Ballardian » Mike Holliday

A Fascist State? Another Look at Kingdom Come and Consumerism

Mike Holliday — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:21:39 +0000

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Fr3d.org. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much? Because it’s so… cretinous. [The consumers] seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains.

J.G. Ballard in interview, 2006.[1]

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ’soft fascism’, [2] received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch – that the metaphors seemed strained, the text confusing and ambiguous.[3] M John Harrison, one of Ballard’s fellow authors in New Worlds back in the 1960s, commented that ‘Perhaps, after all, it is not the consumers who have fallen for the dream of the Metro-Centre; it is the alienated intellectual of the London suburbs … For the old metaphorista, perhaps, the hidden terror of the shopping centre is that it is just somewhere people go to shop’.[4] Other commentators were eager to point to parallels between Kingdom Come and events in the world around us – aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics – but appeared reluctant to delve into the novel’s theses in any depth. In this article, I re-examine Kingdom Come and ask: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

How you convert a metaphor into the arming device of a political conspiracy, or how the consumerist dream might be co-opted to produce the kinds of hard results associated with the nationalist dream of the 1920s and 30s, Ballard seems less sure. In reality, there are only a lot of people buying American sports utility vehicles, Tanzanian fish, Chinese teddy bears, French five-hob stoves … Do unconscious dreams of mass violence need to figure?

M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’.[5]

The elements of Kingdom Come are taken straight from the world that the author would have seen around him … a giant shopping mall (loosely based on the Bentall Centre in Kingston) which is not just a place to buy things but somewhere to take the family for a day out; low-level racist behaviour against ethnic minorities in the suburbs of West London; an upsurge in interest in sporting events such as the World Cup that enable displays of national or tribal identity. These realistic components can prompt a straightforward reading of the novel: Kingdom Come is rendered as the idea that consumerism in 21st century England can be seen – with the help of a modest dosage of imagination and metaphor – to be a type of fascism. Such realist readings appear to lie behind M John Harrison’s complaints, as well as Rod Liddle’s attack on the book as ‘deeply silly and patronising’.[6]

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Joanne Murray. Reproduced with permission.

‘I remember four or five years ago going into the Bentall Centre, a huge shopping mall in Kingston, a town I hate. It was before Christmas, and there were these three gigantic bears on a plinth in the centre of this huge atrium … automatons, moving to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The place was packed; crowds looking up at them. And I thought, God, these people have left their brains somewhere. What’s going on here? And then I noticed that my head was moving, too. I thought, Jesus, get out fast.’

Ballard in interview, 2006.[7]

If Kingdom Come is a realistic reading of the English suburbs, then various of its details fail to convince. It seems odd to emphasize the violence of spectator sports when the most popular, soccer, has become far less brutal, among both participants and spectators, than was the case 25 or more years ago. And the portrayal of ethnic minorities as antipathetic to consumerism seems equally unrealistic, and risks an accusation of the very racism that the author wants to attack – for implying that they aren’t interested in consumer goods or sport because their culture is different from ours.[8]

Beyond the details, there seems to be a conspicuous problem with the novel’s underlying theme, since fascism was always anti-consumerist in its temperament. As Peter N Stearns puts it in his review of Consumerism in World History: ‘For fascist leaders, modern society had become too disunited and individualistic. Consumerism was a fundamental part of modern degeneracy’.[9]

But any such straightforward reading of Kingdom Come surely founders on the fact that Ballard is simply not, and never has been, a realist writer. Deeply influenced by the surrealist artists, and by Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content, Ballard’s descriptions are no more ‘realist’ than Dali’s clock-faces or Delvaux’s mysterious women. He described his semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, as an effort to reach some sort of psychological truth, as opposed to a depiction of actual events in the camp at Lunghua in which he was interned, and Kingdom Come is perhaps best viewed in like manner, as a surrealistic attempt to discover the latent psychological meaning behind consumerist society, rather than as a portrayal, however exaggerated, of the behaviour of sports fans and visitors to shopping malls.

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’.

Ballard in front of his commissioned reproduction of a lost painting by Delvaux. Photo: David Levenson.

This still leaves us with the underlying concept, reiterated by Ballard in contemporaneous interviews, of consumerism as a soft fascism. An obvious temptation is to interpret Ballard as agreeing with the frequently articulated view that modern consumerist societies are totalizing – enclosing individuals in a perpetual obligation to choose, but allowing no alternative ways of living outside of the marketplace and the media – and concluding that therefore such societies can be regarded as fascist.

If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is also no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities. This is one of the most profound secularizations enacted by the modern world … [and] places the intimate world of the everyday into the impersonal world of the market and its values. Moreover, while consumer culture appears universal because it is depicted as a land of freedom in which everyone can be a consumer, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedom is compulsory.

Don Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[10]

But seen as an interpretation of Kingdom Come, this makes little sense. Ignoring Ballard the surrealist, it instead concentrates on an all-too-easy transition from ‘totalizing’ to ‘fascist’, a transition which effectively empties the term ‘fascist’ of meaningful content and historical context. Yet Ballard’s novel is full of such context – from the explicit references to the Third Reich in the set-speeches, to the marching groups of supporters and over-lit sports stadia, and even to small details such as the cable-TV presenter naming his new Mercedes limousine ‘Heinrich’. On the proposed interpretation all this detail becomes mere window-dressing, and the novel adds little or nothing to the political critique on which its main thesis supposedly rests. I therefore suggest that Ballard really does intend arguing for the more substantive, if less obvious, notion that modern consumer societies can mutate into something best understood in terms of 1930s Nazi Germany.

To see how this might be the case, I think we should start by recognizing that Ballard’s understanding of society is principally in terms of psychology, and that Kingdom Come re-emphasizes, and links together, two of his long-standing motifs – that the future will be boring, and that humans are dangerous and violent animals.

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[11]

Lying behind Ballard’s expectations of a boring and empty suburban world is the notion of human reality as a constructed reality, the roots of which seem to lie with his early grasp, as a child in Shanghai, of the everyday world as a stage-set.[12] For Ballard, the human brain has presented us with ‘a kind of ramshackle construct’ suitable to the lives of all those countless ancestors who were engaged in the struggle for food, shelter, and safety. But we no longer live in an age of day-to-day scarcity and insecurity, and as a result the external world no longer forces its interpretation upon us. Therefore the conventional ways in which we viewed the world, which had been buttressed by traditional social structures and conforming behaviours, have weakened their hold over us. The external environment has become fictionalized, and ‘reality’ – that which is of most significance in our lives – has retreated inside our minds, to be represented by our hopes, desires and obsessions.[13] One way in which we establish meaningful relationships between events and objects is via our our notion of time, by working out causal relationships and by connecting the present to the past through memories, either individual or social, or to the future through our intentions and expectations. However, as Ballard has emphasized, the past as a guide and the future as a destination no longer have much meaning for us.[14] Nowadays, an understanding of events and objects cannot simply be read off from the external world, nor can we link them in a straightforward temporal manner.

The Bentall Centre. Photo by elyob. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

The retreat of past and future and the internalization of reality – both of which are ultimately grounded in increased prosperity – are viewed by Ballard in two very different ways. On the positive side, our freedom and possibilities for fulfillment are enhanced. But, because we lack the sense of meaning provided by a stable external reality and by an awareness of time, we can experience emptiness and boredom. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ballard chose to emphasize the use of our imaginative powers as a way of providing us with different perspectives and of transcending our conventional outlook on the world. But the way Ballard told it to Carol Orr in 1974, this seemed a demanding and daunting task: ‘people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour.’[15] Fifteen years later, there was more urgency in his comments to Rolling Stone: ‘the suburbanization of the soul [forces] the individual to recognize that he or she is all he or she has got. And this sharpens the eye and the imagination. The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. Don’t worry about worldly rewards. Just get on with it!’[16] Using the imagination and following one’s obsessions may, perhaps, be rewarding, but it certainly doesn’t sound easy psychologically, more like hard work. By the early 1990s the warning was starker: ‘If people are going to survive they will need to do this on the plane of the imagination much more than they have done. Otherwise, they’ll simply become a mark on some consumer chart.’[17]

The reasons for concern are clear: if we do not use our imaginations and obsessions, we are at risk of being governed by forces outside ourselves which still operate, such as capitalism or purposeless social conformity. Ballard has drawn attention to the way in which moral structures and decision-making powers have been externalized out into the environment by technology – from traffic lights to CCTV cameras – providing us with a safe passage through our lives,[18] and in like manner we may find it psychologically easier to decline the freedom to utilize the imagination that comes with a safe and prosperous, but individualistic, society. People might instead be content to be governed by forces of social conformity, and to let themselves be directed by their emotions – which Ballard thinks of as tending to reinforce existing social conventions and as restricting, rather than expanding, the possibilities for action.

It may be that we thrive when certain of our relationships are drained of emotion, that we may then be able to explore our lives more fully, because emotions tend to act as a brake. They reinforce the status quo. They set up a kind of tyranny rather like the psychology of a very small child, which may be entirely governed by passionate emotions that are in fact very limiting. It’s only when the child learns to control its emotions that he can begin to explore all sorts of interesting possibilities at the other end of the nursery.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[19]

If this is the bare bones of the psychology that underpins Kingdom Come, we can perhaps add some flesh by considering the social aspects of consumerism. Peter Stearns points out that the growth of consumer behaviour was closely connected with the decline of long-established social structures under the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. In earlier times, social hierarchies were much more rigidly observed, and any crossing of social boundaries or individualistic behaviour tended to be viewed negatively, especially by the upper-classes. The latter had luxury, i.e. their wealth was displayed, rather than consumed, and in standard formats with an absence of individuality or any concern about fashion.[20] However, once this social edifice began to lose its grip, consumer behaviour helped people cope with the resulting uncertainty and insecurity about social status, and with the disruption to established patterns of behaviour, by providing alternative ways of fulfillment and by enabling an individual to demonstrate personal achievement, no matter how limited. This was particularly the case in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the growth of large firms meant that many in the middle-classes found themselves working for others rather than themselves and in jobs with a high degree of routine: satisfaction and success were no longer an integral element of their occupation, and had to be sought elsewhere.[21]

Utama shopping centre, Malaysia

But there is a malign dialectic at work here. I buy things in order to try and reassert my identity, but as the marketplace grows I am offered an increasing variety of goods and services, and associated ways of living, from which to choose. Now my identity is even more in question, because it is something that I myself have to select and realize. The impact is heightened as the material prosperity of society increases – even something as basic as food becomes no longer a matter of survival and physical well-being, but a decision about life-style.[22]

Yet coherent identity seems to be precisely the main problem of modern existence and is itself something to be chosen and achieved. … Consumerism simultaneously exploits mass identity crisis by proffering its goods as solutions to the problems of identity, and in the process intensifies it by offering ever more plural values and ways of being. … That the self must be a project is dictated to us by a pluralized world and must be pursued within that pluralized world. This entails a high level of anxiety and risk. In terms of consumer culture, there is high anxiety because every choice seems to implicate the self: all acts of purchase or consumption, clothing, eating, tourism, entertainment, ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’.

Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[23]

To make matters worse, the psychological support that might have been available from kinship ties, the local community, religion, voluntary organizations, and such like, is now much weaker – in fact, involvement in these is as much a life-style choice as everything else. Yet the evidence is that people with a rich variety of social connections are less likely to suffer depression and anxiety than those without.[24] As well as support that I might obtain directly from others, I am better able to cope if I am ‘not just the local lawyer, but also the coach of the cricket team, the friendly neighbour, and the person who always sings at the christmas party’, as a setback in one role is of less significance to my sense of identity and self-esteem.[25]

Without a traditional social fabric around me, I live in a world of endless possibilities but any failure to find fulfillment in my life must somehow reflect my own inadequacies. Hence, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, we are nowadays more likely to suffer from depression – caused by the fear of inadequacy in the face of endless possibilities – than from neurosis arising from guilt caused by the transgression of prohibitions.[26]

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. We should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Our children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. And everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. … [Hence,] almost every experience people have nowadays will be perceived as a disappointment, and thus regarded as a failure – a failure that could have been prevented with the right choice.

Barry Schwartz, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less’.[27]

In such circumstances, the temptation is to seek comfort and easy pleasures. But experimental psychology suggests that the systems of the brain which control desire are not the same as the systems that control pleasure.[28] Hence, some things – sex, good food – will both activate desire and bring pleasure, but others – such as a bigger, higher-definition TV – may provoke desire but not add much to our happiness. Biologically speaking, happiness is a spur to action, not some end-state that we are programmed to seek out, and this is reflected in the wealth of data indicating a lack of correlation between absolute levels of income and happiness (other than at extremely low levels of income), whether it be between different societies, different individuals in the same society, or individuals over time.[29]

Ballard’s recognition that we ‘construct our own reality’ implies an understanding that happiness is not some ‘default’ or natural state, and that nowadays we have to create the conditions for our own satisfaction and fulfillment; failure to do this in a world that does not impose its meanings on us will lead to emptiness, boredom, and anxiety. What we seem to have, therefore, are the possible conditions for a social crisis rooted in personal reactions to the complexity and uncertainty inherent in a prosperous, individualistic, consumer society, exacerbated by the lack of established social structures that might provide support. And here we can make start to make the connection with fascism …

Given the near unintelligibility of the Nazi regime,[30] any interpretation of its causes needs to explain why it developed in Germany (and not, say, the U.S.A. or France) and in the 1930s (rather than some earlier or later date). Generic explanations based on the ‘German psyche’, or some form of ‘moral crisis’ in modern capitalism, fail to convince precisely because they have no answer to these questions.

Under a leader who talked in apocalyptic tones of world power or destruction and a regime founded on an utterly repulsive ideology of race-hatred, one of the most culturally and economically advanced countries in Europe planned for war, launched a world conflagration which killed around 50 million people, and perpetrated atrocities – culminating in the mechanized mass murder of millions of Jews – of a nature and scale as to defy imagination.

Ian Kershaw, ‘The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation’.[31]

No explanations I’ve seen are ever convincing of why cultivated and intelligent people like the Germans and Italians should plunge into this insane world-view.

Ballard in interview, 2006.

A promising approach is to start from the idea that inter-war Germany was suffering from a crisis that was simultaneously political, economic, social, and existential. Fascism is then seen to result from a generalized sense of trauma, where stresses in one arena – say the economic or the existential – cannot find an outlet in another, such as the political or social. Such an explanation of fascism owes a debt to Erich Fromm’s prognosis in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, where he described the fascist regimes, and Nazi Germany in particular, as resulting from the isolation, powerlessness, and anxiety that people felt following modernization and industrialization in countries where traditional structures had lost much of their strength, and which had suffered hyper-inflation and extremely high unemployment.[32]

By the early decades of the 20th century, the German economy was the most developed in Europe and becoming dominated by large organizations: the local boss whom the worker knew on a personal basis was being replaced by distant and amorphous management, and the individual’s sense of their place in the whole was increasingly opaque. In politics, the parties of the new Weimar democracy were concerned with large-scale, intractable issues at the federal level, weakening the significance of local or work-place participation in political or trade union affairs; and the advent of radio was about to kick-start the transformation of politics into a form of advertising and manipulation of the emotions – as the Nazis were quick to realize.

Hitler practices his acting skills. ‘Apocalyptic, visionary, convincing’: three photos by Heinrich Hoffman from 1925.

The individual was no longer compensated for a lack of security and purpose by the strength of those long-standing and powerful elements of German society to which he had been accustomed. The monarchy had been abolished; the military (who had virtually run the country during 1914-1918) had been defeated in a war largely of their own devising; the once all-powerful German state could no longer even honour the commitments on its own bank notes as a result of massive inflation which had destroyed middle-class savings – together with the resulting bourgeois sense of certainty and security; rapid political change, military defeat, and economic problems had left the older generation lost in the world and the young looking elsewhere than to tradition and family. The lack of – or decline in – local social participation and intermediate-level structures, such as voluntary organizations, led to what Gino Germani referred to as ’street corner society’.[33] And there were all too many whose recourse was to the street – unemployment rose following the 1929 Wall Street Crash until by 1932 an estimated one-third of the workforce were without a job.[34] To many, the world no longer made sense, and in the words of the Marxist historian TW Mason: civil society was no longer able to reproduce itself.[35]

In such circumstances, one psychological recourse for the individual is to seek to give up their independence and to fuse with somebody – or something – else, in an attempt to somehow recreate the lost bonds that had existed at societal level. Hence the attraction to many of an authoritarian party, such as the Nazis, with a clear leader on whom the party member or citizen could project qualities which – especially in the case of Hitler – they clearly lacked, but which were the counterpart of the psychological needs of the adherent. As Ballard once put it: ‘It’s almost as if what [a politician] needs is sort of a reverse charisma now. Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you’.[36] For the disciple, doubt is assuaged by accepting the opinions and directions of others, and uncertainty is conquered by relying on the conviction of the emotions instead of trusting in rational thought and debate – in a world that no longer makes sense, emotions appear a surer guide than reason. As Michael Burleigh puts it in The Third Reich: A New History: ‘Nazism was truly ahead of its time … This was politics as feeling’.[37]

Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you.

Ballard on the requirements for modern politician, interview, 1997.

Hitler himself understood all this perfectly well, as he displayed in Mein Kampf: ‘The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. … If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.’[38]

Fascist ideology was therefore concentrated on a mythic core constituted by the image of the nation reborn, purified, and following its ‘destiny’,[39] and practical politics accordingly relied heavily on symbols, mass spectacles, and a continuously reiterated vocabulary of basic ideas.

A dreadful mass sentimentality, compounded of anger, fear, resentment and self-pity, replaced the customary politics of decency, pragmatism, property and reason … Belief, faith, feeling and obedience to instinct routed debate, scepticism and compromise. People voluntarily surrendered to group or herd emotions … Among committed believers, a mythic world of eternal spring, heroes, demons, fire and sword – in a word, the fantasy world of the nursery – displaced reality. Or rather invaded it, with crude images of Jews, Slavs, capitalists and kulaks populating the imagination. This was children’s politics for grown-ups, bored and frustrated with the prosaic tenor of post war liberal democracy, and hence receptive to heroic gestures and politics as a form of theatrical stunt.

Michael Burleigh, ‘The Third Reich: A New History’.[40]

Fascism therefore offers an irrational escape from apparently intractable difficulties. As Ballard pointed out long ago, in his review of Mein Kampf for New Worlds,[41] Hitler was successful precisely because he dispensed with any rationalization of his prejudices, and was therefore able to tap directly into the unconscious of his followers.

More prosaically, a sense of place and safety could be supplied by hierarchy and control: a 1938 decree introduced general labour conscription by forcing people to work wherever the State decreed, but this effectively gave the well-behaved worker job security, in stark contrast to the early 1930s and to other countries;[42] and the small-holding farmer was tied to the soil just as much as a feudal serf, but was protected against creditors forcing him to sell his property.[43] Independent groups and sources of power which were not destroyed were assimilated into the system: Nazi ideology did not consider a person to have an identity separate from their obligations as a citizen, and it followed that if one was, say, an engineer, a mother, or a writer, one’s own particular concerns could be most effectively met within the context of the Nazi regime. Organizations such as employee associations or trade unions, or women’s and children’s groups, were therefore effectively incorporated into the party or the administration. For example, sports and recreational societies all functioned under the Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) organization, and one of the tasks legally accorded to the Reich Chamber of Commerce was to ‘gather together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich [which] must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions’.[44]

The Nazi’s ‘Metro-Centre’? A detail from an illustration for an article in the propaganda magazine Signal c. 1941, describing the organization of the Nazi Party: ‘Any creative initiative to be introduced in health and hygiene, the training of youth, welfare work on behalf of the working man … whatever revolutionary idea is to be introduced into the crafts, industry, trade or among the peasantry, all flows through the channels of the Party organization’.

The Nazi state was not a completely controlled society, but rather one where existing societal organizations were subject to a form of ‘capture’. Hence, Germany was no longer a pluralist society in the sense of accepting variation in aims, opinions, and interests; variety could exist but it was merely a functional variety – a diversity in unity. As Kevin Passmore puts it: ‘civil society was absorbed into fascism’.[45] The sense of community was now workers and managers marching in the same procession or rally, all shouting Heil Hitler together whilst feeling the same emotions.[46] One advantage of such a non-pluralist society was that it was able to limit the extent to which the functional and social complexity of modern societies impacted on human subjectivity: common activities and emotions, communal gatherings, signs and slogans, all represented psychological simplifications that helped nullify the difficulties of a complex, modern world. The result of this reliance on myth, symbols and emotions was that fascism transformed consciousness rather than society: ‘The idea of the “national community” was not a basis for changing social structures, but a symbol of transformed consciousness. … [Nazism's] intentions were directed towards a transformation of value- and belief systems – a psychological “revolution” rather than one of substance.’[47]

So there are indeed similarities between inter-war Germany and 21st century consumerist societies: in particular, people can feel they live in a world without meaning and have somehow lost control of their lives. Obviously there are also major differences – one could hardly suggest that boredom and ennui were a major factor in 1920s Germany, for example, and the economic backgrounds are dissimilar – but these can obscure the psychological resemblances.[48] In both cases, customary social and political structures are debilitated, providing little tangible or intangible support, and the sense of community is weakened. Traditional politics are viewed as irrelevant or with contempt: there is an absence of debate and we are left with politics as emotion and advertising.

A Nazi mass gathering: the 1937 Reichsparteitag at Nuremberg, including a spectacular performance from the young girls of the ‘Glaube und Schönheit’ (‘Belief and Beauty’) organisation.

