Jeffrey Archer: politician, novelist, conman, jailbird and survival specialist

I found his novels unreadable, his short stories only passable, and his memoirs unconvincing, yet I had a sneaky admiration for Jeffrey Archer, who has died at 86. The Man Who Got Away With It might be the title for a biography of this Conservative politician, novelist, athlete, athletics coach, gymnast, police constable, PR professional, fund-raiser (and alleged embezzler of some of the funds raised), philanthropist, playwright, theatre-owner, fraudster with a side line in insider trading, jailbird, art gallerist, legendary party host, owner of Monets and Picassos, cricket lover and survival specialist. Even in television interviews, Archer’s unique combination of charisma and chutzpah came through. He had a very good opinion of himself, untrammelled by the inevitable pitfalls and comeuppances of “fifty lives rolled into one,” as his (unofficial) biographer Michael Crick put it. He survived everything life threw at him, including cancer. He survived too everything he threw back at life which bounced back at him. He died “between writing sessions,” said his publisher, and there is something to admire in that. He was loved by a reading public in India more interested in straight stories that literary subtleties. There is a special place in our society for the gifted conman, for the tweaker of noses who is successful. This is what makes art forgers, and to a lesser extent, bank robbers such glamorous figures. Archer, wrote Crick, “was a nasty fraudster. He was a crook.” He did give pleasure to millions, though. Death does not automatically confer sainthood, but it might in Archer’s case. He might be capable of conning from beyond the grave. Jeffrey Archer during a book tour in Bengaluru, March 2011. | Photo Credit: G.P. Sampath Kumar The BBC’s summing up was cruel if appropriate: (Archer) “died a wealthy man, albeit one whom very few trusted.” Even when he didn’t lie outright, Archer created impressions that were contrary to facts which he didn’t bother to correct. When he returned to England after a spell in the U.S. (for a short course on physical education), it was assumed he had earned a degree there. On the basis of this, he got a job in a school and then one in Dover College which sponsored a one-year stint for a diploma in Oxford which helped him network his way out of ordinariness. You can fool some of the people some of the time. With success came scandalFor pop psychologists, the salient facts of Archer’s life might be that his father (who was 40 years older than his mother) was a convicted fraudster who spent years conning people in New York. Archer himself was conned out of half a million pounds which led to bankruptcy and loss of his seat as a Member of Parliament. He sat down to write a novel (Not A Penny More, Not a Penny Less) to recover some of the money. That is as good a motivation as any. He wrote novels about ambition, success, scandal, money, setbacks, self-publicity, rebuilding a life, all themes he had profound experience of. With success came scandal — or maybe it was the other way around — and Archer spent two years (of four) in jail for perjury which led to a three-volume Prison Diary. He had once said, “When I was three, I wanted to be four. When I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.” Only the first part of that ambition was realised, although he did rise to be Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher and was later nominated to the House of Lords. He would have to be satisfied with being the nearly man. Jeffrey Archer at a bookstore in Mumbai, May 2009. | Photo Credit: Getty Images By then, his charm, lifestyle and capacity for hard work had earned him the kind of success that is measured in the millions of pounds and a readership across 100-plus countries, including India, where he became hugely popular. He released some books first in India to counter those who pirated copies and denied the bookstores and publishers. He loved to repeat the story of being stopped in his taxi at a traffic signal and offered “the latest Jeffrey Archer” and telling the seller, “I am the latest Jeffrey Archer.” Of genius and talentFor all his success, however, he didn’t convert the critics. “How could any sentient being willingly plough through Archer’s dreadful prose?” asked the literary critic Robert McCrum nearly two decades ago. “To open one of his books,” continued McCrum, “was to risk being assaulted by a hectic claque of cliche, mixed metaphor, implausibility, solecism and sheer, unadulterated stodginess sufficient to send most readers screaming in breathless delirium to the mature, lucid and urgent pages of Barbara Cartland or Enid Blyton.”Readers didn’t care. Some 300 million copies of his books have sold worldwide. But the plots of his novels failed to match the twists and turns of his own life which he lived with an energy and conviction that could only have come from enormous self-belief which overlapped with disdain for those around him. When Oscar Wilde was in jail, he quoted his friend and lover Lord Alfred Douglas as saying, “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.” Archer may have sensed this, but understood that being knocked off the pedestal at regular intervals served the same purpose.Archer’s prison books are unlikely to be mistaken for Wilde’s de Profundis which was written in prison. But in one aspect, there is a connection. Like Wilde, Archer too put all his genius into his life and only his talent into his works.The writer’s latest book is ‘Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?’.