Contemporary Authors interviewed Tom Sharpe by telephone on 31 December 1985, at his home in Cambridge. It was first published in Contemporary Authors, vol. 122 (Detroit: Gale, 1989), pp. 417–421, and reprinted in Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 85 (Gale, 2000).
CA: Before the novels, you wrote plays, one of which caused you to be deported from South Africa. Did you begin writing as an expression of political concern?
SHARPE: I wouldn’t say that, no. I’ve written ever since I can remember, practically. But in South Africa I was writing plays. The first ones had nothing to do with politics but the racialism out there was so evil, well yes, the later ones dealt with the politics of apartheid. Of course it was impossible to have the plays put on out there because of the censorship. And yes, I was deported because I was writing about the cruel stupidity of apartheid.
CA: You had been a social worker in what was later called Soweto, a teacher in Natal, and then a professional photographer in Pietermaritzburg. Had you gone to South Africa with the idea of staying there?
SHARPE: I went out when I finished my course at Cambridge. I don’t think I had any specific plans to stay, but my grandfather had emigrated from England in the nineteenth century and my mother’s family were all out there from before the Boer War. I had visited the country for a year as a child and I went out again in 1951 without any political ideas about the regime at all. Apartheid was not a word most people had ever heard of outside South Africa at that time, but, because I worked in the black townships, I saw the revolting underbelly of white South Africa from the word go. They were just beginning to implement apartheid then. There had always been a color bar but it wasn’t institutionalized.
When the Afrikaner Nationalist government came to power in 1948, they began to implement the quite deliberate and legalized racist policy of apartheid – very different in form from the racism that had existed previously. I’m not saying the policies in the other colonial territories of Africa were in any way good – only that apartheid was much more systematic and had been enforced by Acts of Parliament. I woke up to this when I went to work in Sophiatown and then Soweto. I was a social worker and I found that my job was to collect black patients who were dying to TB and had been declared incurable by the doctors in the hospital, and take them home to their families. Then I had to visit them every week to see if they were still alive and take meager food parcels to them. What this meant was that they were infecting their relatives and the whole thing was genocide by disease and semi-starvation. I found the work so nauseating that I nearly cracked up and had to get the hell out of it after six months and went to Natal to teach and to use the long holidays in which to write.
CA: Was the earlier playwriting experience helpful in specific ways when you began to write novels?
SHARPE: I don’t know. I suppose one would have to analyze the structure of the novels. In those days, back in the fifties, plays had three acts – the traditional form. I think I still tend to think in terms of three acts in my books. But my plays weren’t in the least funny. They were deadly serious, and it came as a complete shock to me when I wrote Riotous Assembly in 1969 after I was back in England and it came out in a comic or hysterically satirical form. It was an almost involuntary reaction to the horrors I had seen the police commit, like shooting people for no reason other than that they were black.
It was the same in the prisons I was put in when I was deported. The warders were inhuman. Not to whites in those days, but to blacks. Torture was a standard procedure with people suspected of even petty crimes like theft or being out after the curfew without a pass. Can you imagine a country with a curfew for people with a different skin color and where farmers could hire black convicts from the local prisons for a few cents a day? And those blacks had been sent to jail for crimes whites couldn’t commit because the law was different for them. No white man was ever hanged for murdering a black all the ten years I was out there. Blacks were hanged for rape or carrying a weapon during a burglary, any number of crimes. And the whites claimed they were defending Western Civilization. Some civilization.
CA: What kind of writing schedule do you keep? Do you work every day?
SHARPE: Yes. It’s pure self-indulgence on my part because if you like writing, you don’t find it a chore. But there’s writing and “writing.” I think it was Truman Capote who said – and I have an idea he was talking about [Norman] Mailer – “That’s not writing; that’s typing.” That’s his version of Mailer, whether it’s correct or not. But there’s a lot of truth in that distinction between “writing” and “typing.” To get to the “writing” one has to do a hell of a lot of “typing.” It’s not enough to put words on a page . . . on pages, but you have to do it, and there comes a point when you know you’re really writing: it’s when you feel right about what is coming out on the page. Well, if you like writing – and I do or I wouldn’t have stuck at it for twenty years without producing anything anybody wanted to publish – you have to get through a hell of a lot of typing. So I do. I just get up in the morning and go to my hut in the garden and hit the keys. That’s the only way I can find out what I’m thinking. You learn to do something by doing it. Talking and theorizing may make an excellent critic but not a proper writer.
