This article appeared in the Arts section of The Daily Telegraph on 24 April 1992.
THE ROBERT CHALMERS INTERVIEW
Comic novelist Tom Sharpe, once prolific and hugely successful, has published nothing for eight years. Has his inspiration dried up, or has he merely run out of his favourite pens?
TOM SHARPE’S was an act that looked as though it would go on for ever. Ten years ago, his publisher acclaimed the author of Porterhouse Blue, Wilt and Blott on the Landscape as a comic genius. He was hoping, he said, for “a Sharpe a year till the crack of doom”. As it turned out, however, Sharpe’s prolific output was to be exhausted this side of Armageddon. A remarkably fertile spell which produced 11 books in 13 years ended in 1984 with Wilt on High. Since then, Sharpe has published nothing at all.
On the train to Cambridge, grotesque images from Sharpe’s books, which I had read in chronological order the previous week, flashed through my mind. Ostriches force-fed with lignite hovered over Natal. Inflatable women paralysed a city. Bull terriers, high on LSD, roamed Croydon. Dominating everything, however, was the image of the condom: as crucial a motif in Sharpe’s writing as the hand-gun in Raymond Chandler, the billet-doux in Barbara Cartland or the steam locomotive in the Rev. W. Awdry.
The paperback covers — typically depicting muscular harridans ravaging bookish and undernourished men — convey the essence of Sharpe’s rude oeuvre. “If getting a taxidermist to stuff your grandfather, and blowing up your neighbour’s house by pumping gas up his lavatory pan are your taste in jokes, Sharpe is your man,” The Sunday Telegraph sneered in 1978.
It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to discover that the writer once described as a “Wodehouse on acid” is a donnish, quietly spoken, elderly man who is keen on roses. Strolling down his garden path, Sharpe looks capable of no more subversive activity than the drilling of irregular verbs in a minor public school.
In the absence of literary commitments, Sharpe’s house, which he shares with his wife and daughters, offers other, often ample distractions. Should he tire of his library, his collection of vintage typewriters, or his photographic dark-room, there are always the asparagus beds, the columbine and the rose bushes. At 64, his grey-haired, paunchy figure does not look out of place among the accoutrements of retirement. But, as Sharpe admits, his professional inactivity is not the result of a decision to retire gracefully.
“I won’t pretend that I am not bothered by it, because I am,” he says. “I sit down to write most days. I have chapter after chapter stored on the computer.”
Sharpe has a downstairs office crammed with technology, but prefers to write in a shed at the end of his garden. Like many writers, he clings to ritualistic working methods. He will only use medium-ribbed Platignum pens: the cheap (and long unobtainable) model popular with schoolchildren in the Sixties. Sharpe has a dwindling stock of these, which he struggles to replenish with gifts from friends. With them, he writes longhand into notebooks; the resulting text is then laboriously typed out in the shed, and finally digitally scanned into his Apple Macintosh. And there, for the past few years, it has stayed.
“I can churn out words as well as the next man,” he says. “The problem is that, when I write like that, I don’t usually like the result. The art of comedy, rather like music, is instinctive. It doesn’t spring from logic. So all you can do is wait and see if it starts rolling and, if it does, hang on to its tail.”
Sharpe offers various explanations for his loss of momentum. He gave up smoking after a heart attack five years ago; nicotine, he believes, has a stimulant effect on the brain. He describes his heart attack, suffered live on Spanish television (“I’ve got it on tape upstairs — like to see it?”) with characteristic gallows humour. “When the presenter asked why I didn’t stop the recording, I told her: ‘Well, if I’m having a heart attack, at least I’ll have the consolation of knowing that, when my daughters get fed up of their husbands, they’ll be able to say: Let’s watch the video of daddy dying again, shall we?’”
Sharpe then expressed the view that Britain has become “too serious to be funny”; a surprising claim when you consider that his first two books, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, were satires on apartheid. In 1969, when Tom Sharpe began to write novels, he was a 41-year-old history lecturer at a Cambridge technical college. He had spent the Fifties in South Africa, as a social worker, photographer and amateur dramatist, eventually being deported when one of his plays failed to meet with the authorities’ approval.
