Electric Picnic to become John Healy's new Grass Arena

Author John Healy will be a guest at the Electric Picnic next weekend.

Anyone familiar with Healy’s memoir, The Grass Arena, will know that he has been to hell and back (and then some). The eldest child of Irish immigrants in London, he joined the British army in his teens, and enjoyed some success as a boxer, before he deserted and hit the bottle and the streets.

Healy spent his 20s and 30s in and out of prison. Each time he was released, he went back drinking and thieving. He lived in the parks, ‘the grass arena’ of his book’s title. By rights he should be dead. “I lasted 15 years,” he says. “Longer than any of the other winos. They were all killed, in falls, or by disease, or by the police.”

On his last sojourn in prison, Healy met an old con, the ‘Brighton Fox’, who taught him chess. The ‘Fox’ bribed him to play, with the spoon of jam they got as a treat on a Saturday. Chess became Healy’s passion. “There were rules, a code, these terms like ‘master’ and ‘grandmaster,” he says. “I was drawn to all that.”

On leaving prison, Healy swore off alcohol and became a professional chess player. “I was good. I won ten major tournaments in five years. But then, I realised I had started too late to ever be a grandmaster.”

He drifted away from the game, and worked as a handyman. “I was mowing the lawn at a big house in Highgate, one time. I saw this book on a chair, The Outsider, by Albert Camus. I could relate to the title, of course. But, then, I read the first sentences, and I knew I’d have to read the whole thing through.”

Reading The Outsider inspired Healy to put pen to paper. “I had the story in my head, in my sleep and in my dreams. All I had to do was get it down. I filled four A4 pages every day for a year. Then I had to edit it, of course. That took longer, it always does.”

Healy gave a copy of the manuscript to a friend, the photographer, Jo Spence, who passed it on to the head of the British Film Institute, who, in turn, passed it on to the prestigious publishers, Faber & Faber.

On its publication by Faber, in 1988, The Grass Arena was a critical and commercial success. It won Healy the JR Ackerly Award for literary biography, and it was filmed by the BBC. His future as an author seemed secure.

Then he fell out with Faber. They dumped him, and his memoir went out of print. The years that followed were a nightmare: Healy was, he says, black-listed in Britain. He wrote a second memoir, The Glass Cage, and an epic novel, The Metal Mountain, and works for film and the theatre. None has been published.

The way back from the wilderness has been slow. Since 2007, Healy has read at the Cúirt festival in Galway. the Kinsale Arts Festival and the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry. Irish filmmaker, Paul Duane, has directed a documentary on Healy, Barbaric Genius, which is released on DVD this week. In 2008, The Grass Arena was republished, as a Penguin classic. It is now being promoted to celebrate its 25th anniversary in October.

Healy is 70 now. His only wish is to see his other works in print. “I think it will happen,” he says. “I live in hope.”

* John Healy will read from The Grass Arena at the Electric Picnic on Saturday.