The ’solutions’ in the two cases are analogous. A sense of pseudo-community is created through common activities and attendance at mass spectacles, by the channeling of emotions into a narrow range, and through a strengthening of the sense of commonality by means of an emphasis – vague but insistent – on ‘outsiders’. Community and a shared-culture may still be with us, but no longer based on locality or history: ‘What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison? Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. … Shared dreams and values, shared hopes and pleasures’, claims Sangster in Kingdom Come.[49]

The concept of ‘us’ implies a ‘not-us’ … an age-old and reliable way of putting strength back into weakening societal bonds: ‘David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport. New enemies were always needed’.[50] To the extent that I am not an individual but part of a commonality, you are not an individual either, but a category; in Nazi Germany, one was ‘no longer a person, but an anti-social, criminal, Gypsy, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness, Jew or political, in involuntary anticipation of modern identity politics, with their replacement of persons by categories’.[51]

The effect of this growth in pseudo-community is the same in Kingdom Come as in Nazi Germany, as Ballard himself described in a discussion with Jeannette Baxter, when he referred to ‘the positive features of the new regime [of the Metro-Centre] – the self-disciplined and healthily glowing families, the sense of a revived community with a new confidence and purpose in life (in short, that “accommodation” made by so many in the 1930s in England and Germany who should know better)’.[52]

‘I like the music,’ I commented. ‘Though maybe it’s a little too martial. Somewhere in there I can hear the Horst Wessel
song.

‘It’s good for morale,’ Carradine explained. ‘We like to keep people cheerful …’

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[53]

Symbols and myths – reaching almost religious significance – start to predominate. ‘Politics’ mutates into something else, a mixture of emotion, myth, and violence that comes close to madness. In Kingdom Come, Sangster is convinced that ’some kind of insanity is the last way forward’, and the psychiatrist, Maxted, draws the parallel with Nazi Germany: ‘The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party.’[54]

But what of psychopathology and violence, which I referred to earlier as another of Ballard’s long-standing themes that runs through Kingdom Come? He has always held – based in part on his childhood experiences in Shanghai and Lunghua – that the human psyche has dark and dangerous depths, including an attraction to violence. On Ballard’s conception, mankind has natural psychopathic tendencies which, although they may not come to the fore in all societies, cannot be eradicated … a view which has some support from the anthropological and historical evidence, which indicates that hunter-gatherer and primitive agriculturalist societies often had far higher male mortality rates from violence than did Europe and North America in the 20th century, despite our technologies of destruction and two world wars.[55]

When I refer to my own childhood, and how people behaved in the Far East during the Second World War, it seemed that some people simply enjoy killing and tormenting others. … To use a term like ’sadism’ and to construct an elaborate psychological machinery to explain this behaviour, however, is to miss the point. The fact is, we are violent and dangerous creatures. We needed to be to survive all those hundreds of thousands of years when we were living in small tribal groups, faced with an incredibly hostile world. And we still carry those genes.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[56]

For the majority of the time that people have lived in crowded urban environments, any proclivity for violence was – probably of necessity – contained by social arrangements and by a widely accepted system of morality. However, both of these types of constraints are weakening, something which concerned Ballard as early as this 1974 interview: ‘I myself think that Man, if you like, is a naturally perverse animal, that the elements of psychopathology or perversity or moral deviancy are a very large part of his character. I don’t think that can be changed. I think attempts in the past to provide a very rigid moral framework succeeded to some extent. I think they’re going to break down now, simply because the opportunities for limitless freedom are so great.’[57]

The risk is that the erasure of meaning in modern societies produces boredom and emptiness, a gap which a dormant psychopathology can readily fill, fuelled by a preference for emotion over cognition. Hence Ballard frequently links boredom and psychopathic behaviour in his later books and interviews: ‘My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader … that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom.’[58] The descriptions of brutality in Kingdom Come – racist attacks and violent sports events – are simply taken from Ballard’s perception of the world around him. Their significance lies not, I suggest, in the precise content, but in their latent meaning: within the absences which permeate both society and our own minds, ‘violence and hate, as always, were organizing themselves’.[59]

Aggressive advertising: For Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Signal’, c1943; and, below, for Hummer SUVs in Australia, 2008.

How might we view consumerism – and in particular the totalizing aspects of a consumerist society – as a result of this analysis of Ballard’s vision of a ’soft fascism’? Consumer behaviour is an exercise in choice, and can therefore infiltrate other aspects of our lives, replacing the traditional but declining forms of morality and politics, both of which are essentially ways of choosing between alternatives. This presents us with an obligation to choose from what is on offer, and thereby effectively closes off the possibility of exiting the system – something that Pearson discovers in Kingdom Come on his first visit to the West London suburbs: ‘I moved through the darkened streets, searching for a signpost to guide me back to London. But here by the M25, in the heartland of the motorway people, all signs pointed inwards, referring the traveller back to his starting point’[60] (my emphasis). The fictionalization of the external world means that Ballard’s ‘exit door’ through the use of our imaginative faculties is gradually closing, as these powers of the imagination become colonized by the fantasies around us and by our own emotions. This enables consumerism to satisfy our needs, not directly via the goods and services that we purchase, but indirectly by meeting our psychological requirements through our involvement in the activities of consumer society – shopping, media, leisure. The disassociation between our desires and pleasures – which might be seen as threatening the consumerist system once we discover that satisfying our desires is unfulfilling – can now be bridged: we desire the goods and buy them, but our rewards come from elsewhere, from our very participation in the system itself … from our attendance at Ballard’s Metro-Centre.

This totalizing effect of consumerism, whereby everything is absorbed into it in much the same way as existing organizations and groupings were subject to ‘capture’ by the Nazis, is perhaps reflected in some of those elements of Kingdom Come which perplexed reviewers: Are the group led by the local solicitor Fairfax really opponents of the Metro-Centre, or are they just trying to use it for their own purposes? How much can we trust what the main protagonist, Pearson, says – or should we regard him as an ‘unreliable narrator’? Why is it not clear, even at the end of the book, whether Pearson really regrets getting involved with the Metro-Centre?[61] The ambiguity of Ballard’s narrative is in keeping with the self-reflexive nature of the society that he is describing, where the transgressive gesture rapidly becomes another media item that can be purchased for cash, and an attempt at escape puts you right back at the centre. Any effort at political action or opposition becomes pointless, because this is not – on Ballard’s view – a conspiracy of false needs and false consciousness: by accepting the emotional lie and the feel-good fairy story, we are ourselves complicit in the consumerist society. But if this is right, then we can see the point of Ballard’s long-held insistence that we must, as he puts it, immerse ourselves in the most dangerous elements and hope that we can swim to the other side[62] – a view that infects both the ‘extreme hypothesis’ of Crash and the studied ambiguity of Kingdom Come.

Finally, what does Ballard’s novel tell us about fascistic activity and what it represents? As I have described it here, fascism arises as a result of a generalized sense of crisis in prosperous, complex societies, whereby tensions in each sphere – the economic, the social, the political, and the personal – cannot find relief, but actually amplify each other. The result is an escape to pseudo-community, and a surrender to the emotions and to psychopathic urges. This suggests a close similarity to Daniel Woodley’s recent discussion of the links between fascism, modernity, and capitalism:

Modern [critical] theorists have abandoned class reductionism for a more sophisticated account of fascism as a political commodity, a form of ideological production in postliberal capitalism based on the aestheticization of politics and the mobilization of emotion. … postliberal capitalism entails new forms of ideological justification based on the bureaucratization and societalization of economic life. These structural tendencies increase the pressure for collective solutions to political integration, resulting in a panoply of new ideologies aimed at addressing atomization. … [Fascism's] timely appearance and reappearance is rooted … in the aestheticization of depoliticized politics and the fetishization of communal identities which conceal the true nature of the commodity as a structured social practice.

Daniel Woodley, ‘Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology’.[63]

What I have tried to show in this article is that in Kingdom Come Ballard has attempted to unearth this ‘latent content’ of fascism by means of his well-honed forensic tools of imagination and surrealistic description.[64]

NOTES

[1] ‘JG Ballard: The Comforts of Madness’, interview in The Independent, 15 September 2006.
[2] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006, pp 167-169.
[3] See, for example, Ursula K Le Guin, ‘Revolution in the aisles’, The Guardian, 9 September 2006.
[4] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2006.
[5] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, op cit.
[6] Rod Liddle, ‘Our simple pleasures go up in smoke’, Times Online, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/rod_liddle/article1267260.ece, accessed 5 May 2010.
[7] ‘From Here to Dystopia’, interview in the Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.
[8] A similar sentiment is displayed here: ‘A mastery of the discontinuities of metropolitan life has always been essential to the successful urban dweller … A failure to master these discontinuities, whether social or genetic in origin, leaves some ethnic groups at a disadvantage, forced into enclaves that seem to reconstitute mental maps of ancestral villages.’ JG Ballard, ‘Airports: Going somewhere?’, The Observer, 14 September 1997.
[9] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), Routledge (New York & London), 2006, p 72.
[10] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1997, p 27.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 101.
[12] JG Ballard, Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate (London), 2008, pp 58-59.
[13] Some of Ballard’s clearest comments on the fictionalization of the external world and the interiorization of reality as a consequence of increased prosperity are to be found in an unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, c1974, available at http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/jgb_cbc_ideas_interview.html, accessed 6 May 2010.
[14] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[15] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[16] ‘The Strange Visions of J. G. Ballard’, interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.
[17] ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review Vol. 20 #1-2, 1991, p 32.
[18] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco), 1984, p. 46.
[19] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[20] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 1-14.
[21] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 32-34, 60-62.
[22] Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1994, p 224.
[23] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, op cit, p 84-85.
[24] Michael Marmot, Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health, Bloomsbury (London), Chapter 6; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp 86-88.
[25] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 180.
[26] Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life, Polity Press (Cambridge), 2007, p 94.
[27] Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Harper Perennial (New York), 2004, pp 210-211.
[28] For example, when rats have their brains stimulated to eat food, they don’t show the typical ‘liking behavior’ that normally accompanies pleasurable activities – indeed, if anything, they show ‘disliking behavior’. Conversely, the rats can be drugged so that they have no desire to eat, but show liking behavior when a sweet solution is put onto their tongue. See also Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, Chapter 5.
[29] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, pp 48-52, 70-75; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, op cit, pp 71-74.
[30] Although the reference is to the generic term ‘fascism’, I shall limit my historical discussion to the Nazi Party and the German Third Reich – as does, by and large, Ballard..
[31] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), Hodder Arnold (London), 2000, p 4.
[32] Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge (London), 1960, pp 106-116, 180-188 (originally published as Escape from Freedom, 1941).
[33] See S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968, pp 107-108.
[34] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan Books (London), 2001, p 122.
[35] T W Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics – Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, p. 171.
[36] In a conversation with Mark Pauline c1987, published in J. G. Ballard: Conversations, RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2005, p 136.
[37] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 210-211.
[38] Quoted in Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, p 193.
[39] Roger Griffin (ed), Fascism, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 3-4.
[40] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 8-9.
[41] JG Ballard, ‘Alphabets of Unreason’ in New Worlds # 196, December 1969, p 26.
[42] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, [1960]/1998, p 265.
[43] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, p 258.
[44] For the Nazi assimilation of intermediate-level organizations, see William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, pp 241-267.
[45] Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002, p 128.
[46] SL Andreski, ‘Some sociological considerations on fascism and class’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, pp 100-101.
[47] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), op cit, pp 174, 179.
[48] It is the psychological similarities that Ballard stressed in an interview with James Campbell: ‘… could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.’ The Guardian, 14 June 2008.
[49] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 85. It is interesting to note that Fromm uses the term ‘automaton conformity’ to describe the form that the attempt to escape from freedom takes in modern democracies (as opposed to fascist dictatorships); see Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, pp 159-178.
[50] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 189.
[51] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, p 204.
[52] ‘Kingdom Come: An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, in Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Continuum (London & New York), 2008, p 127.
[53] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 39.
[54] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, pp 102, 168.
[55] See, for example, Azar Gat, War in Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2006, Chapters 2, 6 and 9; also Steven LeBlanc, with Katherine Register, Constant Battles: The myth of the peaceful noble savage, St Martin’s Press (New York), 2003.
[56] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[57] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[58] ‘Age of Unreason’, interview published online by the The Guardian, 22 June 2004; available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard (accessed 13 May 2010).
[59] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 191.
[60] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 35.
[61] After all that’s happened, Pearson still has positive feelings for the people of the Metro-Centre: ‘Leaving Sangster and his self-hating motives to one side, I admired Carradine and his mutineers, and the robustly physical world they had based on their consumerist dream. The motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future without illusions and snobberies’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 266). And on the penultimate page, there’s the following, rather astonishing, meditation from Pearson: ‘The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air …’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 279, my italics). This appears to mourn the failure of fascism, but I prefer to think of as reflecting Ballard’s oft-mentioned idea of ‘immersing oneself in the most dangerous elements and swimming’. Just to confuse matters further, on the following (and last) page of the book, Pearson turns pessimistic again and ruminates that ‘In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 280).
[62] See, for example, ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review op cit, p 33. And the following brief quote well-illustrates Ballard’s reasoning: ‘I certainly do believe that we should immerse ourselves in the destructive element. Far better to do so consciously than find ourselves tossed into the pool when we’re not looking’, interview in The Paris Review #94, 1984, p 143.
[63] Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology, Routledge (London & New York), 2010, pp 14-18.
[64] c.f. Ballard on the distinction between manifest and latent content: ‘Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content, and I think in exactly the same way today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent content’, from ‘The New Science Fiction: A conversation between J G Ballard and George MacBeth’ in Langdon Jones (ed), The New SF, Hutchinson (London), 1969, p 50.

“Driven by Anger”: An Interview with Michael Butterworth (the Savoy interviews, part 1)

Mike Holliday — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:07:20 +0000

Michael Butterworth in the Savoy office, 1998 (photo by Ben Blackall).

Interview by Mike Holliday.

This is the first of a proposed 3-interview series. Parts 2 and 3, featuring David Britton and John Coulthart, will discuss Savoy’s musical, spoken word and visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, please enter the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

Savoy Books, which bills itself as “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, was started by David Britton and Michael Butterworth in 1976. For more than 30 years, Savoy have published books based on the sole criterion of admiration for the content or the author, and their roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in the heady days of New Worlds magazine — Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones, and M. John Harrison.

By 1980, Savoy were publishing almost 20 titles a year and would surely have been a good match as a publisher of Ballard, but alas it was not to be. Savoy had the bad luck to be based in Manchester, whose Chief Constable — ‘God’s Cop’, James Anderton — had the looks of a biblical prophet and was prone to righteous denunciation of what he saw as good, old fashioned sin. Helping to fund Savoy’s publishing were a string of bookshops, and these quickly became a target for Manchester’s Vice Squad, suffering more than fifty raids over a period of 20 years, during which time David Britton served two sentences in Strangeways prison for selling obscene publications. By 1981 the combined effect of the police raids and the collapse of a distribution agreement had forced Savoy’s publishing business into liquidation, just as they were planning a U.K. paperback edition of William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night.

LEFT: David Britton.

Whilst Ballard was being embraced by the mainstream following Empire of the Sun, Savoy were moving in the opposite direction, becoming near-untouchable mavericks of the publishing world. By 1984, Britton and Butterworth had entered what they termed their ‘moral ambiguity’ phase, and Savoy had transmuted into a rather different creature, concentrating for the next ten years or so on records — many featuring vocals by P. J. Proby — and comics rather than books, although there was, of course, Lord Horror (1989), written by Britton with assistance from Butterworth, an extreme and deliberately distasteful novel about fascism and those aspects of the twentieth century that contributed to it. Lord Horror was the last novel to be successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Acts as likely to corrupt and deprave those who read it (the decision was finally overturned on appeal). In addition, over the years Savoy have re-published the likes of A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, Henry Treece’s Celtic fantasy novels, Ken Reid’s ‘Fudge and Speck’ cartoons from the Manchester Evening News and Maurice Richardson’s compendium of light-hearted surrealist tales The Exploits of Engelbrecht (one of Ballard’s favourite books)

The links between Savoy and Ballard are not immediately obvious, but run deep. In this interview, Michael Butterworth discusses Savoy’s adventures in book publishing, starting with the late 1960s, when both he and Ballard wrote for New Worlds. Later interviews will look at Savoy’s musical and spoken word recordings, and at their visual/comics/graphics output, especially the work of the illustrators Kris Guidio and John Coulthart, who joined forces with Britton and Butterworth during the 1980s.

Savoy’s books, comics and records/CDs are available directly from the publishers.

Mike Holliday.

J.G. Ballard, 1974. Photo from Corridor magazine (#5), published and edited by Michael Butterworth.

MIKE HOLLIDAY: Michael, several of your own short stories appeared in New Worlds between 1966 and 1970: to what extent did Ballard influence you at that early stage?

MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH: It’s more a question of how he didn’t influence me! Coming across his work for the first time in the mid-60’s, I remember thinking, ‘He’s saying what I didn’t know I wanted to say!’ I read ‘The Voices of Time’, and ‘Mr F is Mr F’ and other stories, which led me to discovering The Wind From Nowhere and The Drowned World, and later his ‘fractured’ narratives: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. These stories crossed the blood-brain barrier. They seemed to step right inside me, to be totally relevant to my experiences as an individual and what I was striving after as a writer. Between Ballard and Burroughs, and Moorcock (his Elric short stories), and small amounts of Borges, I was ‘catered’ for, and looking back it did lessen the imperative to find a vehicle of my own, perhaps inducing a kind of complacency.

The things in Ballard’s work with which I identify are the ‘psychological landscapes’ – the deserted swimming pools and lagoons – and the outgrowths of time in The Crystal World. But what makes him compelling is the fact that despite the cataclysms, people are still able to lead recognisable lives. His stories mirrored my own obsession with post-atomic fantasy landscapes, in which the narrator is freed from the humdrum world. The backdrop of nearly all my New Worlds stories, mostly written when I was seventeen or eighteen at a time when you went to sleep at night wondering whether you would wake up to World War Three, were concerned with just this kind of survival and the resulting creative possibilities. They were written very coolly, very detachedly, very sardonically – saying, well if this is what you, mankind want to do with the world, then this is how it will be.

As a writer I was strongly attracted to what I call ’simplified emotional landscapes’, end-scenarios where there is the opportunity for clarity of feeling and thought and picaresque happenings; or, as in Ballard’s stories, where you can just sit and stare into the setting sun above a flooded basin, becoming increasingly internalised. Reading Ballard and Burroughs, and entering into these landscapes myself, was a way of freeing the mind of complexity.

I first heard about Burroughs’ cut-ups about the same time as Ballard’s ‘fragmented’ stories began appearing. Cut-up became terribly exciting for me: it was a new way of ‘breaking out’, a way of actually embracing complexity instead of fleeing it. There seemed to be a correlation with the emergence of South American concrete poetry, which I had also just discovered. As Jim pointed out, writing was now beginning to catch up with art. A post-Duchamp New Wave of conceptual art was happening in the late 60’s and early 70’s … and probably we were all running off the same energies and currents. But there was little conscious interaction between all these practices, and looking back the New Wave of SF could have had more of an influence on the mainstream at that point. Ballard’s advertisements and crashed car exhibition at the ICA in the late 60s pointed to it.

Letter from Ballard (1967), discussing the editing of Butterworth’s stories (click to enlarge).

I believe there was collaboration with Ballard whilst you were writing your ‘Concentrate’ stories. How did that come about?

I was Ambit’s Manchester and Salford distributor for quite a few years until I got fed up tramping round, and I knew Jim was the Prose Editor, and I sent some pieces to him. Through appearing in New Worlds I’d met him at least once, at one of the New Worlds parties, where he had urged me just to be ‘more prolific’. He responded very positively to my work. A correspondence began, and he took the time to edit some of the longer pieces I had sent him. He was generally very kind to me, showing how Burroughs ’subbed down’ his work from much longer pieces. He went through my manuscripts with a pen, underlining the sentences he thought ‘worked’. No one of his competence had taken this time with me before, and we ended up with half a dozen pieces. Martin Bax, the editor of Ambit, didn’t like them enough to publish them, and they ended up appearing in New Worlds instead, in three parts.

By the early 1970s, both yourself and David Britton were publishing amateur or semi-professional magazines under a variety of titles — Corridor, Weird Fantasy, Crucified Toad, and so on. To what extent were you aiming to fill the gap left by the demise of New Worlds as a large-format magazine in 1970? Presumably it was a strong influence at this stage — you had written for the magazine, and several of the first books that Savoy published were by authors who had appeared in its pages – Charles Platt’s The Gas, Langdon Jones’ The Eye of the Lens, Delany’s Tides of Lust, and several titles by Michael Moorcock.

We weren’t consciously trying to fill a gap — some of the contributors were the same because I knew many of the New Worlds writers and artists. Rather, we were inspired by New Worlds, and had started the zines when it was still in its prime — I published Concentrate in 1968, and David published Weird Fantasy in 1969. Concentrate was distributed inside New Worlds and Ambit, as a give away. All things Moorcock were in our blood. I first encountered his work in Science Fantasy magazine in the early 1960s, but it was through Charles Platt (who I met at school) that I was introduced to him. David was a reader from even earlier, from Michael’s own amateur press days, and had met him to speak to at early science fiction conventions.

ABOVE: The first (and only) issue of Michael Butterworth’s magazine Concentrate (1968).

The second issue of David Britton’s ‘Weird Fantasy’ (1971).

What was it that brought yourself and David together as book publishers? Or did you start the bookshops before going into publishing?

The publishing came first. Then, around 1972 David started the House on the Borderland bookshop in Manchester. This was down a back street in central Manchester, and happened to be close to where I worked as a copywriter. I became in the habit of spending my lunch breaks in the shop, although we didn’t know each other personally until our printer, the printer-publisher John Muir, introduced us. When David moved to a busier location in 1974, changing the name of the shop to Orbit Books, turnover increased and more serious publishing became a possibility. For the fourth issue of Corridor, in 1972, I had got hold of an original Jerry Cornelius story from Michael Moorcock, ‘The Swastika Set-Up’, which David illustrated. David published #4 of his magazine and then became the Art Editor of Corridor. By Corridor #7, in 1976, we had become co-publishers. Around the same time, David published an oversized graphic work, Stormbringer. Adapted by James Cawthorn from Moorcock’s story, this was the first Savoy book, and led to us doing The Jewel in the Skull, the first UK graphic novel, in 1978.

Poster (1972) for David Britton’s first shop, House on the Borderland.

So we became full partners around 1976/77. David had the Stormbringer title under his belt, a very productive cash-generator in the form of a bookshop, and he had the beginnings of a publishing ideology worked out. I had a name, and knew Michael Moorcock and the New Worlds writers. As a single parent, having started a career as a freelance writer so I could work from home, I also had some experience of the mainstream publishing world, and had made a few business connections. From the outset we were both of one mind; we wanted to publish books, and wanted to see how far we could go.

