Backing Into Light: My Father's Son

by Colin Spencer

Since his first novel in 1959, Colin Spencer has written eight more and published many short stories both here and in America. His masterly Generation series, describing the anarchic lives of a group of young people growing up in the late 1950s, remain one of the great novel sequences of the twentieth century. Best remembered now perhaps as a food writer, his column was published for fourteen years in the Guardian and his epic British An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History reissued in 2011.

260 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Author biography:

Colin Spencer was born in London in 1933 and attended Brighton Grammar School and Brighton Art College. From an early age, he was interested in both art and writing and had his first stories published in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22.

Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), and Panic (1971), books that one critic has said ‘revel in the eccentric, the bizarre, and the grotesque’.

A man of many talents, Spencer is also a prolific author of non-fiction books, including gay-interest titles like Homosexuality: A History (1995) and The Gay Kama Sutra (1997) and acclaimed works on food and cooking which led Germaine Greer to call him ‘the greatest living food writer’.

More recently, Spencer has devoted himself to painting and to writing a trilogy of autobiographical works, the first of which, the memoir Backing into Light: My Father’s Son, was published by Quartet in 2013. He lives in East Sussex.

Reviews

[David Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colin Spencer, now in his seventies, is best known for his cookery books and a long-running food column in the Guardian, but back in the 1960s he was a leading novelist and playwright, much admired - especially by me. His quartet A Generation is one of the finest novel sequences of modern times and I would rate The Tyranny of Love (Part Two of the quartet) as one of the best novels written in my lifetime. Bisexuality is a major theme in the quartet and Spencer's handling of this prickly subject is as good as James Baldwin's in Another Country, one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.

Subtitled My Father's Son, Backing into Light is a short autobiography, highly 'confessional' in the style of Alan Bennett's diaries, filled with vivid family members - not just Spencer's loud brutish father and long-suffering religious mother, but aunts and uncles and neighbours - and his dad's mistresses, openly paraded before the family. Spencer had a love/hate relationship with his dad but, as the subtitle implies, he acknowledges how much he takes after him. He says that they came close to killing each other at different times (and once, curiously, he almost murdered his adored mother).

His unruly family life provided a rich seam which he mined for his fiction. For an admirer of his novels it's fascinating to learn the story behind his books: not many authors are as candid as this. But the rumbustious comic tone that underscores his quartet is conspicuously lacking here. This is almost a 'misery memoir': his home life was unbearably wretched, he was unhappy at school, dropped out of art college, came close to a nervous breakdown during National Service - woe upon woe. Only when his sex life gets going in his twenties does he start to enjoy himself. As a successful writer and artist he meets some seriously fascinating people: Forster, L.P. Hartley, Rattigan, Diana Athill.

Becoming the 'toy-boy' of John Lehmann, editor of the prestigious London Review, gave his writing (and artistic) career a serious boost, but he was lucky enough to have publishers beating a trail to his door, something which today mostly happens to celebrities from non-literary fields. He ends this memoir without explaining why his projected quartet became a 'sequence' and then fizzled out after Victims of Love (1978), which clearly did not complete the saga of Matthew and Sundy Simpson. In a throw-away line he says that Reg, the bisexual husband of Sundy (and lover of Matthew) is based on a schoolfriend, but the character reads like another side of the author who is surely both Matthew and Reg. It would be great if writing this autobiography could 'unlock' whatever it is that held Colin Spencer back from continuing with his towering novel sequence. Cookery's gain was very much literature's loss.

He's very honest about his bisexuality.Sexually and emotionally he was always drawn to both men and women. His marriage to a girl he'd loved since their schooldays was a wretched failure and his description of their parting and divorce is one of the most bitter I've ever seen. He has had an amazing number of lovers, male and female, but the disintegration of his marriage hangs over this bitter memoir like a black cloud.

Back when he was a novelist he alternated the volumes of A Generation with some zany comic novels and zanier plays. Gore Vidal famously did the same thing but Vidal's writing, even at its most satirical and vitriolic, was always tightly controlled. Spencer's writing - and his life - has been mercurial, volcanic. If you think bisexuals have twice as much fun as 'normal' people, think again: they have twice as much anguish.