This article was published in Scotland on Sunday on 17 September 1995.
Tom Sharpe, the master of gallows humour, has dropped another dollop of farce on his patient following, writes Rosemary Goring.
As the prison doors clanged shut behind him, Tom Sharpe remembered the advice his friends had offered: “For God’s sake, if you have to share a cell, get a murderer. Burglars are a dirty sort, rapists are horrible people, but murderers aren’t really criminals, and they wash.” He ended up sharing floor space with two killers, a car thief and an abductor, and seems rather to have enjoyed the experience. “If you’re going to be a writer, seeing the inside of prison is very interesting.”
It was one of several imprisonments he suffered in 1961 as the South African authorities deported him. At the time, he had been running a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg, but was also writing some anti-apartheid plays, which were performed in London. Word filtered back to South Africa — “That’s what brought the Special Branch breathing down my neck.” A trumped-up charge of lying was levelled against him by an Afrikaner Nationalist newspaper, he served a writ on them for libel, and within a few days he was ordered to leave the country.
Seething against the ludicrous face of apartheid, once back in England he wrote Riotous Assembly, a mordantly black satire lampooning the crass idiocy of the South African political system. It started as a serious book, “then the full force of apartheid began to come out. I didn’t know where I was going. So it became horribly, hysterically hilarious.” It set him up as one of the funniest writers Britain had seen in years, and since then he has produced a steady series of farces, his focus moving from South Africa to the drearily crumbling state of Britain.
Each book is emblazoned with the hallowed Sharpe motifs — sheer farce, fetishist sex (latex plays a big part), gallows humour and vicious twists of fate. It’s a distinctive blend of writing, and not to everyone’s taste. Roundly criticised in some quarters, he has raised a variety of indignant accusations, from chauvinism to pornography (“If anyone can get erotically excited by my books, they’re clean off their trolleys!”). Readers read on regardless. Sales in Britain soared, and his international fame, once translators had managed to conquer his pun-ridden language, rose to challenge home consumption. In Catalonia his books are used to teach schoolchildren English. One young woman approached him in Spain and said she was a great fan, and had been reading him since she was 12. “I hope not, I thought. Unless they’re getting a bowdlerised version.”
With favourites like Blott on the Landscape and Wilt under his belt, and other titles flooding out with no hint of declining inventive powers, he led the world to imagine it could rely on him for regular shots of hilarity. But after Wilt on High, the torrent stopped. The public waited, but there was not a word. The years ticked by, and still nothing. Sharpe, it appeared, had run dry. But at last, 10 years later, he has resurrected with a sequel to his hugely popular Porterhouse Blue, that burlesque on life behind the scenes at an eccentric Cambridge college, based on Sharpe’s own education there. Entitled Grantchester Grind, the sequel picks up the story from the death of the hated college Master and weaves a labyrinthine tale of power games and financial skulduggery, with the baleful new Master, Sir Skullion firmly at the heart of this sticky web.
So why the long silence? Tom Sharpe shrugs, “I don’t know,” and nibbles the end of his cigar. He gets irritated when people infer writer’s block — “I can’t stop writing. Now plot block, that’s another thing.”
An imposing man with a penetrating gaze, Sharpe is warmly hospitable. He shows no sign of pretension. As he talks, emerging now and again from behind a scarf of smoke, his face is that of a boy in the back row at school, alert to the possibility of a good joke, and while not exactly plotting mischief, more than happy to lend a hand once it’s under way. Ruddy cheeked with slick creamy hair and a mouth that relishes each anecdote before it’s even uttered, he lives with his American wife Nancy in a village close to Cambridge. It is a large, comfortable house, surrounded by lush gardens and jammed with books. Downstairs there is a friendly English bull terrier and two cats. In the attic, snug in a big hamper, lie four tiny kittens mewling and hissing. Their mother preens near the basket, looking for praise.
Simple domestic harmony is not what you’d expect for the author of such rumbustious, barbed tales. Nor is his background exactly what you’d picture. The son of a Unitarian minister from Northumberland and a South African mother — “I was an accident” — he had a severe Victorian upbringing: “You didn’t argue with father about anything.” As a boy Sharpe was allowed no comics except Film Fun. Instead he read the complete Waverley novels, devoured Hardy and Dostoevsky, and wanted, above all else, to be a poet. After a spell in the Marines he went to Cambridge, refusing to take English: “I knew damn well I could go on reading and I wanted to write and I didn’t want to have opinions of any sort pumped down my throat.” In the event, remarkably few opinions were passed on to him in any form. Taking anthropology with an eccentric called Fortune who rivals any of his fictional creations, he found himself dragged out to “do” the Grantchester Grind — a five-mile walk by the riverside — in lieu of formal tuition. Fortune would discuss “bus timetables, Plato, Palestine, anything except anthropology. He was as mad as a March hare.”
Granted another year’s study as recompense, Sharpe left with a third, an ingrained hatred of anthropology, and a bagful of ideas for later books.
Now part of the British comic canon, he rejects any idea of association with previous great comic novelists. Waugh, though a great stylist, “was a nasty piece of work”; he has nothing in common with him, he insists, nor with Wodehouse, whose only legacy to Sharpe is the caution he instils each time he finds himself about to tackle a simile. “How can you write a simile after Wodehouse? Every time I write ‘like’ I think, hang on Sharpe, that’s what you can’t do.” Firmly believing that no one is ever obliged to read a book, he writes to amuse himself. “If I don’t have fun with it, then I don’t publish.” He started Grantchester Grind years ago, but got no further than the third chapter. Quickly bored by his own writing and, one suspects, by most things, Sharpe put it to one side. Last year he picked it up again, took off to a small hotel in Spain where he can write in peace, and wrote it in six months and two drafts. The result is a savage indictment on the material world and the spiralling decay of morality and sense.
Sharpe, however, dislikes analysis of his works, largely because he doesn’t set out with any specific aim. “As far as I’m concerned, other writers have intentions. They know what they’re doing, and what they intend to say. I haven’t got a clue. E M Forster put it very well in Aspects of the Novel where he quotes an old lady as saying ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ And that’s exactly what I feel.”
Grantchester Grind, like his other novels, is a rich, thickly woven tale, Dickensian in its caricature, Machiavellian in its cavortings. The comedy is broad, sometimes uncomfortable, and the underlying mood is horribly bleak. Not for Sharpe a happy or sentimental ending. Life for him is a dark affair, ridiculous, cruel, often pointless. He is not religious, and there’s a great deal about the modern world that he dislikes. Melancholic by nature, he turns to writing to vent his discomfort. “My mother used to say, it’s better to laugh than to cry.” He sucks his cigar and narrows his eyes. “I have a black outlook, I can tell you.” And then he smiles a big smile that wipes out the gloom that has crept close, and we head off for lunch.
Photograph caption: Ripe as ever: Tom Sharpe in the greenhouse at his home near Cambridge, content at the publication of Grantchester Grind after a long pause since his last best-selling delivery of the bawdy humour that has upset some and delighted many.
Photograph: Kev Dutton