The outlook
Magazine| Jun 02, 2008
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Man Of Conviction
The best-selling author, soaking up the sun in India, shoots from his quiver
SHEELA REDDY
No wonder Lord Jeffrey Archer, ex-armyman,-politician, -convict,-cop, adores Indians: they read his doorstopper books by the thousands, if not the millions he boasts he sells here; they recognise him with the right mix of adoration and reverence on the streets and cafes—when he got off the plane and gave his passport for checking, the clerk was so excited that he called all his friends who crowded around for his autograph. And they're too "gentle and well-mannered" to rake up his chequered past, unlike "the jealous and envious people" back home. It's the stuff of Archer's wildest dreams.
"You saw them last night," he gloats, referring to the first stop in his six-city author tour organised by the Landmark bookchain, at a bookstore in Gurgaon that was gratifyingly packed. "Don't you think any human being would like to come into a room like that, in any country on earth, and see it so full, all the way to the back, spilling over to the sides, you can't get in the room, can't get a seat? You think I didn't ring my wife last night and tell her: I had no idea it would be like this."
In Archer's version of his own life, he's a fighter who never gives up. His two years in prison for perjury was like a game of cricket which his adversaries thought he'd lost. Like V.V.S. Laxman and Rahul Dravid keeping the Australians at bay for a day. "That's how I fight back. The entire Australian nation against them and they just stay there the whole day. The Australians thought they had the game all wrapped up and those two just stay there and fight back."
Or like Nelson Mandela. "He was in jail for 27 years and came back to be one of the world's great leaders," he says. At the risk of damaging the nation's reputation for good manners, I remind him that Mandela didn't go to jail for paying off a prostitute and lying about it in court. But Archer is unfazed. "We all have our moments of despair," he explains. "The only difference is that mine hit the front pages of newspapers."
Nor, he claims, did his reputation take a beating. "My friends stood by me. I sent out 400 invitations to my champagne and shepherd's pie party the year after I left prison, and only eight people didn't reply out of 400." These parties for the rich and the knighted, now a familiar feature in the Archers' social life in London, are not the only sign of the former Tory vice-chief clawing back into high society. More important, he says, is that his readers—the "public," as he describes them grandly—stood by him. "The public bought more of my latest book, Prisoner of Birth, than any before I went to prison." And, admonishingly, as if he's had it with my prying questions: "So NO, lady, don't go down that road. My friends and the people stood with me. You mouldy journalists might have not." It's said half-jokingly, but still, in a tone that's half command, half appeal, he adds: "Don't print that."
Clearly, self-doubt is not Archer's thing. His life, he says, far from repeatedly leaving him facing public and personal ruin, has been one of "enormous privilege—a thrilling, exciting life". The best thing about going to jail, according to him, was "realising how privileged I was". He confides, "I have a friend who is dying of cancer, same age as I am. Got about a year to live." Then, leaning over to bring his face close to me, he adds dramatically: "You think he wouldn't do two years in jail for another twenty years on earth?" And then, in a repetitive flourish that his readers are familiar with: "I've got another friend who's just gone bankrupt. Sixty-seven years old. Same age as I am. (He's 68, but what's a year when you're making a point).You think he wouldn't do two years in jail to be as rich as me?"
"I always assumed I would be wealthy," says Archer, the third child of a man the English describe as a "chancer" and a nurse, who put him through public school by writing a column in a local newspaper. The story goes that Archer, having lost everything he owned in a stocks crash, immediately sat down to write a bestseller, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, to save himself from bankruptcy. But it was less to rescue himself from insolvency and more to fill the vacant hours that Archer says led to his multi-million- dollar writing career. "I couldn't get a job, and I had this good story in mind—about four people who lose their fortune and decide to steal it back from the man who robbed them." It was rejected by 17 publishers before it was finally signed up. "I got £3,000 for it and that doesn't get you out of trouble." It took another two books before Archer got a $3.2 million advance. "I didn't realise that my books would bring me wealth beyond my imagination," he says. Such wealth that the man who was once accused of fiddling with expense accounts (the original "Mr Ten Per Cent") and even of walking away with three suits without paying for them can now dismiss his banker son's suggestions for earning a quarter per cent more interest by saying: "Go away, I'm not interested in money. I want to live!"
It's hard work being number one on the bestseller lists and hanging there for three decades. "Thirty years ago, when I was on the top of the bestseller list it was Graham Green in second place, and now I have chicklit books chasing me." It's an Archerism I'm getting acquainted with: at once equating himself with Graham Green and chicklit, placing them both where they belong: in second place to him. Is he the 20-20, a form of cricket he avowedly despises, of literature? "That's insulting. That's like saying Dickens is 20-20, or Dumas. Or even Shakespeare. We fight just as hard for our skills. Storytelling is a god-given gift."
Each of his books, he claims, goes through 17 drafts—the first draft to get the story down and the rest to hone the art of making the reader turn the page. I venture, as gentle as any Indian, a query about the friends/editors who are rumoured to help him with the writing. He picks up his glass of juice and for a moment, watching his eyes narrow behind his steel-rimmed specs, I'm afraid he'll throw it at me. Instead, he takes a quick sip, places it firmly on the table and says—quietly, for a man who brags he'll never mellow: "That's a myth that died when I went to prison. No one can say I took a team of editors to prison with me." So that's yet another reason why prison was such a blessing for Jeffrey Archer.
© Outlook Publishing (India) Private Limited
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