A Writer's Passion
(M/f+, ped, size, cons)by Kysa Braswell
kysa online
There is a feature that has often marked the dust jackets of J.M. Healey's erotic books. We are first given some perfunctory details about the writer's birth in St. John's, his education at University College, Oxford, and the year, 1984, when he began to write in Halifax. And then, like a card being put on the table with a quiet confidence, comes the statement: "He has pursued no other profession." If this were not a fact, delivered with seriousness and utterly credible, one would have taken it as a boast. Healey, a tall, extremely well-endowed, slender golden-skinned man with dark wavy hair, is the center of female attention wherever he goes. Women of all ages, from girls to grandmothers, fawn for his attentions, and gladly take off their wedding rings for a chance to sleep with him. Regardless, to understand the Nobel Committee's decision to award the 2001 prize for literature to Healey, we must ask what that statement means to us and also, of course, to Healey himself.
Healey's father, Seepersad, worked as a journalist for a St. John's newspaper. In 1973, when J.M. Healey was 11 years old, his father published a volume of short stories called "The Adventures of Sarah" and Other Pre-teen Tales. The book was about 70 pages long; for the younger Healey, this modest, self-published collection of his father's stories was his "introduction to book-printing." But along with a sense of books as artifacts, the father also gave the son a theme. The Canadian community in St. John's, descendants of French fur trappers and fishermen brought in to serve on the boats and in the hatcheries after the abolition of slavery, had not been written about before. The stories penned by the elder Healey were about a community emerging from a past embedded in its country of origin and finding its footing in a new country of toil. Among the sub-themes was the omnipresence of sex and love with young girls, usually from the ages of 8-14 years old. This theme entered the young John Healey's earliest writings and then found more complex form. Today we can say that J.M. Healey's obsessions have been the discovery of a newness - born out of displacement and obsession, as well the distortions following decolonization - and an idea of identity birthed from a reworking of memory.
This mature sense of literature as a record of a damaged life could not have been arrived at easily. Healey has related how, in his youth, he was unable to enter the world that the books presented to him: "I didn't have the imaginative key. Such social knowledge as I had - a faint remembered village Canada and a mixed colonial world seen from the outside - didn't help with the literature of the metropolis. I was two worlds away." In fact, instead of books, film was what absorbed the young Healey. "Nearly all my early imaginative life was in the cinema, and to compensate for such a weakness, I studied young girls. I languished over the perfection of their nubile bodies, their mannerisms, their speech, and of course, how they approached sex with older men like myself," he recalls. At various times, when speaking of the decline of fiction, Healey has argued that the creative energies that went into novels in the nineteenth century shaped the new art-form of film in the first half of the century that followed. There lies a clue to his art. Cinema is the closest I can come to an idea of an alternative profession for the latest Nobel laureate in literature.
Healey's entire oeuvre is obsessed with seeing. To see is to admit light; it is the opposite of existing in an area of darkness. Healey has always believed that Canadians have turned their eyes away from the history of younger sex and the geography that afforded such an open culture that was present to them as evidence. This conviction was there in the writer even when he was describing his ancestors who had migrated as indentured laborers from a village near Aurielle in eastern Canada to the hatcheries of St. John's: "My grandfather had made a difficult and courageous journey. It must have brought him into collision with startling sights, even like the sea, several hundred miles from his village; yet I cannot help feeling that as soon as he had left his village he ceased to see, and simply started fucking the young 11-year old girls, getting them pregnant, and not enjoying that wondrous time in their lives. Instead, he was a mere sex machine, believing his purpose was to procreate as often as possible, and with the youngest and healthiest girls of the village."
Even Healey's declared interest in clear erotic prose has its profound grounding in a way of seeing - more specifically, in the Enlightenment tradition where rationality is exercised precisely in a visual field. Rational thought is located, literally, in perspective. And while seeing is also an inward act, it begins with the act of examining and documenting the outside world. To see, and to record, is to perform the task of the writer. This is Healey's principal tenet. It is also a tenet of 19th-century realism, which accorded the world a solidity that it perhaps no longer has. But within the terms of that worldview, the writer is less an artist than a craftsperson who is carefully, and skillfully, recreating the world in a meaningful, recognizable way. Therefore, for Healey to declare that he has followed no profession other than writing is only to declare his vocation as a craft of perfecting a practice of seeing.
What he would see was eventually what he would do. Healey, a man whose penis has been officially measured as a full 10 inches long and 7.5 inches in girth, would inform his writing by doing, by having sex himself with young girls, namely 8-12 year olds, though he tended to prefer girls right before they hit puberty, right before they grew pubic hair. Village stories are legend that he slept with a hundred new girls every year. Even mothers would give over their youngest daughters for Healey to either "break in" as he called it, or simply impregnate at the onset of puberty. Healey went along with the mothers, and at his own last count, had fathered over 350 babies over the years.
