Something Thoughful

  

                                IN MEMORY OF IAIN SHARP 

Scottish born, Iain Sharp came to New Zealand when he was seven. He was a poet, a scholar, a very good speaker and great company. Never one to ever get into a fight, he always spoke softly even when he discussed issues that were regarded as dynamite by some people. He was very generous and very thoughtful. After complications, he died at the age of 72 in January of this year. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the people who were to speak at the memorial gathering in Nelson, where Iain and his wife Joy had been living for seven years. What follows is what I said.

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I’m not very good at ad-libbing, so I apologise for reading what I am going to say about Iain.

In the early 1970’s we were both studying in the same English Department at the University of Auckland, but I think we both barely noticed each other. It was only some years later that I got to know him well.

Often I would meet him in Ellerslie in Auckland near the Harp of Erin where he lived with his mother Catherine.  His mother was a very strong, forthright character, who wouldn’t take any nonsense in the best Scottish way. My wife Gabrielle thought she was great, but she tended to call me “Knockolass”  - so “Knockolass” I was. 

It was very good all those years as I got to know Iain when he was a librarian dealing especially with manuscripts in the Auckland Central Library. He was very erudite, especially about literature, and had an excellent grasp of New Zealand history, both Maori and Pakeha.   I knew he was a hard working person, but when he had time off, I would invite him to have lunch with me in a café and have a nice long chat about this and that … and he then would have to run back to work. Naturally the chat was often about books and how good or bad they were, only occasionally disagreeing. I never did persuade him the Joseph Conrad was the greatest novelist of the 20^th century because he was able to direct me to other novelists that he had read and I hadn’t.     Back then I was a film-reviewer and had to go to the movies all the time, good or bad though they were. When I took him he could be quite critical. I remember he particularly hated the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, noting the film was both pretentious and had a bad actor in the leading role. We was right.

He was for a long time in charge of the Sunday Star Times literature section, and he was very generous in sending books to me for review. In fact he sent so many to me that sometimes I used a pseudonym.  He was happy to go along with that. Iain was very scrupulous about reviewing. He wrote a very detailed article in a magazine about how cowardly most New Zealand book-reviewers are when it comes to New Zealand books, because most are afraid that they might bump into New Zealand authors whom they had reviewed. Again, I agreed.

When Iain and his wife Joy got together, they were a perfect couple. Gabrielle and I sometimes visited them and sometimes they visited us. They were very interested in our larger-than-normal family.  When they moved to Nelson we twice stayed with them. They were, as you might expect, very courteous hosts.   Iain still had his gentle Scottish lilt way of speaking and he was very good at never losing his cool.  He had a great sense of humor, he never raised his voice and, even if the word is now out-of-date, it’s fair to call him a gentleman in the true sense of the word.