This profile on Tom Sharpe by Alan Franks was published in The Times on 8 November 1982.
Don’t suggest to Tom Sharpe that his novels are too far-fetched or he may embark on the otter story. He will probably tell it anyway, if he thinks you have the stomach for it.
“I was taking photographs for the Natal Mercury and they said: ‘Get down to the Southern Insurance building in Pietermaritzburg. There’s been a witchcraft killing’. In the office garbage someone had found the skinned torso of a young boy. No head, no arms, no legs. By the time I got down there the police were rounding up the workers and taking them in for questioning.
“Next to the building was a museum where a couple of fellows had been stuffing an otter that morning. They didn’t think it was up to scratch, so one of them decided to take it home for his wife to cook. But he changed his mind and offered it to someone at the Southern, whose wife wasn’t keen on the idea, and he chucked it out. Well, all these poor bastards were being interrogated by the time someone at the autopsy said: ‘Hey, there’s the wrong number of ribs here . . .’”
It’s a South African story admittedly, a farce made black by the excesses of the police, just as in Riotous Assembly, the novel which Sharpe, now 54, rattled off 12 years ago in three weeks. That was the start of a prolific spell which shows no signs of abating; ten books in 11 years, the latest of which, Vintage Stuff, is out today. None is without its otter episodes – mishap compounded by mishap until “realism”, whatever that might be, runs clean off the rails into a landscape mined with outlandish devices.
For the diminishing number of people who don’t know his books, they are strangely schizophrenic affairs, compulsive or repulsive depending on whether you are rudish or prudish. Classical plots and squirarchical characters are swamped in farce that is at once witty, inventive and unashamedly juvenile. Whole bathrooms start moving in country houses; inflatable women paralyse a town; unprintable misfortunes happen with sexual aids; it is as though, on an immaculate English Saturday, a horrid schoolboy has slipped something funny into the vicarage tea urn. Sharpe himself would accept with joy the tag of “Wodehouse on acid”.
He is a bit of a paradox himself. In Bridport, where he lives with his wife and their three children, he has dug and double-dug his garden and tended it lovingly to yield marrows the size of landed whales and rose bushes of which Fred Streeter would have been proud. But still he can stand on his verandah overlooking this profusion of blooms and say with the vehemence of a Basil Fawlty: “Look at that. Horrible. Horrible!”
Just like his idol, “Plum,” his image is that of a man more English than the English: the tweedy attire and the vicar’s mien support the illusion, which is a matter of huge amusement to Sharpe. It tallies with his sense of humour that he should be painted as this parsonic gent whose pages turn the air blue with profanity.
The reality is that he is in some respects a stage Englishman, the first to admit that he envies enormously such “real Englishmen” as stockbrokers or lieutenant-colonels – the very ones from whose ranks he feels permanently disbarred by colonialism. His mother was South African, as are most of his relatives, and his father was a Unitarian minister (as well as a fascist). His second wife is American. The South African note rises in his voice when he is animated, which is frequently, and he has a habit, when puzzled, of shrugging his shoulders and saying: “Ich weiss nicht. Ich weiss nicht”.
But his education was Lancing and Cambridge, and if you add to that the decade he spent teaching at a Cambridge tech, you can see why he is quick to spot the dead hand of Eng Lit Crit, particularly when it comes within a mile of his own output.
“If people want to elevate the writer to the status of guru, they’re welcome to do it. Why do they do it? Because they’ve lost religion, that’s why. And that is thanks to the univeristy [sic] system. Once men used to read tracts. Serious works. Nowadays we don’t have serious works; the novel is the nearest substitute, thanks to Dr (expletive deleted) Leavis and the whole industry of elevating writers. They’re not Kants, they’re not Hegel, they’re not Nietzche, not Treitschke. Novelists are people who write books for enjoyment. Enjoyment is the basis of art”.
Vintage Stuff is nothing if not enjoyable; all the surest of the Sharpe techniques are in play. This time it is what you might call a Euro-farce, cutting between a chateau and another of those abattoir-like public schools (the Bloxham of his pre-Lancing days?). It is like Wodehouse intercepting an Alistair Maclean script (Sharpe grimaces at the name), and coming up with Where Pigeons Dare.
But once again the air is grey with repression, whether from police, parents or teachers; just as in Wilt, Riotous Assembly, Porterhouse Blue, in fact almost any of his previous nine, not even the layers of farce can insulate the power figures from contempt. So what is going on? Is the world so grotesque that straight exposure falls short of the mark? Are these books actually subversive?
“That’s your word, not mine. Subversive means underground, threatening, attempting to destroy. I’m not any of these things. The things that I hang on to in a world where you’re very uncertain are the old Victorian values, Christian values if you like . . . . immediately I stumble because the Christian Maronites went and did a Babi Yar in Beirut.
“What I am is anti the institution. In the 19th century Bagehot said the reason freedom existed in Britain was that there were conflicting institutions, each of which was demanding the right of free speech against the other one. I am against monopoly of power”.
His political alignment is a polite but firm “No comment.” If you look in the books for clues, you could draw virtually any conclusion within the entire spectrum from looney left to Blimpish right, Dave Spart to Colonel Mad. He was one of those authors who preferred not to contribute to the book of writers’ views on Argentina’s occupation of the Falklands; but he concedes that, had he done so, his advice to Mrs Thatcher would have been “Belt the buggers!”
