Malcolm Sharps and the Long Road

By Stephen O’Connor

Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs…

                                                                                    —Swinburne

It was 1979. I had been on a train all night from Paris to Montpellier, 735 km. This was before the days of the TGV that now flies along the track at 150 to 200 mph. The train I had taken rumbled southward at less than half those speeds. Lost in the rocking of the train, the faces of travelers in the windows of cars rushing past on the opposite track, the jarring hiss of the air brakes’ release, the sliding doors and the timeless voices of passengers and conductors, I fell asleep more than once and found that my head had slumped onto the shoulder of the man beside me. “Pardon, Monsieur,” I’d say, and pull myself up until I was rocked to sleep once more.

When I arrived in Montpellier, I checked my map and began to hitchhike, or “faire le stop,” toward a town called St. Andre because I had been promised a job working in the vineyards there. When I arrived, I was unable to locate my employment contact. Bruno, from Antwerp, the brother of a friend, was nowhere to be found. I rented a little room above a café. Since I hadn’t slept the previous night, I was ready to drop on the bed. It was a charming town, though, and I thought I should at least take a walk through the center, have a beer at a café and observe the Saturday evening life of a village in the south of France. I found a neat little café with a few tables on a sidewalk terrace, and took my beer there.

At a nearby table, I heard people speaking English and struck up a conversation with them. One of them was the Belgian, Bruno, and the others, a woman and two men, were English. One of those Englishmen was Malcolm Sharps, who was to become a close friend for the next forty years. Bruno went his own way, and I never saw him again, but the English invited me out to their workers’ hut where they had made a pot of ratatouille.

I seemed to have gotten a second wind and went with them. We drank some more beer and ate and talked. The couple, Brian and Beth, were from Stoke-on-Trent, and Malcolm was from Liverpool. The following day was Sunday, but they told me to join them at the vineyard where they were working on Monday. When I got back to the hotel some time before dawn, half-drunk, the door was locked. The woman who ran the place leaned out of a porte-fenêtre above me, tying her peignoir, and saying “Jean Michel?” It seemed her husband was late, too. She came down and let me in while I apologized.

When I awoke the next morning, for the first and only time in my life, I truly had no idea where I was, and it was only slowly that it dawned on me who I was. I pulled the curtains apart and looked down on the sun-brightened village. Across the street, a woman in the standard floral-patterned apron was sweeping her sidewalk. A tiger cat seated before the blue door of her house supervised. Two men in caps and blue overalls smoked and laughed on the corner. I tried to fix every detail of the scene in my mind because I felt there was something—I don’t know—of a revelation in the scene, or maybe it was just that I felt so good to finally be rested that everything was vivid and beautiful. And, I could take a shower after days on the road.

I reported dutifully to the vineyard on Monday to work la vendange, or grape harvest. I was given a pair of secateurs and a bucket, or “seau.” The job of a grape picker, or vendangeur, was not complicated, nor was it easy. I still have a scar on one finger from those secateurs. Bent low over the vines, we cut the grape bunches, filled the bucket, and cried out, “Un seau, s’il vous plait!” (A bucket, please!) Someone would come, take your full bucket and hand you an empty one. Each picker had a partner, working along on the other side of the row. At the end of the row, you’d stop and stretch your aching back, and drink some water flavored with anise, or sometimes a cup of wine from a large jug.

As I worked, I listened to Malcolm Sharps sing. He did not have a particularly fine voice, though he was in tune. What surprised me was that this Liverpudlian knew the lyrics, or most of the lyrics, to every song in the Great American Songbook, as well as of American musicals, some of which I, the American, had never heard. I can hear him now…

Isn’t it kind of fun holding hands
According to a sweet and corny custom?
Isn’t it kind of fun making vows?
Admitting that we both intend to bust ’em!

“What the hell is that, Malcolm?”

“For God’s sake, O’Connor, that’s Oscar Hammerstein, from the musical State Fair.

Music by Richard Rodgers.”

Somewhere, I have a tape cassette of Malcolm singing:

They like to talk about the dresses they will wear tonight
The something something, the something and the neighbors’ fight
Inconsequential things that men don’t really care to know
Become the kind of things that women find so à propos…Oh!

