THE JOURNAL
Mr Jamie Byng at Freemasons Hall, London, 2016. Photograph by Philip Volkers Photography, courtesy of Letters Live
The former bad boy of publishing is bringing the dying art of the letter to a new audience with Letters Live.
On the windowsill of Mr Jamie Byng’s west London office, there’s a framed quotation that purports to be from The Tao Of Byng: “I haven’t pissed anyone off. People have just chosen to get pissed off with things I’ve done.” He says a colleague insisted on blowing the quote up and framing it. “It’s a bit unfair, don’t you think?” he says. “Still…”
There was a period around the turn of the millennium when Mr Byng was touted in the newspapers as the bad boy of publishing. He spoke in interviews of his fondness for cocaine, threw annual parties at which he DJ’d at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and was as likely to be talking about Mr Gil Scott-Heron, a friend and hero, as he was about Ms Anita Brookner or Dame Iris Murdoch.
Here, as every profile told us, was the son of an earl, whose Edinburgh University dissertation had been on the poetics of hip-hop, who sported his chin stubbly and had been running a nightclub until, in his early twenties, he went to intern at the venerable Scottish publishing house Canongate before rescuing it from receivership with the help of a bit of family money (his stepfather was the late Sir Christopher Bland) and transforming it into the hip but commercial concern it is today.
By the early 2000s, Canongate was making waves. It had a huge-selling Man Booker winner in Mr Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi and had published Mr Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal And The White and Ms Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room, among other hits. Since then, it has consistently published both originally and well.
There’s definitely been an element of playing with the image of bad-boy rock ’n’ roll publishing, being absolutely independent
“There’s definitely been an element of playing with the image of bad-boy rock ’n’ roll publishing, being absolutely independent, you know, and using that not in a cynical way, but partly because that’s how I am and who I’ve been and our style on one level,” says Mr Byng. “But I think the thing that’s increasingly important to me that we’ve done is publishing with a professionalism that I’d like to think is up there with any of the biggest houses in the world.”
One person who famously chose to get pissed off with something Mr Byng had done was Mr Julian Assange. Having signed a huge deal to produce a ghostwritten memoir for Canongate, Mr Assange, says Mr Byng, “sabotaged the project” and then refused to pay back his advance. So Mr Byng, to Mr Assange’s fury, went ahead and published the half-finished book as an unauthorised autobiography.
Mr Byng describes Mr Assange, amiably, as a “sociopath of the first order” and “an absolute lunatic” and says the collapse of their deal cost Canongate about £500,000. But that is all behind him. “I look back on that with a lot of amusement,” says Mr Byng. His only regret, he says, is “when we were trying to work out what to do with the many hardback copies of The Unauthorised Autobiography, I wish we’d created a Christo art piece around the Ecuadorian Embassy.”
Mixing it up with Mr Assange is the sort of thing you find Mr Byng doing. In conversation, the names of stars trip familiarly from his lips. There’s Benedict (Mr Cumberbatch), Nick (Mr Cave), Stephen (Mr Fry), Olivia (Ms Colman) and Gillian (Ms Anderson) – all regulars at, and in the case of Mr Cumberbatch, co-producer of Letters Live. The show is a spin-off from Letters Of Note, a collection of remarkable letters co-published by Canongate and based on Mr Shaun Usher’s website and Twitter feed of the same name.
Second and front row from left to right: Ms Samantha Bond, Mr Colin Salmon, Ms Louise Brealey, Mr Sanjeev Bhaskar, Mr Benedict Cumberbatch, Mr Andrew O’Hagan, Mr Tom Odell at Freemasons Hall, London, 2015. Photograph by Philip Volkers Photography, courtesy of Letters Live
What has become a series started as a one-off in 2013, almost by accident. “Because Nick Cave’s in the book and we published him and he’s a good friend, I rang him up and said, ‘We’re going to be doing this event and would you come and read a few letters?’” says Mr Byng. “Before I knew it, we had Gillian Anderson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Neil Gaiman, Juliet Stevenson, Bruce Robinson, Peter Serafinowicz, Kerry Fox, James Rhodes. We had 300 seats at The Tabernacle and we could have sold 3,000.”
Since then, there have been dozens of performances, with a different line-up and different letters each time. A run of London shows in March sold out within an hour before a single performer was announced; now the show is launching in Los Angeles, too, in partnership with NET‑A‑PORTER and MR PORTER. Mr Byng describes the shows as “a complete emotional rollercoaster. One moment you’re reading something so heartbreaking you’re in tears, and next you’re hearing something incredibly funny. Or just so riveting because it’s a fascinating letter.”
He recalls, for instance, Mr Cumberbatch reading a Mr Alan Turing letter before anyone knew he was going to be in The Imitation Game; a show in Brixton Prison – streamed live to every prison in England and Wales – at which Mr Clarke Peters read Mr James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook”; a show in which Sir Ian McKellen asked to read the “Dear Mama” letter about a gay man coming out from Mr Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City (the only time a fictional letter has been used); a show in which Mr Cumberbatch read a letter from a 17-year-old Mr Thomas J Hanks to the director Mr George Roy Hill asking him to make him a star (“We sent Tom Hanks a recording of Benedict reading the letter and he was like, ‘Oh my god, he smashed it out the park’”); a show at which “we got Ben Kingsley to read Gandhi’s letter to Hitler, which was amazing. No one even knew that Ben Kingsley was in the house. He reprised Gandhi for the first time in 33 years.”
Mr Byng ruefully admits that, as a publishing genre, the collection of letters is dying out, along with the generation who wrote letters. “There’s something about having the very best of those selected letters not only selected for you, but performed by a great reader,” he says. “It’s such a treat, a celebration of the art of the letter and taking it to an audience who wouldn’t ever have come across those letters.”
Four great letter writers, according to Mr Jamie Byng
01. Mr Kurt Vonnegut
“Time and time again, he writes letters of such importance and such interest. He was someone who had as much integrity as anyone I’m aware of in the 20th century, certainly among writers. Vonnegut I just think is a great prose stylist, a beautiful letter writer and had such a kind, generous sensibility, and just got wiser and wiser and more generous as he got older.”
02. Ms Dorothy Parker
“Such a brilliant poison pen and such a great turn of phrase.”
03. Mr James Baldwin
“‘My Dungeon Shook’, which he wrote to his nephew James in 1963, is about race, and it’s about being shackled in one way and another. It’s one of the deep philosophical letters. It’s one of the wisest and most important letters about race ever written.”
04. Mr Raymond Chandler
“I love Chandler’s letters. He was just so out of sorts in LA, and so interesting in his sensibility. His famous letter about splitting infinitives [‘When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split’] reminds me of so many angry letters written by writers to editors.”