The “No comment” is surely not caginess, but a simple don’t-know, coming from a feeling that politics, like himself, are too full of contradictions to be shoved under a label.
He, of course, is labelled: farceur, which is fine by him. The image is helped along by those wild Paul Sample cartoons on the Pan paperbacks, hinting at the unthinkables which await the reader.
As one who has been through his particular educational mill, on both sides of the counter, he is glad that he has a rather maverick status and that in part his constituency is anti-intellectual. It is just another literary London, he will soon have one eye on the books pages of the “qualities”.
For the 10 years before Riotous Assembly, there he was doing a Henry Wilt, that is, trying to din the classics into butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, and growing ever more disenchanted with the task. To all intents and purposes, the Meat One lecture scenes from that book are straight autobiography.
His spell in the Marines is another rich seam; he has a fund of shipboard anecdotes that are as far beyond belief as his most outrageous fiction – crazed officers, mutinous crew, victims of draconian injustices – all reproduced for something more than their comic value. “That was a strange experience for me. I mean, I was the only public schoolboy in the whole lot. No, there was one other chap. Downside. Anyway, he got hit over the head with an entrenching tool and I didn’t see him after that . . .”, and he’s off again.
If he came late to writing, it was not for want of trying. In his twenties in South Africa he had tried a number of plays, only one of which, The South African, was staged, and which brought about his deportation.
“I don’t read them now. I guess most of them were rubbish. What were they like? Oh, they were all very, very heavy, and all of them about South Africa. There was a lot of symbolism in them. I suppose you could say they were contrapuntal in a Mannian sort of way.” There is no apparent irony in this last judgment, and it makes one remember how familiar he is with that opinion jargon against which so much of the writing is a reaction. “Look, if you’re 41 before you know you’re a clown, my God you’ve got a great deal of highbrow reading behind you”.
With the resignation of someone who knows he is going to be taken out of context, Sharpe describes himself, without apology, as a genius. He follows that at once with: “I know, I know, I can just see the headline: I’m a genius, says Tom Sharpe.”
What he means is simply that there have been certain books for which he has been a conduit, a holder of the pen. The most conspicuous in this category are Wilt and Riotous Assembly, of which he says: “I didn’t write them . . . let me be very clear about this; when I use that word genius, I mean it to have nothing whatever to do with geatness [sic], only with where the writing comes from.”
Porterhouse Blue, The Great Pursuit and Blott on the Landscape, are among the ones he “wrote himself,” the last being “hammered out on an anvil.” Vintage Stuff is hardly an auto-composition either; its writing ran into years, not weeks, and was distilled from a total of 600,000 words, or about nine times its actual length.
In the mornings Sharpe takes himself off to an office in Bridport to work. Whether a book is running him, or he it, he must get out of the house to write. Sometimes he goes no further than a little wooden summer house hiding at the far end of the garden. He will sit down, look back up towards the house and almost certainly the lines of handwriting will start to appear in his hard-backed pad as the latest Skullion, Flawse of Peregrine asserts his right to life.
He could be at it for less than an hour, or for up to 15. “If it’s running, you just hang on to its tail.” At some stage he will probably stand up and hold his sides as the laughter gets to him. It might become so bad that he is wheezing and weeping with hysteria.
That word hysteria is another key one for Sharpe, and he uses it in its proper, minority sense. Right from Riotous Assembly he was aware of its power, and recalls Durrenmatt’s observation of comedy being a trap, ‘the thing which dictators fear most.
He was so appalled by the Soviet Goverment’s [sic] treatment of Andrei Sakharov that he aborted the negotiations for publishing his books in the USSR. One of those to be translated was The Great Pursuit which lampoons, among other things, American cultural sensibilities. But though he may have mocked the Yanks, and found Watergate a vindication of his claims, he has a soft spot for a country whose president can be brought down by “a little old judge, a black detective, the eastern Seaboard and the New England liberals”.
The vision is one of a man who has got fed up with being “heavy,” and seen that there is another, more palatable way of getting at certain desperate realities. It is this chance mixture of training and temperament, or as he would say, over-education and under-education, that has produced such substantial farce. There is certainly no one else writing like this, and the world that his fiction creates (perhaps, under the circumstances, better not “Sharpe-ville”) is utterly his own.
The head of Secker and Warburg, Tom Rosenthal, whose three-book, three-year contract enabled Sharpe to give up teaching, says of him: “All my publishing antennae told me that here was a comic genius, and I have seen nothing to make me change my mind. We’re hoping for a Sharpe a year till the crack of doom”.
The public agrees, and puts his novels into the bestseller lists within a week of hardback publication. Does the casual reader, laughing aloud on the train, have any idea of the contradictions that have made up this comedy? It comes from someone who is both very private and very open, scathing and compassionate, idealistic and throwaway, serious and hilarious, not sure whether to water those roses or pee on them – but who is always, always ready for a laugh, at himself if necessary.
“Am I getting a full page? . . What d’you mean you don’t think I’m the sort of person that gets a full page in The Times? . . . You gave le Carré a full page, why not me. . . Look, phone Murdoch. . . What d’you mean you don’t think it would do any good? He owns you, doesn’t he? Well then. The phone’s through there. . . OK, so phone America or Australia or wherever he is. . . go on, then”.
And then a broad, warm smile. The joke’s over, but not before a damned good run. “Ah well, what you write about me will only be fiction anyway.”
Maybe, but that’s often less strange than the truth, isn’t it?