This article was first published in the Arts section of The Guardian on 26 April 1971.
Alex Hamilton interviews Tom Sharpe, whose first novel looks like taking the world by storm.
“I’m going to retire on you,” said Dick Odgers to Tom Sharpe. Odgers pumps the celluloid options for the Curtis Brown agency, and the property under review was Sharpe’s first novel Riotous Assembly. “For Chris’sakes tell me the truth,” said Sharpe. “I’ve got the builders in.” “Buy yourself a gold bidet,” said Odgers.
Sharpe loves it. Not so much the money, since in his youth he had access to plenty, but the talk. The sheer ham. He loves ham better than a lapsed Rabbi. If he’s to write the script and mill about among film folk, he wants to live out cliché upon cliché. He says he’s met some and they’re just beautiful to watch. “Take it down the middle,” they told him. His own idea exactly.
They asked him who he saw in the role of the terrible Konstabel Els, Kaffir killer and rapist, the police juggernaut who mows down 22 of his own men with an elephant gun and knocks out a Saracen car to boot, who’s proud to be hanging a bishop even though he can’t read the instructions on the ramshackle scaffold, a man with such nil moral sense you have to feel sorry for him. Sharpe replied, “Jack Palance – with a pre-frontal.”
Naturally since Vorster had Sharpe fired from his teaching post in Natal when he was Minister of Education, and deported when he was Minister of Justice, theres no hope, now that Vortser’s Premier, of shooting the film in the Republic, but Elliott Kastner’s men are searching Kenya and the Caribbean for a suitable site. Not, on the face of it, that they’ll need many black extras. All the blacks in Sharpe’s book are dead. What he wants to get over, he says, is the South African mentality, where blacks are merely a frieze, ghosts etched on the rim of the skull.
Take it down the middle as they say at the slaughterhouses. For Sharpe, after 10 years in South Africa, there was no other way to write it without making himself ill. The result is a murderous farce. Ridicule kills and he wrote it to screw them all, with some [unreadable] about the Afrikaners. He’s 43, he happily teaches history at Cambridge Tech, rather less happily writes dour and solemn plays which, not to put too fine a point on it, are no good. It pains him even to talk about South Africa – but when he does he goes off like a Catherine Wheel and his book, not to put too fine a point on it, is bloody funny.
It’s all so recent that he still has builders and the bidets and carpets haven’t arrived yet. Through the hole in the glazed window by the front door of his house in Cambridgeshire you can see cleared away the debris in the back garden. He calls the stunted bushes which divide him from his neighbours sanitary condom but as a rule he says he doesn’t notice surroundings. However he did notice that his new wife Nancy notices: his previous home was a shambles, and some vestigial memory of a previous marriage which ended 16 years ago in South Africa reminded him that a roof and food were minimum offerings so he wrote the book. Nancy was away three weeks in South Carolina, where she taught school, and in that time the comic seam burst right down the middle. Some epithalamium.
On the aesthetic plane (to demonetize a phrase) the book was kicked off by the letter written by the aunt of one of his friends to her neighbour the Kommandant of a copshop. She couldn’t stand the screams, but there was no advantage in being rude, so she wrote, “Dear Mr Kommandant, I’m sorry to raise the point but I’m an old woman. I live next door to your police station, and every afternoon I have a little nap. Quite frankly I can’t get to sleep because of the noise issuing from your premises. Yours etc… PS And the same at night.” Very nice letter. Naturally the Kommandant would ensure her feelings in future would be spared. Sharpe pondered on from her to the weird sentimental relationships existing between such as the Kommandant and the lunatic old English dames, who marched with British legions from Caractacus to Kabul and now live out crazy fantasies in the shadows. The Boers, after all, won the Boer War.
Just such a personal nexus is the pivot of the book. Between lunatics the idiot Kommandant works towards his private solution, a change of heart – a high-class transplant. He has a real feeling for her kind; Sharpe hopes that people will realise the pathos in the bedlam of the story. “It’s precise and real that if you ring the law and say: ‘I’ve just shot a Kaffir,’ they’ll say, ‘We’ll be round in 40 minutes and the body will be in the house.’” At least they used to; today the hat will suffice to prove invasion of privacy, even if the head man in the garden whose hat is in the kitchen is your own Zulu cook.
Tom Sharpe is the son of a South African mother and an English Unitarian minister. From his mother he got money, from his father fascism. Fascism?! Well, he says, to be accurate, nazism. Nazism??!! Shall I, shan’t I, he wonders. All right, he’ll tell the whole sob story. His father had been a Socialist, but come the Russian Revolution he’d switched. He was a man of immense sensibility but nervy as hell and by 1932 he’d swung right through and become a raving Nazi. He belonged to the Right Club, to the British Array, to the British Union of Fascists, to Arnold Leese’s Imperial Union of Fascists, to the Anglo-German Club, the Nordic Club, the lot.
So Tom was brought up on Platonism and Carlyle gone rampantly mad. In 1936 he had a dose of Germany. His mother would ask in the evenings, “Where are you going?” and his father would reply, ‘I must see Joyce.” Tom would speculate that this girl Joyce. Came the war and it was William Joyce, broadcasting from Zeesen. Tom would go down to the beach and look at the barbed wire and think of rowing over to the good guys on the other side. There he was at Lancing wearing a Gott Mit Uns belt and wishing he were in the SS. Trevor Huddleston and Evelyn Waugh had preceded him at Lancing, where they thought well of the former, he was a bishop. Waugh they didn’t talk about, he was a writer. But a master called Ape introduced Tom to Decline and Fall. “Kind of eccentric.”