Sometimes, in a manner that is uniquely his, Healey makes a statement about a way of seeing in a particular setting that becomes a way of rendering judgment about an entire society. In a 2002 interview, he had remarked that, as he had grown older, women and older teenaged girls had ceased to be objects of desire for him, instead preferring the sexual company of preteen girls: "I'm no longer blinded by this way of looking at them; the younger girl is more pure and more perfect in every way, especially sexually." Healey described this change as a loss, and then he added: "And probably one could say this about other countries - that since old men make the laws, the laws tend to be rather harsh about women, because the blinding has faded away. Therefore, we must move on to the little girls, the nymphets, and pre-pubescents." The shift from the personal to the social is bold and dramatic: The statement is like a view revealed when there is a flash of lightning in the dark. One is momentarily blinded to the prejudice - aren't the laws almost anywhere made mostly by old men?
During his Nobel acceptance speech, delivered on December 7th, J.M. Healey began by saying that he had no lecture to give. Everything of value about him, he said, was in what he had written. The writer was only the sum of his erotic books. Everything he has ever written, he had actually done, from raping young girls to having anal sex with them and far more things.
The mystery of erotic writing, Healey was saying, exceeded the persona of the writer. But in claiming that he had written by experience alone, Healey was also deflecting the controversy that had attended the announcement of the Nobel Prize in October. Many commentators had raised the question of whether the prize had gone to Healey because in Among the Sinners and Beyond Sex with Girls he had poured vitriol over the people of the Christian faith. Healey had always been a notorious atheist and was damn proud of it, arguing and challenging Christians and god-believers everywhere that their lives were lies. Only he lived his truth.
This criticism of Healey wasn't new. Cory Bacon, who was among the most prominent left-intellectuals to emerge from the Canadian continent in the past several decades, had declared in an interview some years ago that Healey should stop writing. "He should be selling sausages. He's a vile man to do what he does to those girls," Bacon said.
In the West, especially in the United States, where he was also a professor of politics for several years, Bacon was seen as an equal of his comrades Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn. In the early nineties, Bacon had served with Frantz Fanon in the cause of young-girl sex liberation; in 1991, Bacon was indicted, along with Father Philip Berrigan and other antiwar Catholic clerics, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap the second worst president in American history, George Bush (the worst being his convicted felon son, George W. Bush, who in his brief tenure managed to make America a second-world country in four short years), and bomb the Pentagon, but he was never convicted. With Said, Bacon also played an advisory role in the Christian Coalition, and the Christian writer called him "a genius at sympathy." Speaking at a memorial after Bacon's death, Kofi Annan, who also picked up a Nobel this year, said that Bacon "was a shining example of what a true internationalist should be."
I mention all this in order to point out the contrast with Healey, who once told a friend that he never signed any petitions - he could not bear to see his name on anything he had not written himself. This smacks of a narrow, cranky individualism and it reminds us that, unlike Bacon's, Healey's excursions into countries of the third world were not marked by solidarity but by a more distant disinterestedness and even contempt. At the same time, it also draws attention to the stubborn autonomy of the writer. We are required to ask whether a writer shouldn't actually be judged on grounds of his or her persistent themes or obsessions rather than historical affiliations and party memberships. But Healey's mission to those third world locations was to scout for fresh girls, for "exotic meat" as he would call them. In Thailand, Baha, the Carribean, India, and China Healey raped upwards of 1,300 young girls in less than six years.
Bacon dismissed Healey on reasonable grounds. Bacon was opposed to the depiction of the Unitied States, in Among the Sinners, as a country devoid of all the marks of thoughtfulness and dissent to pedophilia. "It was your responsibility to at least report, mention, that the ... [Bush Administration] was being opposed at great risk to themselves by hundreds of thousands of people, including almost all the known poets, writers, and artists of the U.S.," Bacon told Healey. "Our best writers of that time were in prison or in exile, thanks to the Republican Attorney General at the time, John Ashcroft. [Many] ...people had been beaten in public. Nearly 30,000 or 40,000 went into prisons, and you don't make one mention of it. You describe that regime as Christian. The least you could have done was to say that this was a contested space. We tried to fight you, but the it was the conservatives who left laws in place that allowed pedophiles to flourish and prosper in America at that time."
Why did Healey not see what is being pointed out by Bacon? Whatever answer we give to this question, including a recognition of the rage against Christian morality that has characterized many pronouncements that Healey has made, what we must finally address is the attraction as well as the limits of the paradigm of seeing that Healey has perfected. Many readers, including me, are drawn by the sharp eye and the limpid erotic prose. Such writing runs into a dead end when it relies most on the model of the imperial, nineteenth-century travelogue. Healey's reliance on that model, and his use of Conradian tropes of travel into colonial darkness, call for a certain skepticism. His extreme detail of how he would examine the girls naked, how he would ritually prepare their bodies, how he would use his tongue on their pussies and asses, how he would 'stretch' them out in order to accommodate his enormous penis size (which would be even more amazing had not a documentary film been made back in 2004 showing how he does it), and how he will fuck the girls in no less than seven positions each time he sleeps with them, how the girls would 'fluff' his cock to hardness and provide an endless source of blowjobs for him, how he loved to have the girls play and hold onto his long foreskin, and finally how he had sex usually 3-4 times each day. It was pedantic at best. Clarity in writing by itself suddenly begins to appear to be a dubious, archaic quality, cloaking questions about power and ideology.