The bookshops were a lot more than just books and magazines, weren’t they? You also stocked records, tapes, and videos, especially hard-to-find material. How did running the shops influence the way you went about the publishing business?

To pay for Savoy, the bookshop had to be expanded, and as Savoy grew, we opened more of them, until we had a string of bookshops across the North West of England, selling comics, science fiction, horror, rock books, back issues, rare books, adult mags, bootleg records and all the perennially cult works and authors like A Clockwork Orange, the Illuminatus trilogy, the NEL Richard Allen Skinhead books, and so on. David operated a ‘part-exchange’ policy as well as selling new titles, so across the counter came a very wide mixture of things. Seeing all this material gave us ideas, of course, especially in the way we packaged our books, but the shops’ main purpose was to provide for Savoy financially, which they did right up until the final one closed around 2005 in Leeds. They also acted as shop windows for our titles and for authors we admired.

Basement Books in Manchester, one of the shops which helped fund Savoy’s publishing.

What lessons had you taken from Savoy’s difficulties of the early 80s? And what drove the two of you to keep going?

Savoy went into liquidation in 1981. I was bankrupted the same year. David was jailed in 1982. With those events, the first phase of Savoy was over. After a period spent packaging books for other publishers, in the year of Orwell’s Big Brother we published Savoy Dreams, which unconsciously signposted the way forwards for us. Looking back, it is a watershed book, half catalogue, half anthology, that provided a résumé of what we had achieved and, at the same time, by reprinting Kris Guidio’s comic strips of the Cramps and introducing P J Proby, we sounded our intentions for the future. This was also the book that contained the last stand-alone piece of fiction I published.

The second Savoy anthology, Savoy Dreams (1984), which included a selection of the letters which Michael Moorcock wrote to J G Ballard from Los Angeles (later published as Letters from Hollywood), with the drug references left in.

David’s term of imprisonment had been for 21 days, but the real aim of the police raids was books such as Charles Platt’s The Gas, Samuel Delany’s The Tides of Lust and Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, a satirical story about the police that Jack had written (and David had illustrated) following a terrible ordeal Jack had at the hands of the London police during the Christmas of 1968. The police used ‘back door’ tactics against us, so that while making it plain that it was Savoy material they were concerned about (by seizing it and eventually destroying it after due process of law), they actually prosecuted us for other material we had on sale in the shops, a series of Grove Press ‘readers’ that had long passed their sell-by date, which the police had seized from us on numerous different occasions and returned — but after we had published The Gas they needed to make something stick. These were American books, so could be made to look like clandestine imports. The police were convinced we were major publishers of erotica, that they had stumbled on an international distribution network of pornography.

Savoy erotica: The Gas by Charles Platt (1980).

The main lesson we took from David’s imprisonment was really taken by him. He used the opportunity to rein in and focus down on the people and things that really mattered to him. Before this, I think, the publishing direction had largely been left open, as I attempted to build something he wasn’t really happy with — a mainstream publishing house. We had assembled a raft of writers and genres, ranging from science fiction, historical fiction, erotica — even a Savoy cookery line — to my real interests, Burroughs and Gysin. But these all got lost in the reorganisation. In our insolvency we lost control of our published titles, and the main lesson we learned was to, in future, own the copyright on everything we did, even if it meant creating the books ourselves. We have always regarded ourselves as creative publishers, and the direction we then embarked on saw David’s blossoming as a writer. Being in prison had also helped; in some ways, the experience had done him a favour, as it made him realise he didn’t want to waste more of his life on ‘inconsequences’, as he saw it.

Hours passed.

A sickly light, errant and pellucid, thrilled above him. In a drama close to somnia turbula, ganglias of cables and wires, nerve fibres and raunchy buzzing lights radiated down at him from a ceiling, meshed together in a flue. His body felt tropical, infusing him with a chimerical dread.

He woke fitfully, his limbs heavy and somnambulant. He was back in his room. During the long night the hotel’s central heating had switched itself on. The heat was terrific. His head throbbed, full of virulent stuffs and old memories. He thought he could hear the sound of boiling broth close by. Sulphurous fumes filled the room, and a bittersweet almond taste prevailed in his mouth.

He peered from a single drained eye. His room at the Chelsea looked as though the mad hand of a god had transposed it into an everglade sarcophagus. He lay on his side, his head awkwardly positioned on a once-white pillow. Stuck next to him was a single hank of hair that pushed an umber stain into the cotton. He tried to lift his left hand to remove the hair. The hand moved slowly, as though pulling through treacle, then stopped. He raised his head slightly and peered over his naked white shoulders down the length of the bed. Despite an intense light, he could not see clearly. From his chest downwards he appeared to be encased inside a blackish nitrate crust similar to a moth’s chrysalis. Beneath this dark surface he could feel a moist second layer that pressed warmly against his skin, snugly cocooning him.

Futilely, Horror tried to rise up from his bed of excrement. The chrysalis skin broke, and the smell almost made him faint. From his neck he retched a yellow waxen glue. Defeated, he lapsed back in his warm prison.

During the night, monstrously huge poppies, torture-coloured roses and pain-white petunias had grown around him. At his feet, nettles had sprouted from the dark skein. Weeds muffled the metallic clicking of shite flies. Dung beetles scurried everywhere over the crust’s surface.

Neon tubes wrapped in bald flex pushed through the shite and added their burning light to the room. Myriad phalanxes of wasps had taken possession of the upper cornices. They swarmed about the ceiling like dense waves of black hair. For a moment, he thought he was mad, lying with fallen soldiers in the fields of Flanders, Ypres or the Somme.

The bed giggled and sighed. It heaved with an almost sentient life. It let off a series of swaggering farts that echoed ominously round the room in search of an exit.

The lights shook, and a swell of steam rose from the bed. Back it came to him. He remembered packing the enema bags tightly about his body before falling asleep. In the hothouse of the night, they had burst.

Excerpt from David Britton’s novel Lord Horror, published in 1989 by Savoy Books of Manchester, England.

The (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek map of influences leading up to Britton and Butterworth’s Lord Horror (click to enlarge)

Can I move on to Lord Horror, which in a way was a response to the police raids and David’s first spell in prison. This is a novel whose subject matter includes Nazism and racism, yet I was struck by the lack of any explicit moral position within the book. This reminded me of Ballard’s comment that Crash would have been meaningless if he had incorporated some sort of explicit moral justification: the whole point of Crash was to get the reader to consider for themselves tendencies that already exist within the world that we live in, and therefore any moral framework has to be provided by the reader. And in fact Crash appears in the map of influences for Lord Horror.

As soon as you define something, it becomes that thing. We wanted to write something that wasn’t definable, and in a weird way more true. Although, like Crash, Lord Horror is composed in conventional narrative, it is not what it seems; it is an intricate tableau, or rather a series of tableaux, a florescence from a central idea, which we expanded into picaresque forms that really make no overall narrative sense. It was also David’s first novel. He isn’t, any more than I am, a natural storyteller. He would hand me very dense pages of text, together with dislocated dialogue, actually descriptions of ‘pictures’ that he was seeing in his head. I had to open this up, and make it run in sequence. Lord Horror took four years and twelve rewrites on a portable manual typewriter to get it exactly as we wanted it.

The stories I wrote for New Worlds leave the reader to deduce how the post-disaster deserts came about. They are ironic metaphor, in the sense that the first person narrator accepts the devastation as a given, and by being so cool he is actually conveying the opposite of what he really feels. This ‘double distancing’ protects from the horror, but it also enables the reader to interpret what is really being said. In Lord Horror, morally, it’s crucial that what results from the actions of its characters is presented in a similar way, as a given — and on top of this to keep an ironic or sardonic tone. The characters themselves aren’t morally defined, as they are in a work like, say, Maus. Making it clear that Lord Horror is ‘bad’ would have lost the possibility of empathy, and therefore the point of the novel. It would have perpetuated the image of Hitler-as-universal-scapegoat. Of course, it might also have appeased the judges and prevented much angst for David and I.

The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous

J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the death camps in Hard Core Horror #5. The text panels are deliberately left blank … words are superfluous.

I’d like to mention here Brian Stableford’s suggestion that Lord Horror is actually designed ‘to excite revulsion and anxiety’. In effect, it’s an invitation to the reader to reflect on just what it is in the book that causes those feelings. For example, when I asked myself some months after first reading the novel what it was that I found repulsive about it, the thing I recalled was the use of racist epithets… Which is really rather strange, I mean here we have a book that looks at the reasons behind the deaths of millions in the Nazi concentration camps, a book which contains lengthy descriptions of people being abused, dismembered, murdered in the most foul ways, even eaten, yet what seems to cause me difficulty is the use of certain words. It’s an extreme reductio ad absurdum, but one in which the reader does not sit above what’s going on, nodding and smiling to himself, but actually inside the bloody thing, with all the stress and confusion that’s implied by being part of it. That is similar, it seems to me, to another of Ballard’s comments about Crash: ‘I wanted to write a book where the reader had nowhere to hide.’

In Lord Horror, not only does the reader have nowhere to hide, but also, if he or she perseveres with the book — which Colin Wilson famously wouldn’t — they find that they are at risk of becoming the character, which can be even more discomforting. The protection offered by the third person narrative breaks down in several places, with what seem to be very brief passing racist comments of the author casually inserted, a technique that is more refined in the third novel in the ‘Horror’ sequence, Baptised in the Blood of Millions. In Lord Horror they are so brief that you may at first miss them, or perhaps think they are typos. But it soon becomes apparent that this may be happening deliberately, and readers may find themselves in the uncomfortable dilemma of deciding whether they should continue reading the book, and if so how are they to read it? Is the author a racist, or isn’t he? Should I continue to be amused by his black-humoured jokes, or are his detractors right: is this just poor art, camouflaged by quasi-learning, as the magistrate decisively pronounced of the Hard Core Horror comics? A nihilistic, sadistic ‘playfulness’ operates at every level in the book, even in the narrative conventions. Further, the author seems not to care, to subvert whatever credibility the bravest readers and critics give to him.

Lord Horror broadcasts to the people (from Reverbstorm #6): art by John Coulthart (click to enlarge).

The novel is designed to be morally offensive, and also physically offensive. It is highly visceral, often repellent, as when the dried outer skin of the shit cocoon encasing Horror cracks open. When at work on the book, it was a common experience to feel queasy. With succeeding Lord Horror works, each one aims to out-do the preceding one in grossness. If you read one of David’s later books, Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz and Baptised in the Blood of Millions, and nod sagely, thinking that a clue may now be found that will dispel the cloud of ambiguity hanging about the author, you will not find it. Every chink has been firmly filled, hasn’t even been allowed to be open in the first place. There seems to be, at every turn, an imperative to escalate the crudity of the violence and racism — to avoid numbing the reader, to find ways of not allowing the writing the dread anathema of becoming safe.

Ballard’s work has always reflected his interest in surrealist art. And in a way, Lord Horror is a surrealist text, possibly more so than anything by Ballard, who’s always been concerned to ‘tell a story’. A penis that grows so large as to encompass the Earth; a person being devoured whole — that isn’t exactly fantasy, it seems to me … it’s surrealism. The same applies to the way in which the book is written, with rapid stylistic changes — from philosophical disquisition to horrific description — and paragraphs of text lifted from elsewhere and put into the mouths of the characters. To me, the book makes more sense considered as a surrealist novel; if it’s read as an alternative-history fantasy, or as a satire, then I think the reader misses much of what is in there.

Writing about Lord Horror in A Serious Life, Dave Mitchell compared the book to Bataille and Lautréamont and de Sade, and he may be right, but we see ourselves as belonging more in the absurdist camp, with nods to surrealism. Before we knew each other, two of our heroes were Alfred Jarry and P J Proby. I was also influenced by satirical writers like Rabelais, where key figures are exaggerated to ludicrous extremes. David’s ‘surrealism’ was more William Hope Hodgson and Frank Randle than the more formal manifestations in Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. Francis Bacon has always been a strong muse for him, and latterly Paula Rego has excited us both. Michael Moorcock threw in Maurice Richardson, while I also brought the sometimes existentialist bizarreness of the Beats. The ‘absurdism’ of ordinary life, and popular culture such as fifties rock’n’roll and Creole patois was another rich source for Lord Horror — you know, ‘Sleepin’ on his mugwump, playing on his Jew’s harp, music crawlin’ into your skin, Daddy in his Zoot suit, mammy playin’ skin flute, sister makes a swine-hair grin, Doin’ that crazy Cajun cakewalk dance!’ What could be more ‘surreal’ than that? The Mugwump character in Lord Horror is from P J Proby, not Burroughs.

David Britton’s first novel, Lord Horror (1989).

So Lord Horror could be seen a ‘surrealist’ novel, but it is a very personal surrealism, I think, with specifically working-class Manchester roots. William Hope Hodgson once rode a bicycle down the steepest steps in Blackburn. David once saw Roy Rogers riding Trigger through cobbled, terraced streets in North Manchester in 1951. These must have seemed like eruptions from a different universe. The ‘alternative history’ theme, as you have correctly seen, is not the book’s main point; for us it’s a purely theatrical device. And the book isn’t intended as satire. It is more Grand Guignol than satirical.

To our initial mystification, Ballard didn’t like Lord Horror. Possibly it had far too much gaudy end-of-the-pier working-class English ‘surrealism’ for him, rather than the purer, more polite surrealism he did like.

Reverbstorm #4. Cover art by John Coulthart (after Burne Hogarth).

What about Ballard’s use of unconventional narrative structure? I’m thinking particularly of The Atrocity Exhibition, and of Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, where iconic personalities and historic events appear, bringing along their own narratives. There’s a lot of that, it seems, in Savoy’s work – especially in the Reverbstorm magazines, with the cultural references incorporated into John Coulthart’s artwork, and dialogue consisting largely of quotations … so that the reader is no longer spoon-fed a narrative but has to do most of what Ballard once referred to as ‘the hard work’.

If ‘fragmentation’, non-linear and cut-up writing are responses to complexity as I have suggested, then Reverbstorm is certainly this. The ‘story’ of Reverbstorm, like the ‘story’ of The Atrocity Exhibition or Naked Lunch or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, is really its form. It is emblematic of a certain time in the 20th Century and in the mental processes of David, John and I. The use of such forms by Ballard and Burroughs was a way of dealing with personal trauma, but such new chaotic forms in literature and art seemed to suggest that by ‘breaking down reality’, more appropriate new ways of looking at it might be found.

John Coulthart’s artwork from the Reverbstorm magazines, of which Alan Moore wrote: ‘Like Baudelaire, Beardsley and Breughel meeting in a crack house, “Reverbstorm” presents, with diamond focus, a portrait of the incoherent, incandescent rot at the heart of the Twentieth Century. Highly recommended.’ (Click to enlarge.)

But there’s a difference here, isn’t there, to using a ‘cut-up’ technique? How would you characterize that distinction?

In Moorcock’s multiverse, fragmentation occurs during the mixing up of narrative threads, due to the way the threads appear and reappear in space-time from the perspective of an observer. But the results of this apparently random selection are very controlled. I don’t know how Ballard went about achieving non-linearity, but his experiments also seem very controlled. Even Burroughs’ cut-up techniques are controlled because, as Jim showed me, they are edited afterwards, and so they are narratives assembled from cut-ups. Much editorial control and direction is shown in works like Nova Express. Between cut-ups and Ballard’s non-linear experiments, or Moorcock’s multiverse stories, there are big differences in technique in the way material is gathered together, although the outcome can often be the same.

For almost a decade after first reading Burroughs, I could not read linear writing. But I did find that I got very adept at writing in cut-up; I could mimic the ‘unintelligibility’ of random cut-up, and produce text that had randomness to a varying degree. It was this ‘stream of consciousness’-kind of writing I was producing that Ballard helped me to edit, which became the Concentrate pieces.

The final ‘Concentrate’ piece: written by Butterworth, edited by Ballard and published in New Worlds #197 (click to enlarge).

David was originally the artist and yourself the writer, yet it’s Dave’s writings that have appeared in Savoy from Lord Horror onwards. How did that reversal come about?

To write well, you need to be driven by anger or some other strong emotion. What drove me in my earlier days was anger I felt at mankind’s failings, but this voice I’d found was already fading by the time David and I met. David’s anger is different — he has never given it up. He has always been angry per se, at existence. Though he is ultimately optimistic he feels a great frustration at life. His perception has always been of the glass half-empty variety. I am the opposite.

The turning point for me as a writer was Lord Horror. It was a collaborative book, and was to have been published under a joint byline, but at the last moment, I gave David the byline. At the end of my last published piece of fiction, written under my own name (‘A Hurricane in a Nightjar’, Savoy Dreams 1984), I wrote directly from the postatomic deserts to the reader: ‘For the time being, thank you’. I knew my voice had gone, although I hoped it wouldn’t go for good. But though it hasn’t returned, happily it has led me to other things.

The result of the publication of Lord Horror and the associated Hard Core Horror and Meng & Ecker comics was another series of police raids, and the prosecution of Savoy under the Obscene Publications Acts. The charge was justified in Court on the grounds of the anti-Semitism displayed in the publications, a rather strange claim since the racial hatred laws were designed specifically for such purposes but were ignored by the police and prosecutors. There was then yet another prosecution, for non-Savoy material kept in the shops, as a result of which David spent a second period in Strangeways prison. How did Savoy cope with this second ‘crisis’? The changes in the business seem to have been less dramatic than those in the early ’80s…

The second time David was jailed, it was his reward for writing Lord Horror. The book was seized and found to be obscene by the magistrates. I conducted the appeal with Geoffrey Robertson and this resulted in the charge against it being overturned. The local Vice Squad were very bitter about this. Early in the proceedings, two members were caught airing their views about Lord Horror in an ‘undercover’ interview for The Observer, saying there was an urgency to act against Lord Horror because they ‘might be the last generation with a moral viewpoint’ and therefore the last people with the capability to do it. They were officers, guys in their 30s, saying they had a moral sense that might be denied later generations, therefore they had a duty to act now to protect ‘common decency’ on behalf of the public. That was their reason for banning the book. They were hoping for the heaviest penalty. At about the same time as the Observer article we were hauled to the main police headquarters, Stretford House, and grilled separately about our publications, both books and comics. We were told we were racially and morally degenerate. We ran some of this interview in one of the Meng & Ecker comics. Later, we heard that Chief Constable Anderton himself had been listening in to the interview, overseeing it, in fact, in his office above where we had been sitting.

It was quite clear to us that the target was Savoy and not, as the police were continually maintaining, what we were selling in the shops – which was largely mainstream fiction, literary, fantasy, rock books, bootlegs and so on. Only a very small percentage of the shop stock was erotica, and none of this was what was called ‘hard’. But because of the unusual zero tolerance climate being generated in Manchester by police Chief ‘God’s Cop’ James Anderton, they could get away with doing us for it.

Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God’s voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. LORD HORROR was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the “New Worlds school” and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.

And they sent him to prison.

Warren Ellis.

‘God’s Cop’: Chief Constable James Anderton.

The police prosecuted us for Lord Horror on the grounds of obscenity because that was the decision taken by the local office of the DPP (Director of Publication Prosecutions). Many people thought it strange, but he thought the Crown stood a better chance of prosecuting us that way. The DPP only charged us under Section 3 of the obscenity laws, which allowed Lord Horror to be condemned by the magistrates but did not allow us the option of a jury trial. However, under Section 3, they could only destroy the book — we could not be jailed. The police used the same tactics as in 1981, trumping-up charges on non-Savoy material that was really very tame, and it was these which led to Dave’s second prison sentence. After the experiences of Lady Chatterley and Last Exit to Brooklyn, they knew that if they went after our more literary titles then the attack would backfire on them; as indeed proved to be the case when they went after Lord Horror and we won the appeal.

LEFT: Raided! One of the Savoy shops in the late 80s.

This time David’s imprisonment was for four months, and we coped less well. We were in the middle of an intensive phase of work rather than at a natural turning point as we had been on the previous occasion, and our fighting spirit wasn’t the same. I had managed to make publicity out of the Lord Horror case, but the victory we’d won felt hollow. On the previous occasion there had been genuine surprise by all parties, even by the prosecution, that the judge had thought to jail David — something rarely done — rather than fine him.

Prison terms are automatically reduced by a half; you only do the full term if you misbehave. Although David did not do the full four months, it was still a very long time. One hour is a long time in a place where anything can go wrong, and where few may know if it does. How best to survive, where survival is a moment-to-moment question? There were no changes to Savoy; when David was released we had a gathering of the clans in the local Pig and Porcupine, and then just carried on. If anything, it had the effect of firming our resolve, so possibly the one ‘change’ we made was — never to change!

Our final large court case directly involved Savoy titles — the Meng & Ecker and Hard Core Horror comics that the police seized when they seized the novel. The authorities felt themselves to be on much firmer ground with these, because of the ‘link’, as they saw it, with children. They even returned to conduct a second raid before the outcome of the first was known, and seized thousands more comics. I conducted the defence for this also, and took the case as high as I could. It dragged on for six years, but at its end, in the High Court in London, the local Manchester magistrate who had originally found the comics obscene was vindicated — even though a child has never read them and never will.

You’ve spoken out in previous interviews about the politically correct mindset of both left and right — and Savoy has suffered from both versions, rejected by Compendium Books and by Rough Trade Records at the same time as it was being raided again and again by the Manchester Police. Ballard labeled the growth of this type of reaction in the 1980s ‘the New Puritanism’. How do you see the position in 2009 — is there more timidity, more unthinking rejection, than there was 20 or 30 years ago?

We haven’t had a police raid in ten years — after twenty-five years of constant raids. On the last raid, in 1999, the police personally admitted that their game with us was over. Their concerns about Lord Horror and the Meng & Ecker comics had been eclipsed by the Internet and world events. Until Lord Horror, it was popularly believed that the successful Last Exit to Brooklyn appeal in 1968 was the final nail in the coffin of police repression of serious books, but it wasn’t. When the magistrate’s charge of obscenity against Lord Horror was overturned in the High Court in 1992, that genuinely was the end, in the UK.

