This article was published in the Sunday Telegraph on 27 January 1985 as part of the ‘Mandrake’ column.
TOM SHARPE entered the room with glasses of gin and an anxious look: “Terrible, isn’t it? The fireplace. I keep intending to have it taken out.” Our leading comic novelist gave it a long, menacing stare hoping it might dematerialise under his gaze, before he relaxed with a laugh.
A tall, quite handsome man, 56, with a profile reminiscent of a younger Michael Foot. Sharpe is occasionally shaken by small eruptions of mirth as he mentally previews a joke or runs a preposterous circumstance through his mind before sharing it, lightly peppered with Anglo-Saxon obscenity.
Much of it is self-mockery. His Dorset garden, for example, on which he poured love and six tons of muck to grow lots of roses. Now the local authority wants to take a chunk of it for industrial development.
“I’ve got 1,000 roses,” he said. A moment’s silence, then a small splutter. “And the climate is completely wrong for them here. Too wet. They get diseases . . .” he giggled, then paused to regain his poise: “. . . They get diseases I can’t even identify. So I have to spray them with fungicide. Fifteen gallons at a time! Do you know how long it takes to spray 1,000 roses? It takes a day to mow the lawn,” he laughed, looking out on his four and a half acres.
Next month the BBC is showing “Blott on the Landscape,” while in studios elsewhere “Porterhouse Blue” finds a new medium. Options have been sold on all of Sharpe’s prodigious output.
“At the moment I am working on a scenario. Plotting. I don’t like a lot of my books, it should be stated. They are badly plotted. Yes, they entertain, it’s just that I am not satisfied with them myself. When someone tells you that ‘Ancestral Vices’ is ‘The finest thing I have ever read’ I can only assume that literacy has declined to the point where . . .” He trailed off, waving a despairing hand.
He has critics who complain about the blackness of his comedy and the fact that people get killed in his books. “I am just a farceur. The world in which I live and the world in which critics live are poles apart,” he said with unusual solemnity. “The world of my reality is one in which these things occur; a world in which people drop concrete on taxi drivers’ heads. I have seen a South African policeman fire two shots blindly down an alleyway and kill two people.
“If any writer thinks the world is full of middle-class people of nice sensibilites, then he is out of his mind,” he said, recalling that George Steiner had spoken of a guard at Auschwitz who read the poet Rilke while leaning against his sentry box. “Here we have a concentration camp guard doing this while people were dying by the score. When people say I write farce . . . well, I don’t write farce at all. I write about reality but in a farcical way.”
Sharpe had once described himself as having genius. It seems an unlikely statement from a quietly-spoken, mild-mannered man. What he meant, he said, was that he had A Genius, a guiding spirit, that had taken over. “There was Kipling who talked about his Daemon and I do feel that. Therefore there are some books I can’t claim credit for.
“I spent 20 years writing bad plays and ended up teaching at a tech. and yet, in three weeks, I had produced ‘Riotous Assembly.’ I don’t remember a thing about it. It was just sheer concentration—150,000 words in three months, all hand-written in notebooks.”
He produces one, filled with small, neat handwriting from a fountain pen. His typing, too, is said to show a clerk’s obsession with neatness, re-doing an entire page for the sake of one error. Today he has moved on to word processors. “I’ve got two. I always think it’s a good thing to have spares. And if I see a second-hand Adler portable anywhere, then I’ve more or less got to buy it,” he said.
He may have kept pace with keyboard technology, but the modern method of promoting writers, touting them on media tours, is not really in Sharpe’s modest character. Could he, we wondered, ever imagine himself on a Jeffrey Archer-style jaunt, kissing babies in W. H. Smith’s?
“Perhaps. If I was starving,” he said, then remembering he has a black reputation to live up to, added: “Oh yes, and if I had Aids.”