Five months after the death of Tom Sharpe, which occurred on June 6, 2013, I visited the house of Dr. Montserrat Verdaguer in Llofriu, who was a companion, family doctor and guardian angel of the English writer for a good part of the almost twenty years that he lived on the Costa Brava. In her capacity as Sharpe’s legatee, Verdaguer had gathered there the manuscripts, originals, recordings and photographs that the writer kept in her house in Llafranc. Also his typewriters, diaries, correspondence, books, paintings, pipes and others, piled up on tables, chairs, beds and chests of drawers. Or scattered across the floor, turning his own home into a repository for all the literary output and personal effects Sharpe had collected in life. At first glance, an impracticable agglomeration. But, also, the source and origin of the biography that Sharpe had commissioned from Verdaguer before he died.
Ten years after Sharpe’s disappearance, this biography has just been published, under the title, chosen by the writer, Fragments of nonexistence / Fragments d’inexistència, which reflects his less optimistic opinion regarding the benefits of mankind and life. in general. Something apparently paradoxical, since Sharpe lavished on his novels, which were farces with Chaucerian echoes, a wild humor capable of provoking the laughter of millions of readers.
This biography bears the signature of Miquel MartÃn i Serra, who is the one who finally wrote it, “with the collaboration of Montserrat Verdaguer”, who for years has delved into this enormous documentation and has emptied it, still having time to establish and promote the Tom Sharpe Foundation and the Tom Sharpe Chair at the University of Girona, all without neglecting his medical work, now in Palamós.
Sharpe’s life was marked by his father, a Unitarian minister trained in Victorian culture and an admirer of Nazi Germany; for his days with the Royal Marines, who exposed his brutality; for his university stage in Cambridge, where he hated classism; because of his sentimental relationships, which often left a trace of bitterness in him; for his ten years in South Africa, where he suffered the effects of apartheid; or, back in the United Kingdom, for the stage in which he taught history to young people with little interest in learning it. It is true that these experiences, duly elaborated, would become the basis of his subsequent and successful hilarious humor. But when he experienced them, they hurt him forever.
Fragments of non-existence gathers a lot of detailed and previously unpublished information, for example, about Sharpe’s relationships with his father, about his disappointing love life, about the mechanisms of his deportation from South Africa, about his phobias, his character always facing the world or his addictions . This is a fruit of his privileged sources: diaries or passages of memorial texts in which the novelist openly exposed intimacy, and which allow the authors to abound in the portrait of his complex and tormented psychology.
Tom Sharpe wanted to make readers reflect on the injustices of the world, whom he attracted with the bait of his explosive humor. But he also felt the need, long repressed, or postponed, to recount his life, perhaps to justify the formation of his character, both vehement and self-conscious. Fragments of non-existence responds to that need. And he does it on the basis of all the memorial texts that his protagonist wrote or dictated while alive. Which gives this book, as dominated by Sharpe’s voice as sparing in other voices, the autobiography that Wilt’s father always resisted writing and, in the end, decided to delegate.
