This article was published in the Sunday Telegraph on 2 March 1980.
Novelist Tom Sharpe grows roses and strong connvictions
By Auberon Waugh
Tom Sharpe is one of the rarest birds on the English social scene, a fulltime professional novelist. He does not appear on television talk shows. He does not review books, or travel around interviewing other writers. He does nothing else but write novels and tend his rose garden in Dorset. Many people suppose this is what all novelists do, but among the despised and endangered fraternity Mr Sharpe is something of a freak. It is a way of life strewn with hazards, from the mild neurosis of “writer’s block” to melancholia, delusions of grandeur, alcoholism, hallucinations and general paralysis of the insane. We all watch him closely for the first symptoms.
I thought I might have spotted them in his novel, The Wilt Alternative. The first half was a splendid replay of everything he had said before about adult education, the Technical College Culture and the present state of “liberal studies” in the dim world of our leftwing sub-intelligentsia. In the second half we were introduced to a gang of terrorists and, for the first time, began to see Mr Sharpe’s comic mask slip and a serious didactic face appear behind it.
Mr Sharpe had been brooding, it seemed, in his country retreat, as country dwellers are prone to do. Some of them decide Britain should revert to the Gold Standard; others that the Soviet Union is about to invade, the trade unions are taking over, that their neighbours are black magicians intent on world mastery, that the world is facing another Ice Age, we are all burning too much energy, or that London Airport is wrongly sited according to the ancient lines or leys of Druidical theology. Mr Sharpe avoided all these obvious traps. But his Message was no less clear: having given considerable thought to the matter, he had decided that terrorism was a bad thing; terrorists should be seen as Bad Eggs.
Which may seem a harmless enough Message for these times. But it threw the whole book off balance. Mr Sharpe has pioneered a literary form which is neither satire, nor comedy of manners, but which can best be described as angry or unpleasant farce. The funniest things, by this dispensation, are whatever is most coarse, stupid or cruel. One either laughs, finding these things inherently ridiculous, or one does not, finding them too disgusting to be funny. The moral, if such there be, is implicit in the fact that one laughs (or not). But of all literary forms, it is the one least well adapted to a didactic purpose.
A few years ago, when academics occupied the position in Mr Sharpe’s demonology now taken by terrorists, he spelled it out in an interview: “If you want to write moral tracts, you should write moral tracts. I’m not out to improve the world. I want to provide comedy, and I want to be able to appeal to everybody, right across the board, and if I leave out anybody, it’s bloody academics.”
In those days he was plainly suffering from feelings of persecution or neglect by academic critics – a familiar enough symptom among novelists who stand out against the flabby, leftwing modernism of the Eng. Lit. industry. No doubt it was exacerbated in his case by living in Cambridge, home of Dr Leavis. An admirable study of Cambridge life can be found in his third novel Porterhouse Blue (1974). Similarly, one could understand his earlier feelings about South Africa, having lived in that terrible country and been imprisoned as a suspected communist. His description of the stupidity and brutality of the South African police – in Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973) – remains one of the funniest passages of modern fiction. But the new anxiety about terrorists seemed to me of a different order. Is he much troubled by terrorists in Bridport, Dorset? Are they a major threat to the domestic tranquillity of contemplative folk in the West Country? Plainly, it was time I went to see him.
He gave me detailed instructions. You pass a lumber yard on a certain road out of Bridport and then you see a house set back from the road behind four cast-iron stanchions, he said. On the way there I brooded for some time about those stanchions. How does one recognise a stanchion when one sees it? I thought it was some sort of nautical term – possibly connected in some way with Mr Sharpe’s national service in the Royal Marines – and wondered what sort of man, in this day and age, requires to be protected by four cast-iron stanchions.