CA: You do a lot of revision, then?
SHARPE: Oh, yes. Heavens above, yes. I also throw away half a book if it doesn’t seem right to me, or to my wife. She’s my best editor. I can, and have, reached page 165 on a novel and she hasn’t liked it, so it’s gone in the wastebasket. I remember having written twenty-five versions, all completely different, of the first chapter of Indecent Exposure. With Wilt on High I wrote 400,000 words to get the final 80,000 in the form I wanted them. In any case a comic or satirical novel requires a logical plot. Cause and effect must be seen to apply or you lose the reader. My books may seem to deal in mayhem but beneath it there has to be a carefully constructed plot if the comic elements are to be sustained.
CA: Your prose sometimes seems to rush along unstoppable, especially when many things are about to happen at once. Is that an effect that you work quite deliberately at, or does it just come out that way?
SHARPE: With some books it happens almost automatically and sometimes it works well. It depends on the nature of the book. And the characters. I wouldn’t have said that Porterhouse Blue or The Great Pursuit were books in which the action rushed along. In many ways the characters a novelist creates determine the pace of the action. If one were writing to formula this wouldn’t be so but, although I’ve said I do a great deal of work on the plot, this often occurs when I am well into a book and I find the characters – the central character in particular – acting in ways I hadn’t foreseen.
How can I explain this? Before I start a book, I fill large notebooks with ideas and plot situations so that I feel some confidence that I know what I am going to write about, but – and this is the vital part – once I am actually working on the book itself, I never refer back to those notes. The story follows a different course, one dictated by the actions and reactions of the characters, the situations they find themselves in, and the whole mood of the book. A second factor is something I call the tone of the sentences which come out. Perhaps one should call this “style.” To borrow a saying: “The style is the book.” The style or the tone of the sentences has to be right. If I don’t hear the right tone or like the style in which I am writing, I stop and start again.
CA: Is there a chance that Random House will do the two South African novels as part of the Vintage Books editions they’re doing of your works?
SHARPE: I don’t know. The reason they haven’t is, as I understand it, that they are afraid Americans would misinterpret the satire and take the books literally as racist. Or that black Americans would be violently offended by them. My answer to that argument is that they must have an exceedingly low opinion of American readers’ intelligence. If I were black and in America, I’d find that downright insulting. American filmmakers didn’t act like that when Chaplin made “The Great Dictator” and poured comic scorn on Hitler’s horrific anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws and Nazi atrocities, so I simply don’t understand why they don’t publish Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure.
And if they say I don’t portray black South Africans in a sympathetic or heroic light, my answer is that I was delineating white attitudes – solely white attitudes, not black ones; I must emphasize that fact – as accurately as I could, and white consciousness didn’t acknowledge the existence of blacks as people, even if they were the most distinguished and learned people. Chief Albert Luthuli, who won the Noble Peace Prize, was a close friend of mine, for goodness’ sake, and he was probably the greatest man I’ve ever met. The Nationalists saw black South Africans as objects, as subhumans, and as such it was, and remains, perfectly respectable to shoot them, kill them, kick them around and treat them like . . . well, objects.
It’s exactly like the Nazis with the Jewish population of Europe. I remember arguing with a police captain outside the Drill Hall in Johannesburg where they were holding the Treason Trial in 1956 and I said to him, “If you feel that way, I don’t understand why you don’t gas all the blacks like Hitler did with the Jews.” And his unbelievable reply: “That’s exactly what I’d do if I had the chance – gas the bastards – but there are too many of them.” That swine could conceive another Holocaust without a qualm. And that was only one incident. Well, no one suggests that books portraying the Holocaust as a crime against humanity ought not to be published in America. So I am really baffled when I write books about white crimes against humanity in South Africa, and the shutter comes down. I am forced to assume that some sort of racialist censorship is being applied to those books in America. Nowhere else. They are published in translation in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Brazil.
