John Healy: Grass Arenas, Metal Mountains

  • Jolyon Webber met award winning author John Healy to discuss what it felt like to be ostracised from the literary community,
    why it didn’t stop him writing but why the need for recognition still lingers    John Healy portrait
    Above: A portrait of John, taken by award winning photographer and film maker Leo Regan around the time ‘The Grass Arena’ was published

    My meeting with John Healy was one that I went into with a fair amount of trepidation. Not because of anything to do with the man, more my own abilities to do justice to a complicated and sorry story. Paul Duane’s recently released documentary entitled, Barbaric Genius, spent four years getting to grips with John and the sort of life he’s lived, and has done so admirably, but still gave the impression of a man very much at odds with press interest and how to speak when interviewed.When I arrived at Healy’s council flat near Kilburn, it was relatively warm day though the heating was turned up high. John wished to sit directly opposite me when speaking. Though relatively diminutive in size, when he stood close to me and told me he had “concussive power in both fists”, I believed him.  The three hours I spent with John Healy that afternoon though revealed a sensitive character, albeit one still understandably hurt and frustrated by the way his potential literary career failed to develop.

  • John first came to public’s attention more than a quarter of a century ago with his fierce, unflinching autobiography The Grass Arena – an account of more than a decade of living as an alcoholic in the world of winos and vagrants in north London.The kind of work that editors dream of coming across, it has a rhythmic intensity and power that creative writing classes simply can’t teach. John too has the kind of back-story that the bourgeois literary world seems to long for – raw and entirely authentic, something of a study in sociology. It bought all concerned success. More than 20,000 copies sold, the prestigious JR Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1989 and unprecedented media interest.
    John-Healy at his flat in London

    Right: John in his London studio-flat. Photograph Paul Duane

    If you’ve not read the book then I can only urge you to seek it out. It re-emerged in 2008 as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a foreword by Daniel Day-Lewis, and recounts John’s life pressed into military service, hardened by boxing and prison ending up surrounded by beggars, psychopaths and prostitutes in the grass arena.

    His last spell in Pentonville was to see his life change — finally for the better — when he met Harry the Fox, another inmate, who introduced him to chess. The game consumed him as alcohol had done previously, helping him to stay sober to this day – “Chess is a jealous lover, it can have no other”.A chance encounter with Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, during a period of relative calm, changed his life once more. Healy says the impact of the opening line – “Mother died today, or was it yesterday?” – had a profound effect – “I thought, that’s a strange sentence but I thought it was good. Then I realised that there was another world, literature, and maybe I was allowed to write”.

    The process of recollection was easy enough – “It was always there. I had no other life or story and it was all so intense. If you talk to any wino who may be alive today in a mental hospital or prison, they will only talk about that because that’s all they’ve got to talk about…When I got to write it, it was in Technicolor, it was just there”.

  • John-Healy outside the flat in North London where he's lived for over 20 years
    The strength of recall is evident in John’s spare but vivid prose. But these would be some of the last that the general public would see. A spectacular falling out with Faber and Faber precipitated one of the more unsavoury, and white-washed, literary spats in recent memory.A flippant, though undeniably brutal threat, made to the one remaining gentle ear at the company, ended up being relayed and taken seriously by the Faber hierarchy.  John’s book was pulped and out of print for 15 years. Given 500 copies of his book, while a second, The Streets Above Us, had had a print run, it too disappeared and no new fiction has been seen since.
    .

    Above: John Healy
    Photograph Leo Regan

    Chess House Coffee Tactics, published abroad and nominated for the 2010 Guardian Chess Book Award, contains, in Blood Sport, one of the finest essays on competition I have read. It remains the only other book of John’s you can purchase.

    The episode reflects distastefully on all concerned, and has undoubtedly silenced a unique literary talent — one that, had it been sufficiently nurtured, may have given voice to many stories from cultures and sub-cultures, for the most part, silenced from the mainstream. It is the conjecture of many, not least the author himself, that the incident can be put down to that most British of prejudices — classism.  John has only recently stopped writing but has two other novels, plays and poetry that remain unpublished.

    “I’ve got a lot of writing. When I was out of print I did a lot because I couldn’t help it but I need to get some stuff published. You need encouragement and praise. That’s another nasty thing they do here, they burn you out and jade you. They break your talent and try to make you think you’re not as good as when you started. But I carried on because I couldn’t help it”.

    One unpublished piece of work is The Metal Mountain, a novel set in the year of the Queen’s coronation, examining the role the Irish immigrant community played in helping rebuild post-war London.

    Port is proud to present an extract from The Metal Mountain published for the first time

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