Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial

All photography by Rick McGrath.

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London.

Dear Simon,

Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Vale, Marian Wallace and Gee Vaucher. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here.

Left: Toby Litt.

But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie. For the first two days in London I actually wondered if somebody’s god was sending us a message, as the elements did their best to batter us with the kind of weather that resembled a vicious blend of The Drowned World and The Wind From Nowhere. Running from doorway to doorway in search of a tube entrance, I kept stumbling through the usual detritus: soggy cigarette ends, broken umbrellas, empty condom packs. I kept wondering where JG might have visited to inspire The Drought. Certainly nowhere in the UK.

The day of the Memorial, however, broke bright and sunny and warm — a good sign and a fitting description of the events to follow.

The plan was for everyone to meet at the Tate Modern at 11am for an 11:30 start. I overtook a walking Toby Litt about a block away and together we made our way to the top floor of the Tate’s east wing where a substantial crowd had already gathered, spritzers in hand, strung out along a glass and steel corridor that emptied to a large anteroom with a commanding view of old London to the north and the high tech security guards of Canary Wharf to the east. I kept looking down to the Thames, though, hoping to see a bit of wing floating by from a light airplane. Not today. The venue might also have reminded some of Royal’s penthouse suite in High-Rise, but regardless of the number of people fighting their way up the stairs it was an appropriately Ballardian venue, made even more so by the Tate’s current show of “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”, featuring Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Synchronicity? Perhaps.

Claire Walsh.

It was in this enormous space the 100 or so celebrants convened for the Memorial – tributes to The Man from JG’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers on what would have been his 79th birthday. The area was liquid with light and the format was a simple stage and microphone with flanking video screens. We sat in chairs that fanned in a wide arc along the length of the room. Our mistress of ceremonies was Bea Ballard, and after thanking the event’s organizers — her sister Fay, Claire Walsh and JG’s agent, Maggie Hanbury — away we went.

Our speakers — 13 in all, four reporting in by video — gave us a wonderfully Ballardian triad of facts, stories and myths about JG, and I couldn’t help thinking that once again Life is reflecting Art, unconsciously reproducing his Atrocity Exhibition structure of the public, the personal, and the symbolic. His work, his life, and his myth were the topics we wanted to hear about, and Simon, no one was disappointed.

Hold on. We’ve just had a discussion here at the pub, and Mike has suggested that this three-part structure may also be the most appropriate for this re-telling. Vale? Dave? You agree? OK. Planes do intersect.

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

The celebration of JG’s work is also the celebration of his deep impact and the shock waves he sent through the literary community, emphasis on the later generations. And then there was that second wave of carpet bombing in the 1970s, the one that resonated with punk, with the abandoned, with RE/Search, with architecture, with the whole explosion of everyone’s quantification and eroticism of the “outer world of reality”. Unfortunately, Simon, the room held mostly literary types, so JG’s influence on the Ballardian arts was not addressed. Never mind. What was missing in breadth was made up in breath. “A touchstone of authentic genius,” Will Self intoned in his best British boom, “my single most important mentor and influence.” Will also commented about the length and consistency of JG’s oeuvre (pronounced as if it had 14 syllables), and how JG rarely left the road he most preferred, the one where he was caught in the wet headlights ironically waving a warning flag to a population already asleep at the wheel. He’s been at it, Will said, from his early changing planet stories to his last four novels of wacky westerners, that quartet or warnings about the dangers of boredom associated with living behind gated minds and programmed lives.

Not to be outdone, but still a tad cagey about it, Martin Amis beamed in on video to announce JG was “uniquely unique”, and spoke at length about JG’s art and his high place in the pantheon of imaginative writers. He was the only speaker who basically concentrated on JG the writer, rather than the man, and it was good to have him there even in video, although the final effect was a bit Intensive Care Unit, if you know what I mean.

JG’s life story has long been part of the public domain, and The Man did make an appearance, appearing onscreen in segments from the BBC documentary of his 1991 return to Shanghai. We see an obviously emotional JG standing in the yard of his family home on Amherst Avenue, wandering through the rooms, wondering about that second life he might have had if the war had not occurred and he stayed in the terrible city. Then the famous scene at Lunghua where he stands in the cramped room in G Block his family of four called home for three years. This is the closest thing to what I call home, JG told us, “I came close to an adult mind” here. We were treated to one other bit of Ballard before the day was over: the organizers had obtained a video of the What I Believe light display shown at Barcelona, and once again we were all reassured the power of the imagination can remake the world. In a way, that’s why we were there.

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The angles between the walls. Let’s start with the daughters, Fay and Bea. Both talked exclusively about their relationship with ‘Daddy’ and their rather envious home life among the muck, movies and manuscripts. Fay, the artist, spoke first, and I was amazed and amused when she announced she would simply read out a series of thoughts, a verbal collage of unstructured memories. Perfect, I thought. It’ll be just like an Atrocity Exhibition list. And it was. Bea, also, offered up her remembrances, but took a more organized approach, mixing the humour with tales of darker times, such as the passing of her husband, and how she relied on JG’s help and experience from his own tragedy, and now even that support is gone. Sobering. And from Bea we have another inkling of JG’s self-deprecatory nature when he described himself as domestically “slattern”, when in reality the organisation level was probably at full Lunghua. “You can clean a house in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it”, JG once told her. I got the feeling the regimen was simply an extension of JG’s life: work hard, play hard.

Other Jimbits? JG never or rarely replaced or updated anything in the house. Nor did he throw much out, viz a peeled orange that had stood on the mantelpiece for 40 years. The daughters remember the clacking old typewriter and JG perched over it, speaking aloud the words he’s typing. Spending an entire summer naked in his back yard. Watching a tape of Double Indemnity together on TV, all the lights out, and talking about Civilization and Its Discontents. JG doing surrealist paintings! Constant encouragement for all their enthusiasms. Acceptance of a menagerie of pets, including Bea’s rat. Chinese dinners with — get this, Simon — lobster and noodles. A serious approach to education. Bear hugs. The unicycle. Trips to the movies after school. Ahh, memories.

