This article was published in the Dorset Echo on 4 July 1979.
TOM SHARPE has made his name and makes his living writing about things which should be serious but which, when he writes them, break down into pure farce.
The South African Question, should, for example, be a very serious debate. But, try as he might, he found the whole set-up utterly preposterous — wrong, yes, but ludicrously wrong. So when he came to write about it the book just came out as farce and was an instant best seller.
The really funny thing is that Mr. Sharpe, who has now moved to West Dorset to live, was deported from South Africa for writing a serious, little-known play knocking that country.
The play was only performed in a tiny avante garde theatre in England. But his book, Riotous Assembly, will do more good as he sees it than any ten dozen serious tracts on that troubled country.
MADNESS
“You just can’t be serious about such a ludicrous society. You start off trying to be serious and it is just too much. And we’ve got this society which is utterly wicked, totally vile, run by people who are simply evil… but no, they are not simply evil, they are just downright stupid. Totally thick. What can you do with them but poke fun?
“The most daft things in my book really do happen. As in Riotous Assembly where the English lady is told to take the murdered houseboy into the house because if he is dead in the garden it is murder, and if in the house it is not. This kind of madness really does happen.
“It happened to an uncle of mine. He ran into the back of a car in Johannesburg and it was completely his fault and the police were about to book him when the officer realised that the driver of the car in front was a Jew. Immediately the policeman’s attitude changed. He apologised for the trouble caused to my uncle and sent the Jew off with a flea in his ear for having the cheek to have someone run into his car.”
LAUGHTER
“And in another instance, another of my relatives knocked down a black man, and the black man was made to come round and apologise for denting his car.”
“It is utterly, totally, mad. All you have to do is turn such a society on its head and the books write themselves.”
The conversation ran on during the afternoon and early evening in a like vein. Mr. Sharpe tried frequently to give examples, as in the car accidents to the Jew and the black man, and keep serious while telling them. But with an awful insistence the laughter kept welling up, and there were times when the tears were running down my cheeks. It is true. There are some things so stupidly evil that you only have to try and relate them soberly and you have pure, natural, farce.
Mr. Sharpe, whose other books include Wilt, Porterhouse Blue and The Great Pursuit, took his wife Nancy on a house hunting tour of the West when they decided that a semi-detached life in Cambridge was no longer for them.
IDYLLIC
After a weary trek round houses with a little bit of land attached he and Nancy walked into into St. Ronan’s House, a former school, in Bridport, and laid eyes on the huge garden that stretched behind. Within a second thought Mr. Sharpe turned to Nancy and said, “Honey we’ve bought ourselves a house.”
That was a year ago, and now the couple and their three daughters have adopted the country style of Dorset with enthusiasm.
Apart from the occasional interruption from someone making a sentimental journey to see their old school, Mr. Sharpe spends his days in the idyllic pattern of writing in the morning and doing whatever he pleases for the rest of the day.
Mr. Sharpe lived for many years in Cambridge, but although he liked the city he did not like the people. “They’re just not friendly people there. There is this continual Town and Gown friction. But down here in Bridport, everyone is very friendly. In fact they are so friendly you can’t get in and out of a shop in a hurry, they always want to chat. It’s great.
“It’s crazy. I lived for 15 years in Cambridge and I thought, what am I doing here? I don’t like it. So with the freedom a writer has I decided to find a place in the country.”
His ancestors came from Stalbridge, and he included Dorset in a home finding tour of the West. “We were about to give up, and the agents told us about this place.”
“Nobody gives the house a second look. The agent said, ‘Don’t look at the house, look at the garden.’ That’s what I wanted, a bit of garden.”
“We couldn’t wait to get down here. The crazy thing is we bought this house and enormous garden and two and a half acre paddock for only £10,000 more than we sold our perfectly ordinary semi in Cambridge for.”
ENTHUSED
And it was about his garden, more than his books, that he wanted to talk. He had me trying out a new-fangled spade for back sufferers which chucked the earth about half a mile away with every dig, and then a stainless steel spade. “You ought to get one,” he enthused. “I love digging and this makes it a joy.”