You don’t see the same kind of heavy-handed repression happening here now. Rather than laws dealing with reading matter, there are laws restricting movement and access, something Iain Sinclair is documenting. There is also less inclination on the part of writers to go over the same ground. ‘Taboo’ books may not be progressive or relevant any more.

In his history of Savoy, A Serious Life, D. M. Mitchell suggests that the police raids and obscenity trials have directed attention away from your wider achievements, such as the publication of The Exploits of Engelbrecht, A Voyage to Arcturus, Henry Treece’s Celtic Tetralogy, and the work of Ken Reid and of Langdon Jones. To what extent do you think this is true, and if so, are you bothered by it?

The court cases diverted attention away from our early intentions as publishers and writers, and I think they still colour public perception. I think the police raids stopped us in our tracks at a pivotal moment, and for me it was a great frustration. In 1981, when we went in liquidation, we were poised to become mainstream publishers. Up until this time I was still convinced that we could do so, but in the end our uncompromising, eclectic natures and the politically incorrect nature of the bookshops, meant we couldn’t. After the ‘Savoy Wars’, as we termed the skirmishes during the 80s, we found ourselves stuck in ‘a weird place, like one of those soldiers lost in a forest and still fighting the war after it’s over’, to quote Keith Seward).

Certain critics can’t get past the subject matter, or they don’t see the work as being part of a literary tradition. We’ve been defined at a very simple level as transgressors who got into trouble with the law — it’s much easier to understand us this way — or one-offs who shouldn’t be paid serious attention. In our earlier bookshop days, we were cast as pornographers and bootleggers who had fallen foul of the law. This can work for us, of course, and means we are at least assured of a lasting profile of a kind. We have a cultural trademark, like P J Proby’s split trousers or Fenella Fielding’s husky voice.

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the 20th-century city in Reverbstorm #6.

All along, you’ve published authors whom you admire, especially where their work is otherwise unavailable or unduly neglected. But is there, do you think, some element in common between the authors and artists that Savoy publish or with whom you collaborate? Is there something that links Michael Moorcock and P. J. Proby with Henry Treece and Fenella Fielding?

That ‘element’ is something we’ve tried hard to define in books like A Serious Life. As in anything, it is who and where — who you grow up with, and where you grow up. Being Mancunians, David and I were both exposed to the work of people like Ken Reid, whose 3-panel Fudge and Speck strips appeared nightly in the Manchester Evening News when we were kids. As we got older, we both became aware of Proby, a stricken star who had fallen to earth in the Northern workingmen’s club scene, who became an equally potent conductor for fantasies skewed from the mainstream. Ours has not been the normal ‘expression’ of growing up — our allegiance has been to too many ‘odd’ things for that. Savoy is a stitch of David and I. David’s obsession to preserve youthful influences and to put a different emphasis on the art and culture of his time to the one that has become the consensus; my desire for the radical and new — these link the various, on the surface, disparate Savoy writers, artists and artistes.

A Serious Life: D M Mitchell’s marvelous history of Savoy — the books, the records, the comics, plus interviews with Butterworth, Britton and Coulthart.

Did you have much in the way of dealings with Ballard after starting Savoy? You haven’t published anything by him, unlike Moorcock and other New Worlds writers, though I believe a limited edition of Crash was suggested at some point.

We began by publishing Michael Moorcock, and we just seemed to go along that axis. Plus the fact that Jim wasn’t in need of a publisher, so he didn’t fall into our other category of books at that time: he wasn’t a neglected giant of fantasy, as we saw it, like Henry Treece or Jack Trevor Story. Nor was he in the position of Burroughs, whose ‘lesser’ books like The Job or Dutch Schultz, I thought, were in need of greater exposure, or Brion Gysin, who was in need of documenting as an artist in his own right. David Pringle, and later Vale at Re/Search, were documenting Ballard’s work. And as time went by, our options ran out anyway. When I finally did figure out a way of publishing Burroughs and Gysin, the police raids on Savoy reached a crescendo, and I had to relinquish them.

We were disappointed when Jim turned down the Crash/Fenella Fielding package. Fielding has the allure of Hollywood about her, while having an eccentric English demeanor, and has what we think is the perfect voice for reading Crash. It took us a great deal of effort to get her to do it. At first, she was cautious, because she didn’t want to do anything that she thought might demean women. After protracted discussion, which went on for about a year, she finally took the advice of an ex-BBC director friend, who assured her that it would be OK. She did the reading, but would not read some of the more violent heterosexual sex scenes involving women.

We saw Crash as part of a new Savoy deluxe hardback fantasy reprint series we had started, with new editions of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht (2000) and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (2002). We sent Jim the finished reading, together with samples of these books, with a proposal to release it together with a special edition of Crash. But he claimed that he had always disliked ‘book worship’ in any form, and did not subscribe to the ‘industry of limited editions’; he thought books should be mass-produced and disposable. When I asked whether he would mind us releasing just the Fielding reading on its own, he said not, preferring that ‘a book should just be a book’. He was very courteous and kind, asking me not to take this the wrong way, but I did come away with the feeling that the Savoy chemistry was wrong for him and that we had misjudged him once again — he had reacted very similarly to Lord Horror. It sounds silly, but the incident increased my feeling that in some way I had not lived up to his expectation, after he had gone out of his way to encourage my early writing. I had not received such encouragement or understanding off my own father, and when Jimmy passed away it felt like a father had gone.

The Exploits of Engelbrecht, republished by Savoy in 2000, with this commendation on the cover from Ballard: ‘The Exploits of Engelbrecht is English surrealism at its greatest. Witty and fantastical, Maurice Richardson was light years ahead of his time. Unmissable.’

Mike Moorcock has said that one of his ambitions for New Worlds was to cross-fertilize the popular and literary traditions. I take it that’s an aim with which you’d concur?

Yes, but that’s something that was always going to come much more easily to Michael than to us! For a start, as a writer he is a natural storyteller. Audience is very important to him. In his publishing projects he took over existing magazines with ready audiences rather than attempt to start up something from scratch.

His charismatic personality had attracted to New Worlds already-established authors, Ballard, Aldiss, et cetera. When Savoy began, influenced by New Worlds or, more particularly, by Michael’s enthusiasm for certain writers — Jack Trevor Story, M John Harrison, Langdon Jones — these writers readily allowed us to do their books as paperbacks. As we developed, we became a more gaudy, cross-pollinating rock’n’roll publishing/recording outfit, top-and-tailing Ken Reid and T S Eliot, P J Proby and New Order, or joining up like-minded souls, Burne Hogarth and Cawthorn, Fielding and Colette, The Tides of Lust and The Gas. Gradually, we seemed to find an identity. It perhaps helped that we stayed in the North, away from the temptations of the London publishing scene. On the other hand, if we had carried the battle South we might perhaps have succeeded as a legitimate company. Who knows.

To consciously set out to marry the popular with the literate is beside the point, really. Did Dickens set out to do that? He just did it. A basic rule of adventurous writing is to leave in a certain amount of cliché, so you don’t lose the reader. I think that was something Michael Moorcock taught me: you should not take people too far too quickly or you will lose them. But I think if you are a truly great writer — or a great editor or publisher — you will naturally have popular appeal. Once Michael had ‘trained’ his initial SF readership and attracted new readers — each issue contained a reducing amount of traditional SF — New Worlds became a blend of the popular and literary quite naturally. It was second nature to everyone involved: editors, designers, artists and writers. By contrast, the much later Modern Review, say, which had a declared policy of mixing high and low, seemed contrived.

New Worlds was dependent on its editor’s vision and drive, and when he decided to move on it lost its direction. Charles Platt ran it well for a while, but then he also moved on, alas. Just think what could have been achieved had Michael been able to devote his time to keeping New Worlds going as a monthly magazine, acting as a kind of mainstream Counterblast to the various movements and groups that have come and gone since the sixties.

Only one alternate history series confronted Nazism with appropriate originality and passion. Published by the independent Manchester firm Savoy, David Britton’s surreal Lord Horror and its sequels entered the mind of a deranged surviving Hitler whose visions grew increasingly insane… Soon after they appeared, Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror were seized by Manchester’s vice squad. The books were destroyed and their author went to Strangeways, suggesting that successful Nazi alternate histories must take profound psychological, moral and physical risks.

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

What about the future? How much have Savoy got in the locker? There’s a collection of Mike Moorcock’s non-fiction due for publication, I believe. And what about the final issue of the Reverbstorm series — will that actually be published? It’s been ‘forthcoming’ for several years!

There is a lot left in the locker, but whether we produce it or not is a question of what financial resources we have left. Since losing the bookshops we have been forced to raise money in less exciting, more legitimate ways. As a result we are vulnerable to things like economic recessions, and this present one has hit us badly as it has hit others. David and I are both now in our sixties. But while we can, we will keep going. John Coulthart is designing Into the Media Web, the collection of Moorcock non-fiction, at the moment. We hope it will appear in 2010, together with the promised second Savoy edition of Engelbrecht. John is also at work re-mastering the Reverbstorm part-series as a graphic novel. This will contain the long promised final installment. A collection of articles about Savoy is underway, Tales From the Savoy, as is David’s newly completed Lord Horror novel, La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz, which will be illustrated by Kris Guidio. He is also at work on a new novel, more a short coda to the other books, called Invictus Horror. Plus all the work we did with Fielding is still to be released: Fenella Fielding: The Savoy Sessions (a new album of songs, and companion album to P J Proby: The Savoy Sessions), a double album reading from Colette, as well as readings of Four Quartets and La Squab.

Finally, you’ve also been involved, outside of Savoy, with the launch of a new magazine, Corridor8, which revives the title of your early magazines but concentrating on contemporary visual art. How did the new magazine come about, and what are your hopes for it?

It grew out of an interest in conceptual art, and wanting to do a magazine again. I’d begun publishing a small line of print-on-demand books featuring work which didn’t fall into Savoy’s remit, but which I was in the habit of being offered from time to time by people who knew I was a publisher. One of these books was an interview with Colin Wilson by the writer and journalist Brad Spurgeon, about Wilson’s philosophy as an optimist. Another, which arrived anonymously one morning, was a surreal oddity — a full libretto for an imaginary musical about Jackson Pollock written by an artist friend, Roger McKinley. Although his libretto took the conventional form of a book, it worked as a piece of conceptual art, and it was seeing the possibilities of this that got me interested.

When my father died, my partner, Sarajane Inkster, who had once interviewed David and I after Burroughs’s death about our meeting with him in the Bunker in the early 80s, in a mood of mad creativity generously suggested I use part of my inheritance to produce a magazine. Corridor8 derives its name from the small-press magazines I started out doing, and the first issue is dedicated to J.G. Ballard and New Worlds, although I wouldn’t say it is recognisably in the Ballard/New Worlds or even Savoy moulds.

Michael Butterworth’s new magazine, ‘Corridor8′, launched in July 2009.

Corridor8 appears annually — the next issue comes out September 2010 — and the intention is to make its publication an event. The launch this year had a talk by Iain Sinclair, who used Issue 1 as a springboard for a new work set outside the capital, and also an art installation by the arte povera maverick Michelangelo Pistoletto. As subsequent issues appear, I can see the ‘launches’ growing and becoming more like mini-arts festivals. The magazine itself will continue to be North-of-England-based, on a speculative tip with an international outlook and still focusing on contemporary visual art and writing. Issue 1 focuses on art inside Will Alsop’s ‘SuperCity’ — Alsop’s concept of a linear city running raggedly across the neck of England from Liverpool to Hull and beyond. Sinclair’s work in the same issue explores the corridor in two long psychogeographical journeys, East-West by car and then West-East by bus pass, debunking Alsop’s concept. It was also the first time Alsop’s work as a canvas artist was featured in-depth, since when he has announced that he has retired from his architectural practice to devote his time to painting.

There are also interviews with Peter Saville about his new position as Creative Director of Manchester, and with Yorkshire artist and art catalyst Paul Bradley who produced the Pistoletto installation for us, an article by Jon Savage about the Haçienda nightclub, another article about the Danish art group Superflex’s project ‘tenantspin’ — a web-based television venture to empower residents in Liverpool tower blocks threatened with demolition — as well as, all importantly, profiles of eight artists who live and work in the SuperCity region. For Issue 2, we plan to move the geographical focus further north, towards Cumbria, Newcastle, and the Scottish borderlands — it will have a borderland theme — and on artists who work outside the centre. I am hoping one of the artists will be David Hockney, while the main writer for this issue I hope will be Jenny Diski, another favourite writer, who has some thematic similarities with Sinclair.

Thank you, Michael Butterworth.

Don’t forget the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ James Cawthorn, RIP: 1929-2008
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

‘A dirty and diseased mind’: The Unicorn bookshop trial

Mike Holliday — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:28:20 +0000

by Mike Holliday

The Unicorn Bookshop edition of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto-disaster. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (G. P. I.), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender. Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities. In 82 percent of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed faecal matter and rectal haemorrhages.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

“Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” — that was the question which prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley posed in Court for BBC Radio producer George MacBeth in 1968. The subject of their discussion was a booklet written by J.G. Ballard and published by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, titled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. MacBeth’s view was almost as surprising as Worsley’s — he told the Court that if the work became available for broadcasting, he would like to use it.

This surreal discussion took place at the trial of Bill Butler, proprietor of the Unicorn Bookshop, on charges of possessing obscene articles for commercial publication. However bizarre or absurd the proceedings in Brighton Magistrates Court might appear some 40 years later, they had an only too serious effect on Butler, who found himself having to pay fines plus legal costs in the order of £50,000 in today’s money. In a letter written two years later, he asked a correspondent to forgive his temper, explaining that his memory had, to all useful purposes, stopped at the date of the police raid on his bookshop, and that “I am, after all this, paranoid”.

As I looked through the records of the trial, a sense of depression settled on me … Butler seemed like a fly in a spider’s web, fighting the prosecution because he felt he could not do otherwise, yet fearing that at bottom the cause was a hopeless one. Having started out with the intention of investigating Ballard’s involvement with an obscenity trial, I became more interested in how it was that Bill Butler, a 33 year-old American poet, bookshop owner, and sometime publisher, became involved in this drama.

A relaxed-looking Bill Butler (from New Worlds #185).

The law on obscenity in the UK centered on the notion that an article — a book, magazine, or photograph — had to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those who were likely to view it. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act had provided a defence if it could be shown that publication was in the public interest — for example, because of the article’s literary value. There followed a series of Court cases — sometimes great theatre, sometimes personal tragedy, and sometimes unpleasant listening — as the implications of the law were fought over in a society whose beliefs and tastes were rapidly changing.

The first test was theatre — sufficiently so for BBC television to commission and broadcast a drama about the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover some 45 years later. Prosecuting Counsel shot himself in the foot at the outset when he told the jurors: “Ask yourselves the question, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?” — the jurors reportedly smiled at such a bizarrely out-of-touch view of the world. Numerous defence witnesses were wheeled in to testify to the virtues of one of Lawrence’s lesser novels and its four-letter descriptions of adultery, although they all ignored the passage where the Lady is sodomised … the prosecution had either not read or not understood that scene, since they ignored it also. At the end of the trial, the jury found the publishers, Penguin Books, not guilty.

Mervyn Griffith Jones, QC, Prosecuting Counsel in the Lady Chatterley trial, as portrayed in a Private Eye spoof.

A series of other cases followed, less amusing, and often more discouraging for those who wanted to see a more open society. One of the lesser-known cases indicated the way things might go: Cain’s Book, a novel by the Glaswegian writer Alexander Trocchi, was prosecuted in Sheffield in 1964, and the police justified seizing the book on the grounds that it “seems to advocate the use of drugs in schools so that children should have a clearer conception of art. That in our submission is corrupting.” This extension of the notion of obscenity beyond the sexual was confirmed during an unsuccessful appeal by the publishers, when Lord Chief Justice Parker ruled that “there was no reason whatever to confine depravity and obscenity to sex”. John Sutherland later commented that:

[this decision] marked a new phase of obscenity-hunting in which the primary target would not be the work’s text (for instance its incidence of four-letter words) but the lifestyle it advocated, or that was associated with its author or even its readership. If it was risking ‘obscenity’ to be a junkie and a beat, it was also soon going to be similarly risky to be a hippy.

The truth of this judgment is only too apparent in the Unicorn Bookshop prosecution.

LEFT: The Calder 1963 edition of Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, the subject of an obscenity trial the following year.

Bill Butler had managed Better Books on the Charing Cross Road in London, before moving to Brighton and then opening the Unicorn Bookshop during 1967. The shop specialized in poetry and American authors; in fact, many of its ongoing sales were by mail order to American universities. In late-1967, Butler returned to the U.S. for a short visit, leaving the shop in the hands of a young man who was then arrested for possession of drugs, convicted, and sent to a young offenders detention centre. According to Butler, “apparently he had had a container for the hashish and some scissors for the cutting of the hashish in the shop. Subsequently my shop was broken into and the meters pilfered. When the police came to enquire about this they seemed more interested in the sales of hashish than in the meters.”

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions. Parallel films of rectal images revealed a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic and concentration camp fantasies.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

The Unicorn Bookshop, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

According to the police, someone then complained to them about a publication they had seen in Butler’s shop, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, an anarchist magazine containing a play by Tuli Kupferberg entitled “Fucknam”. A plain-clothes officer visited the shop on 15th January 1968, and purchased copies of Cuddon’s and the underground magazine Oz. The following day, a full raid was mounted and the police took away over 3,000 items (mostly copies of Oz), representing more than 70 different titles. The items seized included several issues of the U.S. literary magazine Evergreen Review, as well as books by Burroughs and Ginsberg. Also taken were three copies of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, which had been found inside an addressed and sealed envelope.

LEFT: Oz #4, poster and front cover. Three thousand copies of the underground magazine were seized by the police from Unicorn Bookshop, but the charges were dropped.

Charges of possessing obscene articles “for publication for gain” were brought, but eventually the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped charges against half the items. Butler speculated that the DPP could not afford to drop the charges against all of the original 76 publications, since “he might have faced a suit from me for malicious prosecution. Thorny problem.” The remaining items that featured in the subsequent trial included issues of Evergreen Review and Kulchur, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, books of poetry by Herbert Huncke and John Giorno, and Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Butler decided to plead “not guilty” to the charges, regardless of having been three times refused legal aid by the magistrates even though he appeared to qualify on financial grounds. Between the raid and the trial, the drugs connection continued to rear its head:

A member of Brighton’s police force has visited the shop since the raid and among other things discussed the problem of drugs in the shop and users of narcotics frequenting the shop. It was suggested that I cooperate with the police by revealing names of people I suspected of using narcotics. … A barrister has advised me that in his view the police probably have it in for me. It has been suggested that the shop might be better off in London.

The trial took place in August, 1968. Since the raid, the entire world seemed to have been in turmoil … the Tet offensive had taken place in Vietnam; agitation and strikes had almost brought down the French government; an anti-War demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square ended in violence; President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated; and the British politician Enoch Powell made his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. The day after the trial opened, the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia; before it had finished, a week later, police had clashed with anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and France had exploded its first Hydrogen bomb.

The Summer of ‘68 … Revolution! … Smash the System! … Situationists! … J.G. Ballard!
(publication of Love and Napalm: Export USA in the student magazine Circuit, June 1968).

Rather more prosaically, the charges against Butler were being considered by the three magistrates — a retired Labour Exchange manager, an auctioneer’s wife, and a car salesman and garage proprietor. The defense called a number of “expert witnesses” to provide evidence as the literary value of the condemned items, among them George MacBeth, a poet who also worked as a producer for the BBC and had conducted a radio interview with Ballard the previous year. MacBeth cogently described Ballard’s concerns in Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan:

… here he is concerned with American politics and society and the ways in which, as he sees it, the feelings of sexual desire and love can only be aroused by violence and violent stimuli. He believes American society is sick and he is criticising the sickness in this work. … America is a most highly developed society where advertising is crucial and so is the projection of images. … This [piece] shows how human feelings of sex and love can be manipulated by violence. [It] shows the connection between the different kinds of violence, for example car crashes, Vietnam and racial violence.

At this point prosecuting counsel asked “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” “Certainly not,” replied MacBeth, “and it’s obvious to any man of goodwill who reads it.”

But the value to Bill Butler’s defence of two days of deliberation about contemporary culture and literary merit was debatable. Even defending counsel appeared baffled by some of the discussion, commenting at the start of his concluding speech that “it may be that some of us did not fully understand all that the expert witnesses were talking about, indeed I myself occasionally found it very difficult to understand.” In contrast, the prosecution’s approach was simple and direct — they called no witnesses beyond the police who carried out the raid, and relied on the magistrates’ judgement as to whether the books and magazines were obscene:

I rely on your examination of the works themselves to rebut the defence of public good. It is obvious that these books are obscene and it would not be in the public good for them to be published. I rely on this Court knowing a dirty book when they see one …

The prosecution’s strategy played on the problem at the heart of the 1959 Act. Expert witnesses could testify in Court as to a publication’s literary merit, but not as to whether it was obscene or tended to corrupt — that was the essence of the case and therefore a matter for magistrates or jurors. But how can publication be “in the public interest” if what is published tends to deprave and corrupt? The two major prosecution failures in obscenity trials following the 1959 Act were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Inside Linda Lovelace: both were acquitals by a jury, and both were of books where the jurors stood some chance of understanding what they read, allowing them to conclude that the books were not likely to corrupt and deprave. (Even that may be overstating matters, since five of the jurors in the Lady Chatterley trial apparently had difficulty in reading the oath, let alone the book.)

In other cases, jurors and magistrates tended to react badly to being lectured at by expert witnesses about books they found difficult to understand. A remarkable case was that of the Yorkshire bookseller and publisher, Arthur Dobson, who intended to publish My Secret Life, a pseudonymous autobiographical account of a Victorian middle-class gentleman’s prodigious sexual career (1,200 women, described in 4,200 pages), which was first published for the author’s own amusement in an edition of six copies in 1888. Eighty years later, Arthur Dobson had got as far as typesetting the first two volumes before the police intervened. His subsequent trial at Leeds Assizes in 1969 appeared to be going well for the defence: the judge seemed not ill-disposed, cogent expert witnesses argued for the book’s value as a rare first-hand account of life in the Victorian underworld, and the witnesses dealt well with the prosecution’s attempt to display them as unworldly or inconsistent — on one occasion prosecuting counsel asked of a quiet-mannered academic: “Is this not the vilest thing you have ever read?”, only to receive the reply “You don’t mean that question literally, do you?”, followed by “Have you never heard of the concentration camps of the Third Reich?”