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Moorcock stayed on this plane for his presentation, too, after he managed with some difficulty to negotiate passage to the stage with his crutches, and then actually alight it. Mike stayed Mike, fumbling thru masses of folded paper to find his notes, and then regaling us with stories of domesticity rather than literary appreciation and New Worlds gossip. It was very interesting to hear stories of JG’s early days, and nowadays Mike treasures most his memories of their times in restaurants, pubs and kitchens, wives at one end, Mike and Jim at the other, with all “forever arguing”. Mike had to put up with “cobblers” from his wife, JG with “you know that’s not true, Jim” from Mary. If you were eavesdropping you might think they were plotting the overthrow of SF, except nothing happened because no one could agree. Alpha males, no? When Mary died Mike was there for JG, not only helping him out of his “closed down” fugue, but ultimately introducing him to Claire — “the best possible choice for Jim” — and finally becoming each other’s editors — “logrolling”.

By far the most famous of the name-brand personalities to attend was Steven Spielberg — I got to sit right beside him! Ha, just kidding. Steve and the two Empire producers also attended, albeit in pixilated form, and gave an obviously glowing, but also somewhat underwhelming appreciation of their brief time together. They liked having JG around to help in the “dimensionalizing” of the book, whatever that means, and, of course, they had lots of fun shooting him in the Shanghai party scene, even if that clip was cut.

Steve’s warm memories of JG were also shared by Crash producer Jeremy Thomas, who recalled JG was unusually generous to his film adaptors. His memories involved food and cars, the former being a meal he enjoyed with JG in Cannes after Crash was panned, or should we say skewered? The latter involves a ride he gave JG in a Ferrari, and The Man reaching out to fondle the dashboard leather. A fellow “petrol-head” Jeremy called JG, a secret connoisseur of car magazines, “the equivalent of centerfolds in Penthouse”. I think he’s confusing the author and character here a wee bit, no?

Thomas made way for the enthusiastic and entertaining V Vale, who flew in from his RE/Search offices in San Francisco to breathlessly relate his stories of how he first became aware of JG and his immense appreciation for The Man: “He’s the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”, Vale pronounced, much to the glee of the audience. I’m toasting Vale right now, Simon, for that great line! Dressed in his trademark all black (as he still is), Vale began by confessing he started off as a Burroughs man, and first became aware of JG in 1974 when someone told him Bill had written a preface to a book called Love & Napalm: Export USA. He read it and experienced a life-changing moment. In 1978 Vale interviewed both Bs for the 10th issue of his seminal punkpaper, Search and Destroy. He then realized he had “spent his entire life preparing to meet JG Ballard”, and Burroughs slipped to second place. Cheers, Vale, and thanks for pointing out the obvious to the locals.

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

After Vale the long, lean and lanky body of Will Self undulated itself to the microphone, and Will amused us all by reading out a handwritten letter –- actually, two of JG’s ubiquitous postcards — he received 16 years ago. Will had written JG, tentatively suggesting he might be the man to write a screenplay for Crash. The reply was short on encouragement, but long on suggestions: JG recommended Will immediately go out and buy a book called The Black Box, which featured the final recordings of crews involved in aircraft crashes. “I’m thinking of writing a novel based entirely on black box recordings,” JG enthusiastically wrote, then suggested it might be a technique Will might try. “He was always suggesting story ideas to me,” Will intoned in a lazy, eccentric drawl oddly reminiscent of JG’s dulcet tones. “I knew it was because he had already thought about it and had abandoned the concept”. Much laughter. Will also revealed a bit of JG’s horror of all things literary and fête. When JG won a PEN Award four months before his passing, it was Will who accepted on JG’s behalf. When he delivered the award, JG took pains to warn Will about the “tweedy” side of the literary world — “It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember” (here, Will’s voice drops conspiratorially) “they are the enemy”.

Left: Jonathan Waxman. Centre: Chris Petit. Right: James Ballard, Jnr.

A very interesting speaker was Professor Jonathan Waxman, JG’s oncologist, who movingly re-emphasized JG’s stoicism and bravery, usually expressed as endless concern for others rather than himself. I kept wondering if this Doctor was anything at all like the endless Doctors who passed through JG’s fiction. He didn’t look like he’d ever been to Africa, though. We learned of the closeness between JG and Claire near the end, although even these emotional moments were subject to JG’s wicked one-liners, such as the time Jonathan called up to see how things were going. “Claire’s been absolutely magnificent,” JG replied, “but then I have to say that, as she’s sitting opposite me cradling a Luger in her lap”. Or his description of chemotherapy being akin to “continually eating bad oysters”.

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

This is where these planes intersect, and images are born. Or, in this case, reinforced, as blending the public and private in JG is essentially the basis of his creative technique. JG has said himself his greatest story is his life, and the image I think we all will carry forward is of a bifurcated genius — generous family man on the one hand, hard-drinking shockwave rider of a writer on the other. Unique, to paraphrase Amis. My takeaway image was the vid of JG at Lunghua, white hat, white suit, looking suspiciously like someone who firmly expects to see their 14-year-old self appear around a corner. When I got home I patted my brick from G Block.

And that was basically it for the tributes, although they might have gone on all afternoon given the guest list, which included Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Toby Litt, Tom Sutcliffe, Maggie Hanbury, Marian Wallace, Joan Bakewell, Solveig Nordlund, Peter York, and JG’s friend from his Cambridge days at the Copper Kettle, Bill Spencer, looking sharp in a hot pink bow tie. Yowsers!

