Tom Sharpe / England

Tom Sharpe

ENGLAND

by Tom Sharpe

I love England but I don't like the English. 

Tom Sharpe / An audience

An audience with Tom Sharpe

He's spent four decades satirising a range of entrenched institutions, from the landed gentry to the Cambridge academic community. But, at 81, the Porterhouse Blue author now enjoys a love-hate relationship with his adopted home city, he tells PAUL KIRKLEY.

Tom Sharpe photographed by Roger Adams

It's a little after 10am and, at the kitchen table of his Great Shelford home, Tom Sharpe is in full flow.

“My grandfather was a carpenter,” he tells me, apropos of nothing. “I’m very proud of him, actually. He was a carpenter from Norfolk and he sailed to Africa in 1864, and there was something wrong . . . the weather was . . . there was a fight between the Methodists and the . . . it wasn’t the Methodists who started it . . . it was the other blokes, who were all drunk. And they sailed to get the wind to round the Cape of Good Hope, which is exceedingly dangerous.

Then they were marooned . . . no, not marooned . . . what the hell’s the word? Anyway, they were in the Indian Ocean and the wind died and they were there for a month. It’s all in his diary. You wouldn’t get a carpenter today who could write like that.”

He continues in this vein for some time, before suddenly bringing me up short with a question.

“What do you call those blacks – the natives?”

“Erm . . . Zulus?” I offer, tentatively.

He looks at me as if I’m entirely mad.

“Zulus? In Australia?”

Clearly my own attention has also gone adrift somewhere in the South Atlantic. But that’s an audience with Tom Sharpe all over: While he’s only too eager to share entertainingly rambling, frequently impenetrable stories of his family or recollections from his school days, what you shouldn’t expect is anything like a straight answer to a straight question.

This is something I discover with my opening gambit – a PR-friendly bit of soft soaping designed to let him talk about his latest slice of comic grotesquery, The Gropes. Can you tell me a bit about where the idea for this particular story sprang from? I ask.

“No,” he says, matter-of-factly. Right. Okay then, can you explain how you got the idea for the plot?

“I don’t plot, I can’t plot,” he says, with a dismissive wave of his cigar. “My mind doesn’t work that way. Now Wodehouse . . .. You see, I knew Wodehouse . . .”

This proves the cue for another wandering anecdote about the time he pitched up uninvited at the legendary Jeeves author’s home on Long Island, via a detour regarding the Cambridge academic Piers Brendon and something to do with a man called Townend, before he eventually winds his way back round to the point.

“Wodehouse did 400 pages of notes on ideas. I just launch myself in – boing. And if it works, it works, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’ve got no idea how my books are going to end – I’m in the middle of a book now, my 16th, and I don’t know how that will end.”

Wodehouse was clearly a major influence on Sharpe, whose broad, bawdy satires of life behind the curtains and drapes of Britain’s bungalows and stately homes have inspired a devoted following for the best part of 40 years. But he cites his greatest inspiration as the early novels of Evelyn Waugh.

“My father was a Unitarian minister – I daresay he preached at the Unitarian Church in Cambridge – and, as a child, I only really read the books that were in his library. He was poor as a church mouse – I think he only got £100 a year.

“My mother was his second wife – his first wife died of purpurial fever which, as you know . . .” He studies my reaction intently. “Clearly you don’t know. I can see that by your face.”

Erm, so, anyway, you were telling me about your early literary influences.

“When I was 11, I was in the library at my prep school and the Latin master asked me what I was looking for. I said I’d like an amusing book. He said ‘Try this’ and he gave me Waugh’s first book .. .”

He looks briefly annoyed. “Oh what’s the name of it? You would come on the morning when my memory’s on the blink. Anyway, it was the one with Grimes in it. Look it up. [I did – it was Decline and Fall]. And I loved it.”

Sharpe’s own literary debut came in 1971 with Riotous Assembly, a giddy farce inspired by his experiences in apartheid-era South Africa, from which he was deported in 1961 after being accused of sedition.

“I knew the wrong people,” he explains. “I started off in a finance corporation – they thought I was clever ’cos I’d been to Cambridge, but I wasn’t – then I was working as a teacher, and then I took up photography. I was wandering around townships – I was just showing the misery and horror of apartheid. They burned 36,000 of my negatives.”

Finding himself back in Cambridge, where he’d been an undergrad at Pembroke College, Sharpe took a job teaching history at the then College of Art and Technology, and set about establishing himself as a writer, churning out his first books in a “grotty flat” in City Road.