But all this was to no avail. When the jurors were sent to read the two printed volumes of My Secret Life, most looked only at the first few pages. It was subsequently reported that only two of the jurors were in the habit of reading books, and they had given up very quickly on the 19th century language in front of them. The expert witnesses who had impressed everybody else seemed to have little effect on the jury: Arthur Dobson was convicted and sentenced to a heavy fine, plus two years in prison (reduced to one year on appeal).

Banned in ‘69: My Secret Life by ‘Walter’.

At Bill Butler’s trial in August 1968, counsel had little difficulty in turning the expert witnesses to the prosecution’s advantage. He extracted from one witness, Mrs Anne Graham-Bell, the opinion that adults are not likely to be corrupted, thereby enabling him to portray her as an innocent who “is not to know the evil to which these sort of things lead”, unlike the magistrates, who, he suggested, had rather more experience of the corruptibility of adults than did the defence witnesses. Not unexpectedly, the magistrates found all charges proven.

Incidence of orgasms in fantasies of sexual intercourse with Ronald Reagan. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was superimposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with ‘Reagan’ proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2 percent of subjects. Axillary, buccal, navel, aural and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12 percent of cases, the simulated anus of post-colostomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98 percent of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of ‘Reagan’ in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one- and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But what about Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan? The three copies seized by the police had been taken from an envelope addressed to Mrs Graham-Bell, who at the time had been head of public relations for Penguin Books. In her evidence she explained that Bill Butler had told her about this new work by Ballard, and that she had agreed to forward copies to possible interested parties including the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. As was normal practice, she did not expect to be charged for these copies. This gave the prosecution a problem, since the charge involved publication “for gain”. It was obvious to everyone that Unicorn would not have given all the remaining copies away for free, and they were even noted as publisher inside the pamphlet, but the only evidence the prosecution could present to the Court were the copies that were supplied free of charge to Mrs Graham-Bell. After all his discussion of this supposedly “evil” publication, prosecuting counsel had to concede at the start of his closing speech that he couldn’t prove the offence, and asked that the charges relating to Ballard’s work be dropped.

However, in other ways the rules of evidence worked against the defence. They were not allowed to demonstrate that some of the works were widely available throughout the U.K., since the mere fact that a book is available to be bought somewhere is not evidence as to whether or not it is obscene. After Butler had been found guilty, his Counsel was finally able to quote the availability of the works in mitigation before sentencing. One of the issues of Evergreen Review had been included in the charges because it contained an extract from Justine, and defence counsel waved a copy of de Sade’s novel around the Court pointing out that it was an unexpurgated edition published in the U.K. which had sold 100,000 copies.

Not that this seemed to have any effect on the magistrates. Butler was ordered to pay fines plus costs of £419, and his own defence costs would come to much more than this. The Chairman of the Magistrates, the delightfully-named Mr Ripper, commented that John Giorno’s Poems — whose contents included Pornographic Poem — was “the most filthy book I have ever had to read”.

There was a bizarre ending as Mr Ripper went on to attack the expert witnesses:

May I say how appalled my colleagues and I have been at the filth that has been produced at this Court, and at the fact that responsible people including members of the university faculty have come here to defend it. It is something which is completely indefensible from our point of view. We hope that these remarks will be conveyed to the university authorities.

The end of the trial, reported in Brighton’s Evening Argus.

This attack later earned Mr Ripper a public rebuke from the journal Justice of the Peace, for criticizing witnesses “not because they have in any way misbehaved, but merely because they have exercised their legal right of expressing opinions which do not coincide with those held by the bench.” Ripper was quoted as saying that he had made his comments because he objected as a taxpayer to universities spending their money on trashy publications.

Advised by his solicitors that there seemed no realistic grounds for appealing the Magistrates’ decision, Butler was uncertain how to proceed. Eventually, on 21 November, his solicitors asked the Queens Bench for an order of Mandamus instructing the Magistrates in Brighton to state a case for the consideration of the higher court. This request was refused and Butler was left with a final bill in the order of £3,000. A year later, he wrote to a correspondent that, although he had received numerous offers of help, many remained unfulfilled and he still owed £2,500 to his solicitors, “who are beginning to moan ever so gently off in the distance. Like wolves.”

Bill Butler, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

The Unicorn Bookshop stayed open until 1973, when Butler moved to a remote cottage at Nant Gwilw, Wales, intending to concentrate on publishing. He died a few years later, whilst only in his forties, apparently of an accidental drug overdose. It seems fitting to leave the last words to the late William Huxford Butler, speaking during his trial in August 1968:

You regard it as important that we tell the truth in your court, and you put us under oath to do so. When any poet writes or an artist paints, he is under oath to something inside himself to tell the truth and the whole truth. Not to tell just those parts of the truth which are palatable and pleasing but all that is true – the good and the bad parts. Until he does that, he is incomplete as an artist and a poet.

Acknowledgements:

In researching this article I made considerable use of the records of the Unicorn Bookshop kept by the Archives department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Background on the U.K.’s Obscene Publications Acts came from Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960-1982 by John Sutherland (Junction Books, 1982), and Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by Donald Thomas (John Murray, 2007).

Mike Holliday, April 2009.

Three levels of reality: J.G. Ballard's 'Court Circular'

Mike Holliday — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:08:01 +0000

by Mike Holliday

Ballard’s oeuvre has many highlights: the 1960s ‘disaster trilogy’ of novels, Crash, Empire of the Sun, and short stories such as ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. Not surprisingly, much of the secondary literature tends to concentrate on these key works. But even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention. One of the best examples is his ‘Court Circular’, which appeared in 1968 in Ambit magazine.

The first I heard of this curio was whilst idly perusing the ‘Bibliographies’ section of RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard. There I saw an advertisement for back-issues of Ambit, including the following:
No. 37 (1968) — ‘Court Circular’; and ‘Love — A Print-out for Clair Churchill’ (Rare: $25).
Not just one, but two items by Ballard that I’d never heard of! I traced the second piece, ‘Love – A Print-out’, to David Pringle’s 1984 bibliography, where it is described as ‘concrete poetry’ … but I was left wondering what on Earth the ‘Court Circular’ might be.

Eventually I got hold of a copy of Ambit #37, and found both items on the same page:

At first the ‘Court Circular’ appears to be a straightforward, rather ordinary, concrete poem, with a bit of artwork added to fill up the space. But one thing that bothered me was the apparently minor matter of the titles: the heading for the concrete poem — ‘Love: a Print-out for Claire Churchill’ — is in a much smaller typeface than ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, almost as if the latter were the title for the entire page.

That this might actually be the case was suggested in the previous issue of Ambit where there is an announcement of a forthcoming newspaper-styled issue:

Do not miss number 37 a big blown-up Ambit (to newspaper size). All usual newspaper features but no journalists. J. G. Ballard reserved whole court page for an advertisement. Edwin Brock appointed Sports Editor. Henry Graham education correspondent. Lots and lots of pictures by all your favourite Ambit artists. Plenty of real news of the Going World.

(Ambit #36, 1968)

But if the ‘Court Circular’ was some form of advertisement, what might it be saying?

In order to understand that, we have to go back to the sorts of things that Ballard was working on during the period 1967 to 1968. In a cultural milieu where experimentation was almost mandatory, Ballard now counted among his friends and companions in experimentation: Eduardo Paolozzi — the Scottish sculptor and artist, Dr. Christopher Evans — the ‘maverick scientist’ who would partly inspire the character of Vaughan in Crash, and Martin Bax — a London paediatrician whose main off-curricular interest was editing Ambit, a magazine which he had started in 1959 to provide a mixture of poetry, fiction and art.

Inspired in part by these new friendships, Ballard’s work had gone well beyond prose fiction. A prime example — and particularly significant if the ‘Court Circular’ is some form of advertisement — is the series of what Ballard described as ‘advertiser’s announcements’, the first of which had appeared in the summer of 1967. Eventually a total of five such announcements would be published during the period 1967 to 1970.

The fourth of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements: from Ambit #45, 1970.

The concept behind these announcements was to advertise ideas, as Ballard explained in a 1968 interview:

It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned [and that] I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction in general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea. … I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them. … But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in ‘Vogue’ magazine, or ‘Life’ magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them.

Interview with Jannick Storm, Speculation #21, recorded July 1968.

Another of Ballard’s interests in this period was textual and visual collage. Martin Bax has related how both he and Ballard were fascinated by the archive of their friend Paolozzi:

Eduardo has a huge image archive of material – which I think fascinated Jim very much. I suppose what Jim was interested in was Eduardo’s style of collecting images of the 20th century … I’ve been in his studio when we were doing some images, and he said, ‘What about a playing card, Martin?’ I said, ‘A playing card?’ And he opened a drawer which was totally full of packs of playing cards which he’d bought all over the world – some extremely sexy ones of ladies with nothing on … Eduardo’s used that type of material in his silkscreen work, and Ballard saw this as a way in which you could use this material in texts. There was a piece by Eduardo called ‘Moonstrips’ and ‘General Dynamic Fun’ that was published in Ambit. He had collected 300 or 400 pages of texts, and Ballard and I went through this huge pile of texts together and we cut and arranged it so it has some sort of curious logic. It starts off with a piece about internists locking up wealthy women in Long Island mental hospitals, and goes through a curious range of material.

Interview in ‘Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard’, recorded in 1983.

Advertisement for Volume 1 of Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips’: from Ambit #33, 1967.

The photograph of the models that formed part of the ‘Court Circular’ had originally been included in the Paolozzi/Ballard/Bax piece ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’, where it had been accompanied by a babble of ad-copy:

ALSO AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, A ROMANTIC BIT OF MAQUILLAGE, VIENNA ROSE LIPSTICK-IN-THE-ROUND WITH A SABLE CONTOUR BRUSH TO DIP IN THE LITTLE ROUGE POT AND STROKE COLOR ON YOUR LIPS. THEN, READY TO LET GO FROM A WELL-PACKED QUIVER, THE INFINITE POWERS OF ATTRACTION THAT ARE UNIQUELY YOURS. THE WALTZING DRESS IN PURPLE SATIN (BELOW)-A LUXURIOUS CONCOCTION–SKIRT, BILLOWING FROM A TINY STRAPLESS BODICE, COVERED WITH A JACKET OF LIGHTS-CATERPILLARS OF CHENILLE, TWINKLING WITH FIREFLIES OF CRYSTALS, SILVER AND BLUE SEQUINS. BY SARMI, AT BERGDORF GOODMAN; NAN DUSKIN, PHILADELPHIA; NEIMAN-MARCUS BOTH PAGES; JEWELRY BY KENNETH LANE. KISLAV GLOVES. THESE PAGES: ALL COIFFURES BY THE ANTOINE SALON OF NEIMAN-MARCUS

Photo of models plus ad-copy, from Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips – General Dynamic F.U.N.’; Ambit #33, 1967.

When we turn to Ballard’s prose fiction output in 1968, the year the ‘Court Circular’ was published, we find that he was in the middle of writing the short stories that were to form The Atrocity Exhibition. The previous issue of Ambit had contained one such story, ‘The Great American Nude’, from which many of the usual ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ themes are missing: there’s no car crashes, no JFK assassination or Jackie Kennedy, no atrocity films, no gigantic billboards, and Kline, Coma and Xero — the ‘couriers of the unconscious’ — are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, ‘Great American Nude’ concentrates on the theme of the erotic. Central to the story is a gigantic abstract sculpture of the actress Elizabeth Taylor, and there are some humorous asides on the male’s perception of the female; for example, one of the characters, Captain Webster, is afraid to ‘climb up on her’ in case he falls into ’some unpleasant orifice’.

Cover of Ambit #36, 1968, which included Ballard’s ‘The Great American Nude’.

Ballard’s emphasis on the erotic during this period may be in part due to Paolozzi. Michael Moorcock has recollected that in 1967/8, ‘Jimmy fell in with Paolozzi [and] shifted in that direction. Techno stuff. Women with big tits and guns’ (quoted in Iain Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 1999).

Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect. This idea is put into the mouth of Dr. Nathan in ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, which was published in mid-1967 under its original title ‘The Death Module’. It had first appeared, using many of the same phrases, in comments that Ballard made in a BBC radio interview with George MacBeth:

… one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life, on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level, the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that in fact exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a CinemaScope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.

‘The New Science Fiction: A Conversation between J. G. Ballard and George MacBeth’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 29th March 1967.

Pulling all this together, we can see that in 1967/8 Ballard was particularly interested in the advertisement of ideas, in textual and visual collage, in eroticism and the male’s perception of the female, and in the idea of three levels of experience. And all of this is present in the ‘Court Circular’ in Ambit #37. Here’s what we see …

Firstly there is the concrete poem ‘Love: A Print-out…’. This is explicitly personalised — it’s ‘for Claire Churchill’. It deals with the everyday facets of sex and love — ‘hair’, ‘fuck’, ‘girl’, ’suck’. And it presents itself as having a structure: firstly because it is laid out in the form of a regular grid, and secondly because it can be read in the form of a ‘boy meets girl’ story, ending with ‘wife’ and ‘baby’. (Of course, we have to impose that linearity on the poem ourselves by reading it from the top left and then consecutively down each column — it’s actually just a series of separate words spaced out in a regular display.) So this is sexuality, or the perception of the female by a male, on the level of everyday life.

Next, there is the photograph of the models. The girls all look much the same, and have a ‘classic female figure’ of the time; they all wear underwear that is designed to say ’sexy’ but without actually being especially erotic; they all wear a broad and meaningless smile. And the photo is an ‘image’ — it’s presumably from Paolozzi’s archive, and it has even appeared in Ambit the previous year, as part of ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’ This is sexuality at the level of mediatised reality, ‘a figment in CinemaScope’ as Ballard puts it.

Finally, there are the drawings by Bruce Mclean. Here the individual features of the woman cannot be seen … what we have instead are the elements of erotic fantasy: the long hair, the arched back, an open mouth, the over-emphasised thighs in various positions, the arm hanging languidly down from the body, a glimpse of the pudenda (it seems to be a black blob, perhaps the ‘orifice’ that worries Captain Webster in ‘The Great American Nude’). This is sexuality as perceived by a man on the level of the imagination.

Two of Bruce Mclean’s drawings from the ‘Court Circular’.

So the ‘Court Circular’ displays sexuality — or, more specifically, the perception of the female by the male — in terms of all three of Ballard’s levels of reality. And perhaps Bruce Mclean’s drawings symbolise the power that the imagination has to flow into the interstices and create a meaningful reality in the gaps and angles between the different levels of our existence.

This, then, is the advertisement within ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. Perhaps it is a touch didactic … but Ambit #37 is, after all, a newspaper.

Front page of the newspaper issue; Ambit #37, 1968.

Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

Mike Holliday — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:34:16 +0000

BALLARD AND THE VICISSITUDES OF TIME

by Mike Holliday

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘News from the Sun’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age, Arkham House, 1988).

The late 70s and early 80s represent a sort of interregnum in Ballard’s career — between the last of the urban disaster novels, High-Rise (1975), and the success of Empire of the Sun (1984). During this period he published two of his most atypical novels, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America, and returned to earlier concerns with three short stories that are preoccupied with time, and which recall such works as The Crystal World and ‘The Voices of Time’. These three stories — ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982) — are all concerned with a psychological disturbance of our perception of the flow of time, a dislocation that has been caused, somehow, by human space-flight. These stories are so similar to each other that one might suspect self-plagiarism, were they not written by Ballard. In the chronologically arranged Complete Short Stories, they sit there one after the other, eighty or so pages of obsessive investigation of the same themes.

‘Memories of the Space Age’ can serve as an exemplar for all three stories. Dr Mallory, an ex-NASA physician, has driven from Vancouver with his wife, Anne, to reach an abandoned Cape Kennedy in search of Hinton — an astronaut who murdered his co-pilot whilst in orbit. Mallory and his wife are suffering from a ’space-sickness’, in which time appears to slow so that a few minutes of normal time seem to last all day. This condition was first observed in returned astronauts, then in other NASA personnel, and has now spread out to envelop the whole of Florida. Mallory hopes that by returning to the source of the sickness he can understand its true meaning:

The murder of the astronaut and the public unease that followed had marked the end of the space age, an awareness that man had committed an evolutionary crime by travelling into space, that he was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness. The fracture of that fragile continuum erected by the human psyche through millions of years had soon shown itself, in the confused sense of time displayed by the inhabitants of the towns near the space centre. Cape Kennedy and the whole of Florida itself became a poisoned land to be forever avoided …

As time slows, it seems to Mallory that the world is bathed in a bright light, with ‘photons backing up all the way to the sun’. The descriptions of surrounding objects resemble those in The Crystal World: a fountain turns into ‘a glass tree that shed an opalescent fruit onto his shoulders and hands’, and ‘the waves were no longer running towards the beach, and were frozen ruffs of icing sugar’.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

At the Cape, Hinton has collected a number of antique aircraft, apparently in an attempt to engineer his own escape from time:

We had to get out of time — that’s what the space programme was all about. … Flight and time, Mallory, they’re bound together. The birds have always known that. To get out of time we first need to learn to fly. That’s why I’m here. I’m teaching myself to fly, going back through all these old planes to the beginning. I want to fly without wings …

Hinton attacks Mallory from his aircraft, and Mallory realizes that his own real aim is to kill Hinton. They seek each other through the deserted Cape and abandoned suburbs, but eventually Hinton sets fire to his aircraft and, taking Anne Mallory with him, he climbs the Shuttle launch platform and steps off with her ‘into the light’. Knowing that time will have stopped for his wife and Hinton as they experience this final moment of flight, Mallory looks forward to his own ending — he plans to open the cage housing a tiger that was once part of a small zoo:

… without time the lion could at last lie down with the lamb. … The key to the tiger cage he held always in his hand. There was little time left to him now, the light-filled world had transformed itself into a series of tableaux from a pageant that celebrated the founding days of creation. In the finale every element in the universe, however humble, would take its place on the stage in front of him. … He would unlock the door soon … lie down with this beast in a world beyond time.

The other two stories repeat the formula, with variations. In ‘News from the Sun’ people who have been associated with the space-programme, or who watched the flights on TV, are suffering deep fugues that leave them unconscious and motionless for increasing periods each day. Some of the victims eventually learn to become conscious through these fugues and they then become aware of a world where objects are endlessly multiplied as their past, present and future selves become simultaneously present. The sickness in ‘Myths of the Near Future’ is characterized by a ‘reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike of daylight, a gradual loss of weight and retreat into a hibernating self ‘ and in the later stages by a perception that time is slowing-down to an eventual frozen instant.

All three stories are remarkably similar. In each case, (i) the time distortions represent a psychic disorder caused by mankind attempting to leave the planet; (ii) each of the protagonists realizes that this change makes available to them a world where time no longer exists and all events — past and future — are simultaneously present; (iii) this new ‘world without time’ is characterized by a bright light; and (iv) the stories all include astronauts (or people who believe they are astronauts) and characters obsessed with flight, for example with micro-light planes, antique aircraft, and birds. Even minor elements are repeated: in all three stories the main protagonist has taken a long journey to or from Cape Kennedy once the psychological disorientation becomes apparent, and they each lose a considerable amount of weight as the condition progresses.

This repetition of themes in three stories in such a short space of time is rather puzzling, particularly as the concept of transcending time had already featured strongly in Ballard’s fiction in the early and mid-1960s. Why should he return to this theme in 1981-2? And why visit it three times in such a short period? In trying to understand this conundrum, it’s interesting to look at some of the comments that Ballard has made about his own creative activity, where he admits that the forces driving his imaginative processes are obscure, even to himself:

I just tend to write whatever comes mentally to hand, and what I find interesting at a particular time. These decisions as to what one’s going to write tend to be made somewhere at the back of one’s mind, so one can’t consciously say: ‘that’s what I’m going to write’. It doesn’t work out like that! (interview in ‘J. G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years’, 1976).

I’m barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves … (interview in ‘The Paris Review’, 1984).

I feel that the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seen obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer’s mind (‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’, 1963).

If we take these comments at face value, then something within the landscape of Ballard’s mind was presumably driving him in the direction taken by these three stories from the early 1980s. Perhaps a clue is evident in his own personal situation. Following the death of his wife, Ballard had brought up his three young children on his own. His close involvement and the deep satisfaction he got from his family is evident in both his semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women and his recent autobiography Miracles of Life. But by the late ’70s all three children had left home, and interviews at the time show the deep impact this had on him:

… the absence of those three children left a colossal vacuum in my life. … It is very strange … So I’ve been asking that question for at least a year — what the hell do I do now?’ (interview conducted in 1979 and published in J. G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1984)

I get up in the morning and the day just sort of stretches like the plains of Kansas, with not a speck on the horizon. Which is great, of course! (interview conducted in 1982 and published in Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard, 1984)

And in The Kindness of Women, the fictionalized version of Ballard explains ‘I spent the whole of my adult life with children. Suddenly, when I’m fifty, there’s this colossal vacuum. Mothers feel the same way. Nature hasn’t provided a contingency plan — or, as Dick would say, nature’s contingency plan is death.’ So it isn’t surprising that Ballard’s unconscious creative processes should turn once again to the notion of time, and of time’s involvement with the creation of meaning in one’s life.

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘News from the Sun’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

But why the specific obsession with a ‘frozen time’? I think that to comprehend this, we have to go back to Ballard’s idea that reality is, at bottom, a construct of the human brain. This has long been has been one of his favourite themes in interviews, and here’s a typical example:

What I do have is the notion, which I take from modern experimental psychology, that the universe presented to us by our senses is a kind of ramshackle construct that happens to suit the central nervous system of an intelligent bipedal mammal with a rather short conceptual and physical range. We see rooms and people and have perceptions — but it’s all a construct (interview in ‘Rolling Stone’, 1987).

