MY LIFE IN BOOKS: JONNY SWEET
Jonny Sweet won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer in 2009, and since then, his work as a writer and actor has been varied and exceptional. His first feature film was Wicked Little Letters, starring Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley. He also develops and produces TV and film through his awardwinning company People Person Pictures. His debut novel The Kellerby Code has just been published by Faber.
The books on your bedside table?
We moved a year ago and I still have a stool rather than a bedside table. It’s fairly precarious but I do have one book on it, A Certain World, which is a commonplace book compiled by WH Auden. It’s completely wonderful: eccentric and teeming. So far highlights include Byron’s account of climbing in the Alps and a young clergyman’s description of Easter morning in 1870. Auden calls it a kind of autobiography and I suppose it’s called A Certain World because it’s the very particular version of the world he chose to live in. I haven’t finished it yet and I’m not sure I need to – it’s the perfect bedside stool book.
A favourite literary character? George Harvey Bone from the peerless Hangover Square. Patrick Hamilton, who also wrote the plays Rope and Gas Light (and the equally excellent Gorse trilogy), began writing it on Christmas Day 1939. While other novelists might begin on, say, a Wednesday in March, Hamilton cracked to it, with war recently declared on Germany, to write a seedy, miserable, funny thriller — sad, human, and macabre, set upon the precipice of war.
Your book of the year so far? Golden Hill by Francis Spufford. A young man with an elusive past and uncertain future arrives in a nascent, dangerous and thrusting New York. Impossible to stop reading and the writing is exquisite, especially in passages about church and fire, from memory. I’ve just googled it and it came out in 2016 but it’s my book of 2024.
A book that changed your life? I think Pinter and Philip Larkin had the biggest impacts: The Homecoming and The Less Deceived. In terms of novels, I can’t remember much about what happens in it but the experience of reading [Ernest Hemingway’s] For Whom the Bell
Tolls in my teens was fairly massive. I felt very grown up. Ditto John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.
I didn’t understand much of either – Hemingway talking about the earth moving or Mill on the tyranny of the majority – but they were equally escapist.
The first book you remember? The Big Green Book by Robert Graves. This is the first book I remember reading myself, on the floor of my bedroom. It’s magical and sweet and I was terrified by the moment a magical man makes someone’s fingernails penetrate their flesh.
The book you couldn’t finish? So many. I don’t think twice. Like Kingsley Amis said, if it’s not doing it for you, chuck it across the room. Many of the greats have met this fate.
Your comfort read? Highsmith and Le Carré are probably my most reliable in this regard. Deep Water and A Perfect Spy are favourites.
The book you give as a gift?
I’ve had bad luck with it (people don’t take to it) but Up in the
Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. It’s a collection of his New Yorker journalism from 1943 to 1964 – astonishing observations of marginalised people. Fanatics, hucksters, obsessives. I associate it with a word I’d never really come across before: flophouse.
The writer who shaped you?
I don’t know the answer. I do think there’s a weird influence of repressed postwar Englishman (Le Carré, Larkin, Pinter, Peter Cook). This just makes me think I need to go to therapy.
The book you would most like to be remembered for?
I think I’m supposed to say the next one? I’d love to be remembered for As I Lay Dying but it’s very unlikely.