Direct family members who were in attendance but didn’t speak included James Ballard, Jr. — who shares many physical similarities with JG — and JG’s sister Margaret.

Absent or unable to attend were Brian Aldiss, Emma Tennant from Bananas, Hilary Bailey, Martin Bax and Michael Foreman from Ambit, and academics such as Roger Luckhurst, Jeanette Baxter and you.

Left: Iain Sinclair.

What else did I find out during the informal chit-chat afterwards? A few items you may find interesting. Remember all those stories about JG taking his manuscripts out to his back yard and burning them after the book was published? I asked Bea Ballard about this, and she looked at me like I had been in the care of Dr Nathan. No, they haven’t been burned — the girls have all that stuff. Good news. Toby Litt was saying he’s heard the ICA is negotiating with the CCCB in Barcelona in an attempt to get the Autopsy exhibition in London. Their space is quite a bit less than the 90,000 square feet the CCCB lavished, so we’ll see what transpires. I was also approached by Claire Walsh and Gee Vaucher regarding another proposed Ballard exhibition the ladies are planning for a subterranean exhibition at Waterloo. So, perhaps things are picking up in the UK after all.

The memorial ended as these events normally do, Simon, with a sort of time trickle of people down to the remaining few — us, of course — followed by a vote to repair to the nearest bar to discuss the experience, which we’re now doing. Interestingly enough, all of us at the table agree the event was also a sort of Rubicon, a boundary we have now crossed which marks the end of mourning JG’s passing to celebrating his extraordinary life, his loving and generous personality, and, of course, his amazing legacy of work.

It was a helluva day. I’m glad I was there.

Cheers,
Rick.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

All photography by Simon Sellars.

Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to clear the backlog as best I can, beginning with this, the conclusion to ‘”Paradigm of Nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay’, my attempt to traverse the fantasy-film of Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company playing in my head. As I wrote in Part 1, I had intended to take photographs of Shepperton, the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on his privacy. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (studiously avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word): the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories, UDC in particular.

In Part 1, we set out from Shepperton train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake in The Unlimited Dream Company was unable to do, we made our way to the famous film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). Now in Part 2, we explore the reservoirs near the film studios before crossing back over the motorway and into town, finally alighting in Old Shepperton, where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

I was struck by the fact, when I [first] came [to Shepperton], that I was living in a sort of marine landscape, most unusual. There are these enormous reservoirs, the nearest is only four or five hundred yards away, the Queen Mary Reservoir, which is a gigantic reservoir about a mile in diameter. The whole area in fact is infested with reservoirs and settling beds and conduits and little private canals. When you fly from London airport, when you look down while the plane circles around, you will see what looks like a huge expanse of water, with the Thames of course here too.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Alan Burns, 1974.

Above is the entrance to the reservoir that worked its magic on Ballard’s psyche. Although we were disappointed that the reservoir embankment was fenced-off and inaccessible, it must be remembered that for a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, it would not be necessary to empirically observe a water body to imagine Shepperton — or London — submerged.

Rather, the reservoir is high above us; we are literally ‘under water’.

In fact, [in Shepperton] we’re living … on little causeways. There are huge gravel lakes as well; for a hundred years they’ve been digging sand out, and some of these old pits are damn big, ten times the size of the Serpentine. We’re living in these houses, these little quiet suburban streets, which are little causeways running between these reservoirs. Most of them are invisible because there are high embankments for obvious reasons; the Water Board doesn’t want people peeing in them, throwing cigarette ends in and so on. So they’re well screened off, but one is aware of a sort of invisible marine world, of living below the water line. It works on you imaginatively after a while.

JGB, interviewed by Burns, 1974.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water — gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

I am a scholar of Ballard’s interviews, especially the ‘Golden Age’ spanning the late 60s to the mid-70s. I find them endlessly fascinating. Once you have a good knowledge of the many interviews he has given, you begin to unravel themes and motifs that he has discoursed on at length before committing to fiction. These interviews are laboratories in which Ballard unleashes thought experiments upon his unwitting interrogators, who sometimes are unable to keep up (see his 1974 conversation with Carol Orr, where Orr seems quite flustered, taken aback at the brutal clarity of Ballard’s futurology). Having taken his creations for a dry run, we then find them machine-tooled and recalibrated in his writing: compare the previous quotes from the Burns interview (‘I was living in a sort of marine landscape’), with the one above from UDC (‘I realized that I was wandering through a marine world’). It’s a fascinating, holographic process, and in some cases appears to work retrospectively. In the Burns interview, for example, Ballard is talking about when he first settled in Shepperton with his wife and kids in 1960. Now we know where the inspiration for The Drowned World, published in 1962, really came from…

Or is it all an elaborate metaphysical game — another version of Ballard’s maddening, yet emancipatory, version of circular time?

It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

…back across the bridge and into town, crossing the always-flowing metal sea that seems to both energise and enervate the citizens in UDC’s version of Shepperton.

I … set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

To my utter amazement, the virtual and the actual continued to merge down to the smallest detail: as we began walking back to Shepperton centre through the parkland just over the bridge, we noticed pollen from poppies and yellow broom dusted on the legs of my jeans. Suitably tagged with Ballardian seed, I dutifully followed the road back into town.

That evening I saw the faces of the three crippled children watching me through the damp light, small moons quietly circling each other. They squatted among the dead flowers and macaws, and played with the pennants of my blood. Rachel fondled them, her blind eyes flickering raptly, trying to read their mysterious codes, cryptic messages from another universe transmitted by the ticker-tape of my heart.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When you observe Shepperton through a Ballardian lens, everything seems in code. I imagined Rachel had daubed the back of this sign with the glyphs of her psyche, marked out using the pennants of Blake’s blood.