The first thing to impress one about Mr Sharpe is his strange athletic gait. A heavyish man of 52, he walks like a rugger player of 30 with a naughty, schoolboyish gleam in his eye and an infectious, enthusiastic laugh. I began to spot the characteristics of a West Country Thinker only after some time when he gave me a shrewd glance and demanded to know whether I hated Harold Wilson. It seemed cruel to point out, if the news had not yet reached Dorset, that Wilson had resigned three or four years earlier; the new man to worry about, at any rate in advanced Somerset circles, was called Wedgwood Benn.
The disturbing thing about Mr Sharpe is that he has only lived in Dorset for a year. He receives The Times every day, but by no means always reads it. On Sundays he reads The Observer with a sort of fascinated loathing. He resents enormously that newspaper’s appetite for vicarious suffering. No doubt it helps to feed the various anxieties of the rustic philosopher.
“If I were richer I would build more ponds and plant more trees. What I really enjoy is digging. You don’t have to think when you are digging.”
His house is dignified and unpretentious, built in 1938 with ugly metal windows and small rooms. Behind it are a pavilion, where he could perfectly well write if he wanted to, and a poky little garden shed, where he prefers to write. Round about him as he writes – mostly about people being blown up, limbs and entrails being scattered all over the feverish landscape of his imagination – there lies his garden, the pride of his creation.
The first fruits of prosperity (he has sold several film options, although nobody has yet made a film, and America has not yet caught the taste for his angry farce) show themselves in four and a half acres of land, added to his house and rapidly being converted into a combined park and rose garden.
His new anxiety, when I visited him, was not about terrorists or academics or, even, when questioned, about Mr Wilson. He was deeply concerned about drugs. His wife, from the North Carolina Bible Belt, shared this anxiety, having been appalled by the drug habit among small children on a recent visit to her home state. But at the drop of a hat he will also inveigh against adultery.
For a man who seems to be protected from most of the horrible things happening in the world, he has a lively awareness of the evils prowling around in the road beyond his four cast-iron stanchions . . .
His father, a Unitarian minister, developed extreme rightwing views before his death. Mr Sharpe, whose views strike me as eminently sensible on most subjects, finds it hard to get a visa to the U.S. because the South Africans still believe him to be a communist. He is a bit sheepish about this. When a play of his was raided by the South African Special Branch he found that the only people who supported him were in the Congress of Democrats, largely made up of communists.
He threw himself enthusiastically into Congress activities and supposes that many of the communists in it might have thought him one of them. But he never was a communist and finds now that even the milk and water liberalism of The Observer produces a nasty green rash on his placid, kindly countenance.
At 52 he has no further ambitions, beyond the desire to watch his children and roses grow. The roses may be manured with the blood and offal of a thousand fictional characters, blown up or otherwise dismembered in a thousand bizarre circumstances, but he insists the only things which make him really angry are the infliction of fear and suffering. Unlike most Englishmen, he has known both in his time. As a small boy he ran away from Bloxham before settling down at Lancing where, surprisingly, he was happy.
Then came the Royal Marines. Strangely, for a novelist, he has given no indication of his life in the army. At one time, as a boy, he was sent to live alone in the north of England with a Belgian .410 shotgun for company and tells us how he developed a passion for killing things. This aspect of his character can be seen in the fictional creation of Lockhart in The Throwback (1978) – a sort of Noble Savage thrown into the corrupt society of bureaucratic suburbia. But if it survives at all now it survives only in his imagination.
Living comfortably and removed from danger among his children and his roses, he has to invent monsters in his mind. Once these dragons are invented, he can use all his ingenuity to devise ways of humiliating them, blowing them up, spreading their entrails for miles around . . .
“Family life is the binding thing. If you haven’t that, you have nothing,” he says in his pleasant, eager voice after an excellent lunch prepared by his pretty American wife. “That is why I feel so strongly about adultery. I simply don’t understand people who are adulterous . . .”
In front of the fire his wife and three daughters sit with three cats and an ancient dog, all purring quietly.
Photo caption 1: Where books are born: a shed in the garden is Tom Sharpe’s favourite place of work
Photo caption 2: Tom and Nancy Sharpe with daughters (from left) Melanie, Jemima and Grace