9780099577249

CHARLES SPRAWSON Charles Sprawson is an obsessional swimmer and diver who has swum the Hellespont.

CHARLES SPRAWSON

Haunts of the Black Masseur The Swimmer as Hero WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Amy Liptrot

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Vintage 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global. penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Charles Sprawson 1992 Illustrations by Clare Sprawson Introduction copyright © Amy Liptrot 2018 Charles Sprawson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Excerpts from The Waste Land taken from Collected Poems 1909–1962

by T.S. Eliot, and ‘The Casualty’ taken from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.; excerpts from Forbidden Colours, The Sound of Waves and The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima, reprinted by kind permission of Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1992 First published by Vintage Classics in 2013 This edition published by Vintage Classics in 2018 penguin.co.uk/vintage A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780099577249 Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

Introduction I’ve just returned from my regular morning swim at the local leisure centre, smelling slightly of chlorine. My dip was refreshing, but far from glamorous. In this book, however, swimming is elevated. Not for Charles Sprawson municipal pools, chilly changing rooms or school lessons; his is the swimming of Classical heroes, poets and Mediterranean pools, and his is a book to convince anyone of the romantic appeal of swimming. It offers the possibility of entering the water as transformation, and reveals its strangeness and sexiness.

Haunts of the Black Masseur is an expansive history of swimming in art and culture, complete with both delight and darkness. We learn how: ‘[Rupert] Brooke used to bathe, often like Byron at night, by the light of a bicycle lamp propped up in the grass on the edge of the river. It was here he swam naked with Virginia Woolf, the dark water “smelling of mint and mud”.’ As someone who has always had an affinity for obsessives and passionates I enjoy the way that Sprawson sees literature, and even history, through the prism of swimming. It makes me realise that my own swims, and my attempts to write about them, are part of a great poetic tradition.

In recent years in the UK there has been a revival of writing on swimming. In 2016 alone, books published included Jessica J. Lee’s beautiful Turning which charts her swims in the lakes surrounding Berlin, with particular affection for icy winter swimming; Leap In by journalist

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Alexandra Heminsley about overcoming a fear of water and becoming an accomplished sea swimmer; and Floating, in which Joe Minihane swims rivers and lakes across England, following the path of writer Roger Deakin. These books are all highly personal, with swimming running parallel to the author’s recovery from, or reconciliation with, something: melancholy, illness or loss. Sprawson’s book, published 25 years ago, led the way for these titles, both in its exploration of swimming as something other, and in its slippery refusal of genre constraints, containing both personal experience and academic research in a way that was unusual in 1992.

Now cross-genre writing about culture and the natural world is increasingly popular and the work of people like Philip Hoare – a writer obsessed with whales, the ocean and who swims in the sea every day – can be seen as a descendant of Sprawson.

Unlike these later authors, Sprawson’s use of the first person is light in the mix. This is his only book and his author’s biography (‘Charles Sprawson is an obsessional swimmer and diver who has swum the Hellespont’) is tantalisingly brief, masking the fuller picture of someone who is clearly a fine scholar and has had the privilege of spending ‘much of my life in pursuit of interesting pools’. Sprawson has the languid tone of an Englishman from another era, who in turn has his thoughts in the past. In his delivery there’s a gentle humour that’s aware of the singularity of his obsession and the quirks of his persona – seen, for example, when he talks of a place, in the foothills of the Himalayas, ‘where I lingered once for an entire day reading Pindar’s Olympian odes on a submerged column’.

I am interested in how the environments and landscapes of childhood leave shadows on the psyche. For me, the cliff edges and high winds of the Scottish islands represent extremes I’ve tried to emulate in later life. Beginning with

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his early childhood in India, ‘bathing in the streams and waterfalls’, Sprawson gives us glimpses of his life which tell us a lot about the formation of his adult obsessions and imagination, ranging from his boyhood admiration of certain Olympic swimmers such as Murray Rose, to the experience of swimming in a rock pool over the ruins of the classical Greek city of Cyrene.

Later in life, Sprawson worked as a classics lecturer in an unnamed Arab city. During this time he ‘devoured book after book’, making extensive notes; the hot and arid nature of his location drawing him to any mention 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.’ At this time the epic research project of Masseurs began. He tells how ‘the swimmer’s solitary training, the long hours spent semi-submerged, induce a lonely, meditative state of mind’ – something I know myself from laps of the pool, and find once more evoked in the dreamy tone and repetitive cataloguing of Sprawson’s book.

Despite their infrequency, Sprawson’s short, first person intrusions are surprising and charming. ‘Distracted recently by the sight of these startling columns and that of a gypsy’s naked breast,’ he writes, ‘I lost through her liquid fingers all the money in my possession.’ There is just one longer autobiographical section detailing Sprawson’s trip with his daughter to the Hellespont – the perilous waterway connecting Europe and Asia, where Byron once swam, and Leander, of Greek mythology, supposedly ventured out to meet his lover, Hero. This is the key moment of the book and reveals its concerns: as much as the classical spirit of swimming underlies the book, there is, for Sprawson, a particular resonance in the idea of taking on more and more daring feats until dragged under.

