Wilt and the #1976Club

Together with a whole lot of other readers in the UK in 1976, I read Wilt – the first in a series of over-the-top, grotesque Tom Sharpe novels about the misadventures of a mild-mannered and hapless tech college teacher named Henry Wilt. He’s a rather fuddy-duddy, decent-enough, beer-drinking, everyman kind of chap given to being misunderstood, especially by his wife and the local Fenland constabulary. #1976Club

Wilt’s job is to bring culture to day-release apprentices variously grouped in classes such as Meat 1 and Gasfitters 2.  Needless to say, they are impervious to the pleasures of Mill on the Floss but always ready to defend capital punishment, give gays a bashing, and expel immigrants.

“The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading The Mill on the Floss to Motor Mechanics.” – Wilt

Wilt’s been passed over for promotion again and Eva has fallen in with Sally Pringsheim whose husband Gaskell is a visiting professor from 1970’s Californication. Gaskell is into plastic and at a swinging party at the Pringsheim’s, Wilt has an unfortunate encounter with a large blow-up sex doll. (He resists Sally’s voracious sexual appetite and she gets her revenge by wedging him into a compromising position with the doll).

Over-the-top chaos and mayhem ensue leading Wilt to fantasize about murdering his wife. In an ill-conceived and gin-soaked escapade, he rehearses the disposal of the body using the doll as a substitute.  When Eva disappears (she’s with the Pringsheims on a boat on the Broads) Wilt becomes the prime murder suspect of the bumbling, incompetent – soon-to-be embittered – Inspector Flint.

And then there’s college politics – always good for a send-up – and a naked Eva hiding in the shrubbery of a drunken vicar.

The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and church-wardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country.” – from Wilt’s lecture to Advanced Foreigners on Liberal and Progressive Attitudes from 1688 to 1978. The Wilt Alternative (1979) 

Policemen, vicars, college administrators, Americans (all varieties), politicians, teachers, students – pretty much anyone actually – are fair game in Sharpe’s anarchic world of Wilt. He’s an equal opportunity satirist with a special edge in sexism and misogyny.

By the time of the second book, Wilt – emerging victorious from his humiliations – is chair of the department, living in an upscale house and with four quadruplet girls. At age four they are precocious and trouble. At fourteen they are lethal. But I get ahead of myself. This is The Wilt Alternative (1979) and Eva is into ecological improvements and the alternative lifestyle.

Humour is idiosyncratic. What has some people falling about laughing can leave others asking: “What’s funny about that?’ And so it is with the Wilt books. When a drunken Wilt pees in a garden hedge and has an unfortunate encounter with a rose bush it’s mildly funny. Ditto endless other misadventures involving his penis – in a tooth mug, at the local hospital, and during a lecture on British Culture at USAF Baconheath.

But give me a terrorist scenario with diabolical children, self-detonating beer bottles, an imperious old woman, bewildered revolutionaries, and a malfunctioning compost toilet – now that has potential. It helps that the children have gorged themselves on a freezer full of homemade ice cream and organically grown apples, the woman has been sampling the brew, and Wilt is coming to the rescue.

In The Wilt Alternative, Eva’s latest enthusiasm includes an organic toilet and methane conversion. Wilt is brewing his own beer and they are the parents of four-year-old quadruple girls.  For some reason, (no need to ask why – the plot is absurd) terrorists have confined the quads and their babysitting ex-colonial neighbor – a Mrs. De Frakas – in the cellar. Imperiously,  she has little regard for the terrorists. She is the widow of  Major-General deFrakas (DSO), grew up in India, and knows just how to deal with small children and unruly underlings. Her voice had a “distinctly firm ring to it—or as Wilt had once put it, if at eighty-two she could no longer break a sherry glass at fifty paces she could still make a guard dog whimper at forty.”

Mrs de Frakas likes children and – being rather deaf – thinks the Wilt quads delightful, an opinion that was shared by no one else in the district.  But the situation wears even her down to great comic effect involving the urgent needs of the quads, drunkenness, and an exploding compost toilet.  All of which disorients the terrorists allowing their capture by the police. 

‘Shits in shits’ clothing,’ muttered Professor Maerlis, gazing in awe at the human excreta that stumbled about the lawn. (p.212)

At one point Wilt inserts himself into the siege and is communicating as an alternative terrorist cell (again – no need to ask why) and shows an alarming ability to mouth off revolutionary rhetoric. He is well versed in the language having managed bolshie, middle-class militants on the teaching staff.

Strictly speaking, only the first Wilt book is #1976Club eligible. But I read all of them last week and each tends to blur into the next.

• The Wilt Alternative (1979)
• Wilt on High (1984)
• Wilt in Nowhere (2004)
• The Wilt Inheritance (2010)

obscene
  gross exaggeration
     cartoonish characters
        absurd plots
           grotesque situations
               in extremely bad taste
                  over-the-top misogyny and sexist stereotypes
                     smutty seaside postcards turned into novels
                        foul-mouthed fiction
                           the worst so-called British humor
                             excessively offensive
                                Benny Hill level crossed with Donald McGill
                                   batshit crazy
                                     deranged vulgarity
                                        wildly offensive
                                           crude in the extreme
                                              tasteless
                                                garish and crude
                                                  demented

And – sometimes – so funny that I couldn’t control my laughter.

And there you have it.

I think I have to re-read his take on literary critics and criticism – The Great Pursuit – next. See if that holds up. 

The featured image is from a satirical print at the Science Museum Group

This print depicts the failed balloon launch from the gardens of Lord Foley’s house in Portland Place, London, in September 1784. The balloon’s enormous shape is exaggerated to resemble a human bottom from which flames erupt and smoke billows. A much smaller balloon appears to shoot out of the fire, in the form of a grinning head with ass’s ears wearing a jester’s cap lettered ‘THE ENGLISH BALLOON 1784’. Spectators watch from the ground and the garden wall as people attempt to bring the situation under control. Lettered underneath the image ‘Caelum ipsum petimus Stultitia’ [‘In our foolishness, we reach for the sky itself’], from Horace, Odes 1.3. Designed and etched by Paul Sandby, probably London, 1784.

#1936Club, 1956Club