Letter: Charles Sprawson obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/23/letter-charles-sprawson-obituary

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When I was working in the music and arts department of the BBC my friend Charles Sprawson began sending me eloquent handwritten reflections on swimming. I could see what an original book Haunts of the Black Masseur would be, sowing the seeds for what could also be an unusual and fascinating documentary collaboration – indeed one which, soon after the book’s publication in 1992, amazingly seemed possible.

We were given money to research various locations and seek out potential additional contributors. They ranged from Olympic athletes and cross-channel swimmers to cultural figures such as Oliver Sacks, Iris Murdoch, David Hockney and the veteran Hollywood movie star Esther Williams, passionate in their different ways about swimming and who would, if possible, be filmed talking as they bobbed up and down in the water.

Submerged Passions was to have its various sequences connected by Charles himself, as he swam in the spaces that were the haunts of the historical figures whose love of water so inspired him: Byron and Goethe, escaping social constraints into the romantic solitude of the sea; masochistic Swinburne plunging through rough icy waves, preferably feeling his skin scourged by jagged rocks below; or Flaubert, for whom swimming was like “the caress of a thousand nipples”.

From birth to death, spanning sex, psychology, sport and art, and exploring the poetic metaphors so often associated with rivers and the sea, this documentary would be a sensual and photogenic journey through some of our most potent fantasies, fears and deepest feelings! And then, just as we were ready to go, the film was inexplicably cancelled and our aquatic dream sank without trace.

Charles was a terrific writer and lovely man, and we will miss him.