This article was published in The Daily Telegraph on 27 March 1976.
TIM HEALD meets Tom Sharpe, who wrote ‘Wilt’
TOM SHARPE is that exceedingly rare bird — a successful writer of funny books. This unusual distinction has led to him being compared constantly with P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, not, I think, because he writes like either of them but because they are the only other two successful and funny English writers most critics can think of. His latest book, “Wilt,” is just out. It is in the best seller list; the film rights are sold and at least some reviewers think it’s his best yet.
“Wilt,” the story of a technical college lecturer who would like to murder his wife but does away with a life-size inflatable rubber doll instead, is his fifth book. He produces them at the rate of one a year, bashing them out at enormous speed on to one of his seven typewriters — he admits to being a typewriter fetishist and talks about them in the way other men talk of vintage cars.
Humour, of course, is a difficult subject to agree about and although Sharpe, who looks almost eerily like the prep school master he once was, is light years away from being a trendy progressive. Some of his jokes are rather rude. For example he always includes a joke about contraceptives (sometimes the same joke) and now thinks of this as a sort of trademark.
Obviously some people wouldn’t find that funny, though he has some eminently respectable fans. His most prized letter about “Wilt” came from Sir Alec Guinness, who said it was the funniest thing he’d read in ages. And the other day he found a man buying a copy in a local bookshop. Greatly daring he approached the customer and asked him if he was really going to fork out £3·50 for one of his creations. The man said indeed he was as he liked the sound of it and had enjoyed the earlier books. He was the university chaplain!
I met Sharpe in Cambridge where he has lived since he took his Diploma in Education.
After a sandwich lunch in his favourite Grantchester pub he showed me first the garden shed, rented from the University Language Research Unit, where he works in the morning, and then took me to his unpretentious semi-detached house, where he works in the afternoons, trying to ignore any distractions posed by his American wife and three small daughters.
He had just returned from lecturing at Lille University, where he had angered his audience by claiming to be simply out to entertain. “You must be committed. You must be committed,” they shrieked. To which Sharpe replied blandly that the minute you started to write a committed novel you were writing propaganda and he detested propaganda. “If you want to write moral tracts,” he says, “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 everyone, right across the board and if I leave out anybody, it’s bloody academics.”
He hates academics, or more specifically traditional academic teaching of English, with a passionate intensity. “The people who have influenced me,” he says, “are Wodehouse, and Waugh (an inspired schoolmaster gave him ‘Decline and Fall’ to read when he was 11)—Richmal Crompton, Kipling, A. E. W. Mason, Dornford Yates. I believe that the teaching of English literature has resulted in the decline of the English novel because everyone is encouraged to write like Henry James. “I can’t imagine anything worse. He wasn’t even English. What the hell can you learn from Henry James except how to write a convoluted sentence that ties you up in knots and makes you feel a fool at the end of it?”
He doesn’t like waffle and he does like a strong plot. “A novel’s got to have a bloody good story,” he says, “and a concise style. Show me an Irish writer and I’ll run a mile.”
This dislike of the literary establishment is just one example of an anti-authoritarianism which has been with him all his life. He ran away from public school at Bloxham on Candlemas, 1941. “I was going with a bloke called Fletcher but he funked it. I got all the way home to Sussex and it rather started a trend. Nobody else managed as well, though. They were all discovered in local barns living off swedes and turnips.”
He did his national service in the Royal Marines (“I was a ghastly Marine”); read anthropology at Cambridge (“God I hated that. I haven’t picked up an anthropology book since”); went to South Africa where he made such mind-boggling mistakes at the Finance Corporation that the experts were quite unable to discover what they were, fell out with the headmaster of a prep school he taught in—he accused Sharpe of being a teacher but not a schoolmaster: and eventually fell foul of the authorities, spending Christmas, 1961, in Cape Town jail before finally being shipped home.
His books are a natural vehicle for this spirited reaction to authority and convention, and he admits that not only does he laugh out loud at his jokes (we spent quite a lot of lunch laughing as he repeated some of the best “Wilt” jokes) but he also loathes some of his characters so much that he can occasionally punish them by giving them scenes which are vicious and, uncharacteristically, quite unfunny.
And underpinning all this there is that recurring bawdiness which some find objectionable. It’s slightly odd because he doesn’t strike one as a bawdy character. Indeed he himself says he looks like a “presbyterian minister.”
When I asked him about it he looked quizzical and said, “Yes, critics are always going on about my ‘vulgarity’.” He paused “But then I happen to think life’s a pretty vulgar business.”
Photo caption: Tom Sharpe. He has been compared with Wodehouse and Waugh.