This article was published in the March-April edition of Million magazine, 1992.
Britain’s best-known humorous novelist, Tom Sharpe, is interviewed by Brendan Wignall
The day I met Tom Sharpe, the Guardian carried an interview with a writer (to save embarrassment I won’t name her) which contained the following remarks about her highly autobiographical first novel:
My brother was very worried by [the book]. He told me not to write a book that would haunt me the rest of my life. But I think books should do that. They should be painful. Otherwise what’s the point?
No doubt she would agree with the following, and perhaps might even have echoed these sentiments when “in conversation” at the ICA later that month:
…the novel if it is to justify itself as a mode of inter-communicative art must deal solely with experienced reality. The self-indulgent use of the imagination beyond the parameter of our personal experience demonstrates a superficiality which can only result in the unrealization of our individual potentialities.
The tone and style belong to that great arbiter of literary sensitivity, maturity and discrimination, F.R. Leavis. Unfortunately, the remarks are satiric in intent and come from Tom Sharpe’s sixth novel, The Great Pursuit (1977); even the title mockingly alludes to Leavis, combining the names of two of his works, The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit.
Although reviews of the novel at the time of publication concentrated on it as a satire on the publishing industry, it is obvious that the real villains of the piece are not the commercially-motivated literary agents and publishers, but rather the Leavis-inspired purveyors of high culture, most notably Dr Sydney Louth, author of The Moral Novel; at the end of The Great Pursuit Louth’s disciple has given up his own attempts to write “the great novel” – instead resorting, emblematically, to faithfully reproducing the accepted “greats” of the canon of English Literature.
After all in a thousand years who the dickens would care who had written Great Expectations? Only a few scholars who could still read English. The printed works would have perished by then. Only Piper’s own parchment manuscripts bound in the thickest leather and filled with his perfect hieroglyphic handwriting and gold illuminated lettering would stand the test of time and lie in the museums of the world, mute testimony to his dedication to literature, and to his craftsmanship. And when he had finished Dickens he would start on Henry James and write his novels out in long-hand too. There was a lifetime’s work ahead of him just copying the great tradition out in Higgins Eternal Ink.
I’m sorry I read the article in the Guardian only after I’d interviewed Tom Sharpe. His writing would not have been approved of by Leavis, but he shows in his novels that he is a great puncturer of pretentiousness and I would have enjoyed his reaction to the absurdity of the “writing should be painful” posturings.
Born in 1928, Tom Sharpe’s first novel, Riotous Assembly, only appeared just over twenty years ago – when he was 41 – which seems unusually late in life to begin writing.
“Yes, I was 41, but the point really was that I was writing all the time before that more or less, from the time when I was an undergraduate. I didn’t come to writing late, I came to publication late. For most of the twenty years or whatever it was before that I was writing plays. I wrote plays in South Africa – and they might have contributed to my being kicked out, in a minor sense – but I’ve never seen anything I wrote produced, so I don’t know if it was any good or not. I think you’ve got to experience a theatre and a play and a director and a producer and all the rest of it to learn about how to write plays – I was writing in a complete vacuum, but they wouldn’t put them on in South Africa because they were all anti-racist, it was as simple as that; so they weren’t going to be a great popular success out there. Also, this was the fifties of the Angry Young Men; I suppose I was as angry as any young man could be at the time, but I wasn’t very successful at becoming one of the Angry Young Men.
“So my plays didn’t get put on because I was modelling myself, in a sense, on the works of French writers. Just after the war there were a hell of a lot of French playwrights: Sartre, Camus, and a man whose name was almost unpronounceable, Anouilh. And these were not the right sort of models – because everybody does ape someone else to some extent. The expression from Stevenson, ‘play the sedulous ape’: he said he’d done that to Hazlitt, and I think nearly everybody who sets out to write does this – I certainly did anyway. Stevenson did, because he said it, and Buchan must have done because he quoted Stevenson saying it. So I was modelling myself on quite the wrong models, as fashion would have it; and in any case I was being political: I was writing with a direct intention. I attack the phrase ‘meaningful and significant’ in my books but that’s partly because I was being meaningful and significant all those bloody years and I wasn’t getting anywhere with it.