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, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In the book, Blake encourages all to slip the noose of consumerism, to rouse from the waking dream of late capitalism, to throw down whitegoods and gadgets and escape into the unfetettered realm of the imagination, passing through into a micronational realm, ‘the commonwealth of nature’, responsible to no master, least of all bored London admen selling lifestyles to the satellite towns. Pyramids of discarded goods line the streets, expanding upon the consumer bricolage of ‘The Ultimate City’ and presaging the razed shopscapes of Kingdom Come.

Here, the barbaric razor wire surrounding something as banal as the Shepperton Carpet & Flooring Centre triggered something suitably apocalyptic in my mind.

Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: Shepperton’s placid high street, over-ripe for transcendence and transformation…

There is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom. Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild.

I recalled the above quote from Running Wild when I came across this leaf that had been embedded in the tarmac. It seemed to be lacquered solid into the road surface, losing any semblance of nature, losing its ability to drift, its colours supervivid and oversaturated; the organic encased in concrete, the fusing of the animate with the inanimate: UDC in a nutshell.

Waiting for release…

Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand. As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.

Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The levels in this photograph have been messed with to give it a suitably lysergic feel — as much a cliche as it sounds, UDC feels like an acid trip; but the synaesthetic elements of tripping, rather than any notions of ‘cosmic consciousness’. Ballard’s work, after all, is relentlessly about reordering and recoding the senses to subvert dominant systems of control.

We were soon more than a mile above Shepperton, this jungle town surrounded by its palisade of forest bamboo, an Amazon enclave set down here in the quiet valley of the Thames.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: the jungle-like gateway to Old Shepperton, the third part of the town’s tripartite structure (high street/reservoir/old town)… and representing our best chance of locating the sunken Cessna.

Pinned to the wall were the X-ray plates of my head, deformed jewels through which a ghostly light still shone, like that corona of destruction I had first seen over Shepperton.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In interviews, Ballard has often said that in the suburbs one needs to perform a deviant act almost daily — like kicking the dog — to get a charge out of one’s flaccid existence. This ‘report vandalism’ sign, itself vandalised by a blob of incoherent spray paint, amused me, as I imagined it to be the first bumbling stirrings of Blake’s legions awakening themselves from their perimeter-town stupor.

The sun hid itself behind my naked body, dazzled by the tropical vegetation that had invaded this modest suburban town. Pausing to rest, the crowd began to settle itself. Mothers and their infants sat on the appliances in the shopping mall, children perched on the branches of the banyan tree, elderly couples relaxed in the rear seats of the abandoned cars. There was a sense of intermission.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Intermission: lurking in the background, the invading chaotic rhizomes of supernature prepare to engulf the arboreal trap-cars and litter patrols of civic duty.

Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a dream … ? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right — we’ll get this over with.’

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cock-pit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When Blake crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, I can’t help but think of Ballard hitting the town in 1960, wondering what he had got himself in for, but deciding after all, in a strange way, that his perverse talent could be explored to the hilt here. When Blake’s love interest, Miriam St Cloud, dies, I can’t help but think of Ballard’s wife, Mary (known as “Miriam” in The Kindness of Women, of course), and her sudden death in 1964. When Blake teaches the townspeople to not only fly but to explore the farthest reaches of their sexuality, I can’t help but think of the obsessed Ballard, stricken with grief at the death of his wife, hatching The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash on an unsuspecting world; what must the good people of Shepperton have thought of this ‘madman’ lurking in their midst? When Blake is shot down by Stark, I can’t help but think of the storms of outrage that greeted Crash on its publication — and perhaps of Ballard’s later, more cautious narrative approach, when he managed to touch the same veins of psychopathology in his work, but without flying as close to the sun himself.

The final pages of UDC are touching, as Blake yearns to once again merge with Miriam in the afterlife. Ballard has always stared with extraordinarily clear, unmisted eyes at the spectre of death, perhaps never more so than in this book. Ballard’s announcement that he has cancer is very sad, of course, but I can think of no other writer more prepared for whatever may follow.

I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone? The river was my target… We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. … He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters.

Iain Sinclair, London Orbital.

The Cessna was almost submerged, its wings tipping below the sweeping tide. As I watched, the fuselage turned and slipped below the coverlet of the water. When the river had carried it away I walked across the beach to the bone-bed of the winged creature whose place I was about to take. I would lie down here, in this seam of ancient shingle, a couch prepared for me millions of years earlier.

There I would rest, certain now that one day Miriam would come for me. Then we would set off, with the inhabitants of all the other towns in the valley of the Thames, and in the world beyond.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Here it is: the exact spot where Blake crashed his plane into the river. How did we know? Call it instinct…

Ballard said that The Unlimited Dream Company was yet another preview of his, at the time, still-to-be-written autobiography; thus the book’s transformation of Shepperton is about ‘the writer’s imagination, and in particular my own imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company’ (interview with David Pringle, 1996).

The book is a beautifully vivid evocation of Ballard’s love for Shepperton. He may playfully run it down in interviews, but it’s precisely Shepperton’s anonymity that has allowed Ballard to play out his own psychopathology in the pages of his books. He has lived there for almost 50 years now and virtually his entire ouevre has been composed within its boundaries. If, as Ballard has repeatedly claimed, the nature of fiction and reality has reversed in the post-war era, with the imagination the only true node of reality left in a world of endlessly mediated fictions, then The Unlimited Dream Company can be read as more autobiographical than either of Ballard’s so-called ‘semi-autobiographical’ works, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

In this light, visiting the place is an enriching experience, as Iain Sinclair identifies from his own Shepperton sojourn:

“To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that ouevre.”