If Riotous Assembly and its sequel, Indecent Exposure, were ostensibly about South Africa, they also introduced

readers to several concepts that would become Sharpe trademarks, most notably his Rabelaisian portrait of the ineffectual, degenerate English ruling classes and the moral and sexual hypocrisy at play behind their thin veneer of respectability.

It is a theme he would develop in knockabout novels ranging from Ancestral Vices and The Throwback to 1975’s Blott on the Landscape, later the subject of a memorable TV adaptation in which the current Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie) performed bondage on a naked Arthur Daley (George Cole), while dressed as a cat.

The following year saw the launch of Sharpe’s most enduring comic creation. A downtrodden lecturer at the fictional Fenland College, Henry Wilt is to some extent an avatar of Sharpe himself, and went on to star in four well-received novels and one very badly received film starring Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith (“I was so angry about that because it was so absolutely wrong,” he says. “I told the writer/director to get lost. He’d ****ed Wilt up. He really had. Nobody liked it.”).

By now, Sharpe had left the grotty flat behind and upgraded to his own office – if you could call it that. “I hired a hut in the university language research unit, which was run by a Mrs Braithwaite,” he recalls. “I wrote Wilt in there in three weeks.”

Though he’s now 81, boasts a “foot full of metal” following a gardening accident eight years ago and recently narrowly survived a serious digestive illness, Sharpe has lost none of his desire to prick the pomposity and prod the peccadilloes of the English gentry.

He appears to retain a particular fascination for the war between sexually predatory female battleaxes and their quivering, emasculated menfolk – a theme explored in extremis through The Gropes’ eponymous northern matriarchy, who have been conjuring devious ways to lure virile males into their crumbling country pile ever since their distant ancestor was rejected by the raping and pillaging Vikings.

It’s a very British, seaside postcard take on sex, isn’t it?

“Well I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it,” he says.

But does he actually meet many women like that?

“Yes, actually I do. Not a lot, but some. In Spain [since 1995, Sharpe and his American wife Nancy have divided their time between Cambridge and their home on the Costa Brava] I find quite a few of the English women a bit . . . domineering. Not all of them, of course.”

Ian Richardson and David Jason in Porterhouse Blue

Another target for Sharpe’s satirical barbs over the years is his adopted home city – or, at least what he perceives as the intransigent, reactionary university culture so vividly depicted in novels like Porterhouse Blue, The Great Pursuit and The Grantchester Grind.

“It’s actually not so much the university as Pembroke College,” he corrects me. “I made some very good friends at Pembroke – many of them have died, now. And actually the porter was very nice, I liked him [in Porterhouse Blue, college porter Skullion – brilliantly played by David Jason in the 1987 TV adaptation – represents the entrenched face of college tradition resisting the changes planned by the new master].

“But I was the odd man out at Pembroke. Everybody else went in two by two, Sharpe went in one by one. The senior tutor didn’t like me. I’d been in the Marines for two years before Pembroke. Pembroke at that time was

changing and . . .” He pauses. “No, you shouldn’t put this down. Don’t put this down.”

If he’s reluctant to dish the dirt on his alma mater, he’s less circumspect when it comes to Cambridge itself. You’ve remained here all these years, I say, with a house in the city as well as the one at Great Shelford. You must be quite fond of the place?

He shakes his head. “I don’t like it now for the simple reason there’s too much violence and not enough police,” he says. “I mean, the chief constable has said that herself.”

But it’s still a fairly civilised place to live, as far as British cities go, surely?

He fixes me with a Sharpe stare. “Up to a point, Lord Copper,” he says, quoting – who else? – Waugh’s obsequious foreign editor Mr Salter in Scoop.

By now, I think I’m starting to get the measure of who Tom Sharpe is as he rumbles into his ninth decade on the planet. He’s a man who loves to tell a tale (indeed, though we’ve been talking for more than 90 minutes, he seems disappointed when I start to pack up and leave, and insists on taking me on a tour of the garden, lame foot or no lame foot) but he’s entirely resistant – or

perhaps plain disinterested – in any attempt to analyse his work or the motivations behind it.

How would you like your books to be remembered? I ask.

There is a long silence. “Never thought about it,” he says.

What, not even one sly eye on the legacy?

“No. I don’t think I will be remembered. I mean, we already speak a different language to what we did 20 or 30 years ago. “

But we still read the literature of centuries gone by, don’t we?

“Oh yes,” he nods. “But they were great writers. I’m not a great writer, for God’s sake. I’m just a fool.”

