A Tasmania-based social behaviourist and former arts administrator, Honeywill knew McNeil, and was unabashedly fascinated by him. The author of business books and the well-received Lamarck’s Evolution (2008), on nineteenth-century French evolutionary scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, he has produced a well-researched biography that invites readers to turn the pages with alacrity. McNeil’s correspondence, Honeywill’s friendship and conversations with him, and interviews with family, friends, supporters, and enemies supply facts and no few fancies. There are also slabs of ‘recreated scenes’, which lend a novelistic edge to the tale but invite scepticism as to the veracity of McNeil’s mind and motives. The book is not high art, but it is an artfully constructed take on a life that intrigues and repels in equal measure.

In many ways, McNeil was cast by a wrong-side-of-the-tracks inevitability. Honeywill evokes with clarity and colour the ‘poor white trash’ times that McNeil spent growing up in the slums of St Kilda, where drunkenness, poverty, and stunting brutality were everyday realities. In his dysfunctional family, beatings significantly outnumbered hugs. His education was dulling, and as a boy he was raped by the only father-figure teacher to show an interest in him. Life improved in a hurtle of drugs and sex and wayward glamour after his teenage seduction by a youth-loving madam, and he moved in as a junior gangster to her party-time central brothel amid the ganglands of Melbourne. Inevitably, McNeil graduated from gofer for underworld bosses to standover merchant and then robber. Equally predictably, he would end up shooting a policeman and being imprisoned on a long sentence amid the brutalities of the New South Wales jail system.

In Parramatta’s maximum-security prison, McNeil was heavied by underworld escape artist/crime boss Darcy Dugan to join his entourage and was also approached by the president of the Resurgents Debating Society. He tried to evade the former, and embraced the latter. Membership was for a select eight or so of the five hundred inmates, and to belong, ‘you have to be a violent crim in for a long stretch, the worst of the worst; but no druggies or sex offenders. Only the decent blokes like you and me,’ he was told. It was the making of him. In preparing and shaping words, McNeil said, ‘I forgot about being a crim or a thief or anything else. That’s when I ceased being a crim, in the Resurgents. My whole previous life became ridiculous and irrelevant. It was the first time I ever thought about the future.’

It was through writing ideas for his fellow debaters and reading philosophy that his predestined spiral towards prison death or recidivism took a surreal turn into creativity. McNeil was a whiz at capturing raw emotion and authentic dialogue: he began to write plays, starting one that eventually became The Old Familiar Juice before completing The Chocolate Frog (both 1973), which he then persuaded prison authorities to produce. Word got out about the prisoner playwright. The Australia Council sent actor–director Malcolm Robertson to work with McNeil and the Resurgents; Robertson took McNeil’s work outside; productions were staged at the Melbourne Theatre Company and Nimrod; McNeil was critically acclaimed.

In 1971 journalist–lawyer David Marr and other supporters began talking about the possibility of parole after McNeil had served seven years. Opposition came from Nancy, his sister, who warned them not to ‘be in too much of a hurry – you’ve never seen him drunk’. And it was true, Honeywill notes – ‘the Jim McNeil they all knew was sharp, witty, ironic, intelligent – and sober. Mostly.’

If art was to be McNeil’s redemption, it failed him – or he it. Away from the regimen of prison life, with its structured power lines and enforced routines, he was reduced to vacillation by hedonism. His addictive personality overdosed on opportunity. His supporters had believed he ‘was going to be the new Australian Chekhov’, but, succoured by a breathless cultural élite, McNeil was like a caged songbird that fell silent in the wild.

There seems to have been a disconcerting naïveté within the arts circle that attempted to ‘liberate’ him. McNeil played them off a break, only ever realising half of his designated role as noble savage. He used and abused those who lionised him, even as his rough-diamond magnetism charmed and frequently seduced highly cultured women – and men. Esteemed theatre critic Katharine Brisbane was a champion, he married actress Robyn Nevin, had a passionate affair with film producer Margaret Fink, and numbered among his lovers numerous others in the theatrical and literary worlds, as well as sundry barmaids and groupies. Eventually, his aggression and surly drunkenness alienated him from polite society.

Honeywill has few illusions about McNeil, and his account of the life is mostly unvarnished and unblinking. However, while he is no apologist, he is unequivocally a McNeil fan, and his enthusiasm leads him at times to over-egg the dish. When he conjectson his subject’s psyche, a mongoose–snake fascination can hijack his otherwise methodical mien into the realms of the purple:

The red mist that had occasionally kidnapped his mind always hung in the middle distance, threatening, and his psychological strength waxed and waned like the moon, pushing and pulling tides in and out of his brain.

These are small blemishes in an otherwise engaging exposé. As Honeywill points out, McNeil ticked all the boxes in the medical textbook definition of a sociopath: he had superficial charm and a grandiose sense of self, he was a pathological liar, he lacked remorse, shame or guilt, his emotions were stunted, he had limited capacity for love, his behavioural controls were abysmal, he was unreliable and sexually promiscuous, he led a parasitic lifestyle, and he was a resourceful (if unsuccessful) criminal. He was also an alcoholic. All up, it’s not a terribly attractive package. A convincing case could be made that McNeil was bad to the bone, a mean-minded, self-centred danger to everyone he encountered. Yet he charmed crim and culture-vulture alike, he had poetry in his soul, and his potential as a playwright was undeniable. So much promise, so little realisation, raising again that perennial poser of nurture versus nature.

This is ultimately a tale of tragedy. McNeil died in middle age as a shambling street bum. There is limited redemption to be found in his story, no glorious deliverance to be admired. He hurt almost every person who loved or helped him, yet his supporters were legion, and there are glimpses in the book of the charisma that attracted the loyalty of so many. Perhaps, as Marr suggests, it was because, ‘One thing we under-estimate is how much we love story-tellers. I don’t mean writers, I mean people who can tell stories, and [McNeil] told marvellous stories. He was his own best fictional character.’