To take a trip to (or even in) Shepperton, ‘the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere’, as Blake declares, is to submit to a form of virtual reality that anyone admiring of Ballard’s work simply must experience.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay, part 1
+ JGB: a ‘billionaire’ in Shepperton?
+ J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton
+ Sam Scoggins: ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ film
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Shepperton under water

Growing up [in Shepperton] from 1987–1998 I knew the mysterious J G Ballard lived in the house next door to my sister’s best friend Tara. Your beautiful photographs bring back so many memories for me, especially the curly bridge from the end of my road. Living there and walking past his house every day I never once laid eyes on the man himself but so many stories circulated about him that he was almost like a mythical character. We believed he was a billionaire but he refused to leave his semi in Shepperton and that he had a car in his living room. I’m sure there were some nudist rumours too. Does he still live there?

A billionaire! Not quite…

One of the things I really love about Thomas Cazals’ Ballard docudrama is the way it taps into this mythical strata, exaggerating it for supreme comic effect (but still with all the affection due our favourite writer). I think I agree with Toby Litt, who said on his panel at Kosmopolis that he sometimes wishes Ballard had never excavated at length his Shanghai background in interviews.

What would we be left with? How should we fill in the gaps, answer the questions asked of us by his work, without the distorting lens of biography? With musings similar to Vicky and Thomas, trying to make sense of this warped genius who seems to have drifted into our reality from a parallel dimension, where he is indeed enjoying a hearty laugh at our expense.

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

Here is the press release with fuller information on JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, opening today at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

EXHIBITION AT THE CCCB: J.G. Ballard: An Autopsy of the New Millennium

CURATOR: Jordi Costa
DATES: 22 July–2 November 2008
ADVISOR: Marcial Souto
SPACE: Gallery 2
PRODUCTION: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
DESIGN: Dani Freixas – Varis Arquitectes, with the collaboration of Pep Anglí
COORDINATION: Miquel Nogués

The CCCB presents the exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium”, from 22 July to 2 November 2008. The exhibition features the English writer of novels and short stories, considered one of the most intelligent, seminal voices of contemporary fiction.

The literary work of James Graham Ballard (Shanghai, 1930), the paradigm cult writer, has for some time now been looking ahead to dissect the world in which we are now living. His visionary imagination grew in the realms of dreamlike, subjective science fiction and gradually came to embrace an aseptic hyperrealism. Deep down, the themes are always the same: the keys of contemporaneity and the pathologies of our immediate future, as though he were carrying out the autopsy of a stillborn future.

J. G. Ballard has constructed a body of work marked by recurrent themes and obsessive symbols that is capable of transcending generic codes to decipher the present and propose plausible views of the future. This exhibition sets out to offer an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his themes and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic anti-utopia and disaster.

The exhibition uses a whole range of supports to introduce visitors into the Ballardian world: stage sets, audiovisual installations, the complete library of Ballard’s writings, works by Ballardian artists and miscellaneous documentation.

The exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium” coincides with this year’s International Literature Festival, Kosmopolis 08. It is therefore included in the festival programme, which devotes a special section to Ballard.

K08 includes two sessions about the work of this English author and his influence on the contemporary cultural imaginary. The first looks at the influence of Ballard’s body of work on Hispanic writers, and the second centres on the English-speaking world, in the form of a dialogue about the various ways in which Ballard’s literature has struck a chord with new generations of writers who identify with the visionary aspect of his work. Participants: Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo and V. Vale.

Alpha Channel devotes a further section to Ballard, exploring the audiovisual production inspired by his literature.

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

The French magazine Science Fiction, edited by Daniel Riche, commissioned a text from J. G. Ballard in which he summed up his personal and artistic credo. The result, published in the January 1984 issue of the publication, was “What I Believe”, a summary of Ballardian poetics which synthesises the obsessions of the author and the ability of his writing to decipher the secret keys of the contemporary world, as well as its disturbing evolutive logic. The canonic version of the text in English appeared in the summer 1984 issue (number eight) of the British magazine Interzone. Below are some excerpts:

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

Despite being fantasy fiction, the literary work of J. G. Ballard handles a repertory of images and obsessions that are closely linked to his own life. These early experiences were to mark his worldview and find a particular form of sublimation in his later literary output.

Son of chemist and textile entrepreneur James Ballard (1902-1967) and of Edna Ballard (1905-1999), J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930 and spent his early years in the comfortable surroundings of the international colony in the west of the city. The Japanese invasion of 1937 and the outbreak of World War II brought to an end the hitherto peaceable existence of a British community that ran its everyday life under the aegis of a nostalgia for Victorian society. Between March 1943 and August 1945 the Ballard family was held captive in the Lunghua internment camp.

In semi-autobiographical works such as Empire of the Sun (adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg) and The Kindness of Women, the writer revealed the origin of many of the obsessions running through his work. The atomic bomb on Nagasaki, how he adapted to life in a concentration camp and the series of deaths that marked his life (victims of bombings in the streets of Shanghai, the Chinese soldier killed by the Japanese at a train station, the first corpse he dissected in his years as a medical student, the Turkish pilot presumed dead during his years as a pilot at a Canadian base, the premature death of his wife and the death of a close friend) have a correlate in some of the most shocking scenes of his literary work.

The creation of his imaginary world has its epicentre away from the literary circles and bustling cultural life of London, in his home in Shepperton: a territory that the writer considers not as a soulless suburb but as a magical space whose inner light can be freed by imagination, as he illustrates in his novel The Unlimited Dream Company.

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s formative years were marked by the attempt to reconcile his incipient literary vocation with the articulation of a voice of his own. His initial contact with psychoanalysis and Surrealist painting opened the door to the construction of a unique and totally distinctive artistic identity. As he saw it, explorations of the unconscious in the fields of science and art offered the most precise reading of the spirit of the time and had predicted some of the more obscure pathways of the 20th century. In the dreamlike, desolate landscapes of Surrealism Ballard recognised the images of his own inner world. His writing not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies⎯superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations⎯in order to explain the deep structure of the real.

INNER SPACE

JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’ for Ambit magazine. Scan via Mike Holliday.

