Comic with Tragic Flaws
Jeffrey Archer’s story.

July 25, 2001 8:40 a.m.

he fall of Jeffrey Archer, the best-selling multi-millionaire novelist, former candidate for Mayor of London, and member of the House of Lords, is not a tragedy because it is not about a hero — not even a hero with a tragic flaw. It is that rarest of well-made plays, the tragi-comedy, because Jeffrey Archer's life has been a collection of tragic flaws in search of hero status. And the curtain that descended on the third act at London's Old Bailey last Thursday left our anti-hero permanently blackballed from the ranks of honor — even if he manages to revive his career and fortune after his two-to-four years in prison.

It is doubtful if Jeffrey himself will see it that way when he recovers from the shock of his first terrible days in Belmarsh prison — the loss of his personal effects, the donning of prison garb, the covert kicks and blows from fellow-inmates, the endless ironic cries of "My Lord" from warders and prisoners alike. Jeffrey Archer does not lack courage, and he will find it within himself to cope with these humiliations. When he does so, however, the self-deception that has enabled him to bounce back from bankruptcy, accusations of dishonest share-dealing, tabloid tales of his adulteries, and the rest may well persuade him that he can turn this latest disaster into a best-selling novel and a springboard back to social acceptance.

Even the two trials — the first in 1986 in which he denied newspaper claims that had slept with a prostitute and collected large sums in libel damages, the second last week in which he was convicted of committing perjury on the earlier occasion — may now be transformed by his imagination into the tale of a noble-hearted hero who, confronted by his enemies with a past sexual indiscretion, told a politic lie and risked prison to save his wife's happiness. He might even make the hero of this future novel a president of the United States risking impeachment — Jeffrey's plots were always somewhat over the top.

Nick Garland of the Daily Telegraph captured this capacity for self-deception in a cartoon that showed Archer lying on a prison bed, smoking a pensive cigarette, and reciting in his mind the lines from Thurber's famous story: "Then, with that faint fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last..."

Jeffrey's genius was also his most tragic flaw: fantasizing. It was his mistake to take Oscar Wilde's epigram literally and to put that genius into his life rather than into his novels.

Mention of Oscar Wilde inevitably brings up the public reactions to Archer's disgrace. Most of them were the self-righteous and slightly gloating homilies always brought out on those occasions when someone is completely ruined and so incapable of protest or revenge. The BBC reporter, for instance, retailed the news that he had been taken off to prison in a van "with the other common criminals." It is not hard to imagine the thrill of savage pleasure with which these words were conceived — nor the thrills of satisfied envy they evoked from those who relish the thought of a millionaire, a former MP, a member of the House of Lords, a famous novelist, and a former deputy chairman of the Tory party being carted off in handcuffs. A different sort of crowd jeered at Oscar Wilde, as he waited in shackles on a railway platform after his conviction, but the vicious pleasure in another's wretchedness unites both crowds over the span of a century.

Did not Jeffrey, however, bring it on himself? Of course, he did. He was dishonest, untruthful, boastful, and in the end a liar, perjurer, and adulterer. But he was also kind, generous, energetic, loyal, and a good friend. After his bankruptcy in the early seventies (in which he himself was the victim of con men), he sat down purposively to write a best-seller, did so, paid off his debts, and never looked back — and never learned his lesson. He was lavishly reckless and recklessly lavish. He was lucky to escape prosecution for insider dealing; but he also raised vast sums for charity. He flattered the powerful at parties where the nosh was shepherd's pie and Krug (not only champagne but, significantly, the most expensive champagne); but unlike many other celebrities, he also loved meeting his readers and ordinary members of the Tory party and spent hours pressing the flesh. He sued a newspaper for suggesting that he had slept with a prostitute, but wrote a novel which recounted the episode in thin disguise.

Yet threaded through both his good and bad actions there is something curiously missing. It was as if he had every component of decency except a conscience, almost as if he was a new discovery in psychology — a psychopath without malice, thoroughly self-interested but otherwise good-natured. That is why his friends so often resorted to fictional models when discussing the mystery of his oddball personality.

He was the absurdly boastful Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows who composed a poem about himself that ran: "The Queen and her ladies in waiting/Sat at the window and sewed/ She said 'O who's that handsome man?'/They answered: "Mr. Toad.""

He was Felix Krull, Thoman Mann's confidence trickster disguised as a German princeling, who graciously smiled at a train attendant and reflected complacently that his "smile did more for the stability of the social order than a thousand conservative pamphlets."

He was Denry Machin in Arnold Bennett's The Card who made a fortune, married the girl he loved, and became Lord Mayor of his beloved native Stoke-on-Trent but who was associated with no great cause except "the great cause of cheering us all up."

He was Walter Mitty, inscrutable to the last. And he was all these things as the occasion demanded and without much concern for the requirements of truth and reality.

From the outside it often seemed that Jeffrey was not truly serious about anything, except getting into the limelight and staying there. Fame was the spur — it exploited and perverted all his other qualities. Yet in ruthlessly pursuing that fame he ruined very few people. Himself. Perhaps his wife. Maybe a mistress or two — but they were 21 and aware of his marital status. And, of course, the late Monica Coghlan, the prostitute whom he branded falsely as liar. Even there, however, Miss Coghlan declared her enmity first — she had set out to ruin him with a minor squalid truth.

As for the inner man in private moments away from the limelight, who knows but Jeffrey, God and . . . . Well, here is the disinterested testimony of another prostitute he once hired in London: "He thanked me afterwards . . . He seemed lonely and was very grateful. He just wanted some company and some pleasure."

But he also wanted to be a famous man and to host prime ministers on grand occasions — and so last week he began serving a four-year prison sentence.

This originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.