By Jo Higgs
Thomas Healy passed away at the end of 2022 to little public fanfare. At the time, the only major publication to note Healy’s passing was The Herald, a paper that Healy himself had been a contributing writer to for many years.
Rosaleen Pollock’s touching obituary, founded on a personal relationship, is one of only a few search results to come up on Google (that is not simply a website selling one of his books). But it is only right that an artist of Healy’s quality is further acknowledged by the culture to which he contributed a small, but fundamentally beautiful crop of books.
Best known (as Pollock acknowledges in the title of her obituary), for his memoir that depicts a crucial turning point in the Glaswegian’s life as he comes into companionship with a doberman puppy, Martin, whose very presence and reliance on Healy’s care inspired him to abandon his life of drunken roughhousing in favour of a more meaningful and caring existence.
I Have Heard You Calling in the Night (Granta, 2006) is, for most, his lasting legacy. Its simple prosaic style, unabashed and proud, serves dutifully to present the tragic tale of an addict in recovery – at its core, it’s a grittier and less moralistic Marley and Me, not to reduce Healy’s story too greatly.
His other memoir is A Hurting Business (Picador, 1996), a smart book in its own right, plotting much of Healy’s life alongside his passion for boxing. His second novel is Rolling (Polygon, 1992) in which a bildungsroman with Kerouacian influence unfolds, and his first published novel, It Might Have Been Jerusalem (Polygon, 1991) rounds off his published work.
The latter, which weaves a narrative of 1950s Glasgow, is nothing less than a Glaswegian masterpiece and, in this article, I will demonstrate just a few of the quite magical qualities of this remarkable, short novel.
In particular, I will examine Healy’s striking usage of free-indirect speech, his creation of an unholistic community and his engagement with trauma writing through his use of narrative structure.
I first encountered Thomas Healy when I was introduced to I Have Heard You Calling in the Night, as an example of the scene-setting qualities of prose, during one of the famed writing classes run by Thi Wurd and led by Alan McMunnigall.
Not long after I had blazed my way through a copy of that memoir, I turned to Healy’s debut novel. What I found was quite distinctly different, but no less brave. Jerusalem is Healy’s only book-length work to not be written in the first person, and the only one to effectively present an ensemble cast.
Anton, a down-on-his-luck 15 year-old takes a job at a factory but faces unwanted attention from his hypermasculine boss, Parker; Anton’s friend Rab fights through an abusive marriage, barely survives dysentery, and eventually tries to escape to London; Meg works hard and saves money to visit Jerusalem on a pilgrimage but is thwarted when her severely-disabled brother, Rubberneck, throws all her money out into the street in an attempt to gain friends; Violet struggles with her sexuality under the fawning eye of her pupils at the school, and a little miscommunication finds her in a vulnerable position.
The most magical element of Jerusalem is its cohesive narrative voice that so smartly delves into the minds of the characters it creates, valuing them all and being democratic in its allowance of different, and often contrary expression. On the second page of the text we get our first true invite into the mind of Anton:
Anton stood by the window, listening; looking out, down; the street was full of children; you never saw so many children, boisterous ragamuffins, as on a tenement street on a hot summer night.
Healy, Thomas. It Might Have Been Jerusalem. Polygon, 1991.
It’s a simple passage, in which the only objective evidence provided by the third person narrator is as follows: Anton stood by a window observing the tenement street on which there were children on a hot summer night.
The first thing you might notice about my re-capping of this is that, in a sense, it’s hardly a re-cap, it’s just a repetition. That further highlights the magic of Healy, how much other information he can provide in the passage by allowing Anton’s voice to gently slip into that of his narrator.
There is a sense of longing and reminiscence, even playfulness on the part of Anton which can be read in just the word ‘you’. It is not the narrator stating that ‘there were never so many children as on a tenement street on a hot summer night.’ No, it is crucially: ‘you never saw,’ which pulls from Anton an excited observation, an exhilaration at the idea, communicated in a conversational tone that belongs to him and not to the narrator.
Further, that tiny clause in the sentence ‘boisterous ragamuffins’ brings more to Anton than just a longing – it brings distance. This is not the term of either an objective third person narrator, nor is it the phrasing of a child (fifteen, as Healy earlier clarifies) looking upon his peers having a laugh. It is the maturation of a boy into a man, the distance from the scenario to impart upon it this ironical term of juvenescence, that from his own view is entirely inapplicable to him.