At this point he breaks into laughter as I hear Beth or another woman objecting to the lyrics.

The vendange begins in the south and moves north. Brian had a car. When it was over around St. Andre, the English invited me to travel north with them. Malcolm and I were becoming good friends. He asked what kind of music I liked. I said I liked all kinds of music except for heavy metal and opera.

“Really?” he asked. “If I were forced to choose, I would give up every other genre of music to keep opera.”

I had studied French in high school and in college, and in what spare time I had, I was continuing to study French. Malcolm was studying, too. Hungarian. His plan, eventually, was to       live in Hungary. I asked why Hungary. He said that he had become interested in all things Hungarian through the music of Béla Bartók.

We worked the sprawling vineyards of Monsieur Coquard in the village of Letra, its red tiled roofs set among the green hills of the Beaujolais region. Here, instead of secateurs, we were given a simple implement: a single steel stem with a loop that went over the little finger at one end and a hooked blade at the other. I found this much easier to work with, and we filled out share of seaus. As the only American, I felt a duty to represent my country well, so I worked hard, and was quite proud when Antonin Coquard, the proprietor, came up one day, felt my bicep, and said, “Made in Amerique. Very good.”

Malcolm worked hard, too, but did not take the job quite as seriously. At a certain point, he would usually begin to remind Coquard that it was time to knock off by singing loudly the church hymn, “The Day Thou Gavest Lord Hath Ended.”

When the harvest was done and we were paid, Malcolm suggested we hitchhike to Utrecht where he had a Dutch friend who was working on a PhD in Music, and so we did. We attended a party for the Music students and Malcolm began at one point to hold forth on God only knows what—the varieties of musical experience. The students listened intently and finally one of the women said, “You should teach here.”

His understanding of music was deep and remarkable. He told me once that I would not like Bartok. I said, “But you tell me he’s the greatest.”

“I appreciate him because I was listening to Beethoven and Mozart when I was five, and opera when I was ten. You wouldn’t appreciate him.” This was not so much a brag as a simple statement of fact, and that’s how I took it.

He did get our Dutch host rather upset. The man spoke good English, with an accent of course, and a minor mistake here and there. Malcolm told him, “You Dutch people are so cute when you butcher our language.” We left shortly after that. We went to Paris, where I played fiddle in the Metro. Malcolm would stand around at various distances and angles like my manager and tell me to move to the left or the right while encouraging the passers-by. We could usually make enough, my manager and I, to buy some bread and cheese and a bottle of what Malcolm called “very special old plonk.”

Malcolm had apparently done some work on the marché aux puces, or flea market. He had a Japanese friend with whom he thought we might be able to work. We met his friend at a café. It was clear to both of us after a few minutes that the man was on the verge of some kind of breakdown. An aproned waiter came by and began to lay down placemats and settings. Parisian waiters are not known for their graciousness. When we told him we were not eating but just having beer, he sneered and roughly yanked the place mats up. The Japanese friend lunged at him, calling him a dog and a toad and lot of other things while we pulled him off the waiter and dragged him out to the street. That was the end of the flea market plan. Back to the fiddle.

I learned some interesting things from Malcolm. Not useful things, mind you, but interesting. He was a connoisseur of French pastries. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and had never even paused at the windows of les patisseries, but Malcolm knew the names of the pastries and described the delights of each in such a way that one suddenly yearned for a mille feuille or a religieuse. I had never realized that a baguette was measured by the density of the bread. He always requested a baguette of 200 grams, so I adopted that practice as the best bet. At the café, he was fond of a lait fraise, or strawberry milk, though I retained my preference for beer.

When he wasn’t studying Hungarian, he was reading Dead Souls by Gogol. I asked him how it was. He said it was absolutely awful. A few days later, I asked, “Is the book getting any better?”

“Not a bit. It’s dreadful. The worst rubbish I’ve ever read.”

