This article was published in the Evening Standard on 11 May 1979.
MAX HASTINGS plots the picturesque career of Tom Sharpe through classroom and deportation to best-selling author
THE modern urban guerrilla has survived police suppression, body searches at airports and the fall from fashion of sociology degrees. It is another matter whether his self-esteem will be quite the same after the publication this summer of a new novel which contains startling revelations about his habits and motives, The Wilt Alternative, by Tom Sharpe.
It will be Sharpe’s eighth book, the usual mixture of satire, sexual perversion and black comedy that give him a good claim to be the funniest comic novelist of his generation. His first book, Riotous Assembly, dealt with the plight of an Afrikaaner police officer who is telephoned one day by an elderly English lady to report that she has murdered her black cook/lover. The rest of the story describes the authorities’ struggle to keep the case out of court.
In The Throwback, the heir to a family fortune has his dead father stuffed to keep him looking lively for long enough to satisfy the terms of the will. In Wilt, an embittered technical college lecturer, who makes love to a rubber plastic dummy, spends the rest of the book escaping the consequences, which include a charge of murdering his unspeakable wife. It none of these themes sound a firm basis for a cult, try reading one and think again.
Tom Sharpe himself is a mild, innocent 51-year-old who lives in an old schoolhouse in Dorset, nourishing his passion for roses, and currently trying to sort out legal problems with passages in The Wilt Alternative which concern a man’s sexual passion for a model animal.
“I said to my lawyer, ‘Couldn’t we change it and make it Basil Brush?’”
‘Good God, no,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see’d have the entire RSPCA down on us for a million?’”
He is one of those people for whom real life is a ceaseless procession of tragi-comedies. After Lancing and the Royal Marines, he went to South Africa and worked for the Non-European Affairs Department in Soweto and other black townships: “Imagine me, just out of public school, sitting at a desk trying to sort out two huge Zulu women, one stark naked, the other bleeding from head to foot and wearing a coat back to front. They were a wife and lover who’d happened to meet at the water tap. I didn’t feel cut out for this, somehow.”
He taught for six years in (white) Natal colleges, then ran a photographic studio and taught part-time in a technical college until his dissident connections got him the sack, several weeks in jail and deportation in 1961. He learned a great deal about South African policemen and prisons:
“In the Land-Rover taking me to Durban, one of the policemen said: ‘Oh man, we aren’t so stupid as to believe the Kaffirs can be doing all this themselves. We know about that big, fat Jew in Johannesburg who’s behind it all!’”
Sharpe’s rage is closer to the surface of the comedy in his two South African novels than anything else he has written: “They really believe it, you see, about the Jew. They pulled in a Jewish friend of mine once. They took him on Sunday, and then they let him out on Wednesday, he was hallucinating. The joke was that he really didn’t know anything, whatever they did to him. The other joke was he wasn’t very political when he went in, but he’s been a raving Marxist ever since.
Screams
“I got the idea for Riotous Assembly when a friend’s great-aunt telephoned the police station next to her house to ask if they could do something about the screaming, because she couldn’t get to sleep in the afternoon. The commissioner came straight round to see her. He was terribly upset that she’d been disturbed. After that I think they just gagged the buggers.”
Sharpe’s finest sense of comedy is reserved for the English educational system, and especially for the so-called social sciences. He himself read anthropology at Cambridge, and after his return from South Africa he taught for 10 years at Cambridge Tech. The experience of teaching English literature nine hours a day to the butchers and cooks of Meat One and Gasfitters Two is immortalised in Wilt.
“‘Just see they know about socialism and contraception,’ a colleague of mine was told when he started. Today I can still read Candide, which says something for Voltaire, but if you showed me Lord Of The Flies, I think I’d break out in some sort of allergy.
“I liked the apprentices, but the printers were pretty ghastly. They thought they knew everything because they could read. The first time I was sent to teach A Farewell To Arms to the plasterers, the head of Liberal Studies said: ‘Just let them read for a bit, then see if they understand all the sex bits.’ We have some pretty good plasterers in Cambridge, you know. The things those little s—s taught me about sex that I’d never even heard of…
“I hear that some of the Liberal Studies lecturers at the tech have suggested that Wilt be included in the syllabus, but the Head of English has rejected it as unsuitable.”
Last year he moved to Dorset with his American wife Nancy and their three daughters, and now he sits in the garden shed with a couple of brooder lamps under the desk to keep his feet warm, stirring his ghastly literary brews at the typewriter.
“You think I sometimes go over the top a bit? But everything I write is based on reality. Take the hero of The Throwback: my father, who was a Unitarian minister, dumped me at the age of eight in the wilds of Northumberland with nothing but a .410 shotgun for company. Imagine that — at eight. There was nothing to do but shoot and masturbate. I killed everything in miles. The stuffing scene? In South Africa at the turn of the century they were always bringing in dead bushmen to set up for museums.”
Beep
“Life is full of black comedy. Last year I was in hospital, a few beds down from a man on a heart monitor. Beep-beep-beep-beep this thing went all day. Then late one night I suddenly heard it go beepety-beep-beepety-beepety and stop altogether. The night sister came round and said in that accusing way: ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, Sister, but I find it jolly hard to sleep when that poor chap in the end bed just died.’
“‘What do you mean, gone?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s just the machine that’s broken down.’”
But in a Sharpe novel, the patient would have died anyway.
Photo caption: SHARPE — Unsuitable for syllabus