CA: One of the great pleasures in reading your books, for me at least, is finding the allusions to other writers. Were there any who actually inspired your own urge to write?
SHARPE: I have no idea why I got the urge to write. I was brought up in a house where I was surrounded by books, where writers were revered; so I suppose that was part of it. My parents were old and there wasn’t a great deal to do except read and write. Even as a child of eight I used to write just for pleasure. And I read a great many classics in my childhood. Thomas Hardy was one and I even read twenty-two of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels. I remember first reading Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall when I was eleven, though I realize now that I didn’t understand the part about the prostitutes. But we also had Moby Dick, T. S. Eliot’s poems – in fact an enormous number of books of poetry – Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, [Laurence] Sterne’s novels. . . . The house was filled with books and of course I didn’t read them all, but I dipped into a terrific number. I suppose I absorbed the idea of the writer as the most creative individual from that environment. My father was a Unitarian minister and words were the tools of his trade. I remember him sitting up into the small hours writing his sermons. Oh yes, and in one sermon I can recall him referring to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and something about the Grand Inquisitor. Naturally I didn’t understand the reference at the time but it all made an impression.
And we didn’t have the distraction of television in those days either. The nearest I got to it was Plato’s cave with ideals shadowed on the wall. Not true, because I did get to the movies quite a bit and there’s no doubt in my mind that they played an enormous and formative role in my development as a comic novelist. I’ve got to go on about them because they’re the bedrock of my writing. The first one I ever saw was The Tunnel. That one wasn’t funny; it was utterly terrifying, all about digging a tunnel under the Atlantic with people being gassed and crushed between huge doors. . . . Yes, well, I believe the film has been lost now but it’s still in my mind very nastily indeed. But my earliest film going was in the days when the talkies had just come in and there hadn’t been that switch from the madcap action of the silent movies to reliance on speech to explain what people feeling and thinking, which set in later. The directors and the actors were still working in the old way and thinking in terms of images conveying the meaning. I’m sure Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers had terrific influence on my sense of humor and my way of seeing things.
CA: Sexual matters figure heavily in your work, sometimes rather deviate ones.
SHARPE: That’s an interesting word – deviate. I think we have to look at it in a quite different way than, say, was done back in the 1930s or 1940s. It’s the same with everything. No one, or certainly only a tiny minority, could imagine man would walk on the moon then or that there’d be such a thing as an atomic bomb. Scientific advances, call them what you will, have been gigantic. It’s the same with our knowledge of what constitutes normal in the sexual context. Researchers like [Alfred] Kinsey and [William] Masters and [Virginia] Johnson have had a tremendous influence. And there have been changes in the law. To a law-abiding citizen in 1935 what is shown on family television today would have been beyond belief. Remember those innocent days of the 1950s when Forever Amber was banned by the libraries? So, if anyone says that my novels contain anything erotic or pornographic, they clearly don’t watch television or read anything later than Henry James. They’ve certainly missed out on D. H. Lawrence.
But yes, I do find comedy in sexual behavior and I reckon I’m in good company – the best, with [Geoffrey] Chaucer and [William] Shakespeare and any other writer who wrote bawdily. There’s a world of difference between “bawdy” and explicit sex scenes which some authors stick in to sell books or to inform the reader that sadomasochistic sex is part of the human psyche. I mean, it’s the difference between “The Miller’s Tale” in Chaucer and [William] Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch. But if, as in Wilt, a character gets kicks out of fooling around with an inflatable doll and someone else tries to murder the thing, that’s comedy. There’s no explicit or descriptive sex there and I defy anyone to find it even faintly erotic. So, I don’t believe that sexual matters do figure heavily in my work, and I’m sure a word count of each book would show this to be true. As for deviation, try Faulkner’s Sanctuary, where the gangster, Popeye, rapes a girl with a corncob because he’s impotent. Try The Town for a used-contraceptive scene. But no one would dream of saying that sexual deviations figured heavily in Faulkner’s works.