:: The Gropes is published by Hutchinson, priced £18.99

Cambridge News

Tom Sharpe / A relentless writer

Tom Sharpe loved his family, but found that, to write, he had to fly solo.
Photograph: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Tom Sharpe: a relentless writer

In his last years, the Wilt novelist continued to mix a roving imagination with the precision of farce 

by Peter Preston / The Guardian / 6 June 2013

For around a decade at the end of his life and bedevilled by illness, Tom Sharpe lived alone in a quiet cul-de-sac in Llafranc, Catalonia, tended devotedly by a Catalan doctor (whom he taught, from scratch, to speak the most fluent English). He looked forward to visits from Nancy and his daughters – and his brother who lived in Australia. But for the most part, he worked relentlessly, a writer – as he would often say – in search of the inspiration that had made writing so easy in earlier days.

It was a struggle as – reaching for another Cuban cigar – he moved anxiously between computer keyboards, a favourite old typewriter and longhand scrawl, struggling to mix a roving imagination with the precision of farce, but driving himself to produce Wilt in Nowhere (2004) and The Wilt Inheritance (2010), as well as The Gropes (2009), and enjoying the renewed success that came with them. He was loved in Catalonia, his works often translated into Catalan. He was a great local character, recognised and revered for, among other things, not speaking a word of the language. His photographs from South Africa and Cambridge were exhibited in Barcelona.

Tom never forgot, or quite broke free, from his roots. His father's influence – and politics – were a constant, conflicted, almost obsessional memory. He could remember every detail of his life in a South African prison. He told wonderful stories of life with Nancy in the deep south of America and drank malt whisky (on alleged prescription) in wonderfully copious quantities. He loved his family, but found that, to write, he had to fly solo. I saw him last only a few weeks ago, recovering from a stroke and starting to re-read his own books as therapy. He was still funny, still irascible, still interested in everything – including the fate of the coalition. It was a life drawn in bold colours and lived vibrantly to the end.

The Guardian

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF TOM SHARPE

Tom Sharpe remembered

Tom Sharpe with his wife Nancy and daughters Grace and Jemima in 1975. 

Photograph: Dunne/Rex Features

TOM SHARPE REMEMBERED

His books had the mad plotting of PG Wodehouse and the black humour of Evelyn Waugh. Later, when I got to know him, I came to understand what drove him

Posted by

Robert McCrumm

The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013

When I was an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the early 1970s, an otherwise blissful life of indolence was occasionally blighted by the college's head porter, a pocket sergeant major of a man named Albert Jaggard. The 1960s had swept away most college rules. Those that were left – mostly relating to sex, drugs and alcohol – the authorities were too squeamish to enforce. So Jaggard, as head porter, made this his business. Like many bullies, he was a complex character, ferocious yet strangely loveable.

Those of us who nurtured secret aspirations for the literary life, would occasionally share the view that Jaggard was a figure "from fiction" or "should be in a novel". Then we discovered that this ambition had already been realised in a novel called Porterhouse Blue, in the immortal character of Skullion, by a savagely comic writer named Tom Sharpe, who died this week.

As a Corpus graduate, I became mildly addicted to Sharpe's comedies. They had some of the mad plotting of PG Wodehouse, the black humour of Evelyn Waugh – and something else (defined by Juvenal as essential to satire) called "savage indignation" (saeva indignatio).

Later, when I got to know him, I came to understand that what drove him was the resentful desperation of an outsider in a hurry. Sharpe first came to England from South Africa as a photographer. Through drive and talent, he broke into the English literary scene, and began to sell. One thing led to another. His books became bestsellers and he met and corresponded with his hero, Wodehouse.

For a while, he was spoken of as the heir to Wodehouse and Waugh. But Sharpe was too contrary to be comfortable with that kind of labelling. He retired to Spain (where his novels remain popular), and withdrew from the world of letters

When I came to write my biography of Wodehouse, I requested an interview and was rewarded with a wonderful sheaf of correspondence. Soon, we were in regular phone contact. The Tom Sharpe I knew was generous, acerbic, engaging, and full of wicked fun. Above all, he was supportive. He read my typescript in draft and made numerous suggestions. Long after the biography was published, he used to ring from Spain, after the siesta hour, to gossip, rant, reminisce – and amuse. I shall miss him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jun/06/tom-sharpe-remembered-robert-mccrumb

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF TOM SHARPE

Obituaries / Tom Sharpe

Tom Sharpe obituary

Comic novelist in the mould of Wodehouse and Waugh, he was best known for Wilt and Porterhouse Blue

• Stanley Reynolds
• The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 10.45 BST
• 
  
• 

Tom Sharpe developed two mask-like personas. One was a blustering ex-colonial type, the other a genial old buffer. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Tom Sharpe, who has died aged 85, was in the great tradition of English comic novelists and his bawdy style and vulgar approach were said to have made bad taste into an art form – like "PG Wodehouse on acid", in the words of one critic. Sharpe did not start writing comic novels until 1971, when he was 43, but once he got going he gained a large readership. He was a huge bestseller whose hardback editions sold like most authors only sell in paperback.

