“I WRITE slowly,” Charles Sprawson said last summer, explaining why the sequel to his celebrated debut was not yet finished, “so my books take a long time…Of course, then I got ill.” He was smartly dressed, his hair a wing of white above his broad forehead. “It’s desperate, really. I expected to be here for a few days. It’s been…” He screwed up his face, then continued: “…months.” Now and then he raised his deep, patrician voice to drown the shouts of a patient in the next room.

Mr Sprawson, who is now 76, was in a secure hospital ward in west London for elderly people with mental-health problems. Most of his fellow patients were wheelchair-bound and speechless. The television in the communal room was always on, the volume high. Mr Sprawson longed to be back in his nearby flat, among his books. His memory was smudged around the edges, but he recalled his years of literary glory, a quarter of a century ago, with sparkling clarity. “The problem is,” he said, “all the really good people I knew are dead now.”

His first and (so far) only book, “Haunts of the Black Masseur”, will be reissued later this year. When it was first published, in 1992, it enjoyed the kind of critical and commercial success that most debut authors only dream about. It has inspired and influenced homages and imitations. Mr Sprawson was feted—then forgotten. The story of his career since that triumph exemplifies the caprices of literary celebrity and the indignities of old age. It points to a deeper issue, too: what, in the end, defines a person’s life?

In Byron’s wake

Mr Sprawson was born in Pakistan, the son of a headmaster, went to school in Kent and briefly taught classics in the Middle East. He married, settled in Gloucestershire and raised a family. He became an itinerant art dealer, specialising in Victoriana. On visits to the Channel Island of Jersey, his car loaded with oil paintings, he stayed at the Prince of Wales hotel in Greve de Lecq: it was on the beach and he could swim before breakfast. Along with books, swimming was at the heart of his life.

“Haunts of the Black Masseur” came out of these twin obsessions. The London Magazine commissioned him to write a piece on literary swimmers in 1988; the article was vivid and crammed with learning. Afterwards Mr Sprawson worked the piece into what may be the finest book about swimming ever written. It ranges across the windswept beaches of English seaside towns, Niagara Falls, the landings at Gallipoli (“a swimmer’s war”) and Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Its most memorable passages lace between the exploits and reflections of great swimming writers—Rupert Brooke, Lord Byron, André Gide, Jack London—and the author’s own waterborne life.

He tells of the time he heroically swam the Hellespont, and of the (less heroic) time he was picked up by the naval police while attempting to cross the Tagus estuary in Lisbon. He describes childhood dives amid the sunken Greek ruins of Cyrene in Libya:

On Christmas Day we made a ritual of bathing in a natural rock pool, long and rectangular, its sides encrusted with molluscs and anemones, where once Cleopatra and the Romans reputedly swam. The waves broke against one end, and beyond them, beneath the surface, lay most of the remains of the classical city…When we dipped our masked faces into the water there emerged on the corrugated sand mysterious traces of the outline of ancient streets and colonnades, their sanctity disturbed by the regular intrusion of giant rays that flapped their wings somnolently among the broken columns as they drifted in from out of the shadowy gloom of deeper water.

J.G. Ballard said “Haunts” was “an exhilarating plunge into some of the deepest pools inside our heads.” Part memoir, part literary and social history, part personal credo, it gave birth to a whole subgenre of swimming literature. Mr Sprawson recognised something important that animated both his literary heirs and the current vogue for wild swimming: that immersion in water offers a particularly sublime form of escape, out of the material world and into nature. Plunging into it, for him, was at once an adventure in an alien element and a solace, “a return to the security and irresponsibility of the womb”. Recent books from authors such as Philip Hoare, Jenny Landreth, Joe Minihane and Victoria Whitworth could not have been written without Mr Sprawson’s model.

That he was once such a bold swimmer and an exquisite writer makes his later trajectory all the more poignant. After the success of “Haunts” he separated from his wife and became a man of letters. He contributed to the Spectator and the Observer and was commissioned to write a second book, this time about extreme swimmers. He flew to Slovenia to interview an athlete who had swum the Amazon. But he never completed it.

His ensuing decline is, at a simple level, a familiar tale of the trials of age. He contracted throat cancer; then, says Clare Burleigh, one of his daughters and an artist who drew the sketches that open each chapter of “Haunts”, he began to show signs that something else was wrong. “It was little things at first, just forgetfulness,” she says, “then it suddenly became much worse. He couldn’t stay in his flat any more.” That flat is a small, book-filled bachelor pad up a stairway so steep it is almost a ladder. At the end of 2016 he picked up an infection that led to hallucinations. He has been marooned in hospital since.

“All he wants”, says Ms Burleigh, “is to be back in his flat, writing again.” To pay for the home care needed to spring him from what he calls his “incarceration”, his remaining friends tried to secure a grant from the Royal Literary Fund, a 200-year-old benevolent organisation established to help writers in financial difficulty. Its representatives visited him in hospital but, in the end, they turned him down—because he had published only one book, and “quantity is a consideration as well as quality”.

This idea—that leaving behind only a single book, if a beautiful one, is not enough—poses interesting questions about literary posterity. Emily Brontë, Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger suggest a lone classic is indeed sufficient to secure a reputation. But it also points to the difficulty of distilling the essence of a life. Mr Sprawson always saw himself as a writer, and still does, “Haunts” being only the outward evidence of that identity. Others saw him the same way, but only for a while.

Still afloat

Since last year Mr Sprawson has been moved to another ward. His room is underground and looks onto a sunken courtyard. Some of the other patients are able to talk. “They’re really quite interesting, some of them,” he says. Mr Sprawson himself, though, has grown worse. He is still visited by his daughters and by Margaret Vyner, his lover for the past 15 years. But he has stopped reading. He spends much of his time wandering the corridors looking for a swimming pool, opening broom cupboards in the hope that one will reveal the dapple of shimmering water.

He remains desperate to go home, to return to the manuscript of his second book, which is half-finished and sits submerged in a drawer in his flat. “I’m tired at the moment,” he says, looking out at the wintry view. “Much too tired to write. But I’m getting better.”