You can rarely be convinced that you have finally reached your place in the world. Some never understand. The experience of Tom Sharpe (Holloway, London, 1928-Llafranc, 2013) was as follows: He attended a literary convention in Barcelona, and after consulting editor Miquel Alzueta at the Carmen Balcells agency, they suggested that he go out for dinner. A well-kept, humble family-run Llevant hotel in Llafranc, on the Costa Brava. In front of a bright and calm sea, the laughter-raising bestselling author had an enlightenment. He had found what he was looking for.
It was April 1992, and he remained there until the end of June, confident that he would find the philosopher’s stone that would allow him to overcome the satisfying bump in the page that had dragged on for a while. Gradually, with almost no preconceived plan, he left his homeland of England, where he had a wife and family, to focus on creative isolation, which made it easy to know neither Catalan nor Catalan, and never wanted to know. spanish brick
Much more than your doctor
The stays in Llafranc became progressively longer, first at that hotel, then at a rented house. But that peace of mind wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t met Montserrat Verdaguer, whom he always called Montsi, perhaps the only woman who knew how to understand him—others said she could put up with him—and the only woman who didn’t. accuse him of failing because, armed with great patience, he never tired of his practical uselessness, eccentricities, and ingrained dipsomania. A psychiatrist by profession, Montsi was his doctor, psychiatrist, nurse and secretary, all in one and introducing him as “my doctor”, but the truth was something else. In the last 16 years, she had been his not-so-secret partner among his relatives. In the author’s obituary, the British newspaper The Guardian mentioned his widow, with whom he did not officially leave, but ignored Verdaguer. He was also in charge of several autopsy commissions: caring for his legacy, establishing the Tom Sharpe Foundation at the University of Girona, and writing a biography. Ten years after the author’s death, the three wishes were granted by the appearance of the Fragmentos de nonexistencia (Anagrama), a biography Verdaguer commissioned from the writer Miquel Martín i Serra. “Tom—explains Verdaguer—wrote something akin to a fragmentary autobiography in the form of letters and named Lettres Monsieur Printemps, but he didn’t finish the unpublished project today because he magically believed that if he finished that book, it would be him. On the other hand, his father, a convinced Nazi, and friend of William Joyce found it impossible to talk about the Anglo-American publisher Lord Haw-Haw, who worked for Adolf Hitler during World War II. II. Faced with this impossibility, she passed the hot potato to her partner and dictated hours of conversation as well. “You’re going to do that,” said Verdaguer, in one of his wild ideas, because I’m not a writer, poor me,” he remembers with a laugh.
Edges and dark areas
All this material was taken over by Martín i Serra, who was fascinated by a character who integrated a significant part of the author’s writings and explanations into the work and could not simply be summarized as a funny man who writes comic novels. Beneath the clown mask, the biographer has found many edges and dark areas that inevitably taint his writings with wild humor. There is the Nazism of the father, a highly enlightened Anglican priest, who seemed completely decent to Sharpe, who knew nothing but political ideas. When the concentration camps were liberated, shortly after his father’s death, he came to terms with reality at a very traumatic moment, thanks to watching a documentary about Bergen-Belsen. “When I learned what Hitler did to gypsies, Jews, homosexuals … I was impressed for life,” he told Verdaguer. And he summed it up in a more candid Sharpean tone to a reporter: “It was like discovering that Jesus was Charles Manson.” He had no better luck with his mother. Learning that she was pregnant in her late 40s, Grace Sharpe began jumping rope frantically to try other ways to induce an abortion. The boy insisted on being born, but the woman never wanted him and neglected his care. His strict Methodist upbringing, without the slightest sign of affection, also did not help, so much younger than his older brothers, he always felt lonely. The level of intimacy reached in the biography is quite deep. Martín i Serra was not censored by his partner, who did not prefer a hagiography – unthinkable for Sharp – although the author himself left the material and his voice is constantly present throughout the book. . “Sharpe wasn’t shy,” the biographer explains, “she would tell about her sex life to anyone who approached her. She didn’t censor herself, either. But the book lets you enter a dark and private space in life she doesn’t allow you to approach ». The word misogyny that accompanies the author repeatedly is not used in the biography, but the author realizes that Sharpe’s complex relationship with women