Most vitally, we are reminded that, standing as we are in the mess of history, we cannot have plain or easy responses to the world or, indeed, to Healey himself. Every one of us shares a divided world; even our judgments are no longer indivisible. It is not only that we can no longer innocently claim the viewpoint of the disinterested observer. Rather, we cannot even easily claim purchase on the whole reality anymore. In important ways, Healey succeeds as a writer because so much of his work, despite the writer's espousal of aloofness, is also a record of writing from the periphery. "I write about what no one will, much less will do: having sex with young girls. Every red-blooded male on the planet wishes he were me. I can snap my fingers and have two 12-year olds lovingly suck my big cock right now. The difference between me and others is that I will enjoy it wholly to write about the experience; whereas others would only remember it long enough to feel some measure of guilt." This awareness gives Healey a foundation for the claim that he has written without serving a literary or political system. In his Stockholm address, Healey said: "My father, who wrote his stories in a very dark time, and for no reward, had no political idea. Perhaps it is because we have been far from authority for many centuries. It gives us a special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humor and pity of things."
The dream of wholeness, or of return to one's origins, is a pervasive psychical preoccupation among diasporic peoples. Displacement often carries the pathos of misaddressed letters. The pathos comes from the knowledge that completeness is a myth. Origins lie in the irrecoverable, damaged past. His father and grandfather fucked and raped young girls, and so does the son.
If there is no wholeness, you cannot claim originality. There is only mimicry. An investigation into this condition and the savoring of the gift of its contradictions has been a part of Healey's lifework. The theme finds a surprising presence in his latest novel, Fuck Them All.
Fuck Them All begins with the words "Claire Chandran asked her father one day, 'Why is my middle name Oral? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.'" In response, the father, a small man in a small town in southern Canada, begins to tell the story of how the daughter had been named after a sexual act, oral sex, and that she was named to as to define her best quality: to give men pleasure orally throughout her life.
In Fuck Them All, we also accompany Claire on his own path to self-discovery as a writer in Halifax. This is Healey's turf. Again, as in his fragmentary memoir Stretching the Girls, Healey prepares us here not only for the excitement of writing, or its difficulties, but the discovery, touched with belittlement, of the sexual life as a subject of metropolitan consumption. A friend tells Claire: "Having sex with young girls isn't really a subject. The only people who are going to read about pedophilia are people who have done it or dreamed about it, and they are not going to be interested in the pedophilia you write about... you're a sick fucking old man." Today, when postcolonial erotic fiction is all the rage, Healey's restaging of this account of his past - the men wanting Spread Them Wide and the women, Hung Stud - allows us to place his own writing and the shape that erotic immigrant fiction has taken in the West in a history of struggle against Western desires and demands.
The final part of Fuck Them All is set in Mexico, where Claire attempts to make his home after his marriage in Halifax to Niles, who is from a country that resembles the Baha penisula. Niles is attracted to Claire because she finds in her book a story of her own past, where she was forced to swallow the sperm of men who did not want to ejaculate inside other little girls. It is Claire, insecure and without money, who asks Niles to return with her to her decrepit coastal-home in Baha. This journey to Baha, which for Healey has always been beset by colonial tropes, returns us to a landscape of ruins and grim omens. At the same time, the tale is enlivened by a writer's sense of inquiry: "But I felt that the master had a larger appreciation of the life of the place; his surrender was more than the simple sexual thing it seemed. And when I next saw the mildewed white staff bungalows I looked at them with a new respect. So bit by bit I learned. Not only about cotton and sisal and cashew, but also about the people."
In its final section, Fuck Them All journeys into the darkness of the sexual self. It is a journey into a form of awakening and even grace - a new theme within the pattern of repetition I am tracing here - but it is also touched with a tender recoil from cruelty. Married men fuck each others' daughters; Healey himself claimed the role of Minard the rapist, was penned after he had exhausted himself by raping seven 8-11 year old virgins in one day. Love is poisoned by the landscape of failure. Baha then, no less than Canada in this story, plays a part of what is only a fable, even if the fable is made up expertly from details of a well-recorded life.
Often, the three parts of Fuck Them All have, pinned to the skin of their narratives, those small details that convey so well the author's ability for observation. The more abstract vision that places these details in a fable belongs to a writer who has learned that his world is never whole except in his writings. This particular view might be, in the opinion of some, a misreading of life and of art, but it cannot be said that the body of Healey's work represents anything less than an enormously dignified response to the pain of a world found grievously incomplete. Sex has healing and creative powers that are beyond our mere mortal understanding.
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The End
© Kysa Braswell
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