This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The month of June was clearly a busy one for young Mr James Marriott. Not content with filing his columns for The Times, our man could be found moonlighting in the New Statesman with a terrific essay-review of Literature and Learning (OUP), Professor Stefan Collini’s new book about the history of English Studies in these isles.
He then made a considerable splash on social media having fed into an AI app sufficient data to enable it to write a review of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers.
Both these endeavours made Mr Marriott feel very gloomy. The first led him to conclude that the English degree, formerly a mark of cultural elevation, had been hopelessly degraded. The second prompted him to complain that we were essentially entering a “post-literate” age in which the ability to write coherently — previously regarded as a key skill — would shortly become superfluous.
By chance, both these deductions coincided with yet another survey showing that parents have stopped reading to their children and the average tiny is happier with a screen than a book.
The Secret Author sympathises with Mr Marriott, whose columns and air of carefully cultivated Young Fogeydom he greatly admires. At the same time, it is possible to feel that in the aftermath of discovering what a computer thinks of Martin Amis (other judges reckoned the review OK, but rather obviously fabricated) he has slightly overstated his case and that a look at the historical context offers grounds for faint consolation.
History suggests that there was hardly ever a time when “literary culture”, however defined, was safe from the philistines or secure enough to prevent those working in it from feeling terrified about their individual and collective futures.
According to Philip Waller’s compendious Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (2008), the only time in which “reading” held sway as a mass leisure activity was for a brief period before the Great War — after the educational reforms of the 1870s had kicked in but before the rise of radio and cinema.
After that, to extrapolate from Waller, literary culture went back to being a minority interest with its higher end an altogether exclusive quadrant accessible to barely a few thousand people, all of them forever pronouncing jeremiads on the state of the trade and the undermining of “taste”.
The Secret Author, when at university, used to attend graduate employment seminars at which publishing executives glumly discussed not what the future of the book might be, but whether it had a future at all.In these circumstances, it is possible to feel that the book has survived rather better than the pundits of 40 years ago anticipated.
As for the “post-literate” age, should the depredations of AI — yet another of those sinister cyber-horrors promoted as a great convenience but actually part of the wider techno-plot to make us all more stupid — have the effect that Mr Marriott foresees, the result will be to turn literature into an elitist pursuit again.
Novels will continue to be written, but not many people will read them and those that bother will do so in a cultist spirit that will render literary culture even more snooty than it already is.
All of which is terrible shame — reactionary rather than progressive and, once again, excluding ordinary people from something they might quite like if they were told about it and could see its advantages.
And suddenly the Secret Author was back in the company of one of the very first pieces of literary journalism he ever read, long before Grub Street came and claimed him for her own.
It was written by Auberon Waugh and debated the sempiternal topic of how you persuade intelligent people to read books.Waugh’s exemplar was the latest Beryl Bainbridge. By his calculation, there were at least half a million potential readers for a novel of this kind — witty, humorous and having some faint bearing on the lives that the vast majority of people live.
Why couldn’t they buy it or borrow it from a library? The answer to this question — still highly relevant four-and-a-half decades later — is not just that books need to be better publicised, but that better books need to be better publicised.
The Secret Author’s eye recently fell on Recommended (Holland House), Nicola Wilson’s history of the activities of the Book Society in the 30-odd years of its mid-century existence.
No point in pretending that such an organisation could prosper here in 2025 — publishers would jockey for precedence, funding would be hard to come by and the lists would be full of rubbish. But literary culture will only flourish if its value to the world around it is properly appreciated.
No doubt about it: reading a book like John Harris’s Maybe I’m Amazed, an account of his autistic son’s engagement with music, will do you more good than staring at a screen. This point needs to be made as loudly as possible — by James Marriott and everyone else.