This voice of Anton, that pierces the third person narrator, tells us he both misses the youthfulness observed but also that he is maturing and capable of looking down upon it (‘looking out, down’) from where he sees himself as an adult. Later, Healy’s narrator slips between two characters – brother and sister – with magnificent subtlety and ease:
Rubberneck looked down on her. She was tiny, midget almost, with a bird-like look. A thin wiry woman, her name was Meg and not herself the full shilling. She was given to religion; to quotation from the Bible. Rubberneck was her cross to carry. The Lord saw fit; Meg did not question that hers was the heavy load. Or it might be – the Lord worked, she knew, in mysterious ways – his blessing, that, such a brother; a saintly trial her worth in heaven.
Ibid, page 28.
Each sibling takes their own ‘pop’ at the other, poking into the voice of the narrator: ‘and not herself the full shilling’ is the voice of Rubberneck, phrased with ‘herself’ in acknowledgement of his own awareness of his limitations; ‘such a brother’ is likewise Meg’s own restrained, less barbed way of highlighting to the reader that she is equally (if not more) frustrated to be tethered to ‘such a brother’ as Rubberneck.
Healy’s voice – in this novel, entirely unlike in his other works – is democratic and respectful of the thoughts, needs and desires of each character, regardless of their objective moral value.
Anton (while being sexually assaulted) voices his thoughts as ‘he felt the mouth slobber his belly, his thighs, and the head, thick with bone that he might have punched a cannonball’ (page 41) and yet, just a few lines later, his aggressor, Parker, is gifted the same power of voice to reframe the narrative as ‘his head now following his hand; up over Anton’s belly, wet hot kisses’ (page 42).
What was at one moment a disgusting thing (‘slobber’) enacted by someone akin to a weapon (‘cannonball’) is immediately transformed – at least, in the mind of the abuser – into a soppy and romanticised act (‘wet hot kisses’).
Not only is this a wonderful and disgusting presentation of free-indirect discourse flowing through Healy’s prose, this excerpt highlights an element of Healy’s writing that makes both Rolling and A Hurting Business as powerful as they are.
This is his simultaneous engagement with the ‘MacChismo’ which Carole Jones defines as ‘a projection of Scottish national identity as an exaggeratedly assertive manliness’ and Healy’s predilection to the eroticization of the male body.1
Naturally, this scene itself, as a horrible molestation is a poor example of the sexuality that otherwise oozes out of Healy’s writing, such as in Rolling, and even more so in his memoir about boxing, A Hurting Business which describes: ‘A strange, dual life. I was beating up on the heavyweights but sucking on a phallus. The musk and hair and tilt and throb and it was all a contradiction’.2
This tendency to enable and respect a myriad of different voices is a large part of what helps this work present a twisted sense of community, though more likely an anti-community. In many ways, it is the Glaswegian Dubliners. Just like in Joyce’s work, Jerusalem depicts a select ‘odd-ball’ representation of its locale, and yet there is a lingering sense that in every interaction, there is a desire for isolation.
More so than in Dubliners, Healy’s novel refuses its characters any type of positive interaction: Rab loses money to and hence resents Anton, who is molested by Parker; further, Rab detests his wife, and even with his mistress does not seem at ease; Rubberneck can only attract positive reinforcement through buying it, which further disenamours him to his sister; Miss Violet Hazelwood struggles to communicate the world around her and is consequently threatened by a man who thinks she is working the streets, before then being threatened by genuine women-of-the-night.
What the democratic voice of the novel does for the possibility of community, the fragmented form (largely unconnected short stories that intersect one another, weaving in and out) and abrasive content within it brashly strikes that possibility down.
Often one strand of narrative breaks off at an exhilarating moment, only to resume twenty pages later, when it is given its own turn to intercept another story. This brokenness, stiltedness, fragmentation, is indicative of the lives Healy wishes to depict. It is all stop and start, and there is no easy ride for any of his characters.
By the end, as it so often does in Scottish literature, it is the practice of drinking that binds people. Rab has eventually escaped the wrath of his wife, swapping Phillis for his mistress, Winnie, and a couple of winos on their own pilgrimage to London:
‘Give us some wine for fuck sake,’ Paddy said, he sat on the floor like a dejected Long John Silver.
‘But the main thing’s we’re together,’ Winnie said.
‘All the way,’ Rab agreed; he might need Winnie, she helped him home. ‘We’ll always be together.’
‘I think,’ Pol said as she drank more wine in the manger carriage, ‘that all this’s dead romantic.’
Ibid, page 83.
