Haunts of the Black Masseur: Swimmer as Hero - Hardcover

Haunts of the Black Masseur is a book about swimming. In it Charles Sprawson - himself an obsessional swimmer and fluent diver - explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water, and their search for the springs of classical antiquity. In nineteenth-century England bathing was thought to be an instrument of social and moral reform while in Germany and America swimming came to signify escape. For the Japanese the swimmer became a symbol of samurai pride and nationalism. The author gives us fascinating glimpses of the great swimming heroes: Byron leaping dramatically into the surf at Shelley's beach funeral; Rupert Brooke swimming naked with Virginia Woolf, the dark water 'smelling of mint and mud'; Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico; Edgar Allan Poe's lone and mysterious river-swims; Leander, Webb, Weismuller, and a host of others. Combining the literature of Swinburne, Goethe, Scott Fitzgerald, Yukio Mishima with the films of Riefenstahl, Vigo and the explosion of the Hollywood swimming musicals in the 1930s, delving in and out of Olympic history and informed throughout by the author's own experiences and the lyrical release he finds in the water, Haunts of the Black Masseur is a remarkable book, not only an enthralling account of man- body submerged, self-absorbed - and his relationship with water, but probably the best celebration of swimming ever written.

Charles Sprawson studied at Trinity College, Dublin, deals in nineteenth-century paintings, and recently swam the Hellespont.