Night after night he read it, and night after night his response was the same. I attributed this behavior to English perseverance. We would occasionally pass the time in a literary game we invented. We’d begin with a final sentence, such as: “And so, Ralph in spite of his blindness, was able to solve the mystery.” Or, “Sister Agatha swore that she would never divulge the name of the killer, unless the key was found.” We would take turns writing sentences, each trying to arrive at the last sentence in a  reasonable way. If I came up with a character with great potential to lead to the conclusion, Malcolm would have a bus hit him in the next sentence. I would then have a doctor run in and revive him with an injection of adrenalin and a defibrillator. For years, I had that notebook full of our wild collaborations, but I seem to have lost it in a move.

I didn’t keep a journal, unfortunately, so I can’t tell you, in some cases where we were or where we were going. I remember being in the square of a village in the south of France, full of old plane trees and men in caps playing boules. One of the Frenchmen was a  joker who must have heard us speaking English. He unfolded a French ‘girly magazine’ and said, “Ey, Engleesh. Il y a des filles comme cela en Angleterre?” (You have girls like that in England?) Malcolm regarded the woman in the photo critically, and then said, “Non, les genoux sont diffèrents.” (No, the knees are different). The Frenchmen had a good laugh at that.

One fellow who gave us a ride asked if we would like to go to a prayer dinner with him. Trying to be polite, I said, “Thank you, but we don’t have time.”

After a few seconds, Malcolm piped up and said, as if to himself, but out loud, “Don’t have time? I wouldn’t go to his prayer dinner if I had a million f—-ing years.”

****

We had met some women during the vendange. What can I say? We were young. Malcolm was fond of Josie, who was followed around by a forlorn rejected lover named Frederick. The woman I had become friendly with told me that her brother could give me a job in his garage in Bourgoin Jallieu, putting winter pneus à clous, or studded tires, on cars as December approached. Malcolm stayed with us for a few days, then set off to Lyon to meet Josie. I received a letter from him a couple of weeks later, detailing his relationship with the woman and several bizarre encounters with Frederick. Malcolm was not a brawler as far as I knew, but he had a fair dose of the old British pluck, and managed to frighten Frederick off.

It would take too long to trace my movements after the citizens of Bourgoin had their snow tires on and the job in the garage ended. I worked with Patrice François, a bûcheron, or lumberjack, in a town called Panissières, near Lyon. Eventually, I wound up back in Lowell, but my only thought was to find a way to get back to France. In the evenings, I visited O’Leary Library. I had found a series of French conversational tapes with grammatical notes that one could listen to there on headphones. I studied French like a madman and became friendly with the librarian who ran the French section on the bottom floor of the Pollard Library.

All the time, Malcolm and I were exchanging letters. I don’t remember whether he was in Hungary at that time or had returned to England. His letters confirmed my opinion that he was just the sort of friend I seemed to be drawn to: extraordinarily bright and a bit eccentric. I remember in one letter, he offered a mathematical formula proving that a flawed War and Peace was superior to a perfect 1300 blank pages.

I told him that I had bought a ticket on Braniff Airlines to return to France. He said he’d see me there. Somehow, I found a job for the two of us at a chateau as sort of general laborers. It was fine for a few weeks. NOTE: Then one day as we were stacking firewood, we said, “Screw this,” and grabbed our packs and set off down the road. We returned to the Coquards and made la vendange again. Yes, the Sharps O’Connor Show was back on the road, but we all know what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about no second acts. In Lyon, we kept seeing serious men our age with briefcases and copies of Le Monde under their arms running toward train platforms and taxi stands. Malcolm was ready to go try to make it in Hungary. There was a train that left from Lyon to Budapest, where, it turned out, he would spend the rest of his life. To be honest, I don’t remember having a final beer with him, or watching him walk away as Kerouac watched Neal Cassady. I just know that he was gone, and I never saw him again.

I tried to get a job teaching English in Lyon, but was told that without a work permit, it would be impossible for them to hire me. The man who ran the school suggested I marry a French woman, and a friend, a bona fide French woman, offered to “marry” me for the paperwork. I didn’t regard marriage as something to trifle with, and I never considered the proposition seriously. I could pick grapes, busk on the streets, cut wood, wash dishes, mount tires in a garage where the owner was friendly with the local gendarmes, or stack firewood, but I could not get a professional job, and I began to feel as the age of thirty loomed, that my rambling days were numbered.