“After I’d been deported from South Africa I really was broke. I tried to get a job at the Royal Court because by that stage I realized I needed experience in the theatre, watching rehearsals, listening, seeing how it was done, but there wasn’t anything. So I went off to teach, supply teaching and so forth, and then I went to Cambridge to do a Post-graduate Certificate in Education, which was just teacher training, and it was hopeless; I knew it all because I’d already taught in South Africa. In fact I knew more than they ever taught; they didn’t know how to teach: they knew how to teach a ruddy rat to get through a maze, but even that the rat could do better. Then I had to learn a lot of History because they wouldn’t let me teach English because I wasn’t qualified in it, but I had Part I of a degree in History and that allowed the Technical College to give me a job in the History department. Having to learn this stuff, leaping straight in to teach at A level, put a bit of a blight on my writing career. The work I did at the Tech was very interesting, but I think I probably worked harder there than I did anywhere else.”
Life at the Technical College, which presumably provided some of the background for his fifth novel, Wilt, continued for ten years.
“I got married in 1969 and wrote the draft of Riotous Assembly in about a month. I was determined to break the publication barrier: I still hadn’t accumulated any capital. I was 41, I didn’t have a house of my own. I remembered that Faulkner had written quite a bit before he wrote Sanctuary and he’d decided that he was going to shock his way into publication; so, when he wrote Sanctuary he tried to put in the foulest thing he could think of, which was a girl being raped by an impotent gangster who can’t get it up so he uses a corn cob. In 1932, or ’28 or whenever he wrote it, this was absolutely shocking; nowadays it’s regarded as light fiction.
“Anyway, I adopted the Faulkner technique, remembering what Diaghilev said to Cocteau: étonnez-moi, amaze me, astonish me, interest me, which is absolutely key. It was certainly the key to my teaching: if you’ve got thirty hardened brutes in front of you, I’m talking about Techs in South Africa in particular, you have to do this. I do not see any reason why we should have this religious attitude towards writing or reading. I really do not. I feel strongly about it and I’ve always objected to bloody old Leavis on those grounds. All this twaddle about maturity. Well, sure, people who are mature will want to read mature books, no doubt. What used to get me were the headmasters and whatnot that I knew who threw Shakespeare at kids of 10 or 12; it’s rather like putting Larwood in against a boy who wants to learn cricket; I mean it’s a nightmare, they don’t want to know.
“I don’t know what kids want now, but I knew in those days and I used to give them adventure stories to read; they’d probably be regarded as a load of rubbish now and I daresay they were a load of rubbish then, but the point was the story kept them going. I always think of Forster’s thing in Aspects of the Novel, ‘alas we must have a story’ or ‘plot’ or some bloody thing. Yes, well. Doubtless for that little Bloomsbury Group plots were very unnecessary things, but for Joe Soap and anybody trying to make a living out of writing the story is one of the things that really counts and unless you’ve got that you’re stuck. Because the other bloke will say, ‘I don’t see why I should read something without a story,’ or ‘I don’t see why I should read anything anyway.’ And the other thing is you’ve got to compete with TV, and if you can’t beat the box you’re done for.
“Well, that’s not why I wrote what I did; I’m trying to explain the gestation of it. I also found that what I was writing was funny; at least, it seemed funny to me. Anyway, that’s how it all began.”
Riotous Assembly is inscribed “For all those members of the South African Police Force whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of Western Civilization in Southern Africa,” and deals with a number of farcically stupid South African police officers trying to cope with the “murder” of a black servant by his white mistress. She is, or was, his “Mistress” in both senses of the word, as they shared a mutual enthusiasm for rubber clothes and cross-dressing. Clearly, such a combination of perversity and miscegenation presents considerable problems for the police and threatens to disturb their settled notions of the inherent moral superiority of the white race.
