Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  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.

  FN

  Jeffrey Howard Archer (Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare)

  MRT

  The Fourth Estate

  Biog

  M. Crick, Jeffrey Archer: Stranger than Fiction (1995)

  276. J. M. Coetzee 1940–

  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 posthum
ous 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.’

  The author obtruding ‘himself’ into the fictional action, like Alfred Hitchcock’s hallmark cameos in his movies, is no new device. If you go back to one of the fathers of the English novel, Tobias Smollett, one discovers him doing it. Christopher Isherwood (‘Herr Issyvoo’) also did it in Goodbye to Berlin. Philip Roth began introducing a whole regiment of para-Philip Roths into his fiction with Deception (aptly named). Is ‘Jeanette’ in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeanette Winterson? Is ‘W.G. Sebald’ (the inverted commas are meaningful), the narrator-wanderer in The Rings of Saturn, ruminating about life as he ambles around East Anglia, Max Sebald? You shouldn’t do this kind of thing, protested Kingsley Amis, when young Martin went ahead and did it by introducing ‘Martin Amis’ into Self, ‘it’s breaking the rules’, ‘buggering about with the reader’. But who says novels have rules? It’s not association football.

  Assuming that Summertime is a bona fide self-portrait, it’s the least flattering since Dorian Gray’s. ‘John Coetzee’, his near and dear ones grimly recall after his ‘death’, was ‘scrawny’, ‘seedy’ and exuded ‘an air of failure’. He ‘had no sexual presence whatsoever, as though he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutralising spray’. His ‘teeth are in bad shape’. He is ‘sexless’. Intercourse with him, reports one disgusted lover, ‘lacked all thrill’. His cousin (with whom he has an arid fling in a broken-down pick-up truck) calls him ‘slap gat’ – an Afrikaans word for a loose anus (Americans have a homelier phrase). Another lover comes as near as dammit to accusing him of an unhealthily paedophiliac interest in young girls. Above all, John Coetzee has no faith in his art. ‘Why’, he asks himself, ‘does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?’ No answer is given.

  But, to return to the question, is this sad apology for a man and a novelist ‘J. M. Coetzee’? Reviewing Philip Roth’s novel, Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) – in which the principal character is ‘Philip Roth’ – Coetzee observed, in the course of an extremely subtle analysis, ‘We are in the sphere of the Cretan Liar’ (i.e. ‘everything I say is a lie, including this’). Summertime, one suspects, is in the same riddlingly Cretan sphere.

  ‘Autre-biography’, as what Coetzee does has been called, is a bent genre in which, like alloy, the elements of personal biography and impersonal fiction are so artfully intermingled that they defy disentangling. Is it a dead end, or one of the new mansions in James’s House of Fiction? An interesting dead end, in my view, but one should never underestimate novelists’ ingenuity in escaping the traps they set themselves. Like the magician, their next trick is always impossible.

  FN

  J. M. Coetzee (John Maxwell Coetzee)

  MRT

  Summertime

  Biog

  D. Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993)

  POSTSCRIPT

  277. Bret Easton Ellis 1964–

  I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of non-fiction as I could in any of my novels.

  As novelists insert versions of themselves and the events of their lives more and more into the pages of their fiction, the boundaries between truth and make-believe, fiction and biography, blur. No writer has taken the blur of autre-biography to a blurrier extreme than Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park (2005) and its successor, Imperial Bedrooms (2010). Lunar Park is supposedly named after the place where the main action happens. There is – I’ve checked – no town of that name in New York State, any more than there is a Stepford in Connecticut, or an Ambridge in Borsetshire. The hero-narrator of Lunar Park is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’: a real person of that same name wrote the novel set in the fictional place. In a long authorial preface to Lunar Park, Bret (let’s say ‘Bret’) confesses to gargantuan excess after the runaway success of his precociously early super-sellers, Less than Zero and American Psycho, had shot him to bestsellerdom, millionairedom and the ranks of front-page celebrity as the brattiest leader of fiction’s brat-pack.