The Belsen files shattered him. He did not have a breakdown because, he thinks, he’s fairly tough-minded, but it was a near thing. He went in the Marines and he still has the build. The Marines declassed him and when he got to Cambridge he loathed it. When he reached South Africa where his grandfather had built large chunks of Johannesburg including the Rand Club and the Carlton, it turned out his Cambridge friends were all millionaires. Kidney-shaped swimming pools and waiters with white gloves and sashes. Sharpe would arrive at the club by bus and go home in some girl’s Cadillac. He wanted to write like Thomas Mann or perhaps Camus but the most significant cultural fact about South Africa, he feels, is that Dornford Yates died in Umtali. And furthermore the model for Berry died drunk in Nottingham Row in Maritzburg.
Daylight was nastier because bugger the cultural facts, men are dying. He was in the Non-European Affairs Department. He and three girls took food parcels to coloured TB incurables, the cases written off by the hospitals. In his innocence he toddled off to Vrededorp, Newclare and Sophiatown. It was, he says, just ghastly bloody murder, people coughing their lungs out in these overcrowded conditions.
And then endless cases like Johnny Abrahams, and Indian in Ferreirastown. Johnny was thrilled – he’d cacked for a job. What job? Waiter. But Johnny was terminal. What do you do? asks Sharpe. Warn your friends off the restaurant, or slit his throat?
Then, being a stunning Cantab, Sharpe was made secretary to Wilhelm Johannes Petrus Carr, boss of NEAD. This move upset Grades 24 to 16, who weren’t Cantabs. “OK the whole crowd of you,” said Carr. “Each in turn you’re secretary, and Sharpe does your job.” This took him to all the locations, from Marorke to Orlando, sitting in the masters’ desks, a real grand tour of chucking people out of their homes. If they were out of work they were ordered back to their homelands. The catch was that they’d never been to their homelands. A bloke might be Zulu on his pass in Jo’burg and know nothing about Zululand. It wasn’t deporting, it was banishing.
Before he was deported himself, Sharpe had ten years of this, also of teaching, or running a photographic studio, and writing plays. Only one was ever produced and he never saw it because The South Africa was only put on in England. It was based on an encounter between an Afrikaans culture hero and Chief Luthuli in Pretoria, and from then on he had the Special Branch breathing down his neck.
He has today an unframed photograph of Luthuli on his bookshelf in Cambridge. Luthuli was, says Sharpe, a lousy farmer and a rotten accountant, but he had greatness in him and he often rode pillion on Sharpe’s motorbike. Luthuli’s obiter dicta stuck in Sharpe’s mind. Such as “The spears would have been out out long long had it not been for the African women.” Most have a white son. “Not only that,” adds Sharpe, but nesting on plump black thighs in childhood and coming up against uptight white women in maturity puts not a little strain on the immorality laws.
As Verwoerd himself said when white women (Nationalist Women’s Institute) agitated for a castration of whites who transgressed, it was impractical. It would decimate the police force. All very baffling to the English mind which, registering the tails on the women in the Excelsior case, wonders how anyone could.
In America Sharpe is persona non grata on the grounds of communism. But he has no more use for isms of any sort, he takes it all down the middle. That, he says, was because he had a girl friend who knew Robert Kennedy and Muskie got onto it. That was a mere absurdity while the South African score is an existential absurdity. Take for example the fact that the white Nats can’t see there’s a black nationalism south of the Limpopo which has no respect whatever for Zimbabwe characters. Or Nkrumah. Or Kaunda. Nyerere perhaps, but the view from the south is that the rest hang out in trees.
The year after Sharpeville was a bad year for photographic studios, and Sharpe was teaching part-time at Maritzburg Tech. Vorster busted him out of that over his play, though he’d kept his nose clean and never went nearer to politics than drawing an analogy between Eichmann and what might happen to a Nat who in for genocide. Then Die Nataler accused him of writing knocking articles in the British press. Not an ounce of actuality in that and Sharpe sued for libel, £10,000. The editor came up and actually wept, begging Sharpe to lay off, he would wreck his career. “What do you think you’ve done to mine?” asked Sharpe.
Next thing was a writ, giving him ten days to deport himself. On the ninth, he went to the courts, asking why. Lost, of course. Another writ, another ten days. On the ninth, he went to the appeal court. Lost, after a fortnight. Another writ giving him ten days. On the midnight of the ninth there was a knock on the door. Special Branch:
“I don’t know what you’re playing at. I don’t understand you. But you can go back to bed and I’ll arrest you tomorrow.” “Tomorrow is Dingaan’s Day,” said Sharpe, “who wants to get up early on a holiday?” The guys were late at the rendezvous, so Sharpe complained of victimisation to the regular police. The two forces loathe one another he says, and the specials were in. The story gets weirder all the way.
One more detail. A cell in Port Elizabeth. Sharpe at his grub, passed by a squad with Stens. The sergeant says, “You fockink Engelsmann, get to England and tell you bleddy lies about us.” Sharpe’s Afrikaner guard, so young he can’t even carry a pistol, apologises for it. A face, says Sharpe, from the back veldt, you’d think he was just a swine, an ignorant Konstabel Els. How can you judge them? He asks. He just goes looping round the question. Even while he thought that, he fiddled with the drawer in the desk, and there’s a loaded .38 sitting there. Pathetic.
I said to Sharpe, “You’re stuffed with farce. You’re farce. Don’t tell me. Write some more.” Yes, he says, he might do that, now that he knows what happens when you take it down the middle.