Haunts of the Black Masseur:
The Swimmer as Hero
by Charles Sprawson
Published by Vintage
ISBN 9780099577249
$26.99
A classic cultural history of swimming, first published in 1992, its enigmatic title references a short story by Tennessee Williams, a true swimming obsessive. Charles Sprawson matches him, self-describing as someone who has ‘spent much of [their] life in pursuit of interesting pools’. Water to Sprawson is both ‘masseur’–supportive, remedial, sensual; and ‘black’ – unknowable, changeable and threatening. His discourse of swimming feats and failures draws heavily upon Romantic-era notions of nature’s duality as both beautiful and sublime. The grace and lightnessand the author’s wit, mask scholarship that is both broad and deep. We read of bewitchment by water of the likes of Shelley, Lord Byron, Goethe, Whitman and Jack London, and of the allure of the grace and form of swimmers and divers such as Annette Kellerman, Eleanor Holm and Esther Williams who were to turn their prowess into Hollywood stardom. Swimming attracts not only heroes and champions it seems, but outcasts, dreamers, compulsives and those for whom a classical education firmly entrenches an innate eccentricity. Australia’s Annette Kellerman is quoted as saying: ‘Swimming cultivates imagination; the man with the most is he who can swim his solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people who push.’ The author and his diverse band of adherents, from antiquity to the present day, invite us to seek such immersion away from the mainstream.