is revealed in the intrigues where men are good-natured and reserved. He makes life impossible for them, but also forces them to indulge in unbridled sex. but it is clear that he has some responsibility for failure after failure,” says Martín i Serra. Confessing that he cannot fall in love many times, Sharpe told Verdaguer – “I am not a very sexual man, although I admire women” – for the first time carefully, He described his impressions of seeing a woman having sex, armed with a flashlight, during his brief marriage to his first wife, Criquette: “I was horrified, it was disgusting.” Nor did he hide the latex fetishism inherited from his early childhood attempts at masturbation when he discovered that wrapping his penis in rubber enhanced the pleasure. Panic attacks in general, the impossibility of being part of a quiet audience in a theater or church without taking sedatives, and extreme hypochondria, which has worsened in recent years thanks to a truly fragile health that he has punished with booze and alcohol. distinctive features of an indecisive character. Thanks to the humor—he said, “it sounded better than most of the many psychoanalysts I’ve spent very serious hours with,” he said—and saved by the writing that he couldn’t dedicate himself professionally until he did, is well known. He was 40 years old, taking all the water out of the years he lived in South Africa. There, she witnessed the terror of apartheid after working as a teacher, photographer, social worker, and left evidence in her first two novels, Riotous Meeting and Impudent Exhibition, which explored it to the general public. Then, in 1976, the beginning of the Wilt saga brought him universal notoriety for the misadventures of that insignificant little man who was overwhelmed by a series of humiliations.
Can be canceled
Can the world of scary women and scared men be canceled today? No one, neither his partner, nor his biographer, nor the Catalan translator Màrius Serra had the slightest doubt. Definitely yes. He was not a friend of political correctness. It was also a ball of contradictions. An anti-apartheid activist who enjoyed listening to Nazi songs in her final years. A writer who enjoys popular success and seeks recognition by distinguished critics. Even his distinctive style, which does not shy away from vulgar humor or rudeness, is contradictory. «As Martín i Serra notes, it is true that he often uses easy sources, profanity from his time in the Navy, but at the same time he uses a very detailed prose product of his training at Cambridge, and from this conflict the impeccable style emerges» . And to finish, Màrius Serra starts a definition marked by that stroke: “Someone who is completely decent despite writing obscene things.”
South Africa: Blacks’ darkest laughter-causing cries
At first glance, Tom Sharpe’s South African adventures and the resulting anti-apartheid militancy may seem far from what a comedian might expect. But it is certain that the author would not have developed his dark and offensive humor had he not lived there for more than a decade. The author moved from England to his mother’s hometown of his family, at the age of 23 and fleeing the snobbery of Cambridge, where he studied with discreet grades and zero commitment to school. The author was looking for heaven and found the worst of the hells. Realizing the dark side of a moon inhabited by wealthy South Africans—the social circle to which she belonged—was nothing better than working as a social worker helping blacks in the slums of Johannesburg’s slums. mestizos and Indians with tuberculosis without access to healthcare. It was a shock. In those days he saw death very close, and of course an unprecedented level of misery and neglect. While she would soon become a teacher of white children, she discovered at the time her passion for photography, an ally of her anti-apartheid commitment, which she used as documentary material about poverty, prisons and detention camps.
In connection with activist groups, she was persecuted by the police, and much of her 36,000 negative photo archive was destroyed by the husband of Sharpe’s black secretary, who feared reprisal. Only 6,000 negatives have managed to be saved, who had traveled secretly to Great Britain and have since sparked exhibits on the subject. Arrested for his activities as a photojournalist and playwright, he was deported to Great Britain as riots and riots escalated in the African country and the government tightened anti-terrorism measures that kept Nelson Mandela in jail for 27 years.
On his return, he remembered an actual event told to him in South Africa that would soon become the core of his first novel, the Riotous Reunion: the aunt of a friend, a possibly respected lady who lived near a police station in Natal. was to complain that the screams of black prisoners as they were tortured kept him from taking a nap. The chief of police promised that he would keep his mouth shut so that the possibility of such events occurring around him would not disturb the woman, whom he did not lose his sleep. Pure Sharp.