The Grass Arena: An Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I like this novel most of all because it holds a certain 'nostalgia' for me. I remember when I was a child watching the film adaptation of this and seeing a pre-adolescent given a pint of beer in a pub bought by an older friend, and the child later became an alcoholic down the years. This was prescient, the experience mirrored my own, where drinking at the age of twelve/thirteen I drank in the company of older friends, and by the time I was nineteen was a fully-fledged alcoholic. Tragedy ensued, as recorded in my memoir 'Love, China and Alcohol'. Two areas of interest for me - alcoholism since I have lost family members to the disease, uncle and granddaughter and because my father was an active AA member for 33 years, and chess since it is a game I thoroughly enjoy. Chess shows up later in the story as a possible means of deliverance from the throes of the drink. A unique insight into the world of the alcoholic vagrant. It's reminiscent of some of Charles Bukowski's work, although - unlike Bukowski - John Healy had no safety net, no rented room, and no employment. He and his fellow vagrants get injured, maimed, die by accident, and get murdered, and all the while their only focus is on their next drink. When not united in their common aim of acquiring alcohol, winos sometimes murdered one another over prostitutes or a bottle, or the begging of money. So that's it. I and this book has nothing in common and it could neither be an escapist book for me. Towards the end, when Healy was in India, I even thought that he would be like Elizabeth Gilbert in her very popular (and I don't know why) Eat, Pray, Love (1 star). Good that Healy did not go to Italy and Indonesia. Otherwise, I would not have given this a 4-star rating that in Goodreads means "I really like it!"

If you enjoyed The Grass Arena, you might like Last Exit to Brooklyn, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. Healy, punchbag for a violent, vicious Catholic father, tempered by a hard environment, further brutalised in the army, and soon for fifteen years a member of that ‘vagrant society’ (his words) that is the city within the city of London. Alcoholics will love you if you have a bottle and kill you if you will not share it. This is a tremendously violent world, bleak beyond respectable imaginings, a world that is kept hidden largely by the routinely violent institutions of court, prison, healthcare. It is not the individuals as such, although there are plenty of psycopaths within and without the arena just as there are some gems (a probation officer, one who helped turn his life around) it is more a structural divide: “It just is”. Very funny at times, very warm too. Human, at the individual level, this Healy is a man worth the time in knowing. Not just for gawkish or voyeuristic reasons, not to admire or detest, but to see ourselves in. There is a good Afterword by Colin McCabe which compares human behaviour in the Grass Arena with that in the (financial) city: both societies struggle for power, the first is more honest and stripped down to basics stripped of their sartorial sheen of respectability. The book begged to be published for as Colin MacCabe says in the after-forward it's a world we knew existed but thought it existed in isolation from us. In a sense, it is a parallel world that nonetheless touches ours briefly through murder, violence, and robbery; and to think we believed it a low-risk sedentary life that would slowly fade towards death. In his searing autobiography Healy describes his fifteen years living rough in London without state aid, when begging carried an automatic three-year prison sentence and vagrant alcoholics prowled the parks and streets in search of drink or prey. When not united in their common aim of acquiring alcohol, winos sometimes murdered one another over prostitutes or a bottle, or the begging of money. Few modern writers have managed to match Healy's power to refine from the brutal destructive condition of the chronic alcoholic a story so compelling it is beyond comparison.Didn't realise that it was possible for me to not fall in love with the subject of a biography... John Healy I don't idolise or apologise for him. I respect him. An amazing man. That John Healy was able to create the opportunity to write his account is miraculous, that's it's so well written is even more so. Healy's redemption is unexpected and unlikely, and I cannot think of a more unusual and compelling tale. Time and again one is appalled by the pleasure The grass Arena furnishes as literature, when it is so clearly not fiction. And this sense of the reader#s dilemma as a priviledged observer in a world of casual savagery that is palpably real is a troubling and thouroughly enriching one' -- John Kemp Literary review The world he found himself living in was bleak and violent, full of repeated arrests, assaults and injuries.

The greatest benefit Healy gained might have been its cathartic quality. This Penguin Modern Classic republished the first edition that was prematurely pulled from print by the piqued boss of the publishing house. Characteristically Healy had said what he’d thought about him.Beside it, a book like Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London seems a rather inaccurate tourist guide' I found Healy's early childhood, the time when he went to rural Ireland to visit relatives, and even his army days a good start. Bucolicism and nostalgia met head-on with urban brutality. But during his wino days, Healy's writing is like a stand-up comedian performing his material in rapidly delivered one-liners, and there are a lot of them. They’re mostly unconnected and extremely brief reminiscences. Rather than telling a coherent story, they are a series of similar, pithy anecdotes with the common theme of drinking and violence. New characters arrive with alarming frequency with no introduction. It's like a butterfly frenetically flitting from one anecdote to another without respite to take nectar, or in this case for Healy to take a plaudit. Because, nearly all these anecdotes are interesting but after a sentence or two, we are off onto another one, and another, etc., etc., etc… As in Knut Hamsun's mighty book `Hunger', we are utterly compelled both by the power of Healy's story and his great power in the telling of it, no matter how bleak the outlook, to stay by his side until the last word is writ. -- Daniel Day Lewis, August 2008 Healy never quite lost everything. He never went mad completely. That made it worse in some ways. “Trying to hold onto a bit of sanity can make you vulnerable in lots of ways.” That he did hold on leaves us with a rarely powerful testimony.

OK I’ve changed the 4 stars to 5, mainly because I’ve been sat thinking about this again, and can’t get the voice, its insistence on truth and its brutal depiction of the world of the vagrant alcoholic out of my head. This is one of the milder episodes: ‘We could get no water to mix with it [surgical spirit], so we went in the church and filled a milk bottle out of the holy water font and started slowly to swallow it. But it’s hard to get down first thing in the day – any time for that matter. Bastard stuff. It either makes you dead sleepy and fit for nothing or drives you mad and ready to kill some cunt.’ Healy was born into an impoverished, Irish immigrant family, in the slums of Kentish Town, North London. Out of school by 14, pressed into the army and intermittently in prison, Healy became an alocholic early on in life. Despite these obstacles Healy achieved remarkable, indeed phenomenal expertise in both writing and Chess, as outlined in the autobiographical The Grass Arena. He was abused by his religious parents for most of his childhood and became an alcoholic early on in life. An alcoholic knows no line they cross them all until there is no where else to go. It is either death or salvation. John Healy had a noxious childhood. Isolated by his mother and abused by his father, he staggered into drug and alcohol abuse to alleviate the pain in his body and soul.This Penguin Classics edition includes an afterword by Colin MacCabe. In his searing autobiography Healy describes his fifteen years living rough in London without state aid, when begging carried an automatic three-year prison sentence and vagrant alcoholics prowled the parks and streets in search of drink or prey.