“South Africa was easy to write about,” Sharpe says, “because it was a mad society; never mind how many Telegraph readers thought it was all wonderful. It was just mind-blowing to any fair-minded person. But remember that I didn’t write the novels out there. It was only when I got back here, years later, that I was able to re-invent the country in my own mind.”
“South Africa made me angry,” Sharpe continues, “but what has happened in Britain has made me so furious that I can’t even write about it. There are things that have happened over the last 10 years; er no, not, 10 . . .” I wait while Sharpe, a convert to the economics of Thatcherism but not to the accompanying moral climate, searches in vain for another way of saying 13.
“It is the corruption,” he went on, “that is what I really cannot stomach. There was no way, when I was young, that a man sent to prison would not be forced by social pressure to resign from clubs and committees. No way that an innocent man could be sent to prison for 16 years and beaten up as a sex offender, as that poor bastard was recently.”
Sharpe is shouting now, his complexion assuming a colour frighteningly close to that of the level indicator on the tape recorder, which is signalling danger. He is the only man I have met who could really justify the use of the verb “to fume”.
“No way,” Sharpe pursues, “that a generation should come to accept that sleeping rough is a natural thing. Or teenage prostitutes should walk around Charing Cross soliciting for drug money. Dear Christ. This is something else I get very heated about, as you can see. These are things that I don’t find even remotely funny. The other day a journalist called me bilious. Well that’s not a bad way of putting it. A better way would have been ‘bloody outraged’.”
As Sharpe begins to talk about his past, what amazes you is not that he should have hit a sticky patch, but that he should ever have written comedy at all. His father, a Unitarian vicar, was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and a friend of William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw. Sharpe recalls how, during the war, his family was obliged to move frequently round the country, “otherwise father would have been arrested and interned in the Isle of Man. So long as you moved, then they felt you couldn’t influence people.”
At school, Sharpe says, he argued the case for Hitler, “though it seems completely mad to me now. I wore a German belt, for God’s sake. But my father never lived to see the death camps. He died in 1944, with all of his mistaken Platonic theories intact. I was the one who lived to see the film of Buchenwald and Belsen. It was appalling.”
Ever since he was a student at Cambridge, Sharpe says, he has been unable to attend church, because of panic attacks brought on by an irrational fear that he might start shouting obscenities.
Sharpe refused to talk in detail about what has been filling his notebooks over the past eight years. He may write another money-spinning sequel to Wilt. He has not discounted completing another sequel, Porterhouse Black, a project which he was rumoured to have abandoned two years ago. “I’m not starving,” Sharpe says, “and I’m not greedy. If I was, I’d probably be writing like mad.”
Was it possible that he had secretly set off on an altogether different, perhaps more serious, literary tack? “Where did you get that idea?” Sharpe snapped, with an abruptness that led me to think (possibly wrongly) that I might be on to something. “I didn’t wish to be rude,” he added, “but you’re the only person who’s ever said it, so I was wondering how you got there.”
At the end of an afternoon which had not been without its awkward moments, Sharpe, in a moment of unexpected generosity, presented me with two of his antique typewriters. “These are not a bribe,” he said, sucking on his pipe. “Write what you like.” He then offered me a tape of his candid revelations on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair — the journalistic equivalent of a man carrying his own cross.
Sharpe started smoking again a fortnight ago; welcome news to his frustrated readers, if not his cardiovascular systems. It seems unlikely that we have heard the last from Tom Sharpe, an obsessive, likeable malcontent who for my money is considerably better company than most of his books. In the meantime his admirers can do little other than pray or cross their fingers. Readers who are not of a religious or superstitious nature, Sharpe points out, might prefer to send him Platignum pens. Medium.
Photo caption:
Sharpe focus: in the absence of literary commitments, the author enjoys photography and other hobbies
Picture: DAVID MODELL