From The Sunday Times

August 15, 2004

THE author Tom Sharpe has revealed that he had to overcome a severe case of writer’s block to revive the bumbling college lecturer Henry Wilt in a new novel after a 20-year break. He admits that his lack of inspiration was caused by the huge amount of money he was paid for his earlier books.

Over two decades Sharpe, whose first Wilt book was made into a film starring Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, so despaired of being able to write a new instalment that he burnt the manuscripts of abortive attempts.

Since then, however, the author, 76, has “tried and tried” to produce his latest work and revive his career. The book, Wilt in Nowhere, will be published next month.

“I’ve had writer’s block,” admitted Sharpe this weekend. “I suppose more lack of inspiration than block itself. I just didn’t think what I’ve tried to write over the years worked. I would read a few thousand words of something I’d started and then not find it funny.” He added that he had put “in total, about 1,500 pages” of his work on a barbecue at his second home north of Barcelona. “It was a symbolic burning, ” he said.

Sharpe, whose first Wilt book in 1976 took him just three weeks from inspiration to finished product, acknowledges that his success has made writing less of a necessity. “I had these enormous advances for book deals, but all this money meant I was uninspired,” he said. “Being poor is better for a writer. It means you are driven to continue working.”

Sharpe, born in Britain, worked as a teacher and photographer in 1950s South Africa, where his mother had been born. He was deported after being imprisoned for his anti-apartheid views. In the 1960s he lectured in liberal studies at the Cambridge College of Arts before his first novel Riotous Assembly, a satire on South Africa, appeared in 1971.

Eleven novels followed over the next 13 years, including Blott on the Landscape, about a gardener who seduces and then marries his employer, the wife of a Tory MP. This was made into a television series in 1985.

He had on-screen success two years later with a Channel 4 dramatisation of Porterhouse Blue, a satire on Cambridge college life starring David Jason. Sharpe was regarded as Britain’s funniest novelist.

Over the past decade, however, Sharpe felt his ability to write humour had dried up. He was disappointed at the response to his last novel, The Midden, which appeared in 1996. One critic called it “a charmless new farce”.

He abandoned one of his attempts on a new Wilt novel after asking his wife Nancy to read the book. “It didn’t raise a smile from her. I also felt I had no poison in me to write,” said Sharpe, whose novels are full of black comedy and bitter satire.

Wilt in Nowhere features Henry Wilt on a walking holiday in England while his wife Eva and children are in America. Disaster strikes when Henry is knocked unconscious. He ends up in hospital and unwittingly becomes involved in a sex scandal. Meanwhile, Eva is accused of drug trafficking in America.

Wilt’s appalling experiences in hospital are based on Sharpe’s own encounters with the National Health Service after a ruptured tendon in his foot was misdiagnosed as a sprained ankle. “I now wouldn’t go to an English hospital if you paid me,” he said.

Sharpe is not the only novelist to have suffered writer’s block. Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind, produced only one book each. Donna Tartt and Louis de Bernières each had a decade between their first big successes — The Secret History and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin respectively — and their next novels. De Bernières admitted that wealth had dimmed his inspiration.

Sharpe now hopes that he will be able to write more. “Mind you, it needed my agent to force the end of this Wilt book out of me with a final cut-off date,” he said.