The Grass Arena: An Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Raised in an strongly religious family, with an abusive father, John soon learns that he has to defend himself. Healey doesn’t help or even react much, he’s just happy there’s more to drink: I started drinking one of the bottles.

He found something else, another addiction without harmful side effects and which brought him money and prizes and respect. Think William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (5 stars) and then add chess as the turning point of the story. 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.From then on, (s)he can look the wino in the eye and think "I know all about you, for I have been there too".

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. R.Ackerley prize for "The Best Literary Autobiography of 1988", this is the true story of John Healy. 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. 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.The reason this book was recommended to me is that it was recently in the news because penguin picked it up as a modern classic after it being out of print for several years. He was a boxing champion by the time he was 16, was dishonorably discharged from the military and then lived the life of a wino in London.

Blood splashed and exhausted, stumbling and jerking around, he was saved from toppling over by being bounced from car to car. I am wondering much more practical things about the "texture of their lives" as Colin MacCabe puts it. 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.Wow, what a book, feeling guilty for the one star rating already, but it was such a painful read that the only honest review for me would be 'didn't like it' hence the one star. Because, nearly all these anecdotes are interesting but after a sentence or two, we are off onto another one, and another, etc. It was only around page 160 that I realised Healy's grass arena was my, and my childhood friends, den in Euston Square Gardens. The author's writing is raw and honest, there's no sugar coating and he never asks for our sympathy. On the one hand I was intrigued, on the other hand I know that London always bigs-up London (boxing and football being good examples of undeserved reputations) so I approached the book with trepidation.