CA: Is there a lot of literary criticism-type of writing done in England about your work? I didn’t find much here.
SHARPE: There have been any number of articles about my books over here, and I believe I have been discussed in a literary work on Cambridge novelists and in other such compendia, but in general the world of academic literary criticism in Britain hasn’t paid overmuch attention to my books. I can think of two reasons for this. I mean, in The Great Pursuit and in Wilt, I expressed the opinion that English literature courses in universities are harmful to literature; concentrate only on the achievement of long-dead writers; are parochial in their refusal to study foreign novelists – yet how can one begin to understand the novel if one ignores Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, or Stendhal and Balzac, or Melville? – and, worst of all, demand of twentieth-century students those “mature sensibilities” which they assume to have been attributes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. As I put it in The Great Pursuit, the English university system of teaching literature inhibits a great many keen would-be novelists from ever putting pen to paper for fear that their novels will compare unfavorably with Dickens’ Bleak House or with Jane Austen or another of the “Greats.” Well, those sort of statements aren’t ones calculated to make a writer popular with professors and people who earn their living doing what I attack.
But perhaps an even important reason – partly connected with the low standing of comic writing in general, which is, by definition, not “serious” – is that academic literary critics obviously spend their lives in academic surroundings and don’t meet many people who don’t share their own tastes. The world of universities is a closed one. To get into it you have to have a degree and a doctorate and so on. It’s an academic club and you can’t expect people who live in an enclosed and exclusive world to begin to understand a different world which doesn’t share their values. My experiences have been in a world so far removed from theirs that I seem to them to be fantasizing. People in British universities may read about torture in the papers, but it’s still abstract and theoretical.
It’s the same with bribery and corruption and murder and lions actually killing someone, which occasionally happens in Africa, and even with people going to work in an office or a shop. It would be worth finding out how many English literature academics have ever been inside a factory or worked as a truck driver. They haven’t and it shows in the novels they write. The campus novel has become a genre all its own. Now there’s a new genre about international conferences. And all the time they are forced by the limitations of their experience to write about intellectuals and academics and their families. It’s not their fault but when someone – me in this case – knocks their trade and their closed world, they obviously don’t like it. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people avoid or ignore what they don’t like. I’d be crazy to expect them to like my books or treat them seriously. What matters to me is that millions of people outside the lit-crit world – many of them on other faculties in universities – buy and read my books.
CA: Will Wilt resurface in another book?
SHARPE: I think so. I’m very fond of the Wilts. I don’t understand why people insist that Eva is entirely stupid. If she is, then I am too, because I recognize many of her attributes in myself. I rather doubt that I would have her resilience, but I share her enthusiasms for compost making and organic gardening and, I’m afraid to say, her gullibility and the way her mind leaps from one theory to another, many of them phony. I also share her anger when the phoniness becomes too apparent. Henry Wilt’s another side of me. His teaching routine and his views on it were exactly mine. And if I had four daughters like the quads, I’d feel about them the way he does. But I don’t. Nancy, my wife, sees to that.
CA: Is Wilt your favorite among your characters?
SHARPE: Well, I’m not sure about this notion of a “favorite” character or “liking” one’s creations. It suggests far too much identity between the author and all his inventions. No one could possibly like Lockhart Flawse in The Throwback if he had a real existence, and his grandfather would be most disagreeable. A character’s only justification ought to be that his development interests the author – his development or his innate qualities and opinions. How can I best express this? Possibly by explaining the genesis of The Throwback.
