Haunts of Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero [Paperback]

The Romantic ideal was closely associated with Classical notions of the body and nature, and its notion of hero was intertwined with this. Hellenism held a special thrall over the Romantic period. This was the impetus to Byron's swimming of the Hellespont, and to a tragic sub text to his and other lives as they were swept up in naive movements or misadventure (Byron died in a Greek rebellion against the Turks). Swimming was seen as a dissent from the priggish, sanctimonious, imposed to something pure, original, regenerative through nature.

But there was an impulse to self annihilation as well. Some were smashed on rocks, or gripped by undertows or had their health broken by cold water and over exertion. Fitness was not the prevailing motivation; swimming was muse, cave, judge. Its influence continued into the 20th Century, In Jack London's 'Martin Eden', John Cheever's 'the Swimmer" or Yukio Mishima's seduction by Byron's hedonistic fantasies, it again cast down verdicts of elevation, dissolution and destruction.

I was drawn to this book by an Australian broadcast on swimming during the Sydney Olympics, amongst which was excerpts from this book and an interview with Jon Konrads, the 1500 Meter Olympic Champion of 1960, who had returned to swimming in late middle age after decades of absence. In it he found a cerebral tonic, albeit at a much slower pace-- an invigoration, relaxation and something spiritually satisfying, even more so now than in his Olympic form. This is a worth while read for anyone interested in the sport and pastime. Even for the most pedestrian of lappers, it is an invitation to glide in eddies of imagination, sublimely cognizant of and refining the stroke, seeking some mysterious grace. There swimming provides an elixir of meditation and inspiration-- for those that it does not consume.

Australian champion Annette Kellerman associated swimming with the ability to face the unknown in life, thus seeing it as a symbol of the adventurer and explorer. Her belief that "swimming cultivates imagination" perhaps accounts for the occurrence of water as both theme and setting in numerous paintings, poems, and songs. Writers in particular, many of them compulsive swimmers, noted the influence of water in their work and in their lives: water is best (Pindar); "clear, light, of high value and desirable" (Homer); a way of measuring the decline of Rome (Juvenal); enticing and difficult to leave (Arnold); a craving lust (Swinburne); "a delight only comparable to love" (Valery); a symbol of youth and revolt against civilization (Rupert Brooke); akin to philosophical thinking (Wittgenstein); the only relief from ennui (Byron); like opium addiction (DeQuincey); innocence, boyhood, and a release from introspection (Clough); a return to the pastoral, pagan world of Greek mythology (Goethe); and the symbol of one man against the elements (Jack London).

Sprawson himself notes that many swimmers suffer "like Narcissus, from a form of autism, a self-encapsulation in an isolated world, a morbid self-admiration, an absorption in fantasy." As his examples accrue, Sprawson gives us that sense of discovering something profound in what previously seemed so common and obvious.

This is an odd, surprisingly enjoyable book. It's the only book I've read about swimming. It's the only book I've read that follows swimming as a theme in literary and cultural history. Although it appears to be the sort of book aimed at grad students, who will drool over its obsessiveness and allusions, it should find a home among many other readers.