A Faber editor has written an open letter to Morrissey pleading with the singer to bring his "much-rumoured memoir to the House of Eliot".Lee Brackstone, editorial director at Faber, wrote that it would be "the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream" if Morrissey were to pick Faber as the publisher of his autobiography. The singer and former frontman of the Smiths revealed in late 2008 that he would be writing his memoirs in order to "[set] the record straight", and in November an essay from his forthcoming autobiography was published in The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art, entitled "The Bleak Moor Lies".
Posting the open letter on Faber's company blog, Brackstone wrote that "forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere".
"We love the perverse and the contrary at Faber," he continued. "And we also like to think we are the custodians of 20th-century Modernist poetry. In fact we are. Our shelves groan and bulge and spill over under the weight of Ezra, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. And that's just the surface; deep as it may seem. We feel very strongly that you belong in this company."
Brackstone said this morning that he corresponded with Morrissey via fax around five years ago, "and he was definitely interested". "A year ago a few publishers here offered big money [for the singer's memoirs], there's been correspondence all over the place, and I'm pretty sure he's well away with it," Brackstone said. The letter, he added, was "a bit of fun, but at the same time we'd be desperately happy if it happened … It's worth a crack."
Some Morrissey fans responded positively to the post – "What a way to woo the talent, Lee, baby! You go, boy," wrote one; others described it as "a load of bum-snogging grovelling". Brackstone said he had intentionally written in "inflated, pretentious" language in an attempt to appeal to Morrissey's "more playful nature", but admitted that "there's a risk that it may just irritate him - that is if he even sees it".
