getting is a kind of ecosystem of ideas and things being turned around and looked at from different angles. And it’s probably the sort of “context collapse problem” of the way our information technologies work, that they get ripped out of someone’s wider conversation with themselves and the public. And just seen as these very reified, “this is an opinion and it is fixed in time”. So that’s been a good challenge to me to not do that to columnists.
James Marriott
Obviously, you know, that’s an opinion that is very flattering to columnists, and gets us off the hook a bit. So you know, that maybe self–serving.
Elizabeth
This is why I left the more hard newsy forms of journalism for whatever this soft and squishy reflective world is. But I have found that defaulting to a more generous interpretation, where possible, given that we all have the tendency to judge other people harshly, can actually get me certainly closer to accuracy. And yes, columnist, I’m sure including you some days, I’m sure are self–serving, and arrogant and all those kinds of things, but also they’re complex humans trying to do a good job and tell telling those stories too. How we say stay sane in our common life is attempting to default to a more generous interpretation.
James Marriott
I think you’re right. I mean, ours is a culture that is certainly in need of more context, not less. I was amazed to see people getting cross at my columns on Twitter, where they’ll go… I mean, someone tweets the headline that you didn’t write, or someone tweets one paragraph, that you then qualify or make more complex in the next paragraph. And they say, “Why didn’t you mention X?W And you literally mentioned X in the same column. So yeah, all in favour a little more generosity to columnists. But of course, it’s the price of an incredibly privileged and enjoyable job.
Elizabeth
When you do get those occasional pile–ons. What’s that experience like? How do you process it?
James Marriott
The first few times I happened – in fact, the first few years – I found it awful, horrible. It sounds ludicrous. But really one of the worst things that I have about unhappy as I felt almost as unhappy as I felt, just when Twitter turns against you, and everyone’s horrible to you. And you think, Oh, God, I think I’m a nice person. But all these people think that I’m a horrible person. That’s my reputation. Now I’m forever incredibly anxiety inducing. You know, beginning to kind of walk down the street and think, oh my God, these people see my face on Twitter, they think I’m evil. I’m a little more mature than that now. I mean, I did really find it traumatising and upsetting I think, especially because I never said people set out to be controversial. And I never really did. I always hoped I was being nuanced. And when people thought I wasn’t really upsetting, because that’s not who I thought I was. The classic thing that always says, people have got this idea of me that I didn’t think is me. But everyone’s really angry with this kind of caricature of me they’ve invented, which I guess is a kind of minor form of one of the problems that the celebrities always complain about. But I have become a bit more relaxed about it, I think, partly because I feel that there are people who like my columns, and who understand what I’m trying to do. And that even if thousands of people on Twitter think I’m evil, because they’ve read something that’s been taken out of context. There are also a lot of people who trust that I’m trying to be nice and reasonable, and that I’m not evil. And that makes it a bit easier, because it doesn’t feel like my whole reputation is determined by what Twitter says in one day. Also, I think just understanding that Twitter isn’t the real world, and that, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of people can be cross on Twitter, and that can still be a very small fragment of the population. So yeah, it still upsets me, but much, much less than it wants to do. I used to find it really, really unbearable.
Elizabeth
Thank you for sharing that. And I could set it could sense, even as you’re sharing it, that we internalise those voices in our head, don’t we? Like, saying, “I found this thing hard the someone, somewhere will respond words like, ‘You have no idea what suffering is like. My life is so hard. How dare you!’” Tiny violins and that there’s a brutality and a lack of graciousness in that world. To come full circle, I think that literature can turn the volume down on that because as soon as you start listening to the internal world of someone or really listening to someone’s story, it becomes legitimate, right? It becomes a reminder of the subjectivity of our human experience. I’m now making no sense to myself.
James Marriott
You’re totally right. There’s a great line, you made me think of a great line in the in the Greta Gerwig film Ladybird, where the main character, a teenage girl, I think, she’s really upset about something about her relationship and her kind of not very nice, irritating boyfriend. I think he’s gesturing to the TV and saying, “Look, why are you so upset. There’s a war.” You know, it filmed the time of the war in Iraq or something. And she says, “Different things can be sad”, which is I think a useful reminder that not everything, has to be judged against the same standard of tragedy.
Elizabeth
Yes, gosh, that’s just like the distilled simplicity of it. James Marriott, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
James Marriott
Thank you for having me.
Outro and conclusion
Elizabeth
So, James. What an interesting conversation. I suspected I was gonna like James. I like the kind of reflective and thoughtful tone of his writing. And we’re often drawn to people who are in some ways what John Yates called “PLM” – people like me. The sort of technical term is homophily. But humans tend to be drawn to people with whom we have something in common. And I also love poetry, and love novels, and therefore already had a sort of point of connection with James. And it’s useful, I think, to notice those things in ourselves, because they’re not really rational at all. They’re just this sort of tender, fragile thing in humans that we like to see ourselves reflected back. And I did like James very much, as expected.
