Frederick Forsyth - The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

ALSO BY FREDERICK FORSYTH

The Day of the Jackal

The Odessa File

The Dogs of War

The Shepherd

The Devils Alternative

No Comebacks

The Fourth Protocol

The Deceiver

The Fist of God

Icon

The Phantom of Manhattan

The Veteran

Avenger

The Afghan

The Cobra

The Kill List

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Copyright 2015 by Frederick Forsyth

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Forsyth, Frederick, date.

The outsider : my life in intrigue / Frederick Forsyth.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-40712-1

1. Forsyth, Frederick. 2. Novelists, English20th centuryBiography. I. Title.

PR6056.O699Z46 2015 2015015842

823'.914dc23

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

For my sons, Stuart and Shane, in the hopes that I was an OK dad

CONTENTS

PREFACE

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But Im getting ahead of myself.

During the course of my life, Ive barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian Civil War, and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau. The Stasi arrested me, the Israelis regaled me, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agentwell, her actions were a bit more intimate. And thats just for starters.

All of that I saw from the inside. But all that time, I was, nonetheless, an outsider.

To be honest, I never intended to be a writer at all. Long periods of solitude were first a circumstance, then a preference, and finally a necessity.

After all, writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, even more so. There are reasons for this.

The first is that a writer lives half his life inside his own head. In this tiny space, entire worlds are created or erased and probably both. People come into being, work, love, fight, die, and are replaced. Plots are devised, developed, amended, and come to fruition or are frustrated. It is a completely different world from the one outside the window. In children, daydreaming is rebuked; in a writer, it is indispensable.

The result is a need for long periods of peace and quiet, often in complete silence without even gentle music, and these require solitude as an absolute necessity, the first of the reasons behind our oddness.

When you think about it, with the abolition of lighthouse keepers, writing is the only job that has to be undertaken wholly alone. Other professions afford colleagues. The airline captain has his crew, the actor the rest of the cast, the soldier his mates, the office staffer his colleagues grouped around the watercooler. Only the writer closes the door, takes the phone off the hook, draws down the blinds, and withdraws into a private world alone. Man is a gregarious beast and has been since the hunter-gatherers. The hermit is unusual, odd, and sometimes weird.

You may occasionally see a writer out on the town: wining, dining, partying; being affable, sociable, even merry. Beware; this is only half of him. The other half is detached, watching, taking notes. That is the second reason for the oddnessthe compulsive detachment.

Behind his mask, the writer is always watching; he cannot help it. He observes, analyzes, takes mental notes, stores nuggets of the talk and behavior around him for later use. Actors do the same for the same reasonsfor later use. But the writer has only words to use, more rigorous than the film set or stage, with its colors, movements, gestures, facial expressions, props, and music.

The absolute need for extensive solitude and the permanent detachment from what Malraux called the human condition explain why a writer can never really enter in. Membership involves self-revelation, conformity, and obedience. But a writer must be a loner and thus always an outsider.

As a boy, I was obsessed by airplanes and just wanted to be a pilot. But even then, not one of an aircrew. I just wanted to fly single-seaters, which was probably a warning sign, had anyone noticed. But no one did.

Three factors contributed to my later appreciation of silence in an increasingly noisy world, and solitude where the modern world demands jostling crowds. For one thing, I was my parents firstborn and remained an only child; and they are always slightly different. My parents might have had more children, but the war intervened in 1939, and by the time it was over, it was, for my mother, too late.

So I grew into little boyhood largely alone. A boy alone in his playroom can invent his own games and ensure they are played by his rules and come to their desired conclusion. He becomes accustomed to winning, and on his own terms. The preference for solitude is beginning.

The second factor in my isolation was occasioned by the Second World War itself. My town of Ashford was very close to the coast and the English Channel. Just twenty-two miles across that water was Nazi-occupied France. For a while, the mighty Wehrmacht waited across that strip of gray water for the chance to cross, invade, conquer, and occupy. The bombers of the Luftwaffe droned overhead to raid London, or, fearing the waiting fighters of the Royal Air Force, to turn back and dump their loads anywhere onto Kent. Other raids sought to destroy the great Ashford railway junction just 500 yards from my familys home.

The result was that for most of the war, many of the children of Ashford were evacuated to foster homes far away. Apart from a brief departure during the summer of 1940, I spent the whole war in Ashford, and there was no one else to play with anyway. Not that I minded. This is no poor-little-me narrative. Silence and solitude became not my bane but my dear and lasting friends.

The third factor was the public school (meaning of course the private school) to which I was sent at thirteen. Nowadays Tonbridge School is a fine and humane academy, but back then it had a harsh reputation. The house to which I was allocated, Parkside, was the most brutal of all, its internal philosophy dedicated to bullying and the cane.

Faced with that, a boy has only three choices: to capitulate and become a fawning toady, to fight back, or to withdraw into some mental carapace like a turtle in a shell. You can survive, you just dont enjoy it. I survived.