This letter from Tom Sharpe appeared in The Sunday Times on 11 January 1981. It was a response to Peter Ackroyd’s scathing review of Ancestral Vices, published the week before.
IN Mr Peter Ackroyd’s review of my novel, Ancestral Vices (The Arts, January 4), he makes a number of statements so far at variance with the activities described in it that I must suppose that he had not read the novel at all closely before putting pen to paper. They are as follows.
1. “When a novelist decides to write about the sexual molestation and murder of dwarfs, one assumes he has some good reason for doing so.”
There is no murder of anyone in Ancestral Vices. In so far as sexual molestation takes place it is done by an honourable woman seeking to redress the injustice of the law.
2. “But Tom Sharpe uses the subject simply to reinforce his own evident distaste for sex: only masturbation and bestiality emerge from Ancestral Vices without, as it were, having the bloom rubbed off them.”
Mr Ackroyd’s opinion of my taste or distaste for sex can hardly be founded on any activity described in Ancestral Vices. The word “bestiality” occurs; the activity does not. Masturbation is mentioned twice but is never realised.
3. “Yapp spends most of his time entangled with dwarfs and dead animals.”
My character, Walden Yapp, finds a dead dwarf in the boot of his car and puts the body in a river. The only dead animal mentioned is a roast pig. All other animals are healthy and friendly and he never touches or fears them. They consist of a bored dog and a cheerful rabbit.
4. “I cannot remember a Sharpe novel where a dildo has not loomed.”
Mr Ackroyd has evidently not read Riotous Assembly, Indecent Exposure, Porterhouse Blue, Blott on the Landscape, The Great Pursuit, The Wilt Alternative. The only novels in which I have mentioned dildos are Wilt and The Throwback.
5. “Sharpe spends most of his time, as he says of one of his characters ‘in a trance of prurient curiosity’.”
Mr Ackroyd’s omniscience is assumed. My wife can testify to the fact that I spend my mornings writing, my afternoons weeding and digging in the garden, my evenings talking to her or with the children and listening to music and my nights sleeping in a double bed with her to, I hope, our mutual happiness.
Tom Sharpe
Bridport
Caption: Sharpe: afternoon gardening