The roots of this idea seem to lie in Ballard’s boyhood in Shanghai and his early grasp of the notion that the everyday world is a sort of stage-set, as he describes in his autobiography Miracles of Life in a passage where he and his father enter a deserted nightclub:

[I] walked on tiptoe through the silent gaming rooms where roulette tables lay on their sides and the floor was covered with broken glasses and betting chips. Gilded statues propped up the canopy of the bars that ran the length of the casino, and on the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.

If our reality is a constructed reality, then this applies equally to our notion of time and those aspects of our lives that are closely connected with our sense of lived time, such as our memories, hopes, and ideals:

… the view of modern psychology [is] that the brain presents us with only a ramshackle view of reality, a partial construct imperfect in numerous ways, from the more trivial — the geometry of the rooms we inhabit — to the more serious — our sense of time, memory, our hopes, ideals and private mythologies (interview in ‘Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space’, 1988).

And if our sense of lived time is a construct, then it becomes possible to conceive of an alternative form of reality that contains some form of timelessness or a non-linear time. But the source of this alternative notion of time must lie within ourselves, or as one of the characters in ‘Memories of the Space Age’ tells Mallory, ‘Doctor … The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head, not out here.’

Implicit in what Mallory refers to as ‘a world without time, an indefinite and unending present’ is the disappearance or metamorphosis of the future and of the past. The evanescence of the future is heralded in each of these three stories by the failure of the manned space programme and the resulting psychic disorientation, and is reflected in the landscapes, which are derelict or overgrown and largely deserted of inhabitants: ‘an immense silence of deserted marinas and shopping malls, abandoned citrus farms and retirement estates, silent ghettoes and airports.’ The shedding of the past can be seen in the loss of weight that occurs in those who experience time dislocation — as Mallory puts it, ‘he and Anne had each lost more than thirty pounds, as if their bodies were carrying out a re-inventory of themselves for the coming world without time.’ And the past explicitly withdraws in ‘Memories of the Space Age’:

Thankfully, as time evaporated, so did memory. He looked at his few possessions, now almost meaningless … The minutes were beginning to stretch, urged on by this eventless universe free of birds and aircraft. His memory faltered, he was forgetting his past, the clinic at Vancouver and its wounded children, his wife asleep in the hotel at Titusville, even his own identity.

But the stories do not represent the past and the future as disappearing completely. Instead they become available again in a new form of existence that brings past, present and future together simultaneously. In ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ this occurs explicitly through a process that is reminiscent of the crystallization of the universe that takes place in The Crystal World — the multiplication of objects so that all the different versions, past, present and future, exist at one and the same time:

The sun was annealing plates of copper light to his skin, dressing his arms and shoulders in a coronation armour. Time was condensing around him, a thousand replicas of himself from the past and future had invaded the present and clasped themselves to him. … The flow of light through the air had begun to slow, layers of time overlaid each other, laminae of past and future fused together. Soon the tide of photons would be still, space and time would set forever (‘Myths of the Near Future’).

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘News from the Sun’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

But sometimes, the merging of time is more indirect, as in ‘News from the Sun’ where Franklin describes himself as having a ‘premonition of the past’ and a ‘nostalgia for the future’, or in this passage from ‘Myths of the Near Future’:

There was a sense of stop-frame about the whole of his past life — his childhood and school–days, McGill and Cambridge, the junior partnership in Vancouver, his courtship of Elaine, together seemed like so many clips run at the wrong speed. The dreams and ambitions of everyday life, the small hopes and failures, were attempts to bring these separated elements into a single whole again. Emotions were the stress lines in this over–stretched web of events.

The essential thesis of these three stories is that the withdrawal or transfiguration of past and future should enable us to live in a more real and rewarding eternal present, and this new mode of being is described as transcending our everyday existence entirely. When Hinton and Anne Mallory step off the Shuttle gantry into empty space, they will continue to exist in an eventless eternity that others will perceive as merely a few seconds as they fall to the ground. As Dr. Mallory reflects,

It was curious that images of heaven or paradise always presented a static world, not the kinetic eternity one would expect, the roller-coaster of a hyperactive funfair, the screaming Luna Parks of LSD and psilocybin. It was a strange paradox that given eternity, an infinity of time, they chose to eliminate the very element offered in such abundance.

One of the underlying attractions of apprehending the simultaneity of all existence is that it will somehow enable us to transcend death. In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Sheppard is convinced that his wife is still alive even though she has died, and explains: ‘Everything that’s ever happened, all the events that will ever happen, are taking place together. We can die, and yet still live, at the same time. … No one who has ever lived can ever really die.’ And in an interview, Ballard tells us why The Crystal World is one of his favourite novels: ‘the idea that time might condense like ice, that we might somehow escape from that flux of time that sweeps us towards the end … is intriguing’ (interview in SFX, 1996).

If we can put to one side the ecstatic descriptions in Ballard’s fiction, it becomes apparent that an eventless eternity is the predictable result of the emasculation of the past and the future. Without memories, hopes or ideals to give meaning to the events of our lives, we find merely a series of occurrences, and the present starts to blur into an endless procession. But if this is the case, then the nature of such a world-without-time is ambiguous — instead of being a life lived to the full, an endless present can instead be deadening and boring, a major concern in Ballard’s later writings:

Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams that money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore. … Maybe we’re going to live in an eventless future. In a hundred years, the world might be very, very boring. (interview in ‘The Face’, 1988)

That Ballard holds this two-fold view of an endless present is not surprising, given the ambiguity that runs through all his work. Responding to a comment by Hans Ulrich Obrist that ambiguity is central to his writings, Ballard enthusiastically agrees: ‘I hope everything I have written is ambiguous, reflecting the paradoxical faces that make up human nature.’ Given this ambivalence, it is best to view an eternal present as one of Ballard’s extreme metaphors, or as an example of his predictive mythologies:

which in a sense provide an operating formula by which we can deal with our passage through consciousness — our movements through time and space. … mythologies that you can actually live by (interview in Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard, 1984).

These predictive mythologies can be utilized via our imagination, and in Ballard’s iconography the imagination is often symbolized by flight:

Deserted runways have a tremendous magnetic pull for me. … The concrete strip just beckons one into new realms. Indeed, any major airport in the world charges me with a powerful sense of inspiration: they offer new points of departure for the imagination (interview in ‘ZG Magazine’, 1988).

Imagination has special significance because our perception of reality is, for Ballard, an artificial construct, and more particularly a type of construct that may have been necessary when mankind was struggling for survival in a dangerous world but which is limiting and restricting in a society where external dangers are largely absent and the need is rather for an exploration of alternative possibilities. Hence it is to imagination that Ballard looks for help in understanding how we are now to live:

Don’t forget that man is, and has been for at least a million years, a hunting species surviving with difficulty in a terribly dangerous world. In order to survive, his brain has been trained to screen out anything but the most essential and the most critical. Watch that hillcrest! Beware of that cave mouth! Kill that bird! Dodge that spear! … But now the world is essentially far less dangerous. (interview in ‘Penthouse’, 1979)

Bearing in mind the difficulties that a wholly rational being would have in coping with a largely hostile environment, there must be enormous evolutionary advantages in possessing a powerful imagination, contrary to what one would assume, or the pressures of natural selection would long since have eliminated anyone handicapped by this confusing ability to invent an imaginary alternative to the world presented to us by our senses. And that, I take it, is the vital function which the imagination performs for the central nervous system and a brilliant stratagem for dealing with crucial limitations in the brain’s picture of reality. … The more we can engage our imaginations, therefore, the better, and the most important task for each of us is to test the imperfections of reality against the perfectibility of the dream. (interview in ‘Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space’, 1988)

We can now see why symbols of flight — antique planes, gliders, birds — figure throughout these three stories. It is only by using our powers of imagination that we can work out what Ballard’s extreme metaphor might mean for us, how we might live in a manner other than that ordained by a linear time that ‘runs into the future like a narrow-gauge scenic railway’ as Ballard tellingly describes the chronology of our lives.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

In fact, at the end of ‘Myths of the Near Future’ the metaphor changes when the characters find that they can merge their past, present and future selves into a single body:

[Martinsen's] body was now dressed in a dozen glimmering images of himself, refractions of past and present seen through the prism of time. … [Sheppard] embraced the helpless doctor, searching for the strong sinews of the young student and the wise bones of the elderly physician. In a sudden moment of recognition, Martinsen found himself, his youth and his age merged in the open geometries of his face, this happy rendezvous of his past and future selves. … they would move on, to the towns and cities of the south, to the sleepwalking children in the parks, to the dreaming mothers and fathers embalmed in their homes, waiting to be woken from the present into the infinite realm of their time-filled selves.

There is no suggestion here of a transcendent and eternal existence within an instant of time. Instead, the present is re-established by incorporating the past and future within itself, and they once again become available to create a meaningful life.

So the continual struggle is to how to relate the present to past and future. If these relations become too rigid, then our understanding of reality becomes conservative and restrictive, a theme that occurs regularly in Ballard’s interview comments:

One needs to break the conventional enamel that encases everything. … All around us, in practically every aspect of our lives, decisions are being made for us to guarantee our safe passage through this world. … There’s a sort of constant struggle on a minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives, throughout every day; one needs to dismantle that smothering conventionalized reality that wraps itself around us. There’s a conspiracy, in which we play our willing part, just to stabilize the world we inhabit, or our small corner of it. One needs at the same time to dismantle that smothering set of conventions that we call everyday reality. (interview in ‘Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard’, 1984)

The danger is that our memories, hopes and ideals act as conventions that stabilize our lives only too well. In reaction against this, we are driven towards the metaphor of a world without past or future, a world that is depicted in its most extreme form in Ballard’s ‘The Summer Cannibals’, one of the pieces that was included in The Atrocity Exhibition. The story concerns a visit by the protagonist (not named in this story, but I shall call him Travis) and his wife to a Mediterranean resort, the entire action taking place within a brief period of time — perhaps a couple of days. There’s much play on the way in which people’s lives are enervated at this type of resort: ‘exhausted by the sun, the resort was almost deserted’, ‘bodies … as inert as the joints of meat on supermarket counters’, and so on. Time passes, but nothing much happens, rather as in Ballard’s Vermilion Sands stories. This enervation is reflected in Travis’s relationship with his wife: ‘An enormous neutral ground now divided them, across which their emotions signalled like meaningless semaphores.’ And this neutral ground, which the sun opens up by bleaching away meaning, feelings, etc., is something that Travis can utilize — it opens up new vistas for him to explore. As meaning drains out of the resort and out of the lives of the people within it, the normal sense of time disappears. So the past, instead of being a history, becomes something that exists in our imaginations, and Travis can play around with his memories:

He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent over the handbasin; … her right hand touching the finger-smeared panel of the elevator control. Looking at her from the bed, he re-created these situations, conceptualizations of exquisite games.

And just as ‘the past’ disappears, so does ‘the future’, or at least that idea of the future as something that helps tie together our activities and lives. Instead, we have an open plain of endless possibilities — more exquisite games for Travis: ‘Was he playing an elaborate game with her, using their acts of intercourse for some perverse pleasure of his own?’

In a way, the absence of time passing, the lack of change, is reflected in the first and last paragraphs of ‘The Summer Cannibals’, both of which feature Travis’s wife waiting for him in the car as he wanders around on the beach. These two paragraphs, which bookend the story, are very similar — but are they two alternative versions of the same event? … or two different moments between which nothing much has changed? … or is there in no real difference between these two alternatives? And right at the end of the story, the disappearing footprints of the young man walking past Travis’s wife are symbolic of everything that may have happened: ’she looked down at the imprints of his feet in the white pumice. The fine sand poured into the hollows, … [she sat] watching the last of the footprints vanish in the sand.’ The footprints just disappear, as if they were never there, vanishing to leave no trace. They have been erased just as surely as the events of the story. The past isn’t in the story at all, except in the memories that Travis plays with. And there’s no future referred to — the end paragraph is virtually identical to the first. So the short period of time in which the events of ‘The Summer Cannibals’ takes place is entirely self-contained — it only means as much or as little as Travis makes it mean.

‘The Summer Cannibals’ is one of Ballard’s extreme metaphors. However, if we turn from the fiction to reality, we see that we might be able to escape the conventionalizing effect of the past and future and live in a more congenial type of endless present, as Ballard did when bringing up his young children, such that one’s everyday life somehow ’sits right’ with one’s memories and hopes without being determined by them. But (pace Ballard) time does not stand still — memories and hopes can always turn into constraints or into hollow catechisms, and the endless present can resolve into a mere series of events so that time stretches out in front like ‘the plains of Kansas’. This seems to me to be the sort of position that Ballard may have found himself in when he returned to the subject of time and wrote ‘News’, ‘Memories’, and ‘Myths’.

Ballard’s own resolution to these vicissitudes of time is hinted at in a contemporaneous vignette, ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’ (1984), in which ‘B’ wakes up to a world totally deserted except for himself and the birds. After wandering around for some months and ascertaining that no-one else remains, he stocks up for the winter:

But his only visitors were the birds, and he scattered handfuls of rice and seeds on the lawn of his garden and on those of his former neighbours. Already he had begun to forget them, and Shepperton soon became an extraordinary aviary, filled with birds of every species. Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

+ ‘News from the Sun’, first published in Ambit #87, Autumn 1981.
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’, first published in Interzone #2, 1982.
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’, first published in F & SF, Oct. 1982.
+ ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’, first published in Ambit #96, 1984.

A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company

Mike Holliday — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:46:55 +0000

Cover detail: The Unlimited Dream Company (Cape 1979; artwork by Bill Botten).

Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.

Ambiguity is one of the defining features of J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Consider, for example:

+ Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – to what extent are they fiction and to what extent autobiography?

+ Crash – about which the author himself appears undecided, sometimes describing it as a psychopathic hymn, but on another occasion as “a cautionary … warning against [a] brutal, erotic and overlit realm”.

+ The Atrocity Exhibition – the book which best displays Ballard’s refusal of unambiguous interpretations, and his dictum that the reader, rather than the writer, should bear “most of the hard work” in interpreting “a more oblique narrative style, understated themes, private symbols and vocabularies”.

However, Ballard’s 1979 book The Unlimited Dream Company contains, on the face of it, little in the way of serious ambiguity. To most readers, the eye is taken by the lyrical descriptions of the transformations wrought on Ballard’s home town of Shepperton, and the emotions are engaged by the progress towards a near-mystical transcendence of the day-to-day world. The outline of the story is straightforward. The main protagonist is Blake (fairly obviously named after William Blake), a young loner who steals a light plane and crashes it into the Thames at Shepperton. He somehow escapes from the submerged plane and is assisted by a number of local residents. But he finds himself physically unable to leave Shepperton, and begins to develop a series of magical powers with which he can transform the town and its inhabitants. Blake experiences flying as a condor, swimming as a whale, and running as a deer; and he seeds a luxurious growth in the local plant life using his own semen. Under his influence, the townspeople start to give up their sexual inhibitions and their interest in material goods. Blake learns to fly unaided and passes on this gift to the others; he also finds that he can absorb other people and animals into his own being. At the end of the book, the inhabitants of Shepperton fly upwards into the waiting universe, whilst Blake stays behind in order to work a similar transformation on the rest of the world and looks forward to a unification of the entire universe in a mystical transcendence: “we would merge with the trees and the flowers, with the dust and the stones, with the whole of the mineral world, happily dissolving ourselves in the sea of light that formed the universe … celebrating the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead.”

Certainly Malcolm Bradbury concentrated on the lyrical and optimistic aspects of The Unlimited Dream Company in his review of the book for The New York Times, lauding it as “a remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire, … a dreamy pastoral”, although Bradbury did think that at times the pastoral tone became “too innocent”. And in Out of the Night and Into the Dream, his book-length treatise on Ballard, Gregory Stephenson describes Blake as “the first truly whole, truly heroic figure in Ballard’s oeuvre”, who undergoes a “peaceful, affirmative and finally joyous metamorphosis.”

But the eye and the emotions are deceived, for beneath the surface of The Unlimited Dream Company lies the possibility of other, less straightforward, interpretations. For one thing, the status of the reality of the book’s events is never resolved: are they hallucinated by Blake as he lies trapped in the submerged plane? … or are they are a reflection of his delusional state as he wanders around Shepperton? … or is this straight fantasy and we are meant to understand that these unbelievable things actually happen? Any single interpretation is supported by sections of the text, only to be undermined by others.

But this uncertainty as to the ‘reality’ of the book’s events is itself a function of one critical fact: everything in the book is described as it is perceived by its narrator, Blake – and on Blake’s own account of his early life in Chapter 2, he is manifestly a delusional paranoiac. For example, he tells us that he was thrown out of medical school after becoming convinced that a cadaver was alive and terrorizing another student into helping him march it around in an attempt to revive it. On another occasion,

I was arrested by the police for being over-boisterous in the children’s playground … I was gripped by a Pied Piper complex, and genuinely believed that I could lead the twenty children and their startled mothers, the few passing dogs and even the dripping flowers away to a paradise which was literally, if I could only find it, no more than a few hundred yards from us.

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J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (p13).
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And Blake already has a Messianic belief in himself:

Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography … for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p13).
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To describe Blake as a classically unreliable narrator, as Andrzej Gasiorek does in his recent book on Ballard, is putting things mildly.

In fact, the lyrical descriptions of Blake’s awareness of his growing powers, and of Shepperton’s subsequent mutation, together with the singular narrative perspective, take the attention away from the darker side of Blake’s behaviour following his plane crash. He retains his paranoiac delusions, one example being his assumption after the crash that the bruises he has suffered are due to an attempt to kill him, rather than an effect of the accident or a genuine attempt at artificial respiration. He then goes around comparing the size of people’s hands to the bruises on his chest, in order to try and identify the culprit. There is, of course, no reason why anyone would want to kill him – it’s a paranoid delusion that feeds his own sense of self-worth.

The Thames at Shepperton, around the spot where Blake must have crashed his plane (photo: Simon Sellars).

As the book progresses other aspects of Blake’s personality and behaviour become apparent.

He is particularly susceptible to the suggestions of others:

Blake is extremely suggestible; in fact, much of his behaviour and thoughts are based on what others say or on events around him. Early on in the book, Miriam St Cloud asks Blake, somewhat humorously, whether he is some sort of Pagan God, and later on her mother suggests to him that he might start a flying school to teach the townspeople to fly (“I’ll talk to the people at the bank”, she adds). In both cases, Blake latches onto the comments as reflecting his own potential powers, and goes on to behave as if he really were a Pagan God and can teach people to fly like the birds.

The spreading of his semen around Shepperton to produce a luxuriant foliage is suggested to Blake by two occasions where he notices unusual plants growing nearby, in one case rising from the ground between his legs, “as if in response to my own sex”. From this, Blake develops the idea of fertilizing the whole of the town from his own sperm.

LEFT: Father Wingate … Blake’s “anti-conscience”.

Blake readily accepts Father Wingate’s suggestion that he stopped himself from “raping” the blind girl, Rachel … but this just isn’t true – Miriam St Cloud had to pull the little girl out of Blake’s arms. In fact, the priest seems to act as an “anti-conscience”, providing Blake with reassurance as to his motives and desires, at one point telling him to go ahead and possess Shepperton: “Blake, take your world … Look at it, it’s around you here”.

Most significantly, Blake takes all too literally Father Wingate’s suggestion that “For all we know, vices in this world may well be metaphors for virtues in the next. Perhaps you can take us all through that doorway”, and uses it on a number of occasions to justify to himself his increasingly megalomanic behaviour. For example, just before devouring a 12 year old girl as a “small, sweet breakfast”, he says:

I had dreamed of crimes and murders, unashamed acts of congress with beasts, with birds, trees and the soil. I remembered my molesting of small children. But now I knew that these perverse impulses had been no more than confused attempts to anticipate what was taking place in Shepperton, my capture of these people and the merging of their bodies with mine. Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world. [my emphasis]

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Ballard, UDC (p177).
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He is subject to abrupt changes of mood and thought:

One example of Blake’s changeability occurs early on in the book, when he sees that the three children have built a mock grave for him. He asks himself “Am I dead?” and becomes annoyed: “I kicked the flowers from the grave, pushed through the dusty foliage and stepped back into the park.” But at this point Blake’s mood suddenly changes, and his concern that he might have died disappears in an instant: “Immediately the light trapped below the trees rushed towards me, happy to find something living to seize upon. … I was certain that I had not died”.

The lack of stability in Blake’s emotions and thoughts is exacerbated by his incipient megalomania. He makes emotional declarations concerning what he wants to achieve, which are then contradicted by his later actions. One example occurs when he is preparing for his last attempt to leave Shepperton, and ecstatically describes how he wants to unite with the “fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, … within the great commonwealth of nature”. But the following afternoon, he regards the birds very differently:

The thousands of birds sat on the roofs of the abandoned cars, perched in the gutters of the supermarket and post office, and on the portico of the filling-station. Together they seemed to be waiting for something to happen. Were they expecting me to fly again for them? Irritated by the silence, I hurled a concrete chip into the flock of flamingos standing around the fountain in the shopping mall. They staggered into each other, flailing their wings in an ungainly pink glare.

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Ballard, UDC (p178).
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Blake rationalizes away his own behaviour:

His suggestibility and abrupt changes of thought mean that Blake easily rationalizes his own conduct. For example, here’s the description of his attack on his fiancée prior to stealing the plane:

While watching my fiancée dressing in the bedroom, I felt a sudden need to embrace her. … But as I held her shoulders against my chest I knew that I was not moved by any affection for her but by the need literally to crush her out of existence. … Only when she collapsed around my knees did I realize that I had been about to kill her, but without the slightest hate or anger. Later, as I sat in the cockpit of the Cessna, excited by the engine as it coughed and thundered into life, I knew that I had meant no harm to her. [my emphasis]

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Ballard, UDC (p14).
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As I’ve already noted, Father Wingate’s comment about “vices being metaphors for virtues in the next world” is frequently used by Blake to justify and rationalize his own behaviour. Here’s another example:

I remembered my bizarre attempt to suffocate Mrs St Cloud, the strange way in which I had tried to rape the little blind girl, and the unconscious young woman I had nearly murdered in her apartment near London Airport. These crimes and lusts were the first stirrings of the benign forces [sic] revealed to me in Shepperton. … Remembering Father Wingate’s words, I was certain now that vice in this world was a metaphor for virtue in the next, and that only through the most extreme of those metaphors would I make my escape.