Wilt (1976) introduced perhaps his most popular character: Henry Wilt, a mild-mannered teacher of literature at the fictional Fenland College of Arts and Technology, who gets involved in a murder investigation. Sharpe claimed that the account of teaching day-release apprentice butchers and tradesmen in classes timetabled as "Meat One" and "Plasterers Two" was based on his own experiences as a lecturer at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology.

Henry Wilt has a plain common sense that gives a touch of ordinary, everyday reality to the novel and its sequels – The Wilt Alternative (1979), Wilt on High (1984), Wilt in Nowhere (2004) and The Wilt Inheritance (2010) – which is often lacking in Sharpe's wilder farcical flights such as The Throwback (1978) and Ancestral Vices (1980). A film of Wilt, starring Griff Rhys Jones in 1989, brought Sharpe an even wider audience, as did the TV adaptations of his novels Blott on the Landscape (starring David Suchet in 1985) and Porterhouse Blue (starring Ian Richardson and David Jason in 1987).

Surprisingly for a comic writer and such a jovial character, Sharpe came to attention first as a hero in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in 1960. After leaving Cambridge with a degree in history and social anthropology, he had gone, in 1951, to South Africa, where he did social work for the Non-European Affairs Department, witnessing many of the horrors inflicted on the black population. He taught in Natal for a time and then set up a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg in 1957.

He wrote a political play, The South Africans, which criticised the country's racial policy. Although it was not produced in South Africa, and had only a small production in London, it was enough to bring down on him the wrath of the Bureau of State Security. He was hounded by the secret police, spent the Christmas of 1960 in jail, and was deported back to Britain in 1961. The ship he was put on sailed along the South African coast stopping at every port, at each of which the police would come on board to question and attempt to intimidate Sharpe.

He had written many symbolic, and unproduced, plays in South Africa and he was, he said, as surprised as anyone when in just three weeks he wrote the novel Riotous Assembly (1971), a dazzling comic send-up of the South African police. The inspiration for the book came from hearing about the old-fashioned English colonial aunt of a friend of his who lived near the police station and complained that the screams of tortured prisoners disturbed her afternoon naps. The aunt came to life in the book as the eccentric Miss Hazelstone, who amazes a police chief, Kommandant Van Heerden, when she says she wants to be arrested for murder because she has shot and killed her Zulu cook. In a marvellous piece of irony, Sharpe dedicated the book to "the South African police force whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of western civilisation in southern Africa".

He was teaching then at the Arts and Technology college, but was able to give up his job because his publisher, Secker and Warburg (now Harvill Secker), agreed to pay him £3,000 a year for three years to be a full-time writer. Tom Rosenthal at Secker had faith that Sharpe would become a bestseller.

Sharpe continued his noble crusade against racism in South Africa with Indecent Exposure (1973), in which Kommandant van Heerden returns under the mistaken impression that he had been given "the heart of an English gentleman" in a transplant operation, a new persona which manifests itself when he starts reading the British novelist Dornford Yates.

Readers thought Sharpe perhaps a one-subject writer, but with Porterhouse Blue (1974), set in a Cambridge college, he proved that he was a true comic novelist in the great English tradition. "If Wodehouse wrote a plot and [Evelyn] Waugh wrote a book around it, the result could hardly be more hilarious," wrote a critic for Time magazine.

Sharpe continued his dissection of English life with Blott on the Landscape (1975), a farce on urban development and the spoiling of the English countryside. After the first Wilt novel he produced The Great Pursuit (1977) which, in spite of the romping nature of the tale, was a serious attempt at satirising FR Leavis and the 20th century's replacement of religion with literature. Sharpe was keen on the idea of both writing and reading as fun. In spite of abusing Yates in Indecent Exposure, his favourable comments on the author were plastered all over Dent's Classic Thrillers reprints of Yates's books. Sharpe's 1982 novel Vintage Stuff was an excellent send-up of Sapper´s Bulldog Drummond and John Buchan's Richard Hannay.

Born in Croydon, south London, Sharpe had a most unusual and troubled boyhood. His father, the Unitarian minister Reverend George Coverdale Sharpe, was a fascist, a follower of Oswald Mosley and a great believer in Adolf Hitler. From the start of the second world war, the family was continuously on the move to avoid the father being interned with other British Nazis.