Indeed, Sprawson’s waters are dark rather than clear. The

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phrase ‘black waters’ is repeated, as in the title of the book itself. The water is a masseur – it is sensual – but also black – unknown and threatening. In the Hellespont, he ‘swam sidestroke to avoid looking down’.

The adventure continues the next summer with Sprawson’s attempt to swim across the Tagus estuary at Lisbon, again in the poet’s wake, told with characteristic humour and selfawareness. Both of these journeys involved much effort and could have borne more space and description but Sprawson modestly condenses them, just as he relays his deep research without fanfare.

Much more than a book about the history of swimming as a sport, this is a book about literature and symbolism.

Sprawson reveals just how important swimming has been as both a subject and a pastime for major writers including Byron, Pushkin, D.H. Lawrence, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Walt Whitman, Jack London, John Cheever, Yukio Mishima and many more. As both a writer and swimmer myself, I think that so many of us use and enjoy swimming because it has such versatility as a metaphor. In his book Sprawson explores ideas of swimming as representing the erotic, desire, or thirst; of it being something particularly connected with the homosexual or bisexual; of swimming as a recreation of the womb, or a means of achieving cleanliness; and of the comparison between swimming and using drugs, particularly opium. The common thread of these metaphors is of swimming as a pursuit ‘outside the common run of humanity’ and ‘lyrical release from all that is mundane and constricting’.

I have written about swimming in terms of addiction and recovery, as an alternative intoxication. For a recovering alcoholic outdoor swimming has come to fill many of the functions that alcohol used to. I use it as a form of stress relief, to celebrate special occasions, and for the buzz –

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the ‘cold water high’. The cold blast is the perfect antidote to tension and helps to observe and mark the changing seasons, fluctuating weather and sea state. These dips are the shimmering crests on the waves of routine and unremembered days, they are my refreshment from work and anxiety and planning and frustration. With seaweed and the Atlantic on my skin, up close to anemones and limpets, I am alive.

This idea of swimming as metaphor continues as Sprawson mentions lone women travellers of the nineteenth century: ‘Their swims meant more to them than mere refreshment in a hot climate. They seem, rather, to symbolise their release from the restrictions imposed on them by a masculine society.’ However in general the book concentrates on male swimmers, more heroes than heroines, and I recommend as a companion piece Jenny Landreth’s excellent ‘waterbiography’, Swell, on the history of women and swimming and their battles to be allowed in the water.

In Scotland, I swim in the sea year-round with the ‘Orkney Polar Bear Club’. We are part of what has been a massive increase or resurgence in the popularity of outdoor swimming (also known as ‘open water swimming’ ‘wild swimming’ or indeed just ‘swimming’) in the last decade. Those taking part range from 30-second dippers to those undertaking long distances in wetsuits. I think the craze is partly thanks to improvements in equipment – neoprene boots and dry robes and car heaters – and also because of how well a ‘wild swim’ goes down on social media. Swimmers talk of the endorphin rush obtained after immersion in cold waters, not found in heated pools, and the rewards of immersion in the natural world.

I have written almost obsessively about my swims. I find a five minute dip in the sea provides as much material and inspiration as a much longer walk or time spent deliberately

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thinking. I get a deeper understanding of my environment, the complex interaction between temperatures of air, water, earth, and how my body reacts to these things.

I have found a high crossover between people who swim outdoors and people who read books. They seem to be those who are willing to push themselves for knowledge and sensation. But Haunts of the Black Masseur is not just for people who like swimming. It’s for anyone who enjoys reading; for those who would find pure pleasure in a sentence, such as: ‘Although in “The Crackup” Fitzgerald describes “all good writing” as “swimming underwater and holding your breath”, he tended to avoid swimming as he was ashamed of his feet.’

Through swimming the artists detailed in these pages, men of the pen and the mind, are brought back to their physical selves. Time and again the writer uses swimming as a way of affirming his physicality and masculinity.

For myself I have found that swimming fits well into the sedentary, cerebral life of a writer. When I’m in the pool I don’t really think, I just count my lengths and adjust my stroke – which has become a meditative practice. I’m up to my neck, in my element.

There are two sides to swimming for Sprawson, the darkness and haunting, but also the redemption that comes with the subtitle of the book: the swimmer as hero. With him, we explore the psychology of the swimmer, those for whom everyday life seems inadequate. I am writing this introduction at eight months pregnant, feeling heavy and harassed, but earlier, submerged and supported in the pool, I was as Sprawson knew: briefly weightless, temporarily heroic.

Amy Liptrot