As a master of British farce, Tom Sharpe’s savage, satirical pen delighted millions of readers worldwide.
Now, anguished love poems by the author of Porterhouse Blue and the Wilt novels have come to light, revealing writing that is very different from the outrageous antics of Sharpe’s fiction.
Piers Brendon, a historian and one of Sharpe’s closest friends for 50 years, has unearthed about half a dozen poems and will include them in a book to be published this month.
“They throw a fresh and fascinating light on the novelist,” Brendon said. “What they show above all is that the master of raucous slapstick and cruel satire was at heart a romantic.”
Before Sharpe found fame and fortune as a novelist, he wrote poems inspired by his passionate, but unconsummated love affair with the wife of a prominent communist lawyer in apartheid South Africa.
Having emigrated there and initially finding some success as a photographer, the 32-year-old Sharpe met Jackie Arenstein – a leftwing journalist seven years his senior – and her husband, Rowley, in 1960.
Rowley Arenstein was a staunch champion of black trade unionists and Sharpe was among a group who helped defend him after a tip-off about his planned murder by racist thugs at his home in Durban.
Soon afterwards, Sharpe and Jackie became infatuated with one another, developing what he called an “unfortunately guiltless passion”.
Those feelings inspired several love poems. In one, Sharpe wrote: “I too have seen the world through my love’s hair / And listened through her laughter to its sound, / Have in love’s greed learnt my one love to share / And loving you loved all the world around.”
Their relationship came to an abrupt end in December 1961, when the Nationalist government objected to an amateur production in London of Sharpe’s anti-apartheid play, The South African, and deported him to Britain. Sharpe had previously suspected that the Nationalist authorities were tampering with his mail.
In his book, Tom Sharpe: A Personal Memoir, Brendon writes: “Both Arensteins suffered persecution and imprisonment, and Rowley would endure the longest period of banning (33 years) and house arrest (18 years) in South African history … Tom saw a lot of the Arensteins, who kept open house day and night. His association with them was fraught with political and personal consequences.”
Once back in Britain, Sharpe missed Jackie. He wrote: “I search myself for what with you I lost / And find no replica for what you gave, / Only your absence on my life embossed / And scars of love that mark me still your slave.”
Brendon said: “She was still absolutely obsessed by him and contemplated leaving her husband and coming over. But she had her two daughters and she felt she couldn’t really do that.”
Sharpe, who died in 2013, aged 85, wrote 16 novels, having made his debut in 1971 with the brutally comic Riotous Assembly, set in South Africa. His third novel, Porterhouse Blue, satirised life in a fictional Cambridge college, inspiring an acclaimed television adaptation starring David Jason. He went on to write the Wilt series of novels, about the longsuffering lecturer Henry Wilt. Reviewing the fourth of them, Wilt in Nowhere, the Observer said Sharpe “confirms once again that his position at the heart of British comedy is as assured as that of the seaside postcard”.
The poems were found among a mass of Sharpe’s original papers. Brendon said: “I knew Tom for 50 years and I was amazed by his poems to Jackie.
“The soulful introspection of the poems could scarcely be more different from the anarchic ribaldry of Riotous Assembly … The writer of these incredibly hard-hitting and often obscene novels actually was a romantic.”
