Charles Sprawson obituary
Iris Murdoch called Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer As Hero, Charles Sprawson’s classic memoir, “as zestful as a plunge in champagne”. The book, which was published in 1992 to widespread acclaim, is rich and allusive, melancholy yet often very funny, a work that is as much about the power of language to evoke deep feeling as it is about heroic sporting endeavour.
Sprawson, who has died of pneumonia aged 78, completed only this one book – he came to writing late in life and developed vascular dementia before finishing a second (a planned life of the Slovenian endurance swimmer Martin Strel) – but the influence of Haunts of the Black Masseur has been significant and enduring. It was the forerunner of the swimming memoirs that have become a staple of contemporary publishing: he inspired the writing of authors from Amy Liptrot to Roger Deakin to Philip Hoare.
Haunts of the Black Masseur - its title derived from a Tennessee Williams story - emerged from an essay on swimming and literature Sprawson wrote for a 1987 issue of the London Magazine, commissioned by his friend Alan Ross. Sprawson was at the time an itinerant art dealer, and yet the essay is luminous in its erudition, astonishing in its depth and breadth of knowledge, and written with a glorious lightness of touch, the twinkle in the author’s eye always visible. The essay was read by David Godwin – now a literary agent but at the time working at the publisher Jonathan Cape – who contacted Sprawson and asked if he wanted to write a book.
Haunts of the Black Masseur begins with Sprawson’s memories of his exotic, peripatetic childhood. He was born in Karachi, still part of British India, during the second world war. His father, Eric, after distinguished war service, went back to his former career as a colonial headteacher, first in India, then Libya. Sprawson writes of bathing in the “flooded subterranean vaults” of the palace of the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, who was a pupil at his father’s school, and later, in a memorable passage, among the sunken Greek ruins of Cyrene in North Africa.
It was here that he “began to form a vague conception of the swimmer as someone rather remote and divorced from everyday life, devoted to a mode of exercise where most of the body remains submerged and self-absorbed. It seemed to me that it appealed to the introverted and eccentric, individualists involved in a mental world of their own.”
Sprawson was sent to Britain to be educated and, after Tonbridge school in Kent, followed by university at Trinity College Dublin, he spent a year working as a pool attendant at the Porchester Baths in Bayswater, London. He answered an advertisement worded in Latin in the personal column of the Times and took up a post teaching “classical culture” at the University of Riyadh. It was there that he developed his obsession with swimming in literature, finding in the “parched atmosphere” that he was “acutely sensitive to the slightest trace of water … Novels and poetry seemed to revolve around water and swimming, in a way that was quite out of proportion to the author’s intentions.”
The authors who populate Haunts of the Black Masseur share more than just a love of swimming. In the writing of Swinburne, Goethe, Poe, Coleridge, Clough and, most of all, Byron, swimming represents freedom and self-dissolution, a way of making contact with the classical past but also with earlier, simpler stages of life. Sprawson writes that the “sense of the classical Golden Age merged in the minds of these swimmers into the unruffled, radiant years of their childhood, whose loss so many of them mourned … ”
Subtly and by accretion, Sprawson forges associations between the figures in his book, discovering in them all a particular strain of heroic melancholy, of homoerotic impulse (whether acted upon or not), of dissatisfaction with the present and longing for the classical past; they are all “scholar Gypsies” out of time with their age. One can see why Sprawson found them such compelling subjects – he was one of them himself.
When asked in 2018 during the recording of a BBC Radio 4 documentary (Searching for Swimming Pools) whether he had ever considered writing an autobiography, Sprawson said that he did not need to, as all the important elements of his life were in Haunts of the Black Masseur.
Certainly his great swims are there – a successful crossing of the Hellespont with his daughter Clare and a comically disastrous attempt on the Tagus estuary in Lisbon. We get a sense of his athleticism – he was a gifted squash and tennis player and came from a long line of sportspeople (his mother, Ann, nee Alexander, played squash for Britain). We see his erudition and deep love of the classics: at one point we find him reading Pindar’s Olympian odes while resting on a submerged Roman column in the ruins at Pamukkale.
There is much, though, that is not there. We do not read of his wife, also Ann (nee Fenton), whom he married in 1966 and divorced in 1993. We do not read much of his daughters. We naturally do not read of his companion Margaret Vyner, whom he met after the book was published, and who was with him for the last 15 years of his life. We read nothing of his time as an art dealer, after his return from Riyadh, when he lived first in York and later in London.
In the 2000s, Sprawson was diagnosed with cancer and then with vascular dementia, and his health deteriorated rapidly in the final years of his life, but in June 2018 he was able to leave his nursing home in Barnes to attend a party thrown in his honour by Vintage to mark the reissue of his book in a beautiful new edition.
He is survived by Margaret, his daughters, Clare, Emma and Sophie, and four grandchildren.
• Charles Sprawson, writer, born 12 June 1941; died 6 January 2020
