The Grass Grows Meaner on the Other Side

“Eh?” Sitting edgily across the room from me in his shabby Kentish Town flat, John Healy leans forward and incredulously repeats Hot Press’s question in a harsh London accent, “Do I think I’ve got permanent brain damage?”

Self-consciously touching his balding crown, the 65-year-old writer, chess champion and former wino, seems temporarily unsure whether to be offended. It’s a legitimate enquiry, though. Healy has been sober for more than three decades, but when he was drinking, that’s all he was doing. For a 15-year period in the 1960s and 70s, his life was conditioned solely by alcohol; its obtainment and consumption. When there was no booze available, he drank meths.
“Well, there’s bound to be brain damage when you drink that hard,” he concedes, after an awkward pause. “I would say that, like anyone who drank at that level, I’ve lost a lot of brain cells. But I believe you’ve got so many that it don’t matter.”
“Maybe you had more brains to burn than most people,” I suggest.
For the first time since our interview began, Healy laughs. “Ha! Thank you!”
Actually, it’s entirely possible that the wiry, wrinkled and shabbily dressed man sitting across from me is some sort of strange freak of nature. As documented in his harrowing 1988 autobiography The Grass Arena – recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic – Healy has lived a truly wild and extraordinary life.
Born into an impoverished family of Irish immigrants in 1943, he grew up in the slums of north London. Brutalised by his ultra-religious father, and bullied by racist neighbours, he endured a miserable childhood.
Adolescence was worse. Having left school at 14, he initially enjoyed some success as an amateur boxer. He could’ve been a contender, but a liking for alcohol scuppered his chances of going pro. While he won numerous amateur titles, the booze delivered the knockout blow.
Following a period of working on the building sites, Healy enlisted in the British Army at 16. His military career didn’t work out. Having served some jail time for desertion, he was dishonourably discharged. As his alcoholism worsened, he wound up living on the streets, fighting for survival in what he terms “the grass arena” – the terrifying twilight world ruled by psychopaths and peopled by conmen, thieves, prostitutes and killers, where the law is enforced with boots, blades and broken bottles.
“I was in that wino subculture,” he says. “It was very violent. You become affected by that way of life. Anything can happen... anytime.”
Does he have any happy memories of that period?
He shrugs and smiles. “There were fun times, yeah. It was just like... life.”
Totally embroiled in the sordid alky sub-culture, his only periods of sobriety came when he was imprisoned for vagrancy or violence. An ignominious death seemed inevitable until, while serving yet another stretch at Pentonville, a fellow inmate taught him how to play chess.
At the age of 30, Healy became besotted by the game. “The chess was overwhelming, like an inner brandy,” he recalls. “It was all-consuming.”
Amazingly, upon his release, he managed not only to quit the booze, but also to make the almost impossible transition from the violent, chaotic and unpredictable world of the grass arena into the sophisticated, strategic and esoteric world of chess.
Psychologically scarred from his drinking years, he still found it hard to fit in: “It’s very hard if you’ve been a wino... you know, the wino is the lowest subculture of alcoholics in any culture – it’s very violent. It’s very hard to get accepted in chess or in a normal society after that.”
Despite his inferiority complex, Healy became a top tournament chess champion whose matches were covered by the press. “I was in the tournaments for five years. But I was too late when I learnt chess. You have to learn about three to be anywhere near. Eventually, I had to come to the realisation that I wasn’t gonna get a grandmaster title, although I won ten major British tournaments. So I gave it up at tournament level. It was too stressful.”
While he somehow stayed on the wagon, Healy continued circling the same antisocial scene. “I used to hang around with lowlifes for years after that. Not winos, though, not as low as that. Scam-pullers and this and that. We’d hang out in pubs, but I wasn’t drinking. So that didn’t work out.”
He’d never thought of himself as a writer, but somewhere along the way he wrote a short story called The Old Chess Master, which got published immediately.
“I didn’t think of myself as a writer because psychologically... the class system. So I was surprised it got published. And then about two years later someone suggested that I should write my stuff. So I started to write and, after about a year, I had the autobiography. It’s weird. I never thought I’d be a writer.”
He hadn’t even been a reader, save for the occasional book in prison. “When I went in prison, after about a week when my eyes came right – because you couldn’t focus properly – I’d have a read alright. I used to read detective fiction, James Hadley Chase, and olden books about knights and things. Occasionally I had a dip into Shakespeare. Ha, ha!”
When The Grass Arena was published in 1988, Healy became something of a media sensation - contributing to newspapers and radio discussions. Widely acclaimed, his book won the prestigious J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography, and a film adaptation starring Mark Rylance took the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film of 1990-91.
But then... something happened. His publishers, Faber & Faber, withdrew all copies of his book from the stores. Legend has it that he’d threatened an editor with an axe in a row over payment and this was their revenge.
Healy vociferously denies the charge. “That was just a load of nonsense, hype. I just said that to someone on the phone and it was told back to them. And they called the police! Police came round – and then Faber put me out of print. They was looking for an excuse. They’re very elitist. Then Chinese whispers – and no other publisher would touch me.”
Nonsense or not, his career was effectively embalmed. Ostracised by the literary world, an embittered Healy moved home to nurse his mother through Alzheimer’s until her death in the late 1990s. He moved around for a while after that, before settling in this two-room flat in Kentish Town.
Surviving on benefits, he continued to write – plays, poetry, scripts and fiction – but published nothing at all for almost 20 years.
His career rehabilitation began with an unexpected invitation to read at the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway last year. An anonymous admirer paid for a limited festival reprint of 500 copies of The Grass Arena. One of them wound up in the hands of Adam Freudenheim, publisher of Penguin’s Modern Classics division.
“Freudenheim was an American and unbiased by the literary world’s attitude here. He took it immediately. Said it should never have been out of print.”
Published last July, the Modern Classic edition is already into its third print-run, and has drawn rave reviews from the likes of Harold Pinter, Irvine Welsh and Daniel Day-Lewis. However, although Healy has a completed novel called The Metal Mountain ready to go, he still doesn’t have a book deal. It’s early days though...
“I need to find another publisher because these are Penguin Classics,” he laughs. “Unfortunately, I haven’t got any more classics under the bed.”