The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018 711“I
WRITE slowly,” Charles Sprawson
said last summer, explaining why the
sequel to his celebrated debut was not yet
finished, “so my books take a long time
...Of course, then I got ill.” He was smartly
dressed, his hair a wing of white above his
broad forehead. “It’s desperate, really. I ex-
pected to be here for a few days. It’s
been...” He screwed up his face, then con-
tinued: “...months.” Now and then he
raised his deep, patrician voice to drown
the shouts of a patient in the next room.
Mr Sprawson, who is now 76, was in a
secure hospital ward in west London for el-
derly people with mental-health pro-
blems. Mostof his fellow patients were
wheelchair-bound and speechless. The
television in the communal room was al-
ways on, the volume high. Mr Sprawson
longed to be back in his nearby flat, among
his books. Hismemory wassmudged
around the edges, but he recalled his years
of literary glory, a quarter of a century ago,
with sparkling clarity. “The problem is,” he
said, “all the really good people I knew are
dead now.”
His first and (so far) only book, “Haunts
of the Black Masseur”, will be reissued lat-
er this year. When itwas firstpublished, in
1992, it enjoyed the kind of critical and
commercial success that most debut au-
thors only dream about. It has inspired and
influenced homages and imitations. Mr
Sprawson was feted—then forgotten. The
story of his career since that triumph exem-
plifies the caprices of literary celebrity and
the indignities of old age. It points to a
deeperissue, too: what, in the end, defines
a person’s life?In Byron’s wake
Mr Sprawson was born in Pakistan, the son
of a headmaster, went to school in Kent
and briefly taught classicsin the Middle
East. He married, settled in Gloucester-
shire and raised a family. He became an
itinerant art dealer, specialising in Victor-
iana. On visits to the Channel Island of Jer-
sey, his car loaded with oil paintings, he
stayed at the Prince of Wales hotel in Greve
de Lecq: it was on the beach and he could
swim before breakfast. Along with books,
swimming was at the heart of his life.
“Haunts of the Black Masseur” came
out of these twin obsessions. The London
Magazinecommissioned him to write a
piece on literary swimmers in 1988; the ar-
ticle was vivid and crammed with learn-ing. Afterwards Mr Sprawson worked the
piece into what may be the finest book
about swimming ever written. It ranges
across the windswept beaches of English
seaside towns, Niagara Falls, the landings
at Gallipoli (“a swimmer’s war”) and Leni
Riefenstahl’s film of the Berlin Olympics in- Its most memorable passages lace be-
tween the exploits and reflections of great
swimming writers—Rupert Brooke, Lord
Byron, André Gide, Jack London—and the
author’s own waterborne life.
He tells of the time he heroically swam
the Hellespont, and of the (less heroic)
time he was picked up by the naval police
while attempting to cross the Tagus estu-
ary in Lisbon. He describes childhood
dives amid the sunken Greek ruins of Cyre-
ne in Libya:
On Christmas Day we made a ritual of bath-
ing in a natural rock pool, long and rectangu-
lar, its sides encrusted with molluscs and
anemones, where once Cleopatra and the
Romans reputedly swam. The waves broke
against one end, and beyond them, beneath
the surface, lay most of the remains of the
classical city...When we dipped ourmasked
faces into the water there emerged on the
corrugated sand mysterious traces of the out-
line of ancient streets and colonnades, their
sanctity disturbed by the regular intrusion of
giant rays that flapped their wings somno-
lently among the broken columns as they
drifted in from out of the shadowy gloom of
deeper water.J.G. Ballard said “Haunts” was “an exhila-
rating plunge into some of the deepest
pools inside our heads.” Part memoir, part
literary and social history, part personal
credo, it gave birth to a whole subgenre of
swimming literature. Mr Sprawson recog-
nised something important that animated
both his literary heirs and the current
vogue for wild swimming: that immersion
in water offersa particularly sublime form
of escape, out of the material world and
into nature. Plunging into it, for him, was at
once an adventure in an alien element and
a solace, “a return to the security and irre-
sponsibilityof the womb”. Recent books
from authors such as Philip Hoare, Jenny
Landreth, Joe Minihane and Victoria Whit-
worth could not have been written with-
out Mr Sprawson’s model.
That he was once such a bold swimmer
and an exquisite writer makes his later tra-
jectory all the more poignant. After the suc-
cess of “Haunts” he separated from hisLiterary livesCreatures of the deep
A quarter of a century ago Charles Sprawson wrote what may be the greatestbook
about swimming. Then he was forgottenBooks and arts
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