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Ballard, UDC (pp167-8).
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Later on, he muses about the townspeople: “For all their hate, I was glad that I had taught them how to fly. Through me they had learned how to become more than themselves, the birds and the fish and the mammals, and had briefly entered a world where they could merge with their brothers and friends, their husbands and children”. This has a superficial ring of truth, because it matches some of the lyrical descriptions that Blake gives of what was happening, but it’s rubbish – he actually states several times in the preceding pages that he intends to keep the inhabitants within himself so as to provide the power that he requires to escape from Shepperton and pursue his wider megalomanic aims. And even this contradiction can be rationalized away:

I thought of … my conviction that I would one day slaughter all these people. I was certain that I had no wish to harm them, but only to lead them to the safety of a higher ground somewhere above Shepperton. These paradoxes, like my frightening urge to copulate with young children and old men, had been placed before me like a series of tests. [my emphasis]

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Ballard, UDC (p122).
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He attributes his own behaviour to others:

When Blake first sees Father Wingate, just after coming back to consciousness following the plane crash, he attributes to the clergyman both his own suspicious attitude and his desire to violently crush others out of existence (as he had attempted to do to his fiancée just hours before):

Seeing his strong physique at close quarters, the shoulders still trembling with some strange repressed emotion, I could easily imagine him deciding to crush the life out of me and send me back to the other side before everything got out of hand. He was deliberately exposing the suspicions that crossed his face, trying to provoke me. I was tempted to grapple with him, force my bruised body against his and hurl him on to the oil-stained grass.

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Ballard, UDC (p25).
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Shepperton film studios: backstreet dream factory (photo: Simon Sellars).

And a couple of pages later, he generalizes his own suspicions onto the whole population of Shepperton:

Their faces seemed almost hostile. … the placid town into which I had fallen had a distinctly sinister atmosphere, as if all these apparently unhurried suburbanites were in fact actors recruited from the film studios to play their roles in an elaborate conspiracy. … For whatever motives, one of these people had tried to kill me.

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Ballard, UDC (p26).
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Blake’s megalomania and sense of self-importance:

Blake becomes megalomanic to the extreme. In fact, when stripped out of the self-lyrical context that surrounds them, his declarations are repetitive and tedious: “I greeted the sun as an equal, a respected plenipotentiary I admitted to my domain” … “Feeling the sun bathe my naked body, I worshipped myself” … “I was almost sure now that my powers were limitless, that I was capable of anything I wished to imagine” … “Once I had devoured everyone in Shepperton I would be strong enough to move into the world beyond …, a holy ghost taking everyone in London into my spirit before I set off for the world at large” … “I was the first living creature to escape death, to rise above mortality to become a god” … “I would fly on across the planet, merging with all creatures until I had taken into myself every living being, every fish and bird, every parent and child, a single chimeric god uniting all life within me” … and there is much more along the same lines.

His sexual feelings are transmuted into violence and possession:

All of Blake’s near-victims, whom he attempts to crush to death, are female: his fiancée, the little blind girl, Mrs St Cloud, and Miriam St Cloud. Although on Blake’s account he acts without wishing any harm to the victim, there is always some sort of sexual feeling, thought, or circumstance that is present. For Blake, sexual feelings are transmuted into violence and possession.

The desire to crush rather than to embrace is one symptom of Blake’s desperate need for physical closeness and possession of others. The other main symptom is that after his plane crash he does not eat, but wants to feed off the bodies of the local inhabitants: “Although I had eaten nothing for forty-eight hours, I was hungry only for the flesh of my own species. And I would take that flesh, not with my bruised mouth, but with my entire body, with my insatiate skin”.

Although Blake does on occasion release those with whom he has merged, the underlying impulse to keep and to hold is obvious, as can be seen from the following two examples, which are worth quoting at some length:

Within me I could feel the bodies of ten-year-old Sarah and her little brother, and of a teenage boy. Jealous of their freedom, I had not released them when we landed. I needed their young bodies and spirits to give me strength. They would play forever within me, running across the dark meadows of my heart. I had still not eaten, although this was the fourth day since my arrival, but I had tasted the flesh of these children and knew that they were my food. [my emphasis]

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Ballard, UDC (p164).
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I lusted after this youth. His smell of fear excited me … I lusted after him, but for his body and not for his sex. … In the back seat of a flower-bedecked limousine I embraced him gently, caressed his nervous skin, pressed his cold hands against the gates of my body. At the last moment, as I eased him into my chest, he gave a sudden cry of fear and relief. I felt his long legs within mine, the shafts of his bones forming splints around my femurs, his buttocks merging into my hands. … His grimace with all its terror and ecstasy moved through me like a claw seizing my face. With a last sigh he merged within my flesh, a son reborn into his father’s womb. … While he lay within me, his identity fading for ever, I knew that I would never release him, and that his real flight was taking place now across the skies of my body in the rear seat of this limousine. The last motes of his self fled through the dark arcades of my bloodstream, down the sombre causeways of my spinal column, following the faint cries of the three children I had taken into me that afternoon. … I embraced him within me as I embraced myself. [my emphasis]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p174-5).
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LEFT: Illustration from The Book of Urizen, by William Blake.

Blake’s personality and behaviour have strong similarities to the mind-set of fascism: for example, the megalomania, the paranoid delusions about others, the exclusion or demonization of doubters or those with alternative points of view. In particular, the fascist requires that everything must cohere together as one – and Alistair Cormack has pointed out that this is well described by a line written by the namesake of Ballard’s protagonist, William Blake: “One command, one joy, one desire; One curse, one weight, one measure; One King, one God, one Law” (The Book of Urizen).

The protagonist of The Unlimited Dream Company is a delusional paranoiac, and it is interesting to note how closely he conforms to an early description of the anti-Semitic and fascistic personality by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (originally written in the middle of the Second World War), the authors characterize the fascist and anti-Semitic personality as essentially paranoid, and as based around an inverted relationship between the interior and exterior worlds. In non-paranoid individuals, there is a learning process forced on us by our interactions with the physical and social environments, by means of which we learn to distinguish between that which lies within us and that which lies without, and hence we are able to learn the processes of “distancing and identifying, self-awareness and the conscience.” Therefore, an individual’s mind normally develops and changes so as to reflect the external world and the changes that are perceived there: in a phrase, “the alien must become familiar”. But the paranoiac individual attempts to make the environment match their own interior world: the alien is therefore something that must be destroyed or devoured. There is a resulting confusion between the inner and outer worlds; intimate experiences may be interpreted as hostile and “impulses which the subject will not admit as his own even though they are most assuredly so, are attributed to the object – the prospective victim.”

This leads to a set of behaviours that is typical of the delusional paranoiac. Aggressive wishes are projected outwards in the form of evil intentions belonging to others. Aggression may then be acted out in the form of “supposed self-defence”, and hatred may develop into a “generalized urge to destruction. The sick individual re gresses to the archaic nondifferentiation of love and domination. He is concerned with physical proximity, seizure – relationship at all costs.”

Because the paranoiac has difficulty distinguishing internal and external worlds, he “becomes poorer rather than richer. He loses the reflection in both directions: since he no longer reflects the object, he ceases to reflect upon himself, and loses the ability to differentiate. Instead of the voice of conscience, he hears other voices.” In one sense, such an individual is overflowing: he is continually transferring himself outside himself. But this is a flow into nothingness; and as a result the paranoid individual “overflows and fades away at one and the same time. [The paranoid mind] invests the outer world boundlessly with its own content; but it invests it in fact with the void: with an overstatement of mere means, relations, machinations, and dark practice without the perspective of thought.”

The paranoid mind is therefore prone to merely repeating its own self, and the result is a “closed circle of eternal sameness” which bears a resemblance to the omnipotence of a God: “It is as though the serpent which said to the first men ‘you will be as God’ had redeemed its promise in the paranoiac. He makes everything in his own image. He seems to need no living being, yet demands that all serve him. His will permeates the universe and everything must relate to him”.

Adorno and Horkheimer view fascism as this behaviour transferred to the political sphere: the paranoid’s world view is taken to be normal, and to reflect the world as it actually is. But isn’t Adorno and Horkheimer’s account also an explicit description of Blake’s behaviour throughout The Unlimited Dream Company? Thus:

+ There is a confusion between the inner and outer worlds

+ The paranoiac mind invests the world with its own content

+ The paranoiac’s will permeates the world and everything must relate to him

+ Unacknowledged impulses are attributed to the object or to other people

+ Seems to need nobody else but demands that all others serve his purposes

+ Aggressive wishes are projected as evil intentions belonging to others

+ The other or alien is something that must be destroyed or devoured

+ Cannot differentiate between love and domination

+ A concern with physical proximity, seizure – “relationship at all costs”

+ Hearing other voices instead of the voice of the conscience.

If we consider Blake to be a fascistic personality, then we can also see the defective nature of the transcendent future that he promises to the people of Shepperton. As Alistair Cormack has suggested, the sense of community in the book is a parody of the real thing; in fact, it seems to consist of not much more than Blake’s capricious declamations of his feelings for those whom he is transforming according to the dictates of his own imagination and then assimilating into himself. In this imitation of true community, everything moves in one direction, from the paranoid individual (as from the megalomanic Fuehrer) to the rest of the world. There is no “reflection in both directions”, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase. The one exception occurs after Blake is shot by Stark, when he “cures” the three small children of their mongolism, blindness, and lameness; one of the children responds by saying “Blake, thank you … Can I help you?” Reciprocity briefly makes its presence felt, only for the dream of transcendence to resume, culminating in Blake’s rhapsody about the union of the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate.

The world that Blake creates for himself out of Shepperton is indeed “closed and circular”. … He wants to close-off the town from the outside world. … He starts a process whereby the other humans are all de-differentiated from one another, and begins to assimilate their individuality to himself in both a physical and a spiritual sense. … And he cannot tolerate any manifestation of independence, to which he responds with childish anger, for example when the inhabitants that he has absorbed attempt to rise upwards towards the sun: “Desperate to escape from them …, I pretended to climb towards the sun, and then plunged into the empty shopping mall, ready to dash us all against the ornamental tiles, scatter the corpses of myself and these townspeople across the appliances and furniture suites”. What Blake really wants, to paraphrase his own words, is to “embrace them as he embraces himself”; this would indeed be a world that is closed in on itself – such an embrace crushes the other out of existence, just as Blake’s physical embrace had tried to crush the life out of the women he has met.

LEFT: Lord Horror appeals to the townspeople (illustration by Kris Guidio from Hardcore Horror #2).

The way in which Blake wants to take the very existence of Shepperton’s inhabitants into himself is rather reminiscent of another, more notorious, fantasy novel — Lord Horror, David Britton’s extreme, and deliberately offensive, satire against fascism and anti-Semitism (published in 1989 and the last novel to be successfully prosecuted under the U.K.’s Obscene Publications Act, albeit overturned on appeal). Lord Horror’s hatred of the other in the form of ‘the Jew’ culminates with his devouring, all too literally, a Polish Jew in Manhattan, and Horror ruminates that by this method, “his body could simultaneously be home and grave [for the Jews] … perhaps he could rejuvenate himself endlessly and free himself from death.” A home and a grave — this is exactly what Blake offers the population of Shepperton. But in Lord Horror, David Britton gets it right. Horror takes to his bed and expires; by attempting to negate and control the other by assimilation into himself, Horror only succeeds in bringing about his own demise. The absorption of everything into oneself is a journey not to transcendence but to the void; as Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, the perpetrator “overflows and fades away at one and the same time”.

In fact, the transcendence that Blake offers up in The Unlimited Dream Company is as empty as that suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer or as portrayed in Lord Horror … all we are left with are vague phrases and the promise of the ending of all differentiation and individualization, a process which can only result in the annihilation of everything: “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

LEFT: Lord Horror embraces himself
(illustration by Kris Guidio from Hardcore Horror #4)

Note: This article has its origins in my sense of dissatisfaction when I first read “The Unlimited Dream Company”, some twenty years after it was originally published. Here was the first book of Ballard’s for which I could feel no real empathy. I could admire the novel stylistically and appreciate the message of the power of the imagination, but the only emotion I felt from reading it was a vague sense of frustration and irritation – yet I wasn’t really sure why. A subsequent re-reading started to enlighten me – I was “reading through” the lyrical and pastoral descriptions and seeing Blake’s true personality, which was megalomanic but at the same time rather ordinary (a description that might equally well be applied to Hitler). Interpreting Blake’s actions and desires in this light led me to the idea of a “fascistic reading” of the book. The impetus to finally put pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard) came when I heard Alistair Cormack give a talk in which he arrived at a similar conclusion, expressed by reading the “dark side” of William Blake against the more usual optimistic and utopic view taken of The Unlimited Dream Company. Mike Holliday, July 2007.

..:: WORKS CITED

+ Adorno, Theodor W. & Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 1944/1997 (quotes are from pp. 187-192 of the Verso edition).

+ Ballard, J.G. Introduction to the French edition of ‘Crash’, translation into English in Foundation #9, November 1975.
—————— The Unlimited Dream Company, Cape, 1979.

+ Blake, William. The Book of Urizen, 1794.

+ Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘Fly Away’, review in The New York Times, 9 December 1979,

+ Britton, David. Lord Horror, Savoy, 1990 (though actually published in 1989)
———— Hardcore Horror #2, Savoy, 1990 (comic book).
———– Hardcore Horror #4, Savoy, 1990 (comic book).

+ Cormack, Alistair. ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’, a talk given at the International Conference on J. G. Ballard, University of East Anglia, 6 May 2007.

+ Gasiorek, Andrzej. J.G. Ballard, Manchester University Press, 2005.

+ Stephenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and Into the Dream, Greenwood Press, 1991.

..:: MORE BALLARDIANA FROM MIKE HOLLIDAY

+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
+ J.G. Ballard: A Collector’s Guide
+ ‘You And Me And The Continuum’: Doorman To The Atrocity Exhibition
+ The Atrocity Exhibition Discussions

Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

Mike Holliday — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 14:59:55 +0000

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).

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Interview by Mike Holliday
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Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction professionally as soon as he left school. In 1964 he took over the editorship of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds, gradually transforming it into an outlet for imaginative fiction that caught the contemporary zeitgeist. Under his editorship, New Worlds published many of J.G. Ballard’s most innovative stories, including several of those that would later be included in The Atrocity Exhibition.

The Elric novels are possibly Moorcock’s most popular books, featuring an anti-hero who reverses many of the usual fantasy genre clichés. His Jerry Cornelius character is also an anti-hero of sorts, who reflects the uncertainty and ambiguity of the modern age and features in numerous short stories and four novels, including The Condition of Muzak, which won the Guardian Fiction Award. Many of Moorcock’s writings over the last thirty years or so are more mainstream literary, rather than genre, fiction; his best-regarded novels include Behold the Man (1969), Gloriana (1978), Mother London (1988), King of the City (2000), and the recently completed Between the Wars quartet, which explore – through irony and humour – the events and mind-set that led to the Holocaust.

Rock music has always appeared in Moorcock’s fiction, and he has collaborated on a number of occasions with Hawkwind. Members of the band also helped with the recording of Moorcock’s own album, New World’s Fair.

Moorcock has known Ballard since the early 1960s, not only as editor and fellow writer, but also as a personal friend. For this interview, I asked him about Ballard’s influence, the significance of New Worlds, and his musical activities and latest writing projects.

Mike Holliday
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Can I start by asking how and when you first met Jim Ballard?

I think it was in E. J. Carnell’s office in Grape Street. Jimmy was working for one of the other MacLaren magazines (publisher of New Worlds, which Carnell then edited) — Chemistry and Industry, I think. We had a nodding acquaintance for a while. Then John Brunner and I (this would have been about 1960) decided to call a conference of SF writers, with a view to starting some kind of association. The meeting was very disappointing to me, Barry Bayley and Jimmy. We’d hoped to hear some stimulating stuff about, as it were, a new literature for the space age. Instead all these guys were interested in was ‘how to break into new markets — how to sell to TV’ and so on. United in our disappointment, we started meeting regularly once or twice a week, mostly at the White Swan in Knightsbridge, near where Jimmy was working. After I was married, we became even closer, seeing Jimmy, Mary and their kids pretty regularly. We all got on very well.

LEFT: Image taken from The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Doubleday, 1979).

You’ve said in the past that both yourself and Ballard were reacting against what you saw as the sterility of modern literature, and especially the ‘English social novel’. Given this, what were your aspirations when you took over the editorship of New Worlds in 1964?

Well, Jimmy and I were both great fans of William Burroughs. We weren’t so much influenced by him as inspired by him. We were also interested in condensing narrative, of finding forms which would enable us to carry as many narratives as possible in as short a space. We were, I suppose, anti-modern rather than post-modern. Our ideas didn’t come out of academia. They were answers to the problems of working writers trying to find the best ways of dealing with our particular experience. Burroughs pointed the way, as we saw it. We talked about creating a new magazine which would run our more experimental work. When Jimmy did ‘The Terminal Beach’, Barry Bayley and I talked Carnell into running it in New Worlds. When I did ‘The Deep Fix’, Jimmy talked Carnell into running that. So we had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. When I took over New Worlds our aspirations were reflected in those enthusiasms and the kind of work we’d started to do. I told Roberts and Vintner, the new publisher, what I wanted to do. They told me what I could do. So it was a slower process than we’d hoped. Also, we assumed there were dozens of writers out there champing at the bit, just waiting to submit the kind of stories we’d talked about. Sadly, it seemed at first there were only the three of us! It took a while to get the material we wanted. It even took time to formalise what we actually wanted to do. From the beginning Jimmy was my ’star writer’ and complained I pushed him too hard — to write our first serial, for instance, which was Equinox, which became The Crystal World.

This photo is believed to have been taken in 1968 at the Brighton Arts Festival. From the left, Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Mike Kustow (director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London), Ballard (photo courtesy Michael Moorcock).

Did Ballard fully share those aims or were there significant differences between you? And what do you think were the main differences between you and Ballard in the way you reflected your dissatisfaction with modern literature in your own writings?

The differences were mostly to do with personality, I think. I was a lot younger than Jimmy (almost ten years) and I’d had a lot of practical experience not only editing popular fiction magazines but changing them. I’d started with Tarzan Adventures, when I was 17, and had learned how to take an initially conservative readership with me. The same had happened on Sexton Blake Library, which I worked on when I was 19. I had to build the circulation as well as change the policy. That was one thing. Another was that Jimmy had, if you like, a narrower notion of the kinds of experimentalism he wanted to see. I really wanted to open the doors, as it were, to whatever was out there — not just writers who thought as Jimmy thought! I tended to write character-based fiction. Even Elric was that. When I came up with Jerry Cornelius — who was a personality and a technique combined — I don’t think Jimmy was altogether sure of what I was doing, partly because I tended to use comedy and had a far more sardonic voice. I was also far more politically focussed. I didn’t share Jimmy’s commitment to the Surrealists, though we’d both been impressed by the first Surrealist exhibition at the Whitechapel in the mid-fifties (I think). My influences included Firbank, whom Jimmy wasn’t interested in at all.

But these were very minor differences. What we both talked about all the time was the possibility of creating, out of the techniques and conventions of a certain kind of SF (most of which appeared in Galaxy magazine), something which could confront the subject matter and sensibility we felt wasn’t really being addressed by the conventions of Modernism. We felt that Modernism had had its day. We also thought we could reunite popular and ‘literary’ fiction through the medium of SF — or at least what we made of SF. Burroughs had shown us one way of doing this.

Jimmy had been through that Japanese prison camp. I had been through the Blitz. These were, if you like, extreme experiences, yet seemed to us to have a lot to do with how it was in the world we lived in. Neither of us were bothered by the H-Bomb, for instance, as such. Jimmy felt it had saved his life, probably. I saw it as keeping the peace; Brian Aldiss, too, saw the Bomb as having saved him being involved in the invasion of Japan. We were both impatient with the themes of the chattering classes of our day. I think our main differences were probably generational. Rock and roll was very much part of my life, as was the music, say, of Messiaen. Jimmy had no real interest in music at all. That said, we still had more in common than not. And still have, for that matter, for all that we developed very different styles.

LEFT: New Worlds for May/June 1964: the first issue edited by Moorcock, with Ballard’s story ‘Equinox’ and his article on William Burroughs both featuring prominently; the cover is by James Cawthorn.

In your account of New Worlds, reprinted in the recent anthology from Thunder’s Mouth Press, you wrote ‘Ballard remained the backbone of New Worlds’ policy. His influence was seminal and it was profound.’ Can you expand on why Ballard’s influence was so important for yourself and the other writers gathered round New Worlds during the 1960s?

Jimmy, as I said, was almost ten years older and had reflected longer on the issues which concerned us. Disch, Sladek, Langdon Jones, Spinrad and the rest were all roughly my age. Jimmy wasn’t so much ‘influential’ as ‘inspirational’, as I said in reference to Burroughs. Though we often disagreed superficially, he had already developed a vocabulary which identified problems I was still trying to identify and challenge. I got as much non-fiction out of him as I could. He was, I suspect, a bit disappointed that I didn’t follow his lead more closely. Indeed, he tended to be disappointed that all the writers didn’t do versions of what he was doing! But it was his presence, the quality of his work and the quality of his mind which was influential.

He inspired his contemporaries, like Aldiss and Brunner, for instance, to concentrate increasingly on contemporary imagery and issues. He was so far removed from even the best genre writers, such as Dick or Pohl and Kornbluth, that he was our finest model in showing new writers how to develop their own vocabularies. I didn’t want to write like Jimmy any more than the rest of our best writers, but he showed that it was possible to write idiosyncratically about what we saw as the urgent issues of the day, that genre conventions need only be employed where they were useful to the individual. Previous to that I think Jimmy would argue only Bradbury had managed that transformation. Bradbury was Jimmy’s inspiration before Burroughs. I had seen Bester and the Americans who influenced him as a similar inspiration. Neither of us could read what is generally called ‘Golden Age’ SF.

