My Life, in Their Words

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The day In The Line of Fire arrived in bookshops, I was reading The Book of Marco Polo, Wherein is Recounted the Wonders of the World. On the surface, Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, might seem to have little in common with an itinerant 13th century Venetian merchant.

However, Marco Polo's book, commonly referred to as The Travels, became a huge bestseller across Europe just after its publication; the General's memoirs shot to number 12 on the Amazon.com charts the week it was published (it's at number 19 today). Polo's Travels were affectionately referred to as Il Milione, or the book of the million lies""his readers regarded his adventures as the product of an over-imaginative mind. Musharraf's memoirs may not have yielded a million lies just yet, but the General has had to backtrack on many claims, such as the one that the CIA paid the government of Pakistan "prize money" for turning over terrorists to the US agency. Former Indian Prime Minister A B Vajpayee contradicted Musharraf's version of why the Agra summit failed; Pakistan premier Nawaz Sharif has said that contrary to Musharraf's claims, he did not know about the Kargil operation. India has flatly disputed Musharraf's version of the events that led to the Kargil war.

In one key respect""future sales""Musharraf's memoirs might differ from Marco Polo's Milione. Memoirs written by statesmen, corporate CEOs, presidents and prime ministers and other celebrities do extremely well, for a short time. Ariel Sharon's Warrior was a bestseller for weeks, but is now at 228,921 in the Amazon rankings; Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village sold out on its release and is now at 344,938; Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and Colin Powell's My American Journey are doing slightly better at 33,035 and 30,285 respectively. A rare exception is Bill Clinton's My Life, still doing well at 3,601.

Polo's Travels, conversely, has sold briskly down the ages. It is unlikely that Musharraf's memoirs will last in quite the same way, even though he shares a last similarity with Marco Polo""they both had ghostwriters. Three years after Marco Polo returned from his travels, he fought against Genoa and was captured. His companion in Genoese prison was Rustichello of Pisa, a writer who had reworked the Arthurian fables. Modern scholars sometimes doubt Polo's version of his travels""with a few even asking whether Marco Polo ever made it to the court of Kublai Khan""because Rustichello was a natural scribe, but also a natural embellisher. He had none of the scruples of the modern-day ghostwriter, whose job is to write the author's story as the author would like to have written it.

Musharraf's "ghostwriter", identified more stiffly as a collaborator by Knopf in an attempt to make readers feel that they're getting the General's own, authentic voice, is widely rumoured to be Pakistani journalist Humayun Gauhar. (As several columnists have commented, if this is true, then Gauhar is merely carrying on the family tradition""his father ghostwrote Ayub Khan's memoirs.)

Ghostwriters are not new to the Asian publishing market; they're the unseen hands behind many biographies, business hagiographies and coffee table books, ranging from the pedestrian to the excellent. But the bestseller status of Musharraf's memoir might mark a significant shift. Publisher's Weekly reports that a good professional ghostwriter receives between $30,000 and $100,000, in return for the hundreds of hours of taped interviews and archival work required by a job that combines the skills of diplomat and drudge. Some ghostwriters are near-celebrities, like Rick Stengel, now managing editor at Time, who collaborated on Mandela's autobiography; Robert Gottlieb, ex-New Yorker editor, who massaged Clinton's My Life into shape; Bill Novak, who co-wrote biographies for Nancy Reagan, Lee Iacocca and Oliver Stone; and David Chanoff, who worked on Ariel Sharon's autobiography.

There are unusual examples, such as H P Lovecraft, who ghostwrote a short story for Harry Houdini, and Andre Malraux, who ghostwrote Charles de Gaulle's biography. And there are controversies""many feel that John F Kennedy should not have won a Pultizer for Profiles of Courage, because of the considerable "assistance" the US president's book received from his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen.

In our time, though, publishing insiders admit that 50 per cent, if not more, of non-fiction bestsellers are produced with the help of a ghostwriter, a collaborator, or a co-author. For all its ability to outsource literary writers, India and Pakistan haven't cracked this segment of the market. Call the General the modern-day perpetrator of a milione lies if you will, forget the memoirs in a year once they begin the inevitable slide down the sales rankings, but remember that he did his bit to put an Asian ghostwriter on the map.

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