“Thereafter I got some money from the film option; some idiots in America decided they were going to make Riotous Assembly: The Movie, and they gave $25000 option for a year, which was a heck of a lot of money. We bought a house and a car with it, and I could take a year off the Tech unpaid. So I wrote Indecent Exposure in that year.”
Indecent Exposure is a sequel to Riotous Assembly and is, in some ways, influenced by Sharpe’s experiences in South Africa before he was deported for successfully suing a right-wing newspaper for defamation of character. It was followed by Porterhouse Blue, set in a fictitious Cambridge college, and later successfully adapted for TV with the ubiquitous David Jason as one of the principal characters.
“Porterhouse Blue came next because I decided I’d better write about England; I don’t know why that happened, I can’t remember the reason. Then there was Blott on the Landscape. Blott was Lancing and Shropshire.”
Sharpe attended Lancing College, having first run away from Bloxham School (“I remember it vividly; I ran away on a Monday, Candlemas 1942”); during the war Lancing was evacuated from Sussex to Shropshire. The school was accommodated in a number of large houses distributed across a wide area. “We spent a lot of time on bicycles; it was wonderful countryside, a small boy’s heaven, although we didn’t get much teaching. I loved it; it was certainly a change from Bloxham. I once got twelve strokes at Bloxham in twenty-four hours; they were from eighteen-year-olds, and they cut you in half, the little bastards.
“When they decided to make the series of Blott the blokes who drive around the country looking for locations – funny job – found Ludlow and decided that that was where Blott was set, and they were right. The book is also based on the Italian prisoners of war, because they used to be kept up there. They did a very good job as surrogate husbands; they didn’t keep them in camps because none of them wanted to run away, and they worked the fields and they poached. So I thought stick a German in, and that’s Blott. I enjoyed that one.”
Blott on the Landscape was followed by what is perhaps Sharpe’s best-known novel, Wilt, which was recently made into a profoundly dreadful film starring Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones; I did ask Tom Sharpe what he thought of it but he’s contractually forbidden to comment on it, which given the sheer awfulness of the film and his ability with invective is perhaps as well for Smith and Rhys-Jones.
Wilt is the story of Henry Wilt, Lecturer (Grade 2) in Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology, who leads a desperately uneventful life until he is wrongly accused of murdering his appalling wife, Eva, who is in fact stranded on a boat in the Fens with an American lesbian and her rubber-fetishist husband. Wilt’s experiences of teaching Liberal Studies are not particularly happy ones:
For ten years he had remained in the Liberal Studies Department teaching classes of Gasfitters, Plasterers, Bricklayers and Plumbers. Or keeping them quiet. And for ten long years he had spent his days going from classroom to classroom with two dozen copies of Sons and Lovers or Orwell’s Essays or Candide or The Lord of the Flies and had done his damnedest to extend the sensibilities of Day-Release Apprentices with notable lack of success.
“Exposure to Culture,” Mr Morris, Head of Liberal Studies, called it but from Wilt’s point of view it looked more like his own exposure to barbarism, and certainly the experience had undermined the ideals and illusions which had sustained him in his younger days.
“I did teach all those subjects in there, and we did have a Principal who was supposed to have used the expression ‘exposure to culture.’ Well that sort of thing is all very well, but the first time I went into one of those classes I had to teach A Farewell to Arms I think it was to a class of Plasterers. So I asked the Head of Department what I should do, and he told me I should read for a while and then ask them if they understand the sex bits. Well, they knew more about sex than ever I did. Then the next year, when I really began to teach Liberal Studies, I had to teach them Lord of the Flies and they all hated it. They all thought someone should have beaten up Piggy right from the word go, and that Jack was a good bloke. Well, of course, they’d had a lot of training on how to deal with people with sensibilities like me, supposedly. I had nine classes a week of Candide and I did have Meat One; it was actually on the timetable as Meat One – they were first-year butchers. Voltaire came out of it quite well, because with Candide you really have got a springboard to talk about all sorts of things. By the time you got to Ibsen, my god that was frightful; that was at the end of the year. Can you imagine a term of Ibsen, nine hours a week; I had that for two years; it was hell, or rather purgatory before I went into History.”
