This article by Robert Bennett was published in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on 22 October 1984.
TOM Sharpe wrote the first of his bitterly funny books about South Africa because he could not stand the genteel sensibilities of the English liberal establishment.
A deceptively diffident man, who freely admits that he does not enjoy being carted around newspaper offices, radio stations and television studios to be interviewed and categorised, it is difficult, for a while, to believe he has the kind of anger in him that has created 11 best-selling novels of huge force and fierce satire.
But it surfaces quickly when he talks about his experiences in South Africa, and his experience of this country when he arrived back after being imprisoned and deported.
When he arrived back, it was to be taken up by “the English liberal conscience.”
“I felt like the monkey on top of the organ and I got fed up with it,” he said.
But the anger which pushed him into writing his first novel, Riotous Assembly, was provoked by the peculiarity of the English liberal. He does not have a lot of time for the breed.
“I cannot take the overt statement of sensibility when it carries no moral commitment. That is a very English disease. People are very polite here, but they are not there when you need them,” he said.
When he returned from South Africa, he was overwhelmed by English “sensibility.” He was feted for being imprisoned and deported, but those who were so thrilled to meet the man who had suffered for his principles were only interested in “genteel mush.”
As far as Tom Sharpe was concerned, he had not suffered at all and he resented being treated as a hero by people who did not want to face the harsher facts about what was the real suffering of the black South African.
He began to go out of his way to shock them.
Only Kaffirs
“I used to tell them I was in prison with a couple of convicted murderers. That was an experience, mind you. You don’t meet murderers every day, but really, that was all it was.
“But the English liberal wants to be shocked by your suffering, whether you’ve suffered or not, so I used to tell them about those two murderers and tell them they were hanged — but that it did not matter because they were only Kaffirs.”
That they did not want to hear; they did not want to hear what the “crude reality of life in South Africa” really meant.
Tom Sharpe experienced that crude reality, not during his few days in prison awaiting deportation, but during his years working in Soweto for the Non-European Affairs Department.
He had a medical degree from Cambridge, and his job was to look at the health of the blacks living in the township. “When I went out to South Africa, I had no idea what the damn country was like, but I found myself watching people die of incurable diseases during the day, and then spending the evenings with friends from my Cambridge days who were on their way to being millionaires.
“Do you know, I can remember one man saying that TB was the saving grace of South Africa because it was killing all the blacks off? Do you know that when they found a vaccine for polio, the South Africans did not give it to the blacks?”
“Do you know that for many white men there, you are not a man unless you have caught the pox from a Kaffir girl at least six times?” he says — almost seeming to want to test his listener’s ability to face up to the “crude reality.”
Not surprisingly, he gave up his job with the Government. He simply was not prepared to accept the position he was in. “I wasn’t helping people. I was implementing Apartheid.”
He took up photography, wrote plays and wrote about conditions in South Africa — all of which gradually got him into deeper and deeper trouble with the Apartheid regime.
“I write a play about Chief Lutuli, which was put on in London. The people who put it on changed my name to protect me, to Jim Latan, which is Natal spelt backwards, but it did not work. In fact, the authorities went out of their way to find out who I was.
“I never even got to see the play, so I don’t suppose it was very good.”
He also made a habit of photographing prisons and the conditions in them, which did him no good at all — but when he sued an Afrikaans newspaper for libel, that was the last straw.
He was effectively suing the Afrikaan power structure. The deportation order arrived nine days after he took out the writ — but the date it was to take effect was given as two days before he had taken it out.
With a cussedness that goes along with his diffidence, he refused to take any notice of it until the authorities were forced to arrest him and deport him physically.
That was in 1959. Twenty-five years on, he has not lost his anger, despite turning his acid wit upon the English in a succession of best-selling novels which have won him a wide and devoted following.
He appears slightly bemused by his success, and enormously pleased by the sheer variety of his fans. He was in Sheffield to sign copies of his latest book, Wilt on High, as part of a national publicity tour and while he may not like interviews, he is delighted to meet his readers.
In fact, any impression that he gives of being misanthropic is dispelled when he talks about the experience and about the sheer variety of nice people he meets in this way.
He talks about the characters in his books in much the same way, and appears to like most of them and able to forgive them their sins.
“Of course, the problem with many of my books is that there is so much action, it is often difficult to develop anything more that a relatively flat character — but they do develop their own lunacies and foibles as I write,” he said.
Into disaster
Most of his “villains” are victims of ambition for power, allied with an almost touching incompetence.
“I do happen to believe that those in authority are very largely incompetent and that they use their power in a desperate attempt to disguise that incompetence.”
They are also forced to think in black and white, to develop a rigidity of mind which leads them into one disaster after another, particularly if they are confronted with someone who simply does not accept their values, someone, in fact, like Tom Sharpe in South Africa or his best known character, Wilt, of the Fenland College of Further Education, a character born of Mr Sharpe’s 16 years of teaching at Cambridge Tech.
“In so far as I have dreams of power, and I suppose we all have, I would undoubtedly reject them. I don’t know what the world is all about and I feel sorry for those who think they do, and for fanatics of any sort who believe they know what is right,” he said.
But he does know what is wrong — things like an economic structure which denies craftsmanship. “I believe that the English are a race of craftsmen, but they are denied the opportunity to put that to work. You talk to the people who make cars at Cowley. They aren’t making cars. They can’t have any pride in the end product — yet if you go to their homes you’ll see examples of perfect craftsmanship. I’m not surprised they go on strike there. I’d go on strike!”
He, too, would like to be seen as a craftsman. “I’m not as good as someone like Evelyn Waugh, of course, but I try.”
When he is not taking satisfaction in his own craft, he finds it in other people’s. His pride and joy is his collection of typewriters and he finds his relaxation talking to the carpenters, bricklayers and joiners in the Dorset village of Bridport where he lives.
Now aged 56, he does appear to take life very seriously for such a funny man. Taking a pinch of snuff from a very large silver snuff box, he said: “I write very seriously — but nobody knows it. My novels are like chocolates with cyanide inside.”
Caption: Best-selling author, Tom Sharpe: “I felt like the monkey on top of the organ and I got fed up with it…”