London Irish author silenced
JOHN HEALY, author of The Grass Arena — an unflinchingly honest account of his alcoholism, homelessness and prison sentences for petty crime — will read from his book at Kinsale Arts Week on July 11.
Healy, 68, brought up in an impoverished Irish immigrant family in Kentish Town in North London, says he had “the status of a pop star” when his memoir was published in 1988 and was made into a film. The book, lauded by the likes of Irvine Welshs and Harold Pinter, attracted considerable media interest and, more recently, was the subject of a documentary shown on RTE. But a dispute between Healy and his publishers, Faber & Faber, led to the print run being stopped and Healy vanishing from public view in the early 1990s.
Speaking over the phone in a quiet voice from his flat in London, where he lives on social welfare benefits and continues to write, Healy claims the row “was basically all about class. I was a stranger in their midst, uneducated.” Healy, who left school at 14, quotes Spartacus, the rebel leader of slaves in Roman times: “Somewhere in the world, there is a place for everyone. But nowhere in the world is there a place for a slave who will not be a slave.”
Fortunately for Healy, The Grass Arena was republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics with an introduction by Daniel Day-Lewis. But Healy says that, generally speaking, “there is a reluctance to take me on in England. It’s like a conspiracy when you get in trouble with one screw in a prison and it’s on the record forever more.”
It was while serving a prison sentence that Healy met a fellow inmate who introduced him to chess. Healy become obsessed with chess and decided to give up alcohol and the world of chaos he had occupied for 15 years, to concentrate on mastering this cerebral game. He became a top tournament chess champion. He wanted to be a grandmaster but had started too late. But chess was the catalyst for his sobriety, now at the 30-year mark.
Recalling the momentous decision to abandon the bottle, Healy says he had to “make the jump from the violent world described in the book to the sophisticated esoteric world of chess. I got to know middle class people through the game, but I didn’t get to know them very well because chess is a blood sport. It’s all about competition. When I discovered I had a talent for writing, I moved into other bourgeois worlds where there wasn’t competition. It was more relaxed.”
During his spells in prison Healy read just detective novels. “After The Grass Arena was published, I was invited to households with libraries. That’s really when I started learning how to read.”
Healy is a gifted writer with an unerring eye for detail and an astute ear for dialogue. He says his manuscript was left largely unaltered when he submitted it to Faber & Faber. He believes he was born with the talent to write.
“I don’t think you can learn to write. These academics who promote writing schools, it’s because they’re middle-class. But the people (at writing schools) aren’t coming out with anything. They’re smug, self satisfied and pretending to write soulful things. They’ve studied the sentences at university. The writing isn’t coming from the stomach or the heart.”
Healy nursed his late mother when she was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and describes the experience as a privilege. He writes all the time now. “I’m working on a couple of books. One of them is called The Metal Man, which is about the Irish in England in the 1950s when there were signs saying, ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.’”
He has also written a satire about a policeman trying to stitch up an innocent man for terrorist activities.
Admitting to feeling frustrated that his work is not being picked up by publishers, he says “it would take a lot of energy to lift me up into the stratosphere, where you can fly almost on your own velocity. That’s about getting recognised properly. I need one great leap. I thought I’d get that with the documentary that was on RTE. But the BBC didn’t take it up.”
The Grass Arena starts with the ominous line: “My father didn’t look like he would harm anyone.” However, appearances were deceptive. Healy suffered immense violence at the hands of his late father before running away from home in his early teens.
Clearly, Healy has had his demons to overcome. And he has done so in an inspirational way.
- John Healy reads at the Carmelite Friary Centre, Kinsale on Monday. www.kinsaleartsweek.com
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