This article was published in The Times on 18 September 1995.
After 11 years, Tom Sharpe has written a new book. Why did it take so long?
There was a time when Tom Sharpe was one of the few things in life that could be relied on. The author of Wilt and Blott on the Landscape produced 11 books in 13 years, each as grotesquely comic as its predecessor. Sharpe’s imagination seemed to contain an inexhaustible supply of unforgettable images: of black transvestite ballet dancers in Latex tutus, of college lecturers making love to life-size plastic women and of Cambridge colleges awash with condoms.
He offended some and entertained many. He made a lot of money and inspired his publishers into making rash boasts that there would be “a Sharpe a year until the crack of doom”. Shortly after this pronouncement, Sharpe published Wilt on High, then nothing for 11 tantalising years. But now, after a long, cloistered spell in a Spanish hotel, there is a new book, Grantchester Grind. There will be another novel early next year and the book trade is rejoicing, as if Lazarus has been raised from the dead.
Fans of Sharpe (you can spot them stifling giggles on the train) will be delighted to know that Grantchester Grind takes up exactly where his much-loved Porterhouse Blue left off. The Master of Porterhouse, Sir Godber Evans, is dead and has been succeeded by his murderer, the dastardly head porter Skillion, who is stranded in a wheelchair after a stroke. The dismayed fellows, determined to rescue the college from bankruptcy, plot to replace him with a wealthy American paedophile and launderer of drug money. It is vulgar, violent, mordant and, depending on your tastes, hilariously funny or repulsively juvenile. (Most of the critics have gone for the latter.)
Given that this is a sequel to a book he wrote more than 20 years ago, what excuse can there be for the lapse? Sharpe will offer plenty, not least the heart attack he suffered live on Spanish television eight years ago, which obliged him to slow down and give up cigarettes, essential to his prolific output. The main reason, however, was that he produced nothing that made him laugh. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist. My agent would say ‘I like this’ and I said: ‘Well I don’t’. But I never stopped writing. That is a compulsion.”
He certainly didn’t need to make more money, to judge by his house in the Cambridge suburbs with its vast garden and Lexus parked in the gravel drive. The gate is decorated with pictures of a menacing dog labelled “I live here”, but the animal in question turns out to be amiable. Her master, too, is considerably less ferocious than his oeuvre might suggest. Sharpe, 67, is a lumbering, tweedy man, with wispy white hair and huge, age-spotted hands, which cradle a fat cigar. “Do you mind?” he asks. “I shouldn’t be smoking. I’ll stop if the angina pains return. It is a clear addiction in my family. It gave my father cancer of the lip and they had to stick radium needles in it.”
Such macabre images were typical of Sharpe’s extraordinary upbringing. He was born in London, the youngest of a family of four by 14 years. “I was an accident, my 85-year-old sister told me the other day,” he chuckles. “I was born in March and she said that the previous October Mother went out and bought a skipping rope.”
His mother was South African, his father was a Unitarian minister, an open admirer of Hitler and a friend of William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw. The family had to move frequently to avoid internment. “Father was the self-educated son of a quarryman, highly intellectual, irritable as hell and bored out of his skull. He became a Fascist largely because he liked to take up positions which were opposite to other people’s. He didn’t dislike Jews but he became a conspiracy theorist about what they were doing to international finance. He died in 1944, so he never saw what Hitler had done, thank God.”
The sins of the father continue to torment the son, who talks repeatedly and wretchedly about the Holocaust. “I have his qualities, no doubt, but you say ‘hang on, let’s look at this again and use it to my advantage’. I am grateful to him for teaching me how awful ideologies are.”
This view was compounded in the 1950s, when, after the Marines and Cambridge (“a horrible period full of a lot of depressed people who had served in the Army”) he escaped (his word) to South Africa and became a social worker. “My job was as grim as you can get. It involved collecting people dying of TB from hospital and taking them home to their shacks.” Once again, he was in constant contact with racists. He remembers asking a particularly nasty policeman why he didn’t “do a Hitler” and gas the blacks. “I would too,” came the reply, “but it is too late. There are too many of them now to make it practical.”
Later, Sharpe worked as a photographer and wrote eight political plays. These came to the attention of the authorities and he was deported. Back in England he taught liberal studies at a technical college, a job which he loathed. “I was 41, I hadn’t got a house. I was married for the second time and I needed to earn a living from my writing. And suddenly, after 20 years of serious plays, I found that actually I was a clown.”
It took him three weeks to bash out his first novel, Riotous Assembly, a satire on South Africa, which was an immediate hit. Finally, Sharpe had found a palatable form to attack desperate realities.
“I am not trying to teach people anything. I am trying to amuse,” he says, after a long and impassioned digression about among other things, Rwanda, the Moors murderers, Barings Bank and the First World War. He sucks deeply on his cigar. “No, that’s not all I am trying to do. If at the end the readers think as well, that’s good.
“I do my damnedest to avoid pretension. The moment I get pretentious I write rubbish. Has he, perhaps, been getting pretentious for the past 11 years? “That could have been part of it,” he concedes. “But 20 years of writing anti-apartheid, symbolic and what I call meaningful stuff and not getting any result from it inclines you to stick to your laughs.”
“I know how bad some of my jokes are. I know they offend. But I leave them in because I know somebody is going to like them.” His philosophy is that of Sir Robert Walpole, one of his heroes. “He was sitting at a long table with the gentry at one end and the serfs at the other and someone said: ‘Sir Robert, you are a man of great taste, why is it you always talk bawdy at table?’ He replied: ‘Sir, that is because it is the one thing at this table which everyone can understand.’”
“You can rid yourself of certain dark attitudes by the act of comic writing,” he says. “A lot of this sounds very pretentious but Thomas Mann believed that art was a sickness. I don’t like to think so. I prefer to present myself as a genial old buffer.”
In buffer-mode, cushioned by a happy family and his beloved compost heap and rose garden, he will continue to produce. “I refuse to grumble. I refuse to blame my parents. I have nothing to be bitter about. Yes. I am disturbed, but so is everyone. It is how you deal with the disturbance that matters.”