Backing Into the Light, by Colin Spencer – review

Colin Spencer first came to my notice in the Swinging Sixties when a fellow undergraduate alerted me to his larky romp Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, the first novel since Woolf’s Orlando to treat of transexuality. It was published in
1966, two years before Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, and I associated Spencer with the ‘sexual allsorts’ group around the publisher Anthony Blond at that time. But he didn’t build on it and seemed to fade away. Now I know why: he never quite knew what he wanted to be — gay or straight, a family man or a rover, a writer, musician, painter or horticulturalist.

The next time I came across him he was married to a friend of a friend and living in a Regency cottage in Hammersmith, writing food articles for the Guardian. Urbane, good-natured, well-connected, he was the picture of modest and contented success, almost the last person I’d expect to have had the life recounted in Backing into Light.