10/23/2013 – The son of Irish immigrants, John Healy lived rough on the violent streets of London for fifteen years, drinking heavily and turning to crime to survive. In prison he was taught chess by his cellmate. This became his new addiction as alcohol was left behind. He wrote a best selling book and became the darling of the British media. Then he disappeared. Now he has reemerged, and is the subject of a stimulating new documentary by Paul Duane.
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Barbaric Genius
A film about chess master John Healy
The son of Irish immigrants, John Healy lived rough on the violent streets
of London for fifteen years, drinking heavily and turning to crime to survive.
On one stint in prison he was taught the basics of chess by his cellmate.
This became his new addiction as alcohol was left behind. He became a rated
player who had an incredible ability of taking on and defeating multiple
opponents at the same time. He wrote a memoir of his life which became the
best selling book The
Grass Arena and for a time he became the darling of the British media.
In the early 1990s, Healy was on international TV, in the national press,
constantly being interviewed about his book. There was much about him that
made him appealing to the media, not least a sense of danger. John Healy
wasn’t just another award-winning author. He had a history of violence.
And it seemed destined to follow him.
Healy lived rough on the streets of London for fifteen years, fighting
and stealing to survive; a slave to alcohol, any alcohol – wine, strong
cider, surgical spirits. “His life, were it not for an astonishing
turn of events, seemed predestined to be a short one.” Daniel Day-Lewis,
August 2008.
Then he discovered chess. This became his new addiction. Alcohol was left
behind. He became a rated chess player and a famous writer, for a time the
darling of the British media.
Then John Healy disappeared. Stories emerged to fill the vacuum, dark stories;
he’d made threats of awful violence towards his publishers –
he was mentally ill – a psychopath.
Filmmaker Paul Duane avidly followed these rumours. Healy’s book
had made an enormous impression on him when it was originally published.
It seemed extraordinary that its author could disappear. What happened to
silence this man so soon after he discovered his literary voice?
In 2006, Paul Duane found John Healy. Far from the feral, potentially violent
savant he’d been led to expect, Healy turned out to be an articulate,
angry, often hilarious raconteur, but also a man whose intense paranoia
seemed always on the verge of devouring everything around him.
Healy claimed he’d been silenced by a whispering campaign led by
his own publishers. His books had been purposely allowed to go out of print,
some of them pulped. He said there was a conspiracy to portray him as a
street psycho, a drunk with a grudge against those more successful than
him.
How true could this be? Surely a successful author, no matter how complicated
his personal life, would never suffer this kind of persecution? The truth
turned out to be a fascinating mesh of class, money, art and fiction, a
clash of cultures, defining the Irish immigrant experience in Britain as
something that the country’s ruling classes still haven’t quite
managed to absorb.
During the years that Duane filmed with John Healy, his life started to
change. This forgotten man was rediscovered. The Grass Arena came back into
print, rescued by an American editor who knew nothing of and cared less
about the insidious way the system conspired to pretend the book had never
existed. Academy-Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis volunteered to write
a new introduction to a book he’d loved for many years. A new generation
got a chance to discover John’s dark narrative and experience his
ambiguous redemption through chess and meditation.
Barbaric Genius is the first film to tell the story of a man whose journey
has dragged him down to the greatest depths imaginable. A man whose strength
of will enabled him to escape the fate his poverty and his class had prepared
for him. A man who still struggles to understand his own extraordinary life,
whose daily practice of Buddhist meditation is sometimes all that protects
him from a crushing despair at the way his promising literary career was
stolen from him.
Barbaric Genius Official Trailer 2013
With access to John’s archive, the film makers have pieced together
the evidence that shows his paranoia is based on something very real –
a subtle conspiracy of class and education against a man whose aura of danger
made him briefly fashionable. But in the end, John Healy just wasn’t
‘one of us’, and his fate was to be shrugged off – thrown
back into the oblivion he’d struggled so hard to escape.
"Enthralling" **** The Guardian –
"Absorbing" **** Sunday Times
"Stunning" **** Hot Press – "A must-see" ****
London Evening Standard
Barbaric Genius was produced by Duane and Mary Carson for Screenworks with
funding from Bord Scannán na hÉireann/ the Irish Film Board
(BSÉ/IFB) and RTÉ. It is being distributed by Wildcard Distribution.
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