This article was published in The Journal on 4 March 1977.
PETER MORTIMER talks to Tom Sharpe (pictured), “the funniest living English writer,” and discovers a well disguised mischief-maker who writes in the great English bawdy tradition but talks like a parson and apologises for his respectable appearance.
FIRST off, I told Tom Sharpe he was not what I expected.
He didn’t have bells on his toes, a trick bow tie and a large cloak concealing a nasty dagger. Nor a face that slightly suggested madness.
He took the observation in the complimentary way it was intended, and apologised for the middle-class, middle-aged, bracered, and highly respectable appearance. His voice, he rued, was not unlike a parson’s.
Newspapers such as The Observer have called him Britain’s funniest living writer. One respectable critic labelled him as “a pornographer.” In South Africa they first put him in jail, then chucked him out. Were he ever to show his face in that country again – well, of course, he can never show his face in that country again, despite it having been his home for 10 years.
At the somewhat advanced age of 42, Tom Sharpe, after writing a clutch of unperformed and rather heavy-handed plays, woke up to discover a remarkable talent for bizarre, irreverent, often savage but quite extraordinarily funny humour.
Bubbling away for so long, the talent fairly oozed to the surface. Within three weeks, he had written his first novel “Riotous Assembly” and followed it with the sequel “Indecent Exposure” – both set in modern-day South Africa, both using his distinctive style to lampoon mercilessly the white man’s sense of absurd authority.
“My books are bawdy,” says Tom Sharpe, “and I’m proud of that. Bawdiness has a great tradition in English literature. To call them pornographic is nonsense. I cannot conceive anyone reading them for sexual kicks.
“History has shown the English to be the biggest bastards on earth. We weren’t called Perfidious Albion for nothing, and I suppose I use my sense of lunacy — yes I admit they often verge on the lunatic — to make points about how that tradition has influenced South Africa.”
Sharpe went to live in South Africa in 1951. His first job was for a finance corporation, where his handling of the accounts managed to lose £36,000. He then became a social worker.
“We have no idea over here just what that society is like. The whites pay 7½p in the pound tax and simply live off the blacks. The reason there are no blacks in my books is simply that from the white man’s view they don’t exist. To accommodate the Japanese there they made them all ‘honorary whites’. Now I find that extraordinary.”
Trendies
His only play to be performed, “The South African,” was staged in a small London theatre in 1961. Though almost unnoticed over here, in South Africa it came to the notice of the special branch. Sharpe was first thrown in jail, then deported.
“But back in England I found myself introduced to all these terribly liberal types as ‘the man who was in jail in South Africa.’ They were very impressed without understanding anything.
“One day some people were asking me, and I was telling them I shared a cell with two murderers. Suddenly I thought, bugger this, I’ll give them a sample of what it’s really like. So I said what would be quite natural for an Afrikaaner, I said of course, ‘they’d only killed a couple of coons.’ Now you see, people actually do say that back there.”
The shocked look on the faces was one impetus for Sharpe to begin his irreverent books. “Riotous Assembly” and “Indecent Exposure” both centre on the police force. The town is Piemburg (a faintly disguised Pietermaritzburg), the characters include Konstabel Els, with his panting blood-lust for blacks, Commandant Van Heerden, a tough Afrikaaner, self-consciously trying to absorb himself into the “English” culture, and Lieutenant Verkramp, a scatter brained bungler, whose electric shock therapy to prevent his officers sleeping with black women turns them all gay, and sees them mincing down the street hand-in-hand.
Verkramp’s attempts to infiltrate the “communist spy network” also results in a flock (if that’s the word) of ostriches, after swallowing contraceptives filled with gelignite, running amock through the town and exploding at random.
Such episodes abound. Sharpe inflates his characters into such grotesque caricatures that to pop them requires little effort.
“Yes of course there is exaggeration, and you may also spot some malice, but the basis is reality. Is the humour pessimistic? In so far as nothing has changed there, yes.”
Sharpe rarely lands a legal punch where under the belt is most effective. So the whites are parodied where it hurts most, as regards their manhood and basic intelligence. Hardly anyone merits a good word. The humour marches on, destroying all in its path.
“But destructive to a purpose, against a certain set of values.”
This is not the age of the great comic novelists, many writers have seemingly sunk into a pit of black despair. Sharpe appreciates this, but writes as he writes. “Then I don’t give a damn how they label me, just as long as I go on writing. Durenmatt said ‘comedy may lure people into a trap,’ well, here the traps are my books.”
As a student he was at Cambridge. “Though not reading English, thank God; I see the decline of the English novel as coinciding with the time university English literature courses evolved.” It was that hallowed academic institution which formed the setting for his big new “Porterhouse Blue” (all three are just published in paperback), another iconoclastic work, where Porterhouse College (a fictitious name) is held up as a prop of a decaying system, well sprinkled with the semi-senile, the privileged, and the opportunist.
Everyone again is thoroughly objectionable (if at times pitiable) in a monstrously funny fashion, from the new master Sir Godber, erstwhile radical politician attempting to bring a “wind of change” for his own devices, through his frighteningly reform-conscious wife, the crusty reactionary dean and senior tutor, and the novel’s linchpin, Skullion, a decrepit college warden who has secretly been “selling” degrees for years, some of his purchases now being Cabinet ministers.
Here again, the college is badly damaged by exploding contraceptives as the new master’s wish for reform leads to chaos, and an eventual marshalling of the country’s top establishment against him. Could these things be a symbol?
“One reviewer noted that I always had them used for the wrong purpose. I suppose they’re a symbol in that I loathe them.”
Cambridge itself (where Sharpe lectured at the local technical college and now lives) reacted with hostility to his slaughtering of a sacred cow.
“Every college was adamant that Porterhouse wasn’t them, but in private they were all convinced it was. Strange.”
Comfortable
It’s a more mature book than his South African duo in that characters are more finely sketched, the structure is tighter and — for want of a better word — more sophisticated, and though the “comic strip” element is still an essential ingredient, and Sharpe has mercifully resisted respectability, at times it shows almost a compassionate eye for what it ridicules.
But as he says: “England itself is a much more comfortable place than South Africa.”
Finally he confesses to a great love of writing. “Yes I actually enjoy it, so many people say they don’t, even though I’m a puritan in that I believe in the work ethic. But writing, yes, it’s probably the last cottage industry.”
Exit Tom Sharpe, respectable looking demon.