Honestly, I think it wasn’t much more than that Jimmy was there. And when he began publishing the stories which became The Atrocity Exhibition he showed other writers just how far you could go in your own direction. He showed that you could carry an entire narrative on an icon — especially an iconographic name, like Marilyn Monroe. We had also spoken about the new mythology of our times. Again, Jimmy showed how you could employ that mythology to present the reader with a complex fiction in a very small number of pages. Many people, in my view, misinterpreted this idea, or employed it very lazily. Jimmy brought a rigour to his work which was also inspirational. He helped raise the bar, if you like — raise the aspirations of the best writers. You can see this in writers like M. John Harrison, who was not especially influenced by Jimmy’s subject matter, but understood that he could aim to produce his very best work and know it would be published — at least in New Worlds.

You’ve already mentioned Burroughs. Which other authors did you most admire at that point, and how do you believe they influenced what yourself and Ballard were writing?

Burroughs, like Borges, showed us what it was possible to do. Neither Borges nor Burroughs were available to us until about 1960 or so. I first heard Borges’s stories related to me by a Spanish-speaking Swede while hitch-hiking from Uppsala to Paris. It was a while before City Lights, I think it was, brought out the first translations. Burroughs wasn’t a disappointment, when we finally met him, but Borges was. Burroughs pretty much lived as he wrote, while Borges was a rather conservative man with a keen interest in G. K. Chesterton. We were also great enthusiasts of noir thrillers and French nouvelle vague cinema. I was a huge fan of Camus, for instance. I’m not sure Jimmy read much existentialist stuff, but he loved the cinema produced in France at that time, as well as surrealist painting and Dada texts. Jarry was another inspiration to us. And I loved Boris Vian.

I think we were all part of a broad movement which was rejecting, as I said, the played out conventions of Modernism. We were looking for methods which worked for us. Some were eventually abandoned. Some were modified. We now live in a world where many of our innovations, techniques and subjects we considered our own, have become so commonly used nobody even knows where they originally came from. We’ve probably, therefore, achieved what we set out to do, to establish fresh conventions better able to deal with contemporary life.

Front row left to right: stripper Euphoria Bliss, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

During the second half of the 1960s, Ballard was also closely associated with Ambit magazine, and with Eduardo Paolozzi. Was there much interplay between the rest of the New Worlds writers and Ambit or Paolozzi?

Well, I introduced Jimmy to Eduardo. I knew a number of pop artists mostly through Chris Finch, an art critic who began working for New Worlds around 1967, when I changed the format and paper stock so that we could run contemporary art as well as fiction. There was some interplay with Ambit because Jimmy became literary editor and commissioned work from me and Michael Butterworth, for instance. New Worlds was a commercial news-stand magazine. I brought specific experience to it and I had no interest in editing a ‘little magazine’. We had a big crossover audience with things like Oz and IT. We were appealing, I think, to a broader readership than Ambit, yet we took more risks. Ambit, ironically, seemed aimed at a narrower readership, more academic and consciously literary. Our original ideas had involved bringing a more confrontational, risk-taking fiction to a popular audience. I knew how to appeal to the wider market and New Worlds, especially in its larger format, did that. Circulation only became a problem when W.H. Smiths objected to our content, but we remained a news-stand magazine until Smiths found a way of busting us. Then we became a paperback quarterly.

Ironically we reprinted much of the material Smiths objected to in The Best of New Worlds and in New Worlds Quarterly, but since these came from major publishers (presumably) they didn’t object to distributing the same material! Ambit liked what we published and I think it’s fair to say that it picked up on what we were doing. We didn’t pick up much on what Ambit was doing. I have to say we were rather arrogant. We felt Ambit didn’t go far enough. Even when we ran Pynchon, for instance, we tended to think he was a bit weak compared to our most ambitious writers. I never thought his ‘Entropy’, which we ran, was anything like as well done as Pamela Zoline’s ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. I liked Ambit, but to be honest, except where Jimmy had input, it seemed a bit cautious or — I don’t know, middle class? — in comparison to New Worlds. Only when Jimmy took over the fiction did it seem to perk up.

Eduardo Paolozzi’s cover for New Worlds, August 1967.

As well as more established writers such as yourself, Ballard, and Brian Aldiss, New Worlds published some of the earliest, and best, work of writers such as Tom Disch, John Sladek, M. John Harrison. How did you see your role as editor, and later publisher, to those newer writers?

I saw New Worlds as a resource for ambitious writers. A platform, if you like, from which they could fly wherever their ambition and intuition led them. I also knew that most commercial publishers are very cautious and hate taking risks and that they are encouraged to be a little braver if you put something in print first. In several cases we took work which had been turned down by mainstream publishers and only after we’d printed it did a new mainstream publisher accept it — ‘Report on Probability A’, ‘Camp Concentration’, ‘Bug Jack Barron’ and others were all rejected by the publishers who had expressed interest in them. After we ran them, established publishers decided to give them a go. In the case of Phil Dick, though we didn’t run any of his work in my New Worlds, we did publish the first serious assessments of him and Tom Maschler read these and decided to publish his work with Cape. Previous to that, Dick had scarcely appeared in England and only in very pulpish editions. Maschler also ‘poached’ Jimmy from Gollancz and would ask me my opinion of who, as it were, was hot. Michael Dempsey, originally with Hutchinson, was also inclined to publish writers he’d first read in New Worlds. We became good friends as a result.

In a recent interview with Ballardian, Iain Sinclair noted that Ballard is ’seen as a great guru of the West, but the people who are doing that very rarely refer back to the earlier books. They go back maybe to Crash, because they know it’s a film, and they think that’s shocking, but … the real early energy and madness is still not appreciated.’ Which of Ballard’s books do you most admire?

I have to say it’s The Atrocity Exhibition closely followed by Empire of the Sun. For different reasons, of course.

Have you kept in touch with his later books, those that followed Empire of the Sun?

Not much, I must admit. I have no opinion of the later books I haven’t read, and feel very well-disposed towards them from what I’ve read about them. But I think it’s true that the real risk-taking books were mostly done some time ago. This isn’t a criticism, however. If anyone should be allowed to rest on their laurels, he should.

Earlier in your careers, both yourself and Ballard used what’s often referred to as non-linear narrative — most notably in the Jerry Cornelius stories and novels, and in The Atrocity Exhibition. But you’ve both largely forsaken those techniques for more traditional narrative styles — why do you think that is?

I’m not sure that’s wholly true of me. The Pyat books required a conventional narrative to convey the passage of real time, but I’ve continued to write Cornelius stories — see the recent Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius which has stories about Diana, 9/11 and so on. I’m currently working on a new short novel, Modem Times, which is a non-linear Cornelius story. Mother London was non-linear. Even some of the recent Elrics have been what you might call semi-linear! I don’t know why Jimmy has returned to his pre-Atrocity Exhibition mode in his recent books. No doubt he’s found that he can respond better to current stimuli with more linear forms. I’ve no theory about that.

LEFT: Jerry Cornelius, as conceived by Mal Dean for New Worlds…

What did Ballard think of your fantasy novels and the Jerry Cornelius writings?

Oh, honestly, I don’t think he really read much of them. He never quite ‘got’ Cornelius, though I think, oddly enough, that he understands what I was trying to do better now than when we were younger. He’s always been generous in his praise, but I don’t believe he’s ever read a lot of fiction. He’ll offer lavish praise, but it’s never very specific!

You’ve both written novels about, or set in, London: in your case, Mother London, King of the City, and parts of the Cornelius novels; in Ballard’s case The Unlimited Dream Company, Millennium People, Kingdom Come. Yet there are substantial differences between them; it seems to me that Ballard’s contain a sense of alienation so far as the city is concerned, whereas yours have more of a sense of belonging. Yet it’s Ballard that’s stayed in Shepperton, while you seem to have lived all over the place!

I don’t think Jimmy ever liked London much or he and Mary wouldn’t have moved to Shepperton when they did. He got out the first chance he had, partly, of course, because he thought they could give the children a better life. On the other hand I felt I owed it to my children to keep them at Holland Park Comprehensive where they could learn about life and survival! I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving until the whole city seemed to me to become commodified. Moving to the suburbs simply wasn’t an option for me. When I moved to Fulham around 1983 Jimmy welcomed me back and said, ‘You must come and visit me in the suburbs.’ I replied: ‘I’m in the suburbs, Jimmy. You’re in the bloody country.’ It felt odd, even then, not being in easy walking distance of the West End. I was born in the suburbs and got to the centre as soon as I could.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Jimmy has made something wonderful and original of his environment, but I can’t think of anything much worse than living in Shepperton. I’d wither and die there. Similarly, ‘my’ London is West and Central London, say as far as Holborn, while Iain Sinclair has made the East and the City his territory. No doubt we use the material we find wherever we settle, but we also have a rough notion of which environment suits us best. I’m tending to use Paris more and more, because I prefer contemporary Paris to contemporary London. In other circumstances, though, I’d be happy in LA or NY — any large city — but I’d rather live in the country if I couldn’t live in the city. I admire Jimmy for the creative use he’s made of that environment and his circumstances, but we’ve always been pretty much confirmed in our preferences. In both cases, we’ve recreated our environment in our own image, I’m sure.

Until 1980 Ladbroke Grove was the centre of my universe. As it was gentrified I went elsewhere for my stimulus, to places where, if you like, it was a little less comfortable to live (than modern Notting Hill); I was amused when Martin Amis and George Melly moved into an area they considered rough. When I first moved there, taxi drivers refused to take you north of Westbourne Grove and there were knife fights in the streets. I realised at one point that I was what Amis referred to as a ‘denizen’ of Notting Hill. For a while Queens Club Gardens, surrounded by council estates and largely hidden from the gentry, suited me, but once that was ‘discovered’ I had to move again. If I hadn’t started getting ill in Texas, I would have moved to LA or Paris long ago. I’m moving to Paris, but there’s nowhere in London I’d like to live any more. The parts of Paris I like still offer the mixture I prefer of classes and kinds of people.

Jimmy has no choice but to feel alienated. Consider his history and circumstances. I’ve never felt alienated at the heart of the city, only at its fringes. In a way I feel he, Iain and myself have divided up the city between us, each taking our preferred territory. Iain’s territory is almost as alien to me as Jimmy’s and Iain doesn’t know West London the way I do. I think, in his adoption of the suburbs, Jimmy is the most original of us. But it takes a Ballard to make Ballardland. I know of no other writer who could do what he’s done. I have a curiosity about centres of power, too, which has led me to live in LA as well as Texas — places with a highly developed mythology of their own which fascinates me. Jimmy tends to adapt his environment to his own, internal mythology.

What do you think of the film adaptations of Ballard’s work?

I haven’t much liked them. I thought Spielberg sentimentalised Empire of the Sun, while Crash was sensationalised. In both cases Ballard’s originals were vulgarised.

LEFT: …and Cornelius as conceived by Robert Fuest, director of The Final Programme.

When the film of your novel The Final Programme was released in 1973, you quickly disowned it. Simon reckons he read something where you vowed never to work in film or allow any of your books to be filmed again, yet today we hear news of a possible Elric adaptation. Why the change of heart?

I don’t think I swore never to work in film again. Indeed, I did the script for The Land that Time Forgot precisely to get experience script-writing and I’ve done various scripts (see Letters from Hollywood) over the years, none of which have been filmed. I have to admit that I find working in film even more boring than working in rock and roll. At my end, anyway. I realised that the reason people like Faulkner or Fitzgerald had so much trouble working in film was because there’s always someone else involved ready to mess with your ideas!

What I was reluctant to do was let a film-maker get hold of another of my major characters as they’d done with Jerry Cornelius and distort it, meaning that I would have a lot of trouble continuing to work — as happened after The Final Programme was released. I was out in California when I was convinced by the Weitz brothers that they could do a decent movie of Elric and I felt that movies were no longer in the hands of the effects department, that now the effects could be part of the narrative. Lord of the Rings showed that was now possible and the Weitz brothers approached me shortly after the first film (maybe more) had been out. I’m still a bit wary, though …

What fiction are you reading at the moment?

I just finished Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And I’m about to read my daughter Kate’s first novel, The Waiting List.

Do you appreciate any current writers of imaginative fiction? Are there any out there that are as appropriate to the world today as Ballard was to the 1960s?

There are a lot of talented writers developing, if you like, what Ballard pioneered, but we’re not living in especially innovative times. There are a whole lot of reasons for that. I read quite a lot of new fiction and much of it is very good indeed. I’m probably not the best person, however, to say if there is work as appropriate to today as Ballard was to the 1960s. Chances are I wouldn’t recognise them. I do my best to read and encourage new writers, still. I have to admit, much as I admire many of them, no one has struck me with the impact that Burroughs and Ballard struck me with when I first began reading them.

The mighty Hawkwind, frequent collaborators of MM, and famously described by Moorcock as ‘like the crazed crew of a spaceship that didn’t quite know how everything worked but nevertheless wanted to try everything out’.

Unlike yourself, Ballard is notoriously uninterested in music, once saying ‘I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record. … that gene seems to have skipped me.’ And yet there seems to be a cottage industry in discussing Ballardian music. Is there such a thing as ‘Ballardian music’? And why doesn’t there seem to be a ‘Moorcockian music’?!

I didn’t know there was Ballardian music. Maybe there isn’t Moorcockian music because I’m not working the same deep, singular vein in the same way. Or maybe it’s because I make my own music. That said, there are a bunch of bands who do claim to take inspiration from me: Cyrith Ungol, Blue Oyster Cult, Human League. In the past there’s been Hawkwind, Marc Bolan, Graham Bond, Deep Purple… My memory’s not great for band names… There was another Manchester band called An Alien Heat; Tygers of Pan Tang; The Damned…

Since I’m unfamiliar with the idea of ‘Ballardian music’ I’m not entirely sure how to answer! Roy Plumley, of Desert Island Discs, hated me and refused his producer’s request to put me on the show several times, yet he had Jimmy on. That always struck me as unfair, since Jimmy’s notoriously tone deaf, as he says. I felt a strong sense of injustice when Jimmy got to choose a bunch of records which I knew he wouldn’t listen to even if he was stranded on a desert island.

Moorcock on stage with the Blue Oyster Cult.

How did you come to write the novelisation of the Sex Pistols film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle? Did you see any parallels between the punk scene and the Ladbroke Grove/Hawkwind scene you were so much a part of?

I knew various punk bands or members of bands, though not especially well. Punks were just urban guerillas, if you like, with different haircuts. Hawkwind/Motorhead were about the only bands the punks still reckoned to have kept the faith, as it were, so I got on well with them when we happened to meet. I’d go to a lot of gigs. I had a nodding acquaintance with people like Siouxsie, whom I liked a lot. So when Maxim Jakubowski of Virgin Publishing suggested I do The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle I had no problems with the idea — especially since I’d always seen Irene Handle as Mrs Cornelius and I wanted to give Glen Matlock a bit better press than he was getting from some of the others at that time.

LEFT: Cover for the Deep Fix single ‘Dodgem Dude’.

Is your band Deep Fix still active?

No. From time to time we talk about doing a tribute band version of ourselves …

Why did Deep Fix record just the one album — New World’s Fair?

Though we had a three-album deal with UA, I got a bit bored with what we were doing. Eventually, Pete Pavli and I began a working partnership which put out a few tracks, mostly with Flicknife, but we had problems with producers, who didn’t really understand what we were trying to do, which was a lot different to the standard bass-and-drums-down-first sort of production and we felt we were wasting our time. That bit of work I did for Brian Eno, on Robert Calvert’s Lucky Leif and the Longships, made me want to work with him, but he went to the States soon afterwards and various circumstances meant that I lost interest. I always gave writing priority.

Are you still making your own music these days?

A bit, for my own pleasure. But I have painful neuropathy and my old fingers aren’t what they were. I started playing the harmonica more recently!

Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard at a signing for Empire of the Sun (presumably in 1984) at Forbidden Planet. We’ve no idea who the enthusiastic interloper is in the middle (photo courtesy Michael Moorcock).

How do you find the experience of interacting with your fans on the Moorcock’s Miscellany website? What prompted you to take such an active role with your readership?

I always have liked interacting with readers. I enjoy signings, readings and events of that sort. We used to mix with the audience when I did music. It’s just my nature. I suppose I’m a dyed in the wool populist. I’ve never felt apart from my readers. They, after all, allow me to earn a decent living. Why shouldn’t I like them? Attitudes like that are entirely to do with temperament, however. Some people feel intimidated by their audiences or intruded upon. I don’t. While I’m essentially a pretty solitary person, as Jimmy is, I find the net to be a great substitute for dropping into the pub. One can socialise without becoming too involved, if one wants to. When I’m working, of course, I tend to ignore the net completely. As it is, I still only use it as a kind of extension of my old methods. The WP is my typewriter and Google is my Encyclopaedia Britannica and OED. I don’t use my computer to play games, for instance, and very rarely to play or find music. Oh, it’s also my radio, of course, since I can’t get BBC radio in Texas!

In stark contrast to you, Ballard has often said he doesn’t use the internet. Has he never been tempted in the slightest?

I really don’t think he likes it. He’s perhaps a tad less suspicious of it than he was. But he’s by no means the only author I know who doesn’t have email or use the net. Harlan Ellison is another. Until very recently Iain Sinclair didn’t have email. Some authors don’t even own electric typewriters. Jimmy recently started using his old manual again! Mine is standing by in a corner, even as I write! You get settled in a preferred way of working and living. Jimmy has made his own world at Shepperton where his house is rather famously still fixed in the 60s and 70s! For my part, I always have to have my desk and office pretty much in the same configuration I’ve had it in since 1965. I completely sympathise with his preference. If a games company in Austin hadn’t come along and set me up with state-of-the-art equipment a few years ago I’d probably still be looking for spare parts for my old IBM Selectric. As it happened, I took to the net naturally and with great joy, but that wouldn’t have come about if that company hadn’t wanted me to write a game and a movie for them. (That was what became Silverheart — EA decided it was too expensive to produce).

As a writer, you’re famously prolific. I understand there’s a collection of your non-fiction writings in preparation, Into the Media Web, to be published by Savoy Books. How did that come about?

It was Savoy’s idea to get John Davey to collect my non-fiction and publish it. I haven’t seen the collection yet and probably won’t until it appears. Personally I didn’t think there was enough of my non-fiction worth reprinting, but they seemed to think there was. It will be strange to see so much of my forgotten past coming up in print.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on the Jerry Cornelius story I mentioned, Modem Times. Coincidentally, Jimmy has been very insistent on my having Jerry return to take a look at modern London, which he does, though it’s also a return to 60s London, a sort of reassessment. My publisher has suggested I write a memoir of the 60s. I’m not sure I want to, really, but I’m making notes. I’m still working on the memoir of Mervyn Peake and having a bit of a hard time. Certain memories are very painful and Mervyn’s decline and death is still hard for me to get a grip on. I’m writing an Elric story for the new Weird Tales, for the fun of it. I have a set of Seaton Begg stories, The Metatemporal Detective, coming out in September or October. I’m supposed to be doing a Conan comic for Dark Horse. I’m probably going to give reviewing a bit of a rest, unless something really engages me.

Ballard and Moorcock at the London Hilton, September 2006. We suspect this is not JGB’s usual haunt of the Heathrow Hilton, but the one in central London (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).

Like Jimmy, I think I’ve grown angrier and more radical in most respects as I’ve grown older. We’re both as disgusted with what’s going on in politics and business as we ever were. I just did a ‘fighting editorial’ for Interzone, calling on writers to take the kind of risks Burroughs (from whom Interzone took their title) took. The kind of risks Ballard took, for that matter. We’re living in cautious, retroactive times and I think we need to make an effort to resist what we too easily accept as the zeitgeist. I know this is also how Jimmy feels. I don’t think either of us is especially nostalgic or querulous, but it’s comforting to know that when we get together we’re a couple of Angry Old Men with as much invested in the present and, indeed, future as we ever had.

—————————————————————————————————————————————
Thank you, Michael Moorcock.
—————————————————————————————————————————————

..:: MORE INFO
+ Moorcock’s Miscellany

..:: BALLARDIAN INTERVIEW WITH J.G. BALLARD
+ Rattling Other People’s Cages

..:: INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES
+ Mac Tonnies on Ballard
+ Simon Reynolds on Ballard
+ Toby Litt on Ballard
+ Geoff Manaugh on Ballard
+ Iain Sinclair on Ballard
+ John Foxx on Ballard
+ Bruce Sterling on Ballard

..:: TRANSCRIPTIONS OF TALKS GIVEN BY J.G. BALLARD
+ An Evening with J.G. Ballard
+ J.G. Ballard Live in London

The Exhibition of Crashed Cars

Mike Holliday — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:40:51 +0000

In 1970, Ballard put together an ‘exhibition’ centred on a number of crashed cars that had been retreived from a London scrapyard. The background to the exhibition, its wider place in Ballard’s ouvre, and the effect on attendees, are all examined by Simon Ford in an article published in the online journal /seconds:

“Ballard’s choice of car was far from accidental. The Pontiac was a model from the mid-fifties, and thus represented a particularly baroque phase in American car styling, while the Mini symbolised the fun-loving mobility of the swinging sixties. The sober and conservative saloon, the A60, stood for the Mini’s exact antithesis. All however, through the catastrophe of the car crash, were now in a sense equivalent; smashed and levelled to the raw material of their crushed metal, broken glass, and stained upholstery.”

“… the opening party the 100-odd guests quickly became drunk, while at Ballard’s invitation a topless woman circulated, interviewing members of the audience for a closed-circuit television broadcast. The incongruity of the crashed cars and this celebratory social event was further compounded by the alcohol-induced removal of social constraints and the distancing effect of guests watching themselves on closed-circuit television monitors.”

The full article – “A Psychopathic Hymn: J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ Exhibition of 1970″ – is available here.

JG Ballard vs Dismal Jargon

Mike Holliday — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:43:31 +0000

JGB once complained about the "dismal jargon" of over-intellectualised SF criticism. Here is a wonderful example of this sort of stuff.

In a short analysis of "The Crystal World", the author manages to name-check Heidegger, Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Henry James, Kierkegaard, Jesus Christ, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, Guattari, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Plato, Kant, Erza Pound, and Kafka.

I found it quite delightfully whacky.