This article by William Foster was published in The Scotsman on 17 May 1975.
“I SUPPOSE I’m lucky,” said Tom Sharpe, “in that there are very few writers left these days who try to produce comedy. I’m ploughing a pretty lonely furrow, which suits me fine. Think how many thriller writers there are.”
Unspoken between us was the thought that the greatest comic writer of them all, P. G. Wodehouse, was still alive up to a few weeks ago. Sharpe worshipped Wodehouse and is grateful that the great man gave him a friendly shove in the direction of being a comic writer, too.
“I used to be a professional photographer with my own studios and by sheer chance I found myself photographing houses Wodehouse had once occupied in France.” He asked if he could photograph the author’s current home on Long Island.
“He said yes and I spent a day there. I thought him a saintly old party. I liked him.” Though he marvelled, he added that Wodehouse had spent 150,000 dollars in 15 years on setting up the Bide-a-Wee dog home for waifs and strays.
After that, he read Wodehouse’s “Performing Flea,” which showed exactly how the master wrote a comic novel, preparing a complete scenario of 400,000 words for a book that would end up with only 80,000 words after it had been ruthlessly cut and rewritten.
Sharpe used similar methods himself to write his latest comic novel “Blott on the Landscape” (Secker & Warburg, £2.90), planning every chapter with the utmost care. But his very first novel, “Riotous Assembly,” was unplanned, simply flowing out of his subconscious on to the paper.
“What happened was that my wife, Nancy, who is American, went back to the States for three weeks. She taught in a school in South Carolina. I went to live with some jazz musicians and found myself writing ‘Riotous Assembly’ and reading them what I had written.
“We all laughed over my jokes. I’m one of those dreadful people who laughs louder than anyone else at his own jokes. In three weeks, I’d written 105,000 words and I had a book.
It was a very cruel book, he added, and laced with bitter memories of ten years he had spent in South Africa. It features a monstrous policeman, the terror of the Kaffirs, who mows down 22 of his own men with an elephant gun and is proud to be hanging a bishop, even though he cannot read the instructions on the scaffold.
Sharpe thinks it odd that South Africa launched him into the world of comic invention. For much of his life, he has been seriously concerned about the country, barking his shins against its race laws and its police state regulations.
When he first went out to South Africa, where his own grandfather had built large chunks of Johannesburg, he found that many of the friends he had made at Cambridge had got there before him and were millionaires, with kidney-shaped swimming pools and waiters with white gloves and sashes.
He and three girls took food parcels to coloured TB incurables, the cases written off by the hospitals. In his innocence, he visited banned areas like Sophiatown.
In the end, he wrote a critical play about the situation in South Africa which was put on by the Questors’ Theatre in Ealing. “It was one of nine very serious plays I’d written and they were all bloody awful. I’m not a serious writer at heart and it was years before I realised it.”
No matter, the one play that was produced, was enough to get him deported from South Africa after several days in a cell in Port Elizabeth. In revenge, Sharpe has written both “Riotous Assembly” and “Indecent Exposure,” a second travesty about the South African Police.
Having got Vorster’s kingdom out of his system, he turned his attention to Cambridge University with a book published last year called “Porterhouse Blue.” His old mentor, P. G. Wodehouse, read it and was delighted. “Terrific,” said the master. “It is light years since I read anything so original.”
It is about the head porter of a Cambridge college who ends up as the Master. “It gave me a theme that I see can be exploited endlessly. I want to write a lot more about the little man who admires his masters but also nurses the greatest contempt for them.
“It throws up so many interesting questions. Who are the British? Do they have a special quality and if so, what is it? Or have we been bluffing the rest of the world all these years? Topical, you see.”
Sharpe likes to look at the world through the eyes of the underdog. He does it again in “Blott on the Landscape,” the hero being a German who deserts from the Luftwaffe and takes a job in England as a gardener. Yet it is Blott who is the brains behind a campaign to stop the building of a motorway through this idyllic landscape.
Sharpe himself lives in a suburban pebbledash semi-detached house in Cambridge. He calls the stunted bushes dividing him from his neighbours his sanitary cordon and cycles off to a wooden hut 3 miles away in order to write.
“It gives me the feeling of going to work, of getting away from children and vacuum cleaners.” His next novel, now well on its way, is a send-up of the hothouse world of publishers and literary agents.
He asked me about several of the less endearing habits of various London publishers. I told him about them and a purposeful gleam stole into his eye. But a novelist, like a journalist, never betrays his sources, I hope.