I had intended to write a novel about a woman called Jessica who was married to a boring man with a “good” job and with the attitude one comes across all too often that he was, by virtue of being the breadwinner, a “superior male being” while his wife was definitely a woman and therefore “inferior.” You must know the sort of person I had in mind. Jessica finally rebelled and to assert her own individuality learned to fly. Now, at that point in the writing, I found the tone was wrong – the statement was spot-on, if self-evident- – and I dropped the book. The next day I found the first page of The Throwback coming out and I just let the characters and the action take over. It turned out to be the most bizarre book I’ve written and it puzzled me.
On the other hand, people in Northumberland wrote to me and wanted to know how I knew so much about the country and the people up there – their point being that such weird people as the Flawses did exist up there in reality. Simple. From the age of five I was lodged during the summer holidays by a very nice Northumbrian family, the Hopes, who lived miles from anywhere on the fells and, like Lockhart Flawse, I shot things. Practically anything that moved. My father gave me a shotgun when I was eight! So perhaps I was writing Lockhart out of my psychic system. Which doesn’t mean I have anything else in common with the brute. Let’s go on to a pleasanter question.
CA: Publishers and agents were among your targets in The Great Pursuit. Did they criticize the book, that you’re aware of?
SHARPE: Publishers and agents are far too discreet. Anyhow I wasn’t writing about my own agent or my own publisher. Or any others I know. The setting of The Great Pursuit was the world of publishing, but the real theme had to do with the act of writing itself and the way the public views the writer and some writers view their craft. The reviews’ reactions here were interesting though. They all thought the part about publishing in England was absolutely right but wrote that I was “fantasizing” about the States and particularly the Deep South. Well, I’ve been down in Mississippi and Alabama and my wife comes from North Carolina and her family from outside Greenville, South Carolina, and her relatives reckoned I was spot-on with the American scenes but a bit over the top with the British ones. My brother-in-law works out of Selma, Alabama, and he didn’t find fault with the description of attitudes in my “Bibliopolis, Al.”
CA: It was very funny how the international figures gathered in the castle in Vintage Stuff were insulting each other in terms of nationality.
SHARPE: Yes, It’s quite true that I feel very strongly that nationalism or jingoism, chauvinism, call it what you will, exerts a greater pressure on individuals than we would like to admit. As a history student I was led to believe that nationalism was the driving force in the nineteenth century but that ideologies dominated this century. Sure, fascism and nazism and communism are ideologies but beneath them lay, and still lies, the bedrock of nationalism. It’s a sad fact that we still think in “tribal” terms but I believe it to be true. Change that “tribal” to “national,” it means the same thing in practice. We go on clinging to ancient stereotypes, ancient loyalties without really thinking about really thinking about the fact that we all belong to one species and our interdependence is vital to our continuing existence. The nuclear winter and the obliteration of Homo sapiens is real possibility. That’s why I made a mockery of those so-called international figures in Vintage Stuff.
CA: Are any of the novels slated for television productions?
SHARPE: Blott on the Landscape has been made into a six-part mini-series by the BBC and, I’m delighted to say, was a great success with the viewing public over here. You should be getting it on the Arts and Entertainment network. The same team is now working on Porterhouse Blue for a two-part TV movie, so with any luck it will be filmed.
CA: Are you hearing from new readers in the United States because of the Vintage editions of your work?
SHARPE: I get a great deal of fan mail from Americans but it mostly comes from people who have visited the United Kingdom and have bought the British editions. You’d have to ask my U.S. publishers about internal fan mail. I can’t remember ever receiving any from them though they may get some. Perhaps that’s the real reason they haven’t published the South African novels – they might be inundated with mail! That would be a nicely ironical reason. Of course the real irony is that, while I can’t get them published in the States, I stopped publication of The Great Pursuit in the Soviet Union back in 1978 when [Andrei] Sakharov was exiled and the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Human rights count for something, and the Soviets wanted to publish The Great Pursuit because it could be translated, and altered in the process, into a book attacking America! I have held to my decision to stop publication in the U.S.S.R. I just wish publishers in the United States would stick to their guns – their freedom-to-print guns and no-racist-censorship guns – the same way.