The Grass Arena: An Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)

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While in prison, Healy discovers chess. He trades his alcohol for chess and later becomes a chess champion. Like many beggars, thieves and con-men Healy is a great story-teller. Apparently this book is not a case of a middle class editor turning a pigs ear into a silk purse. Healy really did write it as is. Well done him - just a pity about the subject matter and the life he lived to get it! 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. 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.

Beside it, a book like Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London seems a rather inaccurate tourist guide' 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.Brilliant. Not a word wasted. I read it in two days. I will keep this as a talisman to ward off sentimentality and gush. To start at the end of it, I will add this book as a resource to keep away from me, “…middle-class men and women, clean and fresh, whom it didn’t seem possible life had touched, discussing in posh, educated voices the hardships that had been handed to them until, on the point of suicide, they had found…” X,Y,Z: whatever self-indulgent claptrap filled in for them the life that was missing. 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!" Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - John Healy's The Grass Arena describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind. 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. 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.John Healy (b. 1943) 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 alcoholic 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. If you enjoyed The Grass Arena, you might like Last Exit to Brooklyn, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Sober and precise, grotesque, violent, sad, charming and hilarious all at once'Literary Review'Beside it, a book like Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London seems a rather inaccurate tourist guide'Colin MacCabe 288 pp. Englisch.

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'. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuthFew 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. John Healy (b. 1943) was born into an impoverished, Irish immigrant family, in the slums of Kentish Town, North London. 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. A remarkable book. Many have written about addiction but none to my mind from a position so deeply rooted in the abyss as Healy, not even Bukowski and certainly not Burroughs. The story of the author, who lived as a complete alcoholic vagrant for years and had many brushes with death, then finds redemption in prison through chess and strides out of the gutter, is one of the most life-affirming things I think I have ever read.

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… 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 Out of school by 14, pressed into the army and intermittently in prison, Healy became an alcoholic early on in life. So, why did I like this book? The writing: it felt sincere. It is devoid of difficult words and literary style that sometimes are used by authors only to impress. The telling is straightforward and the short sentences felt urgent and you can't stop reading while wondering if there is really that "grass arena" in the seedy part of London where guys with no bottles of booze can get killed (or those who don't share bottles can get killed too). Fantastic book based on the author's own experience as life as a homeless alcoholic in London. It depicts a world that is so familiar to us as we pass by such people almost every day, but yet is a world thoroughly alien and one that we hardly even contemplate.Jon Healy, born 1943 to Irish immigrants, took to vagrancy, alcholism and crime, almost directly from the time he left home at 14. I liked the way his addiction to drink left Healy’s life so abruptly, supplanted by chess, a far less dangerous obsession. Also, his visit to India was told with uncharacteristic charm and repose. In these two narratives and his childhood years, the days in Ireland and the army, there are poignant reflections but still never any true depth of thought. A deep psychological analysis is unnecessary, but I wanted to know what was going on in his mind, for he must have often questioned himself and his desolation: his sentiments, his underlying hopes and fears, his frustrations and anger. Not only were there opportunities in these narratives but more so in the grass arena part of the book where it would have added a much-needed texture to the prose, and a varied pace to the writing. The last thing John Healy needs is a tidy snippet of blurb from the likes of me which is a good thing because economy defeats me; I don't know how to be moderate or concise in praise of his startling autobiography `The Grass Arena'. So economy I'll leave to him, a master storyteller with an ear, an eye and a voice that should be the envy of many men with weightier reputations. There is no perceptible distance between the words, which seem to have chosen themselves and the experiences from which they blossomed like a garden of wild flowers. Armed to the teeth with his wit and self-knowledge he takes us to that other place, his grass arena, the one which we pass how many times in any given day, averting our eyes? The one into whose violent clutches we might descend more easily than we dare to contemplate. He is our jaunty, gleeful tour guide and messenger from hell. His fellow combatants, exuberant, murderous and sentimental, by turns touchingly loyal, vengeful and treacherous seem to have sprung from the same bloodlines as Falstaff, Pistol, Nell and their fellows. They pitch their tents in the same refuse-filled shadows as their forebears; a confederacy of the dispossessed. Healy's life, were it not for an astonishing turn of events, seems predestined to be a short one. The story starts with Healy's abusive childhood and follows his descent into homelesness and alcoholism. 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.

Despite these obstacles Healy achieved remarkable, indeed phenomenal expertise in both writing and chess, as outlined in the autobiographical The Grass Arena. The world he found himself living in was bleak and violent, full of repeated arrests, assaults and injuries. The Grass Arena: An Autobiography' is a brutally honest account of John Healy's experiences with addiction and 15 years of living rough in London without state aid. It’s a book about one person too who could be any or many of us, struggling to communicate. Common ground, park, grass arena, community, society. Healy, brought late to sobriety struggling and feeling unreal outside in the healthy happy laughing world of the confident. To get there, “I only had my aggression to relate with. If I couldn’t use that, I couldn’t communicate.” Think about it. “I only had my aggression to relate with.” He was abused by his religious parents for most of his childhood and became an alcoholic early on in life.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. Kartoniert / Broschiert. Condition: New. John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers f. 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. If you like your memoirs gritty then I have some GRIT 4 u (in the form of John Healy living 15 hellish years on the streets due to alcoholism)