Wilt was followed by Sharpe’s attack on the pretensions of “high culture,” The Great Pursuit, which in turn was followed by The Throwback – a marvellously funny satire on virtue and modern attitudes. After The Throwback came two more Wilt novels; Ancestral Vices – featuring a sociologist and a “person of restricted growth,” whom he accidentally kills; and Vintage Stuff, a splendid send-up of boarding schools and teachers who read too much Bulldog Drummond and John Buchan.
Although Sharpe says he’s eschewed seriousness and meaningfulness, isn’t this a little disingenuous? Much of his writing concerns itself with hypocrisy and social climbing, and is, in one sense of the word, highly moral in tone.
“I’m writing to be read; that is the number-one point. I don’t think of an idea and then have human beings – they’re not human beings, they’re flat, everyone’s characters are flat, as Evelyn Waugh said. The characters are there and then something happens, I don’t know what, perhaps I just daydream. You tend to invent characters with whom you can identify to some extent, and then implicitly in their attitudes there will be an attitude to society. They will be explicit themselves, these creatures of one’s imagination, and it’s not a question of putting words in their mouths, because that suggests the words come first and they don’t. Yes, you are expressing your own opinions in a way, but I don’t see it as that.
“I’ve been quoted as saying I write rubbish, and this is absolutely true in the sense that if I think I am doing anything significant I can’t write. I absolutely glue up; I can’t move. This has happened recently and it’s the whole trouble. I always used to say I was a farceur, and I think that’s right; you’re on a high wire, you’re a juggler. You’re not Henry James, that’s the whole key. I hate Leavis for the inhibition that was built into me – and I didn’t even read English – about this bloody ‘maturity.’ Well, hang on a moment, why can’t people laugh, why can’t people enjoy what they read? It doesn’t mean that the book is necessarily bad because you enjoy it, or good because it’s hard work. Dostoevsky is hard work, but at the same time he’s immensely interesting and that is what’s enjoyable. You don’t give Dostoevsky to an eight-year-old, he grows into that. Some people never come to it; you come to James, yes, but as a result of lots of reading and thinking, ‘I’d like something different and by god here’s James – strewth, that’s extraordinary.’
“It’s all part of this interest thing. I suppose, if you like, you could say I’ve got a totally hedonistic attitude towards reading, which I have. I really don’t see reading as a duty – I’ve said it all in The Great Pursuit over and over again – but I don’t see it as a bloody duty. I had too much duty rammed down my throat when I was a kid: you don’t have a Primitive Methodist father who was a Unitarian and was born in 1872 without having a lot of Victorian attitudes pushed at you. People like Gladstone drive me up the wall, because they went on about duty – they must have created a miasma of guilt. Well, I’m not like that, but that’s where Leavis is. The sod deliberately wrote badly so that his little coterie… you had to write like that to get a good degree with Mr Leavis, you know – with his foul, foul use of language, his dreadful language… urgh: shocking, anyway. And I think phoney, frankly. Anyway, that’s my opinion.
“I came to a similar conclusion about plays a long time ago: I don’t think you should go to the theatre as a religious act and everyone sit there in silence. I think it must have been a damned sight better when you had a whole lot of louts up there waiting to hurl tomatoes, and an actor actually had to dominate. That’s the way I believe you should write; you’ve got to tame this beast and if you don’t do that, screw it. The beast doesn’t have to read you and why the hell should it? There are better things to do like gardening, or going to play cricket or bowls, or throw darts or drink or whatever you like.”
This sort of attitude is hardly likely to endear Sharpe to the many worshipers at the altar of high culture who stalk the land and fill so many column-inches in the “quality” newspapers. However, he has, as one might imagine, little time for their views.
