Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (145 page)

It would be interesting to know if George Eliot, the author of
Silas Marner
, had read
Mark Hurdlestone
.

Mysteriously, Moodie stopped writing fiction on her husband’s death in 1869 and it is suggested he may have been the author, or co-author, of some of the works that bear her name.

When I was three, I wanted to be four. When I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.

The details of Archer’s early life have always been somewhat fuzzy. He was born in London on 15 April 1940, his father’s occupation on the birth certificate being entered as ‘journalist’ (some accounts add ‘bigamist’). Archer and his family moved from their North London boarding house to Weston-super-Mare in Somerset later in 1940, presumably to escape the Blitz. At this point, his father was known as ‘Captain Archer’, although not apparently a serving officer. He was considerably older than his wife and is recorded as dying in 1956. In 1951, young Archer went as a boarder to Wellington School, Somerset – not to be confused, although Archer is sometimes accused of making few attempts to prevent any confusion, with the more famous Wellington College. At school, he shone as a sportsman rather than a scholar and left without ‘A’ levels. In 1958 he enlisted as a regular soldier in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment but promptly bought himself out. In 1960, he joined the Metropolitan Police in London, but again resigned after a few weeks. The following year, Jeffrey Archer was appointed sports master and geography teacher at Dover College, the public school in Kent. According to some accounts, he may also at some time have been enrolled at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and at the University of California at Berkeley.

Archer was accepted, aged twenty-three, to study for a Postgraduate Diploma of Education (a one-year course) at Oxford University’s Education department. At Oxford, he distinguished himself as an athlete, establishing a record for the 100-yard sprint. He was also active in charity work and recruited the Beatles to attend a banquet. Ringo Starr made the much-quoted comment, ‘He’s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it for five pounds.’ The amount, given Archer’s selling skills, was an underestimate.

In 1966 he married Mary Weeden, a scientist (she it was, he once quipped, who helped translate his fiction into English; the same assistance has often been credited to Archer’s editor, Richard Cohen), and the couple had two sons. Later, in the 1980s, the family took up residence at the Rectory, Grantchester, immortalised by the poet Rupert Brooke. Archer’s interests had meanwhile taken a political turn. In 1969, after success as a GLC councillor, he won a by-election as Conservative Member for Louth in Lincolnshire by a large majority. At twenty-nine he was the youngest member of the House of Commons, as he has frequently reminded the world. In 1974, however, his apparently meteoric rise suffered a setback. A Canadian firm, Aquablast, in which he had invested £272,000 of borrowed money,
collapsed. He was financially ruined and did not seek re-election at the next general election. Ever resilient (rubber is rock compared to Jeffrey Archer), he resolved to write a novel based on his downfall in the world of high finance.
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
(1976) was a bestseller in Britain and did well in America too. He followed it, a year later, with
Shall We Tell the President?
, a political thriller set in the very near future, which fantasises an assassination attempt on ‘President’ Edward Kennedy. Viking Press (one of whose senior employees, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was connected with the deal) paid £250,000 for the rights, but sales in America were anaemic. Kennedy Onassis resigned from Viking shortly after.

Archer’s next novel,
Kane and Abel
(1980), was a more ambitious work, chronicling the feuds of two future magnates born on the same day in 1906: William Kane, a blue-blooded Boston banker, and Abel Rosnovski, a self-made Polish immigrant to America. It spawned an equally successful sequel,
The Prodigal Daughter
(1982), in which Rosnovksi’s daughter becomes America’s first woman President.
First Among Equals
(1984) returned to the English political scene and chronicles the story of four politicians competing to become Prime Minister. Like other of his novels, the work was adapted as a mini-series for British television. By now, Archer was, along with Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins, one of the elite of Anglo-American bestselling novelists. His other career interests had equally prospered. He had paid off his debts by his pen and was once again a prosperous businessman.

Archer rose in the Conservative Party (although he never stood again as an MP) and in 1985 was appointed Deputy Chairman by Margaret Thatcher. In 1986, however, his career took another apparently catastrophic knock. Using a proxy, he arranged to pay a prostitute £2,000 to leave the country. The woman, Monica Coghlan, was in the pay of the
News of the World
. Archer resigned his political post but sued the
Daily Star
for libel, denying everything other than being harassed by Coghlan. In a sensational trial in 1987 – in which Mary Archer gave key evidence, and was famously complimented in his summing up by the judge on her ‘fragrance’ – he was awarded £500,000 in damages by the jury for the libel on his character. In 1990 the vindicated Archer signed a three-book contract with HarperCollins which – at a reported $20 million – made him the highest paid novelist in the world (though the scale of the publisher’s payment has never been confirmed, and may have been exaggerated).
As the Crow Flies
(1991) is another rags-to-riches fable, telling the story of Charlie Trumper’s rise from the East End of London and a costermonger background to immense wealth as the owner of London’s greatest department store – an establishment rather like Harrods.

In 1992, after having been previously rejected, he was made a life peer as Baron
Archer of Weston-super-Mare, of Mark in the County of Somerset, by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister, John Major. Two years later, Archer was again touched by scandal, with (unproven) allegations of insider dealings through his wife’s position on the board of Anglia TV. His much-hyped 1996 novel,
The Fourth Estate
, in many judgements his best, was based on the rise and fall of newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell. Thirteen years after the first Coghlan trial, in October 1999, Ted Francis contacted the publicist Max Clifford to reveal that the alibi he had then provided for Archer was false. The
News of the World
, still stinging, set up a telephone conversation between the men which confirmed Francis’s revised version. At the time, Archer was a front-runner for the Mayor of London election (subsequently won by Ken Livingstone) and had published a novel –
The Eleventh Commandment
(1998) – cheekily predicting his success.

