Beneath the humorous surface, there ran, like an underground river, an immense fury, a wild indignation, an enormous disenchantment, a fierce criticism of all the injustices that prevail in the world, a reflection and a questioning of the most universal subjects and, for so much more human”. Miquel MartÃn i Serra writes this in the biography of Tom Sharpe (1928-2013) that he has just published, Fragments d’inexistence (Navona/Anagrama), with the collaboration of Montserrat Verdaguer, a book that delves into the life of the genius satirical writer and brings new data and revelations, especially in two fields: the tortuous relationship with the father and the importance of the years he spent in South Africa.
In fact, his father is one of the reasons why the writer never had the heart to write the memoirs himself – although he had started them on three occasions – for which he had come to be offered a million pounds, and that in the first instance he wanted to accept the assignment: “A million pounds is a lot of money. I don’t care, my father! He was a Nazi, I wasn’t”, he replies, later entrusting the task to Verdaguer – as was also written in the will, according to which she is the executor -, with whom he maintained a sentimental relationship until his death.
Sharpe’s father had it when he was very old, at 57, and his youngest son always felt rejected by it, but at the same time admired it. The biography even explains that the mother, who was then 41 years old, tried to have an abortion but it didn’t work. An abandonment that dragged the writer throughout his life and that also made him feel insecure about his emotional life.
The father, moreover, as we have seen, was a Nazi and so brought him up, to the point that the young Tom Sharpe aspired to be a member of the SS and it was not until he saw a documentary about the death camps, in 1944, which fell off his blindfold and brought him even more into conflict with his father: how could such a cultured man think like that? Either he was a monster or he was crazy, she thought. But the father had already died, in circumstances that the biography suggests may not have been from strictly natural causes.
Serra also insists on the centrality of the ten years he spent in South Africa, which awakened in him a strong commitment largely unheard of until now. Sharpe’s mother was South African and he had grown up thinking of an idyllic world he had visited at the age of 6. He went there having left a Cambridge University whose elitism he detested, and what he found there, of course, was even worse, with an apartheid under construction that he knew first hand, as he worked a time as a social worker. Although it was always clear that he wanted to be a writer, it was then that he began to write plays – he premiered only one play in London –, to work as a photographer and to surround himself with anti-segregation activists, mostly communists, although he never was. At that time he acted as a link between the underground and ran into an infiltrating spy, and he was finally arrested, imprisoned and deported. But before kicking him out, British intelligence suggested that he become a spy infiltrating the communists. He rejected it.
It is not a solemn biography but a narrative, in the style that the biographer would have wanted – and with the title that he himself recommended -, as Verdaguer recalled yesterday, the tenth anniversary of the author’s death in Llafranc, in the old hotel Llevant (currently Isabella’s), where the writer stayed the first time he went to the Empordà , in 1992, and lived for a few years before settling down permanently.
The book also explores this final stage of his life, some relatively placid years in which he came out of a blockade and in which he made friends with numerous English residents, but also Catalans introduced by Verdaguer – Montsi, he called him, and he presented her as his doctor, with whom he mated without either of them leaving their respective partners. It was here that Sharpe dictated hours of conversations to Verdaguer every day: in total, 5,000 transcribed pages and 800 tapes that are the basis of the material for the biography, in addition to the author’s texts and diaries and his correspondence. In Llafranc, Sharpe felt, in his words, “completely free and happy”.