These tragic, until recently unconnected characters are bound in their future (or perceivable lack of it) by the bottle of wine. Jon M. Kingsdale writes that ‘[a]lcohol by virtue of its inhibition-releasing effect, stimulated feelings of social familiarity, group identification and solidarity, and was, itself, a focus of group activity.’3
There is a crushing irony to this final image. Of all the broken and dejected moments inhabited by characters just willing a moment of peace to occur, it is a misshapen family of sorts that closes the novel: Rab and Winnie finding the smallest particle of positivity in their mutual presence, while their two newly-adopted alcoholic adult-children, Paddy and Pol sit ‘on the floor like a dejected Long John Silver’ (a maimed man, trying to overcome his difficulties) and ‘in the manger carriage’, like a baby.
There’s a wholeness to this finale, albeit an unconventional one. Healy’s refusal to let the characters live the life they wish for continues, but his adamance that they remain apart from one another falters and he permits the creation of a family unit, so long as their future is as dim as before.
This wholeness is, as mentioned before, an antithetical twist on the overall narrative form of Jerusalem – which could be described as an ongoing, interruptive cycle, where a strand of story is quickly broken by another strand of story. The literary critic James Wood writes:
History does not seem to be progressing so much as stalling, or self-immolating, so perhaps the fictions set amidst that history must break off, or sliver into fragments, rather than sail towards marriage and harmony and a spreading consensus.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Vintage, 2019, page 134.
Further, Michelle Balaev contends that:
The idea that traumatic experience pathologically divides identity is employed by the literary scholar as a metaphor to describe the degree of damage done to the individual’s coherent sense of self and the change of consciousness caused by the experience.
Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, page 150.
And finally, Chris Olson writes that:
Form is never more than an extension of content.
Olson, Charles. ‘Projective Verse.’ In Postmodern American Poetry, 2nd ed. Norton, 2013, page 884.
Wood’s observation suggests that, in a world where a positive and linear progression is impossible, a novel may indeed break up into smaller parts – as Jerusalem does in its insistence on cutting itself off, with a new character’s story at every turn.
Balaev’s idea provides a secondary understanding of what might enact this fracturedness upon the narrative – making it representative of the mind in reaction to an experience, as would tie in Olson’s idea of a relation between form and content.
Both Wood and Balaev’s concepts are applicable to Jerusalem: the novel both ‘slivers into fragments’ as a consequence of its static characters, incapable of removing themselves from a world that will not get better for them – and it cracks; breaking into new splinters of story in reaction to the trauma, and thus, the broken minds of its characters.
Take Anton who, as I have already mentioned, experiences an abhorrent assault at the hands of Parker. Once Anton is removed from this scenario, not only do we never hear of this occurrence again but we never hear of Anton again. He disappears from the narrative: his trauma is so unspeakable, he becomes an unspeakable (literally, ‘unspoken of’) character.
The act of assault itself is fragmented. It is portrayed over three broken sections, intersected by numerous unrelated scenes. We must read this breakage as the breaking of the mind, the shattering of the coherent self into the incoherent by the experience of abject horror and devastating trauma.
To be split up is an expression of horror, the depiction of a mind unable to process this scenario in full, but only digest it in morsels, allowing both the reader and Anton to breathe and reflect in the gaps.
Ironically perhaps, not long after Anton’s escape, the narrative does begin to cohere to a single story, that of Rab and Winnie escaping Glasgow with their adopted winos. While this could be read as a distraction – as a narrative flecked with the most disturbing of content is abandoned for one of entrapment – but in fact, it conveys a darker, unifying truth; that escape from the unpleasantness of one, old life is simply the entrance to unpleasantness of another.
Thomas Healy’s writing within It Might Have Been Jerusalem speaks for itself, and crucially for others. It is not the graphic content, complicated characters or twisted plotlines that endear this novel to the fervently adoring few that have engorged themselves upon its slight frame, but the prose itself.
This prose, stylish to all ends, is not only a glue that holds together all elements with far more strength than most novels require of their form but the most notable and stunning aspect.
To read this novel amongst the otherwise differently but brilliantly emphatic oeuvre of Healy, is to read a unique and cult-worthy work.
About our contributor
Jo Higgs (he/him) is a writer from Edinburgh, currently living in Sheffield. He predominantly considers himself a writer of fiction but is also fond of writing non-fiction on football, music and literature. In 2022, he won the Sloan Prize for writing in a lowland Scots dialect, and since then he has been chipping away on the completion of a collection of short stories, as well as a couple of larger projects. He completed a masters thesis on Agnes Owens, and before that wrote his undergraduate dissertation on James Kelman, both of which have spurred him on to a deep love of Scottish literature.
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