Colin Spencer


Colin Spencer is an English writer and artist who has produced a prolific body of work in a wide variety of media since his first published short stories and drawings appeared in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22. His work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction, cookery books, stage and television plays, paintings and drawings, book and magazine illustrations. He has written and presented a television documentary on vandalism, appeared in numerous radio and television programmes and lectured on food history, literature and social issues. For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for The Guardian.

Early and personal life

Colin Spencer was born in 1933 in Thornton Heath, London, and was largely brought up in the south of England. From an early age he knew that he wanted to paint and write. He attended Brighton Grammar School and went on to study at Brighton Art College, but he feels now that he is wholly self-educated. His colourful family provided his youthful imagination with rich material for his later novels, as did his passionate emotional involvements with both men and women.
He spent his period of National Service as a pacifist in the Royal Army Medical Corps in war-ravaged Hamburg. He has subsequently lived in London, Vienna, Athens and on the Greek island of Lesbos. His first novel was published when he was 28. His portrait of E.M. Forster was painted when he was 29. He has twice been married and has one son and two grandsons.
He has never stopped painting and writing, and now lives in East Sussex where he is writing the second volume of his autobiography, staring with delight at the Seven Sisters, gardening, and producing the paintings he feels he has striven to create throughout his life – as "muscular, powerfully envisaged oils", the work of "a remarkable Indian summer".
The first volume of his planned 3-part autobiography has recently been published. Backing into Light: My Father's Son tells the story of the first 3 decades of his eventful life through his wartime boyhood dominated by his raucous, womanising and irrepressible father, to his first successes in the 50s and 60s as an artist, novelist and playwright. They were years which saw ardent affairs with both women and men, a stormy marriage, the birth of a son, and a traumatic divorce. The book has been described as “full of clear-eyed observation and thoughtful reflection, as well as comic incident … unflinchingly honest and exuberantly entertaining,” while The Spectator finds it “a remarkable autobiography which subverts everything you thought you knew about love and life.”

Fiction

Since 1955 Colin Spencer has had nine novels as well as numerous short stories published both in the UK and abroad. His work can be divided into the 4 semi-autobiographical works of the Generation sequence; the two satirical black comedies Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, and How the Greeks Kidnapped Mrs Nixon ; the sexual realist drama Panic, a compassionate examination of the mentality of a child murderer; the experimental Asylum, merging the myths of Oedipus and the Old Testament Fall of Man into a narrative written in a style akin to poetic prose; and his first novel, set mostly in Vienna, An Absurd Affair, which he feels can be sensibly ignored.
That first novel was followed in 1963 by Anarchists in Love the first book of his four-volume novel sequence GENERATION which the author describes as the main core of his work, and “fictionalised autobiography.” Further volumes in the series The Tyranny of Love, Lovers in War and The Victims of Love appeared in 1967, 1969 and 1978. With a Dickensian breadth of characters and social settings, the four volumes follow the saga of the Simpson family from the end of World War I through to the 1960s age of sexual and social experimentation. It focuses in particular on the tortuous search for self-realisation and love by Sundy and Matthew, the two artistically gifted children of the raucously womanising Eddy. The sequence was described by Sir Huw Wheldon as a "work of serious purpose; affecting, hilarious and grave. It is a tapestry of unforgettable characters in all their seaminess and sadness, their idealism and desires."