Braniff had gone out of business, but I was told my ticket would be honored by Sabena Airlines. I stayed with friends for a while in St. Pierre de Colombiere in the wilds of Ardèche. The gendarmes showed up once while I was out wandering in the mountains. In Burzet, the next village, they had heard there was an American in St. Pierre and they wanted to check his papers. Jacquie told them I was out, but they were welcome to wait. They said there was no need. “Should he do anything?”

“No,” they said. “Not necessary right now.”

They only wanted me to know that they knew I was there, and they didn’t come back. Soon, I was boarding a plane bound for Boston. I returned to France a couple of times, but as Patrice François said, “You’re not the same person, now. You have a rented car and a credit card. And no violin.” No second acts.

No, I never saw Malcolm again, but we remained in communication through the decades, from around 1982, until his death last year in Budapest, where he had made a living teaching English and translating librettos and books on musical subjects into English. For most of that time, correspondence was by letter. Malcolm did not write short missives. It was not unusual to receive ten pages hand-written on both sides. Some letters were typed, and included a story he had composed set somewhere in Eastern Europe. He was a very good writer. Recently, I tried to gather up all the letters I had; they were in drawers, slipped into books and boxes. I wound up with a large bag full of letters, but I don’t know what to do with them.

****

Malcolm never published his original work which included a novel, The Tree Twins, and a lot of stories. I’m not sure that he tried. I told him that there was a blog in Lowell, richardhowe.com, and that Dick Howe would be willing to take a look at anything he sent. Soon he became something of a regular contributor. And so began his vicarious relation with Lowell and with other contributors to the blog. He would mention email conversations he had had with David Daniel, Dick Howe, and someone with whom he developed a friendship, Louise Peloquin.

He was always a romantic at heart. Though not a classically handsome man, women liked him, and he loved them. In one of the last emails I received from him, he spoke of “the woman.”

It’s the woman who runs a hand down her skirt to smooth out creases. It’s the woman who puts out a tongue to help her find an evading word. It’s the woman whose eyes close as she listens to you and then she opens them when you finish as if she is re-discovering the world. It’s a woman you’ve met many times, yet she has a surprise in every return. You think you have captured her being, yet her essence evades you and leaves you hopelessly clutching at shadow.

Before he died, he was caring for a woman he had loved for many years whom he had met on a bus in Budapest. She was older than he and not doing well last year. I remember him telling me not long before he died that she had fallen, and in trying to get her up he had also fallen and ended up on the floor with her. I didn’t imagine that the woman he took such pains to care for would outlive him. I had not heard from him for a few weeks when Dick Howe wrote to me that he had received an email from Peter Bendall, an English friend of Malcolm’s, reporting that he had died, maybe from some kind of long Covid. His friendship had been a constant in my life since we met in St. Andre in 1979, so the news was a gut punch. Peter wrote a wonderful appreciation of Malcolm for the blog.

****

There is one other story I should relate before I close. In 2023, I attended an event at the Pollard Library at which Elinor Lipman gave out that year’s Lipman Literary Awards. I ended up sitting beside Elinor’s partner, Jonathan. I heard his accent asked what part of England he was from. “Liverpool,” he said.

“Oh, I have a good friend from Liverpool who lives in Hungary.”

At that, I had his full attention. “What’s your friend’s name?”

“Malcolm Sharps.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Don’t tell me you know him.”

“Malcolm was my best friend in high school.”

I was very much interested in the story of this old friendship in the high school that John Lennon had attended. One thing that Jonathan told me that surprised me even more than the fact that he had been a close friend of Malcolm’s was that in those days, Malcolm played the violin. In all the time that I played on the street or in with Malcolm nearby, he had never mentioned that he played, never picked up the violin, never let on at all.

At an event in downtown Lowell, I see Louise Peloquin. She comes up and tells me that though she never met Malcolm, she felt a close connection with him through his writing for the blog and their emails. She asks if she can hug me. As someone who knew him, she says it’s the closest she will ever get to him. I give her a hug and am surprised that I am fighting back tears.

Ave Atque Vale, old friend.