  So far, so true. The young ‘Bret’ embarks on a bender of conspicuous consumption, fashion trashing, and self-indulgence:

  I was doing Ray-Ban ads at twenty-two. I was posing for the covers of English magazines on a tennis court, on a throne, on the deck of my condo in a purple robe. I threw lavish catered parties – sometimes complete with strippers – in my condo on a whim (‘Because it’s Thursday!’ one invitation read). I crashed a borrowed Ferrari in Southampton and its owner just smiled (for some reason I was naked). I attended three fairly exclusive orgies … I dined at the White House in the summer of 1986, the guest of Jeb and George W. Bush, both of whom were fans.

  The Bushes are real (too real for some) but I doubt that they were ever fans of Less than Zero – even in the hot days of their youth. And if the Bush boys were fans of Ellis’s ‘black candy’, it was very wise to keep it secret from the religious right, which voted one brother into presidency and the other into governorship of the conservative state of Florida.

  Briefly for ‘Bret’, as chronicled in Lunar Park, it was ‘top of the world, ma!’ But, inevitably, under the glare and temptations of celebrity, he took to heroin, cocaine and vile sexual practices and ended up lying in a squalid hotel bedroom for seven days ‘watching porn DVDs with the sound off and snorting maybe 40 bags of heroin, a blue plastic bucket that I vomited in continually by my bed’. His descent to the blue bucket was, ‘Bret’ divulges, fuelled by the death in August 1992 of his father, Robert Martin Ellis, a couple of months after the publication of American Psycho. The portrait of Ellis Sr offered in Lunar Park is one that most sons would keep in the attic. He was a real-estate crook, and ‘careless, abusive, alcoholic, vain, angry, paranoid’. Chapter and verse is supplied for these paternal shortcomings. Bret’s dad was, apparently, the inspiration for Patrick Bateman, the sociopath hero of American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Mr Ellis Sr’s dead body ‘was found naked by the 22-year-old girlfriend on the bathroom floor of his empty house in Newport Beach’. He left, among many squandered millions, a wardrobe of over-sized Armani suits. When ‘Bret’ (who, like Bateman, is partial to Armani) took the clothes to the tailor to be altered, he recounts: ‘I was revolted to discover that most of the inseams in the crotch were stained with blood, which we later found out was the result of a botched penile implant he underwent in Minneapolis.’

  Robert Martin Ellis was, so to speak, real. He was, I have read, a realtor. He did indeed die in August 1992 and Lunar Park is dedicated to his memory. Whether it was with a surgically enhanced penis that he went to the crematorium fire, or the unsullied member with which he engendered young Bret, literary history may never know. ‘Bret Easton Ellis’ – he of the novel – suspects that Robby, his love child by the woman who later became his wife, Jayne Dennis, was engendered by Keanu Reeves, ‘who had been a friend of
mine when he was initially cast in Less than Zero, [before being] replaced by Andrew McCarthy’. So suspicious was ‘Bret’ of the actor that he launched a paternity case in which his lawyer asserted in court that Dennis’s child ‘bears a striking resemblance to a certain Mr Keanu Reeves’. Litigation was subsequently dropped, ‘Bret’ and Dennis were reconciled, married, and went to live in Lunar Park with Robby and a daughter born in wedlock. Reeves is, so to speak, real – although, as one reads Lunar Park, the idea of what is or isn’t real gets as hard to hold as a wet bar of soap. The real Reeves enjoys, one understands, cordial relations with the real Ellis. Before becoming a superstar Reeves was, initially, cast as the lead in Less than Zero and replaced by the equally real Andrew McCarthy. Jayne Dennis (although she had a website around the time of Lunar Park’s publication) is not real; nor is the dubiously sired Robby Ellis. They are figments of the fictional Lunar Park. Ellis is not married and has no child. In August 2009 he told the New York Times that he was bisexual, and that his best friend and lover for six years, Michael Wade Kaplan, had died in January 2004, aged thirty. That is not the history of ‘Bret’ in Lunar Park.