Theatre

Seven of Colin Spencer's plays have been performed since the first production in December 1966 at the Hampstead Theatre Club of The Ballad of The False Barman. It was directed by Robin Phillips and featured Caroline Blakiston, Penelope Keith and Michael Pennington. The play is a musical fantasy set in a beach bar run by a bald-headed lesbian "barman" and peopled by whores of various sexes and their clientele, including a transvestite thieving vicar.
His next play to be performed, Spitting Image, also first appeared at Hampstead in October 1968 before moving to The Duke of York's in the West End. The production was directed by James Roose-Evans and starred Derek Fowlds, Frank Middlemass and Lally Bowers. Further productions followed in 1969 off Broadway in New York, in Arnhem, The Netherlands, in Vienna and in Australia. The play concerns a homosexual couple who discover that they are expecting a baby, and society's reaction to this unconventional conception. John Russell Taylor in his book, The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties, remarks “for all the play’s cheery light fantastic contains altogether more truth than is quite comfortable." The play was revived in a performance at the Hampstead Theatre in 2009 as part of the celebrations of the theatre’s 50th anniversary.
Three comedies: The Trial of St George, a satire on British justice when dealing with sexuality, inspired by the Oz Trial; Why Mrs Neustadter Always Loses, a wry monologue by an American divorcee exiled on a Greek island; and Keep It in the Family, a satire concerning a happy incestuous family appeared between 1972 and 1978 at the Soho Poly. Interest in his work abroad led to performances of his play The Sphinx Mother, a modern Oedipus, at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, and Lilith, a comedy of surrealist images, at the Schauspielhaus, Vienna in 1979.

Non-fiction

Colin Spencer's first published non-fiction book, which appeared in 1984, was a treatise on farting, Reports from Behind, illustrated by Spencer cartoons. His moving account of his affair with the Australian theatre director, John Tasker, Which of Us Two?, was first published by Viking in 1990, and then in a paperback edition by Penguin in 1991. The Faber Book of Food, an anthology, collected and written with Claire Clifton, was published by Faber & Faber in 1994. His interest in sexuality and social attitudes towards it led to the publication of Homosexuality – a History in 1995, and The Gay Kama Sutra in the following year.
His scholarly interest in food culture and history led to the publication of The Heretic's Feast – a History of Vegetarianism in 1993, the award-winning British Food – an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History in 2002, and his recently published book From Microliths to Microwaves – The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking, an account of the long history of farming, food and cookery in Britain and how our national cuisine was forged.

Cookery books

From early on Colin Spencer's creative instincts were applied to food and cookery, and in 1978 his book Gourmet Cooking for Vegetarians was published. That was followed through the 80s and 90s by a series of other cookery books, totalling 18 in all.
For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for the Guardian. His column was particularly concerned with exploring current issues and anxieties about food production and manufacture. In 2001 he was described by Germaine Greer as 'the greatest living food writer'.
He has received many awards for his food writing, including the Guild of Food Writers Michael Smith Award, the André Simon Memorial Fund Special Award, the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the Best Culinary History Book in the World, and the Glenfiddich Cookery Writer of the Year Award.

Visual arts

During his twenties numerous of Colin Spencer's drawings were published in The London Magazine, The Transatlantic Review and Encounter. A series of drawings of writers of our time was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1959. Those he portrayed included John Betjeman, E.M. Forster, C.P.Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, Graham Greene, Alan Ross, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Lehmann, Stevie Smith, V.S.Naipaul, and John Osborne, among others. An oil portrait of E.M. Forster hung for many years in his rooms at King's College Cambridge. On his death Forster left it to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and it is now in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh.
Colin Spencer had huge fun working alongside Katharine Whitehorn to illustrate her column in the national Sunday newspaper, The Observer, with satirical drawings delineating the public's interpretation of fashion trends. He was commissioned by the Royal Opera House to draw their idiosyncratic opera audience for their member's Magazine. He has completed oil portraits for a wide range of private customers and collectors, including Carl Winter, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Lady Rawlinson; Diana Hopkinson; Michael Davidson; and Canon Frederic Hood of Pusey House, Oxford. His work resides in a wide range of private collections amongst those of Melvyn Bragg, Germaine Greer, Derek Grainger, Bob Swash, Diana Athill, Prue Leith and the late Mary Renault and Sir Huw Wheldon.
His since has ranged from landscape drawings of Winchelsea Beach and Rye countryside to oil portraits of the poet Harry Fainlight and has lately been exhibited in London, Rye and Brighton. A recent series of paintings entitled The Downs reflected the sensuous forms of the landscape of the South Downs where he lives. He is currently intensely involved in creating paintings which he describes as "images of the unknown, paths through conflict, compounds of sex and spirit, mysterious reflections, hints and fading memories which unsettle the darkness." The themes of his present paintings are: War, Music, and Sex, the interior life of flowers, the sea bed and how do hills form roots.