After discovering science fiction as a reader during his years in Canada as an RAF pilot (1953-54), J. G. Ballard encountered in the genre the ideal framework for his literary creation. From the very first, his sudden emergence in the medium entailed a break with tradition and the dominant currents of the time. To his contemporaries’ technological optimism and fascination for the exploration of outer space, Ballard counterposed an immersion in inner space.

Ballard theorized his singular contribution to the science-fiction genre in an article published in 1962 in New Worlds magazine. “Which way to inner space?” represented a turning point in the evolution of the genre with consequences that only much later became evident. With his theory of inner space, Ballard established a distance between himself and science-fiction forerunners and many of his peers as he sketched out the future direction of the genre. Ballard conquered a new territory for the genre, highlighting the role of science fiction as a mirror of the present and a means to self-exploration.

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

The idea of disaster underlies Ballard’s entire body of work though it finds its maximum expression in works such as The Drowned World and The Drought. In the face of disaster, typical Ballard characters do not act like characters in a 1970s’ disaster film. Far from trying to re-establish order, Ballardian characters see cataclysm as a focus of attraction and seem ready to accept the rules that this new reality imposes, though this may mean renouncing their own identity, wisdom and, inevitably, survival. In this process, the characters will discover a number of hidden truths about themselves. What is happening is not so much self-destruction as the seduction of change and the tortuous path towards psychological plenitude.

The idea comes from Joseph Conrad, and in Ballard’s hands it becomes the basis for his particular conception of science fiction: a literature that speaks to us of radical changes in mindset, fundamental transformations in perception—in short, of the constant evolution of inner space.

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s career entered a feverish state of change in the mid-1960s, following the premature death of his wife Mary Ballard from pneumonia in San Juan (Alicante). His traditional interest in the avant-garde and in experimental literature completely intoxicated his writing, which exploded in a radical switch to fragmentation, technical language and a taste for the abstract. The Terminal Beach (1964) blazed a trail that the later books The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and Crash (1973) were to take to the limit. The author focussed on a form of contemporaneity marked by the death of feeling and a shift from a physical to a mediatic landscape in which reality and fiction are blurred. The more classical High Rise (1974), Concrete Island (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Hello America (1981) continued to develop this vision of an essentially psychopathological 20th century in which pornographic imagery, technological fetishism and dehumanised architecture converge in a traumatic cosmology.

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

It is significant, and deeply disturbing, that J. G. Ballard’s literature has moved from science fiction to the realist register without abandoning its main themes. The most recent passage in Ballard’s narrative work⎯opening with the novella Running Wild (1988) and for the moment closing with Kingdom Come (2006)⎯tours the aseptic architecture of gated communities, residential areas, technoparks, holiday villages and shopping malls in order to extend the terminal diagnosis of a humanity disconnected from its primary instincts. According to the writer, only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible.

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

Here, the exhibition presents the first editions (in English) of the 42 books written by Ballard and offers visitors the chance to consult modern editions published in Spanish.

The Wind from Nowhere. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1962
Billenium. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Drowned World. Gollancz, London, 1963
Passport to Eternity. Berkeley, New York, 1963
The Terminal Beach. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1964
The Burning World. Berkeley, New York, 1964
The Drought. Jonathan Cape, London, 1965
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1963
The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, London, 1966
The Impossible Man. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Terminal Beach. Penguin, London, 1966
The Disaster Area. Jonathan Cape, London, 1967
The Overloaded Man. Panther, London, 1967
The Atrocity Exhibition. Jonathan Cape, London, 1970
The Inner Landscape. Paperback Library, New York, 1971
Chronopolis and other stories. Putnam, New York, 1972
Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. Grove Press, New York, 1972
Vermilion Sands. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Crash. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Concrete Island. Farrar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974
High-Rise. Jonathan Cape, London, 1975
Low-Flying Aircraft. Jonathan Cape, London, 1976
The Unlimited Dream Company. Jonathan Cape, London, 1979
Hello America. Jonathan Cape, London, 1981
News from the Sun. Interzone, London, 1982
Myths of the Near Future. Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
Empire of the Sun. Gollancz, London, 1984
The Day of Forever. Gollancz, London, 1986
The Day of Creation. Gollancz, London, 1987
Running Wild. Jonathan Cape, London, 1988
War Fever. Collins, London, 1990
The Kindness of Women. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1991
Rushing to Paradise. Flamingo, London, 1996
Cocaine Nights. Flamingo, London, 1996
A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Picador, New York, 1996
Super-Cannes. Flamingo, London, 2000
JG Ballard. The Complete Short Stories. Flamingo, London, 2001
Millennium People. Flamingo, London, 2003
Kingdom Come. Fourth Estate, London, 2006
Miracles of Life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An Autobiography. Fourth Estate, London, 2008

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has revelations in store for his readers.

On the one hand, Ballard functions as an oracle who is proved right with every day that passes.

On the other, he exerts an enormous influence on creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music.

J. G. Ballard forms part of the small group of creators capable of inspiring an adjective. Collins English Dictionary defines the adjective Ballardian as “1. of James Graham Ballard (J. G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.

Proceeding from the most diverse realms of creation, artists who accept the adjective as a badge of honour are increasingly numerous. To identify oneself as Ballardian is to form part of a widening circle of initiates aware of the central role played by an author who is a stranger to labels and resists any attempt at classification.

At this point, the exhibition immerses us in the work of various authors to have been described as Ballardian: Ana Barrado, Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord and creators of home cinema using mobile phones.

