This article was published in The Selma Times Journal on 29 November 1987.
By JEAN MARTIN
Community Editor
A trade journal with a full-page photograph of television’s “Emmy” on its glossy front is about the only outward and visible sign that its international category was awarded last week to Tom Sharpe, brother-in-law of Byrd Looper and Thanksgiving visitor to Selma.
If pressed about the win, he replies in a clipped British accent that is the native speech of the Cambridge-bred playwright and novelist that “it wasn’t given just to me, you know, I only wrote it. A team made the TV mini-series. Someone rung up four weeks ago, said I’d been nominated. Unbelievably, we won.
“Good for the ego, but what does it mean … I didn’t even get it, the producer team did.”
SHARPE LAUGHED, made reference to “your American chaps’ saying that and a dime will get a cup of coffee, or some such thing,” then talked about “Porterhouse Blue,” his book on which the TV series is based.
“It’s a farcical novel about Cambridge, a satirical comedy.”
He says the title ‘Porterhouse Blue’ is a play on words.
“At Cambridge and Oxford, the colleges are like hostels with halls that go back 500 years, resembling monasteries with lots of little cells.
“An enormous amount of money has been left to them by people who went there — in my Cambridge class, almost everyone was a millionaire — so the halls are extremely rich. The food served in them is fantastic. So, ‘Porterhouse,’ which is an expensive cut of beef.”
Sharpe wrote his first novel in 1969, “when I met my wife, Nancy, a rich American. She had $1,000 and I had 300 pounds about the same amount which is no money at all. She was teaching school in Greenville, S.C. and went back there to arrange things while I wrote the book.
“I did it in three weeks.”
THE NAME of his novel was “Riotous Assembly,” and it was about South Africa, where Sharpe had been living for 10 years, “until I was deported in 1960. The book was called satire; it was about the South African police, who make Mississippi rednecks look like liberal thinkers.
“The novel was a very savage form of comedy. I’ve written 11 books, they all are.”
Another of his novels, “Blott on the Landscape,” is about a prisoner in South Africa, and was also a mini-series.
In South Africa, Sharpe’s first position was as Non-European Affairs Officer. “I’d collect people with TB, take them out of hospital and put them back home, then keep count of them. I also worked as a teacher and a photographer — I was writing plays all the time, serious plays about real conditions. That’s when the secret police took an interest in me.
“I spent 20 years serious, then found I was a clown. In fact, I’ve turned everything around, and I find that everything in South Africa is a farce. It’s mad. An industrial country, immensely rich, with a very complicated society of artisans, rural people — and the Afrikaans, who have a tradition deeply rooted that God is on their side.”
THE AFRIKAANS (descendants of the original white settlers and the ruling class in South Africa), Sharpe says, “have a Puritan ethic rooted in the 17th century. Some qualities are admirable — they are frugal, industrious, thrifty, husbanders of the land — but they are convinced they are right.”
Sharpe’s grandfather was the first builder in Johannesburg, he says, “and my mother was born there in 1886. She was on the last train to leave during the Boer War, evacuated to Natal. She remembered seeing the Boers ride out, silhouetted against the skyline, as the train pulled out. I use a different name, but Natal is the city I write about in my books.”
His books were accepted in 1971 and ’72, “then held back until last year when Atlantic Monthly Press brought them out, perhaps because they are scandalous books, with some shocked by the language — but that’s the way they talk in South Africa. And only those who’ve lived there know how bad things really are.”
Cambridge, England, is the home of Nancy and Tom Sharpe.