Other activities

Colin Spencer has been Co-Chairman, Chairman and Vice-President of The Writers Guild of Great Britain and President of the Guild of Food Writers. He continues as a judge for the J R Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

Works

Fiction

An Absurd Affair, 1961, Longmans Green. 1970, Panther Books,,,.
Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, 1966, Anthony Blond. 1967, Panther Books,,,.
Asylum, 1966, Anthony Blond. 1970, Panther Books,,.
Panic, 1971, Martin Secker & Warburg, ;. 1973, Panther Books,,.
How The Greeks Kidnapped Mrs Nixon, 1974, Quartet Books,,. 1977, republished as Cock-up, Quartet Books,,. 1977.

Novel sequence ''Generation''

Uncollected short stories

Plays produced

The Ballad of the False Barman, Dec 1966: Hampstead Theatre Club. Sept 1972: Palace Theatre, Watford.
Spitting Image, Sept 1968: Hampstead Theatre Club. Oct 1968: Duke of York's, London. March 1969: Theatre de Lys, New York. Sept 1969: Schauspielhaus Wuppertal, Germany. Nov 1969: Arnhem, The Netherlands. 1970: Vienna. 1971: Australia. Published in Plays and Players, September 1968.
The Sphinx Mother, Aug 1972: Salzburg Festival.
The Trial of St George, March 1972: Soho Poly, London. 1972: Thalia Theater, Hamburg. 1972: Der Kammerspielen, Wuppertal.
Why Mrs Neustadter Always Loses, Nov 1972: Soho Poly, London.
Keep It in the Family, 1978: Soho Poly, London.
Lilith, Feb 1979: Schauspielhaus, Vienna.
A Woman Alone, Feb 1983, performed reading by the RSC at the Pit, Barbican, London

Non-fiction

Reports From Behind, 1984, Enigma Books,.
Which of Us Two? The Story of a Love Affair, 1990, Viking,.
The Faber Book of Food, an Anthology, 1994, Faber and Faber.
The Heretic's Feast – a History of Vegetarianism, 1993, Fourth Estate,.
Homosexuality – a History, 1995, Fourth Estate,.
The Gay Kama Sutra, 1996, B.T. Batsford,. 1996, Harmony Books,.
British Food – An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, 2002, Grub Street,,.
From Microliths to Microwaves, The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking, May 2011, Grub Street,.
Backing into Light, My Father's Son, April 2013, Quartet,

Television

Vandal Rule OK?, 1977, Documentary on vandalism written, narrated and presented by Colin Spencer.
Flossie, 1974, TV play.

Cookery books

Gourmet Cooking For Vegetarians, 1978, Andre Deutsch,.
Good And Healthy, 1983, Robson Books,.
Colin Spencer's Vegetarian Wholefood Cookbook, 1985, Panther Books, 1985, Panther/Granada,,.
Cordon Vert, 52 Vegetarian Gourmet Dinner Party Menus, 1985, Thorsons, /
Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking, 1986, Thorsons,.
The Vegetarians' Healthy Diet Book ,, 1986, Taylor & Francis,
The New Vegetarian, 1986, Elm Tree Books,. 1988
Colin Spencer's Fish Cookbook, 1986, Pan Books, .
One-course Feasts, 1986, Conran Octopus,.
Feast For Health, 1987, Dorling Kindersley,.
Al Fresco A Feast for Outdoor Entertaining, 1987, Thorsons,.
The Romantic Vegetarian: Very Special Meals for That Very Special Occasion, Thorsons, Feb 1988,.
Colin Spencer’s Summer Cooking, 1992, Thorsons,,.
The Adventurous Vegetarian, 1989, Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated,.
Vegetable Pleasures, 1992, Fourth Estate,.
Colin Spencer's Vegetable Guide, 1995, Conran Octopus,.
Green Gastronomy, 1996, Bloomsbury, .
Mainly Vegetables, 1998, Tesco.