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

TIMES
From Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays: from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursdays: from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Mondays except public holidays

PRICES

Admission: €4.40
Wednesdays (except public holidays) and group visits: €3.30
Free admission: under-16s, the unemployed, Friends of the CCCB and every first Wednesday of the month.
Concessions on Wednesdays (except public holidays) for senior citizens and students: €3.30

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

CCCB PRESS OFFICE
Mònica Muñoz – Irene Ruiz – Lucia Calvo
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
93 306 41 23 / 93 306 41 00
premsa@cccb.org

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

ABOVE: Disch, photo by Jamie Spracher.

SF writer Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 4, and was described by John Clute as ‘perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers’. The obits have been noting Disch’s involvement with the New Wave of British SF, and Joanne, of Tomorrow Museum, writes to tell me of Disch’s admiration for Ballard.

Joanne says:

You’ve likely heard the sad news of Thomas M. Disch’s suicide. Although they are very different writers stylistically, Ballard and Disch seem to appeal to the same readers. And Disch was very much a fan of Ballard’s. I pulled a few quotes from Disch’s book about science fiction ‘The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of’. He devotes several pages of it to Ballard. Remarking on the New Wave, Disch writes of:

‘Ballard in the role of T.S. Elliot, the genius in residence, and Moorcock as Ezra Pound, a Svengali for all seasons, ready to welcome anyone in the club who might in some way advance the cause. They were essential to each other (and to the cause), for without Moorcock and New Worlds to beat the drum, Ballard’s work would have appeared in only those few avant-garde venues receptive to the transgressive fictions of non-Establishment writers … and without Ballard’s conspicuous and then prolific talent to showcase, the New Wave and New Worlds would never have reached escape velocity.’
…
‘Ballard, in erasing the rocketship from his fiction, and along with it the notion of outer space as the new frontier, found a new subject matter for SF: the present in, as it were, its futuristic aspect. He could look at the world around him — suburban Shepperton — with the radical innocence of someone whose home town had been a Japanese internment camp. And everything was strange. The sports car that he owned and drove around like a kamikaze pilot was a good deal stranger and more vivid than any rocket ship, which existed, if at all, only as a TV image among a host of other images….Why not build a future from those images rather than the do-it-yourself kits of traditional SF?’

Later, Disch writes about meeting with Ballard when he was 26. Interestingly, David Pringle doesn’t believe it happened the way Disch says. (Pringle also calls Disch the “second-greatest iconoclast” of science fiction after Ballard):

‘His several meetings with J. G. Ballard in 1966 and after, we are told, “took the invariable form of a trip to the Shepperton train station south of London and then a terrifying ride with Ballard at the wheel of his sports car. At his home, a dilapidated, infinitely cluttered bungalow that he shared with his two children, Ballard, fuelled with whisky, would deliver an oral version of his private gospel. Sad to say, I remember not a single oracle from those occasions, only a sense that the man was, as advertised, a genius hard-wired to the Zeitgeist.” Memory may play even the greatest truth-tellers false, and as one who has visited the same house on half a dozen occasions from the 1970s to the 1990s I can testify that Ballard lives in a classic British semi-detached, not a “bungalow,” and that he raised three children there throughout the 1960s, not two; also I can vouch for the fact that JGB’s front door is less than five minutes’ walk from Shepperton station (which lies west of London, not south), so why a car-ride was necessary I can’t imagine. As for the drinking and hairy driving of the period following his wife’s death in the mid-1960s, Ballard has described those things himself in several interviews — and has even fictionalized them, in a chapter called “The Exhibition,” in his novel The Kindness of Women (1991); so, no surprises there — except, perhaps, for the revelation (if true) that JGB once drove a sports car.’

Joanne has included her own tribute to Disch over at Tomorrow Museum:

He will get the audience he deserves. I see other gay writers as well as women and non-whites, and just about anyone who has felt like a genre misfit, really responding to his work and taking influence. Heck, “slipsteam” is already deeply indebted to him.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day his name is as popular among teenagers as Vonnegut’s. It is just too bad it didn’t happen while he was alive.

When Iain Sinclair and Will Self appeared on stage together earlier this year to talk about psychogeography, chaired by Kevin Jackson, I wondered what mystical forces aligned for this event to come to pass, given that Sinclair on a couple of occasions has publicly expressed the view that Self has got ‘absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography’.

Enter Steve Barfield of the University of Westminster, who informs me, ‘Well, writers say all kinds of things …at different times … is probably the shortest answer. But why not look at the full transcript of the VAM conversation, that is now published in the Literary London Journal. I edited the transcript for the journal from the recording with little tidying up of grammar and footnoting for the reader and the Guardian review was a wee bit wayward to my mind. But it’s journalism, after all, they didn’t have the tape and Self and Sinclair spoke at breakneck speed. Nothing mystical about the event, I’m afraid, the intention was to bring them together to interrogate the term [psychogeography] and see what happened!’

Thanks Steve — you are absolutely correct to point out that writers say different things at different times. Let’s not forget that Ballard himself told the Guardian in 1999 that ‘Most television is remarkably good, bearing in mind that it is a popular entertainment medium, but Melvyn Bragg poses a problem of his own making. The South Bank Show is a classic example of dumbing down: most television trivialises the already trivial, but the South Bank Show trivialises the serious, which is far more dangerous.’

To which Bragg responded: ‘I find this snobbish, offensive and depressing, particularly as I admire Ballard’s work and thought better of him. It’s also wrong. I think that a programme on UB40 is every bit as serious as a programme on Harold Pinter. We did both last season and neither was trivial… I am genuinely interested to know if he can tell me how any of those programmes fit his lazy smear… Unless JG Ballard can prove his point, his comment stands as no more than a sad and sour little swipe.’

Yet seven years later, both men amiably faced off on the South Bank Show to celebrate Ballard’s life and latest novel, Kingdom Come.