On 20 November 1999 he withdrew from the mayoral race, and was expelled, prejudicially, from the Conservative Party in February 2000. After a second sensational trial in 2001, he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for perjury, on 19 July. He wrote a Dantean trilogy recounting his time inside:
A Prison Diary, Vol. I: Hell
–
Belmarsh
(2002),
Vol. II: Purgatory
–
Wayland
(2003),
Vol. III: Heaven
–
North Sea Camp
(2004). They are regarded by discerning critics as perhaps his finest work of fiction.

Autre-biography

I was a judge in 1999 when J. M. Coetzee won his second Booker prize, for
Disgrace
. He didn’t turn up to collect his prize, any more than he had when he won his first in 1983 for the
Life & Times of Michael K
. The photographers were obliged, yet again, to take a picture of a copy of the novel in an empty chair. The gesture spoke volumes. Keep your distance, it said. You may read my novels but don’t think you have any right to
judge
them. More importantly, don’t think you have any right to
know
me. It’s odd, then, that this excessively private man should be so forthcoming in the ‘fictionalised memoir’ sequence,
Scenes from Provincial Life
, of which the third part,
Summertime
, was published in summer 2009 (it was shortlisted, inevitably,
but there was not a hope in hell that the Booker people were going to allow a third empty chair). The trilogy began with
Boyhood
(1997), covering the then unnamed protagonist’s upbringing in South Africa. It continued with
Youth
(2002), which followed the still unnamed character in his years of exile in London. Both books conformed exactly to the known facts of Coetzee’s own career.

Born English-speaking Afrikaaner, with a dash of Slav, in Cape Town, Coetzee had an unsettled childhood in an unsettled country. Apartheid separated the races and, globally, South Africa itself from the ‘family of nations’. John Coetzee graduated from university with honours in English and Maths – a typical disjunction, in a life disjoined to the point of continuous fracture. In the 1960s, with national service in prospect, he left for England, where he was one of the first generation of computer programmers with IBM. London did not swing for J. M. Coetzee. He married in 1963, separated, and divorced in 1980. He did a second degree with a thesis on Ford Madox Ford.

Following this second career line, he went to the University of Texas at Austin on a Fulbright scholarship. Combining algorithms and minimalism, he did a Ph.D. on computer analysis of the style of Samuel Beckett (is silence digitisable?). It was pioneer scholarship. Coetzee went on to teach in the American university system and a promising academic career was in prospect. It was at this period, and in America, that Coetzee began writing fiction. He applied to naturalise in the US, but was turned down on the grounds that he had taken part in anti-Vietnam protests – notably an occupation of his university administrative offices, for which he was arrested and charged with criminal trespass. Nomadic again, Coetzee returned to South Africa where he taught at the University of Cape Town. He rose through the academic ranks, writing, on the side, increasingly admired fiction until his retirement in 2002. In the same year he emigrated to Australia, where he took up a senior position in the University of Adelaide, and in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he did collect in person. But he insists that for him all such laurels are withered garlands: ‘In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.’ He became an Australian citizen in 2006.

With the third volume of Coetzee’s fictional memoir, the narrative became overtly autobiographical. The protagonist was finally given a name ‘John Coetzee’ – alias Yours Truly.
Summertime
’s narrative leap-frogs over what was the most dramatic period of Coetzee’s life – his years in America. As it opens, the hero has recently returned – deported and in disgrace (the perennial Coetzee theme) – to live, grumpily, with his father in a South Africa which is falling apart; it is not a happy
domestic arrangement. ‘Fathers and sons’, John says, ‘should never live in the same house.’ Nor, one apprehends, should different races live in the same country. John Coetzee does manual work – something whites in the early 1970s would never deign to do. Why else had God invented blacks? He picks up an extra pittance tutoring – wasting his scholarly abilities (no honourable senior position in the ivory tower for this Coetzee), but in this trough of his life ‘John’ – as did ‘J.M.’ – publishes his first novel,
Dusklands
(1974). Literature doesn’t always come from happy places.

So far so parallel, with the odd fictional swerve. But at this point autobiography melts – perplexingly – into fiction. ‘John Coetzee’, we gather, later emigrated to Australia (as did ‘J.M.’ in 2002), but died there in 2006 (when, in point of biographical fact, ‘J.M.’ became an Australian citizen). His posthumous biography is now being written by a shadowy Boswell called ‘Vincent’. Vincent, an extremely dull fellow, we gather, is interested solely in the years in Coetzee’s life in the early 1970s. He has some uninformative notebooks and the testimony of former lovers, colleagues and a cousin – they give very little away. So is the dead ‘John Coetzee’ to be taken as the live ‘J. M. Coetzee’? Experienced novel-readers will be wary of this ‘catch me if you can’ trick. Young James Ballard, for example, in J. G. Ballard’s novel (so categorised)
Empire of the Sun
, has experiences strikingly similar to those of the young James Ballard, when his family was interned in the war by the Japanese. But the hero ‘James Ballard’ in J. G. Ballard’s novel (so categorised)
Crash
is nothing like J. G. Ballard. He wasn’t meant to be. Ballard explained what he was doing in
Crash
in a 1995 preface to the novel: ‘I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising … the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.’