True, the spade did sink into the silty loam of his capacious garden like a warm knife through butter. “These are the things I spend my money on,” he said. “I don’t want a new car or things like that.
“The Volvo I have will do me for ten years yet. I buy rose plants but I never exhibit them. I never grow a rose unless it has a lovely smell.”
That started a beguiling sidetrack conversation while I dug half his garden for him, as to whether roses smell as good as they did.
“They do,” he said authoritatively. “They had the same debate in Victorian times.”
We supposed, and agreed, that it must be because as a child one’s sense of smell is so much more vivid.
RIDICULOUS
He was an undergraduate at Cambridge, but if he ever had any of the airs and graces of that person, he has long since lost them.
“I hated it. I hated them. I hated their loud stupid voices and…
Tom’s sharp books cut them down to size
(Cont. from Page I)
… their ridiculous intellectual arguments. I suppose the total mayhem of my books is some way due to my being over educated. Because I was, public school, Cambridge.”
He has a deep interest in his own family traditions, and constantly lards his conversation with references to grandfather this and uncle that, who are, or were, spread around the world.
The “over-educated” reference brought up the case of an uncle who was a professor of something rarified like philosophy but who was happiest growing cabbages and tomatoes in his back garden.
“The man was never meant to be an intellectual. He was a peasant, dammit. He should have been a peasant. He was completely wasted as an intellectual, but as a peasant he would have been a fulfilled man.”
It was out of this, and his intense satisfaction with writing books in the morning and pruning roses all afternoon — “you couldn’t find a happier or luckier man than me” — that prompted yet another fierce dialogue, this time in defence of the British factory worker. “They are always being criticised for going on strike and moaning. I don’t blame them. They do these soul-destroying jobs day after day. They have a right to blow their tops. They should blow their tops.”
“People say I’m a satirist. I’m not. When they try to pin me down and ask what I see myself as, the answer is just a writer who seems to be able to make people laugh.
“‘You’re a great writer’ they say ‘In Russia (they’ve just started publishing me there) you’d be a hero’ they say. Rubbish, I don’t set out to be a great writer, and I certainly don’t want to be a hero.
“Great writing is accidental. For example… (he pauses, as though wondering whether he dare mention the name in present company, and decides he might as well)… For example, Shakespeare did not set out to be a great writer. He just wrote plays to entertain people, and get them in the theatre.
“That’s all I think of myself, as an entertainer. One reviewer described me as pornographic. Rubbish. Parts of my books are bawdy, true, but that’s part of English literature isn’t it?”
FORTUNE
When he had to make a decision on whether to become a full-time writer, his family traditions came in handy again. “I had a grandfather who made and lost a fortune in Melbourne putting up a building called Stalbridge. Then he went to South Africa and made a second fortune, and put up another building called Stalbridge. I asked myself, what would Grandfather Brown have done? The answer was he would have taken a chance. So I did.”
He wrote his now famous Wilt and Riotous Assembly in a total of five weeks. Now he spends more time on a plot, working mornings in a shed in his stately garden.
“I do a lot of plotting in my books. That is important. People seem to think that because they are comedy, I can knock off a book with ease. But I do take a lot of pains with my books, whatever people may think of them.
“I seem to have the ability to make people laugh. They are bawdy, yes, and there are some people I would seriously advise not to read them. But you can’t beat a good belly laugh. It has a cartharitic effect.
“I had a letter once from a friend who had given my books to a man suffering a mental breakdown. ‘You really did cure that man,’ they told me. Isn’t that great, to cure someone with laughter?”
Great indeed. But also, in a Sharpian vein, ludicrously funny. When you try to explain it seriously.
Tom Sharpe’s next book, Wilt Alternative, is out on July 30.
Photo captions:
“A luckier and happier man you couldn’t find — author Tom Sharpe, in his garden with one of three little daughters, Grace.”
“Doing what he is happiest doing — Mr. Sharpe weeds his potato crop.”