Tom Sharpe, biography by will

The writer’s work Tom Sharpe (Holloway, London, 1928-Llafranc, Girona, 2013) is considered one of the pinnacle of British literary humor along with those of Saki, PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. Many do not know that the last phase of his existence took place in Spain, since in 1992 a case led him to discover Lafrance and the peace of that haven on the Costa Brava seduced him. That same occasion romantically connected him with a psychiatrist Montserrat Verdaguer, which he called Montsi. Due to this circumstance, his library and his original manuscript and typed work were deposited in the University of Girona, and in his will he entrusted his partner and executor — he said that no one understood him like her in all his weaknesses, hobbies and delusions, mentally — writing and publishing his biography, which he wanted to separate from those hagiographic portraits full of “insolent and solemn” phrases that he hated so much. He even gave it the title in his diaries: fragments of non-existencethe same one with which — in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of his death — hits bookstores in an edition by Anagrama — the publishing house that published all his titles, including the hilarious Henry Wilt series — prepared by the writer Miquel Martin and Serra at the request of Verdaguer, who worked closely with him. And what this essay reveals is that humor was a tool for Sharpe to deal with his many traumas, all stemming from his childhood as the unwanted child of a family led by his father, an Anglican priest who tried to instill Nazism in him. Perhaps this is at the root of his difficult love affairs and his fetishistic and masturbatory idea of ​​sexuality, which – together with his brutal work in the Royal Marines, the hatred of classicism acquired in Cambridge classrooms and his adventures in South Africa as a photographer – feeds his hilarious novels that, along with alcohol, were his way of defense, of facing the horror, madness and injustices of the world. “My biography is so extravagant that it probably explains the kind of books I write,” he said back in 1978 in a letter to Sally Williams of the Harper & Row publishing house. Thanks to this biography, the reader will be able to delve into Sharpe’s writing and abandon the cliché that associates the wild humor of the English genius with frivolity.