“I was once doing an interview alongside Malcolm Bradbury, this would be about the time Blott was coming out on TV, and we were interviewed by a man from the Guardian. He addressed Malcolm as ‘Professor Bradbury’ and so on, but what he was saying to him was how can you bring yourself, you, the writer of The History Man, how can you actually bring yourself to turn this man’s obscene filth into television? That’s actually what he was saying. You can imagine the effect on one’s ego. I could have told him why Malcolm wanted to do it anyway, because he wanted to make some money, a perfectly good reason. Malcolm got all uptight about it, because he knew what was happening, and he started to talk about Defoe; he went through Defoe, Fielding, Tom Jones was involved, and when he made a sideswipe invoking Jane Austen I nearly fell off the chair! Then we were plunged into Dickens and out the other side. He was doing that with good intentions, he was being protective, and it was very funny too.”
Disavowals of “point” and “seriousness” don’t change the fact that much of his work attacks hypocrisy and pretentiousness; but isn’t it fair to say that Sharpe’s targets, sociologists and Technical College Principals keen on ‘exposure to culture,’ for example, are more often on the left than the right of the political spectrum?
“Well, being stern on hypocrisy and pretentiousness is very Victorian of course. You see, the hypocrisy of the right is that of those who squabble in public and people like Mrs Thatcher. These Olympian figures like Willie Whitelaw have such a wonderful mask that if they are hypocrites we don’t know it, we don’t see it.
“All right, let’s be thoroughly pretentious and say that hypocrisy, after all, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Well suppose you don’t bother with tributes, you just are vice, then you’re a hypocrite. I would have thought in Blott for instance the hypocrisy of Sir Giles [the landowner who wishes to sell out to developers] is as blatant as hell. If you take Porterhouse Blue, obviously the Master is a hypocrite, I don’t know what you’d call some of the others. You see, the trouble is the Right in England has always written its own history so it has a confidence which allows it to say things and behave in a way – which I suppose as Englishmen we’ve come to accept as being quite decent and normal – and put on airs which are a form of hypocrisy. It’s rather that what I don’t like are these people climbing the greasy pole, because the way to get up that is to be a slug and eat the grease, crawling up with all the nasty little tentacles sucking on to that pole.”
Tom Sharpe’s last novel was Wilt on High, published in 1984. After a run of eleven novels in thirteen years he appears simply to have stopped writing. Does he intend to publish again, or is that it?
“If somebody says to you, ‘for god’s sake go and write something, quickly, I’ve got to have it tomorrow,’ then you go and do it because a demand is being made of you and to some extent your ego is getting a boost, but if all the time you’re meeting idiots like the Guardian interviewer I mentioned earlier it can be quite disheartening. Anthony Clare said to me, ‘what makes you angry?’ Well, I’ll tell you what makes me angry: anybody who says my stuff is pornographic. I’ll just about lurch across the room and hit the bugger. One thing it isn’t is pornographic. It may be indecent, it may be bawdy – to use an old-fashioned word – but it’s not pornographic. That’s what makes me angry, but that’s what I get all the time. If you say that it’s Feydeau farce, which is obviously what it is, then that’s fine.
“Anyway, I’ve started to write Porterhouse Black. I’m writing it now, having thrown myself at it again. It’s been going about six years. In 1986 I went to a sales conference – any author ought to keep well away from those – in Majorca, and I was working on Porterhouse Black then. One of the editors of the group got up on stage and he was giving it the hard sell, you know, points of sale stuff – I don’t know what a point of sale is actually – for all the salesmen for the group. Then he said, ‘And next we come to Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Black for the Christmas list. I can tell you, I’ve read it and it’s wonderful.’ He hadn’t read one bloody word of it. A salesman came up to me afterwards – a nice chap – and said, ‘Is it as good as he said it is?’ So I said, ‘How the hell would I know? I haven’t even written the bloody thing yet.’”
The anonymous writer quoted at the beginning of this piece seemed keen on the idea that novels should be painful, and with that sort of attitude seems likely to achieve her aim. In contrast, Tom Sharpe’s novels are equally painful, but it is the pain which comes from either too much laughter or the attempt to suppress it: Porterhouse Black should be worth the wait.
Links to scan of article: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5