Tom's mother, Grace, was South African and a rich South African aunt paid for him to go to Lancing college, West Sussex. During that time, he wore a German army belt with Gott Mit Uns on the buckle. He said that when he went to the seaside he used to daydream of scrambling over the barbed wire and swimming across the Channel to occupied France to "join the good guys".

Sharpe's father did not live to see the liberation of the Nazi death camps, but Tom, of course, saw the newsreels and came close to having a nervous breakdown. Looking back on his schooldays, he said that the most significant thing that happened was a friendly master giving him Waugh's Decline and Fall to read. It had, he said, a tremendous influence when he came to write his own comedies. His other influence was Wodehouse; he was very pleased later to learn that Wodehouse was a reader of his.

He did his national service from 1946 to 1948 in the Royal Marines, and went to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was married for a short time in South Africa and then in 1969 married Nancy Anne Looper from North Carolina. They had three daughters.

When he started producing bestsellers he moved to a large house in Dorset, a former school building, and became a keen gardener. He said he liked digging. He moved back to Cambridge but in the 1980s he had an experience like something out of one of his own novels when he had a heart attack live on TV in Spain.

Ill health was undoubtedly responsible for the long silence, from Wilt on High in 1984 to Grantchester Grind in 1995, in which Sharpe – who was used to producing a book a year – published nothing at all. He commented that it wasn't that at all, it was being forced to give up smoking. He later said that the sort of ballpoint pens he wrote with were no longer manufactured and asked readers to send him their own pens. He then said that he kept writing every day of those 11 years but did not think the work good enough. Grantchester Grind was a sequel to Porterhouse Blue, and it was followed by The Midden in 1996. In the following decade, two further Wilt novels appeared.

Much in demand for interviews and often besieged by fans, he developed two mask-like personas. One was a blustering ex-colonial type, the other a genial old buffer. One interviewer, arriving on one of the ex-colonial days, said he had never seen anyone fuming before in real life. Sharpe said he admired the old military men, but thought of himself as the buffer.

He is survived by Nancy and his daughters.

• Thomas Ridley Sharpe, writer, born 30 March 1928; died 6 June 2013

Tom Sharpe, British comic novelist, dies age 85

Author of Porterhouse Blue and Wilt novels dies at home in Catalonia from complications related to diabetes

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 11.26 BST
• 
  

'Witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny' ... the writer Tom Sharpe in 1997. Photograph: Raphael Gaillarde / Getty

Tom Sharpe, whose savage pen and biting turns of phrase helped to earn him the title of the master of British farce, has died aged 85.

Sharpe, author of Porterhouse Blue and the Wilt series of novels, passed away at his home in Catalonia following complications related to diabetes, according to Spanish reports.

Sharpe's editor at Random House, Susan Sandon, paid tribute to a man who was "warm, supportive and wholly engaging".

"Tom Sharpe was one of our greatest satirists and a brilliant writer," she said. "Witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life."

Sharpe, author of 16 novels, made his debut in 1971 with the brutally comic Riotous Assembly. Set in South Africa, the novel describes the chaos that ensues after an innocent black man is blown apart by an elephant gun. Sharpe had lived in South Africa following national service in the Royal Marines, doing social work before teaching in Natal.

Born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, Sharpe later worked as a lecturer in history at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.

His third novel, Porterhouse Blue, was published in 1974. A satirical take on life in a fictional Cambridge college, it went on to find further success in the 80s with a television adaptation starring David Jason.

Sharpe went on to write the Wilt series of novels, about the long-suffering lecturer Henry Wilt, seen as his alter ego, "an insignificant little man to whom things happened and for whom life was a chapter of indignities".

Reviewing the fourth Wilt novel, Wilt in Nowhere, Will Hammond in the Observer said Sharpe gave "voice to a deep-rooted part of English culture", and "confirms once again that his position at the heart of British comedy is as assured as that of the seaside postcard".

"Over the course of his prolific career, Sharpe has been hailed as the king of slapstick, a satirist in the line of Wodehouse, and a major craftsman in the art of farce (a spoonerism he would no doubt enjoy). In Wilt in Nowhere, he shows himself to be all these and more: vengeful, chaotic, Swiftian in his tastes, cartoonish in his extremes, and above all wild and amusing," wrote Hammond.

Sharpe's most recent novel, The Wilt Inheritance, was published in 2010.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/06/tom-sharpe-novelist-dies

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF TOM SHARPE