I was really surprised by the answer to his first question about basically being taught nihilism by his dad. And this, as far as I know, isn’t out there in the public domain,. It didn’t come across it in my research. It sounds like the question of what is sacred to you is that what had prompted James to connect with that memory, to realise how significant it had been in his life as a way against which background literature stood out as so powerfully the only thing, not one thing that we make more important or more central in our lives, but in his sort of childhood ideological air conditioning, like the only thing that had value. What an interesting and complex thing to be raised in. And I was so distracted and surprised by that. I pride myself on listening very well and very deeply to people. So I’m a bit annoyed at myself, because he explained about nihilism and then he did say, “And that’s what makes literature sacred to me.” And I was so distracted by the nihilism I didn’t really hear him say it. And he was very gracious with me, reminding me that he had actually answered my question and said, literature – literature is what’s sacred to him. And that’s a complex thing, right? If at least are raised to think that, that there isn’t really any meaning, there’s no such thing as free will, then literature is this place of meaning, and he said later in the interview, a place of consolation, of steadying. Even for me as someone who is very, very pro–book and pro–novel and pro–poetry, it seems a lot of weight to ask that to take. I just felt a little bit that many of us have childhoods that are not full of joy, right? And James was very frank that he was really quite unhappy in his childhood, that there was a sad divorce. He kind of was waiting for his life to start at university and solaced himself with these books, and particularly Iris Murdoch. Absolutely hilarious. Like, you know, many people’s adolescent obsessions are shallow, and I was thinking, “Mate, mine were way more shallow than yours, if Iris Murdoch was your shallow adolescent obsession…”
But sort of related to something that came up a lot across the podcast, which was just sort of an almost painfully self–deprecating. He was really, very keen not to come across as pretentious or arrogant or any of those things. And honestly, I can’t think of another – forgive the huge generalisations here – cannot think of another man that I felt that with. I cannot tell you the number of women I’ve interviewed, before we went to video, who I and the team have gone through and taken out them saying “sorry”. Like, big chunks of audio of them apologising for themselves and saying “Sorry, I don’t think that’s very good answer. Sorry, I’m really incoherent. Sorry. Sorry.” It was like of a vocal tick. James doesn’t do that but there was this sense of protectiveness or anxiety or something… And part of me wanted to be like, “James, be your wonderful, earnest, enthusiastic, highbrow self. Don’t apologise.” It is a glorious thing, I think, when someone is just purely, unashamedly passionate about something in the way that he so clearly is about poetry, and literature, and criticism as an art form that he wants to defend, but is cautious about defending. I wanted him to go full–throated for it.
But maybe it’s partly related to my next point, which is that when I said, what does he think he’s doing as a book reviewer, he said, “Actually, I haven’t spent much time thinking about it.” And I don’t think this is just James. So many times doing this project, I asked people in public life, and in my language, it’s really like, “What is your vocation? What are you called to in the world? What is the meaningful piece of work that you are trying to do through your work?” And unless you have been part of a religious community or some other kind of conscious intentional group of people or language, very few people have actually thought about that. Very few people have gone, “What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing it? What is it for? And it just feels like a lovely thing to be able to offer people a tiny little bit of space to ask that question themselves. I think sometimes it can be quite scary actually and a little bit confronting, but I hope it’s also generative and healthy.
Book reviews is like the “Which?” magazine for books. Loved that. He said it’s useful not to develop principles. And I expected to react badly against that, but actually, I really understand that point about coming to a book without trying to have a sense of “This is what I want it to say. This is the world I want it to paint.” But taking it on its own terms saying “What can I learn from this? What can I find here? How can it challenge me rather than does it? Or doesn’t it match up to a pre–existing sense of my values?” I think that’s probably not as necessary for just readers, but for a critic it probably is. Line about a poet reaching out and a poem being like someone’s reached out and taken your hand. Just gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.
And I always make sure I ask people who I know have experienced some sort of online abuse, or pile–ons, or backlash – which frankly is almost anyone with any kind of social media following these days – about how it is for them, partly as a practice for me and for all of us to remember the real people behind all this, that when I’m tempted to be “snipey” and retweet something with a sarcastic comment that is so clearly designed to make all my followers also react with contempt… I haven’t got the power to induce a pile–on, but some people have doing that kind of thing. When I feel like, “Look at this ridiculous thing. Look at this stupid quote. Look at what this terrible person is saying. I’m going to share with you how annoying I find it and at the same time show off my intelligence.” So remember that there’s a real person there. And even someone like James in a position of power and privilege said it’s you know some of the unhappiest he’s been in his life. I really think we need to take that seriously, when we’re trying to be good citizens in the world, people who can keep the humanity of other people in mind, even in our public conversations.
Finally, different things can be sad. Yeah, that feels key. That feels a key thing to remember.
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