A chess master, yoga enthusiast and an award-winning writer praised by Pinter – hardly the career path expected of a man who left school at 14 and spent years as a violent alcoholic vagrant.
But as Paul Duane’s documentary shows, scandalised virtuoso John Healy has never walked the beaten path. An alcoholic and thief who watched fellow homeless men fight to the death in London parks before learning chess in jail, Healy’s journey to become a lauded writer following his memoir The Grass Arena was rapid – his fall from grace even more so.
Healy’s foray into the publishing world became a clash of the classes as this volatile man, ignorant of procedure or social morays, shocked the genteel literati at publishers Faber & Faber. Interviews with the editor-in-chief reveal that, “We didn’t know what to do with him, actually,” especially when Healy showed signs of a nervous breakdown and threatened some staff. Though the threatened parties’ recollections err on the side of laughable political correctness, they were clearly terrified by his violence-fuelled background. His books were pulled from the shelves and the negative media coverage that continued to haunt him into 2007 meant that no other editor in England would publish any of Healy’s works. He was “an untouchable.”
Following Healy through chess tournaments and visits to his homeless haunts, Duane stresses that he’s is uncomfortable with the camera; a trait he cheerfully attributes to “too much time in interrogation rooms!” But in embracing Healy’s contradictory nature, Duane beautifully captures not only his warmth, humour and heart-breaking tales of alcoholism and an abusive father; but also the Hemingway-like turn of phrase that made his writing remarkable. “Bravery was the essence of everything,” Healy says of his father’s reign of terror; while the lock on a crèche door causes him to wryly note that, “I could never escape my childhood.”
Both a stunning character study and a damning examination of class-based prejudice, Barbaric Genius proves as warm, accomplished and layered as its fascinating subject.