But back to Self and Sinclair: the transcript does indeed make interesting reading, not least for the way in which Sinclair now seems to go out of his way to praise Self’s work! Also, there’s quite a bit of chat about Ballard as an inspiration to both:

Will Self: It’s interesting what you were saying Iain, about in Jim Ballard’s memoir, about this weird period where he would only walk for what he reckoned was his personal horizon …

Iain Sinclair: His personal horizon … for his own height and I don’t know how he calculated that. But in Shepperton you are on the flat I suppose. He’d seemed to work out that three-quarters of a mile would do him. So he went three quarters of a mile in every direction and he got to know the area intimately.

Will Self: Because he was on a driving ban.

Iain Sinclair: Yeah, for a year. But he said it completely changed his life, because he decided he just wasn’t going to use public transport, it was horrendous. To get into Notting Hill or Hampstead where he wanted to see people was just such a hassle, he wouldn’t do it. So he then became a recluse in some ways. The upside of it was that he wrote more and better — and presumably he was coming towards the period of writing Crash. And, secondly, I think because he now had to walk rather than just leaping into the car, he actually released different kind of energies and it was a wonderful thing. This notion of horizon, a personal horizon, is obviously very important. And the whole culture, the mainstream culture, has followed him into acknowledging the significance of the airport fringe. Ballard says that London is a suburb of Heathrow rather than the other way around, everything you need is out there. This does seem to be true and you walking there, Will, pays homage to this concept.

It’s a lengthy conversation, the anecdotes flow thick and fast, and I have to say that Sinclair and Self do seem to bounce off each other. The audience questions are good, too, and I especially liked the point made that the psychogeographical revival in England in the 1980s seemed to coincide with the rise of CCTV and surveillance culture, with the act of walking perceived as an act of resistance — disappearing from view in the age of perpetual telesurveillance.

There’s also a rambling Sinclair story about Orson Welles, widening the psychogeographical frame to include not only this Hollywood maverick, but also none other than Mr Lemmy Caution himself — Eddie Constantine — and the ubiquitous aura of Godard and Alphaville:

Iain Sinclair: I was telling you earlier about the figure of Orson Welles, the great American director, who pitched up in Hackney in the 1950s to make a play, he was rehearsing a play about Moby Dick — which, incidentally, was J. G. Ballard’s favourite novel. [Orson Welles, Moby Dick – Rehearsed (1955) –ed.] Welles came out of the theatre and found these old ladies who were living in an alms house, the Spurstowe alms houses, and he decided that he would shoot a documentary piece. So he shoots this interview with these old woman — of course the alms house is now gone, the only record of it is this fragmented film by Orson Wells. He put the film together as a series of little essays or home movies which were shot in Paris, Spain and London. [Orson Welles, Around the World with Orson Welles (1955) originally made for BBC television. –ed.]

So it was 1955, and he goes into a Paris bookshop and here are those psychogeographers and Lettrists [Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the 1940s by Isidore Isou, inspired by dada and surrealism –ed. ] and they are reciting incantatory poems, and it is just extraordinary that the date is ’55 — and from Welles moves into a nightclub where the American actor Eddie Constantine, who later emerges in Godard’s Alphaville, is sitting with a hat on, looking sinister and grinning and then there is Jean-Paul Sartre. So there’s a weird cultural stew that appropriates this term psychogeography, which is a way of thinking and dealing with how the city emerges. It didn’t mean a lot to me then, and looking back I find, in documentaries that I was involved with at that time, the term used with more frequency was psychopolitics. I’m not sure what it meant, but people like R. D. Lang and Ginsberg and Paul Goodman and Gregory Bateson were all using this term constantly …

Read the rest of the transcript at the Literary London site.

This post also gives me the opportunity to post a snippet from ‘The Gnome Zone’, another transcript featuring Sinclair taken from a program broadcast on BBC radio in 2006 about the warped nature of English suburbia, hosted by Richard Weight:

WEIGHT: Someone who imagines such events in his work is the novelist, J.G. Ballard, himself a suburbanite.

SINCLAIR: J.G. Ballard’s become the great sort of sage of the suburbs, living for years and years in Shepperton. And Ballard, sitting there and thinking about what the suburbs are, says that they are very interesting because whatever we’re taking on in terms of Ikea furniture, kind of Swedish design, modernism, the use of the Internet, making pornographic movies at home—whatever it is you do to kind of create some sort of shock to your imagination, get you out of boredom and inertia, will happen in the suburbs rather than in the centre. That’s his pitch. And to react against this inertia and boredom that is endemic to that place, you have to come up with solutions like acts of subversion.

Finally, for those wanting even more Sinclair, Greg emails to tell me of ‘Babylon Afterburn: Adventures in Iain Sinclair’s The Firewall’. This is Robert Bond’s 30-page, 12,000-word essay on Sinclair’s latest book of poems, posted over at Jacket magazine. I’ve not had the time to read this, although a quick glance tells me that although there’s no Ballard, at one point Bond compares Sinclair’s work with the post-punk sensibilities of early Fall and Public Image Ltd. (inevitably, Ian Curtis pops up, too), and uses the work of Simon Reynolds (previously interviewed here on ballardian.com) to make the point:

The affinity of Sinclair’s poetic to the post-punk ecology points to a general attempt, throughout the early 1980s, to renovate urban spiritual energies through the evolution of a post-lyric, visionary populism. A quick look at the titles of Simon Reynolds’s books of music history — such as Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock and Energy Flash — tells us that he is the archivist of youthful, energetic, supernaturalism in popular music. Post-punk is just the latest area within which he has delineated the radical transcendence offered by contemporary music’s spiritual energy, and found precisely that visionary populism which is lacking in so much contemporary poetry, the lyric category, and present-day Protestantism.

Intriguing, and I look forward to reading more.

PS: Speaking of psychogeography and music, Jude Rogers in the Guardian was recently spotted championing a so-called ‘psychogeographic rock’ movement, supposedly including the likes of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box crew. But isn’t this music hauntological? Were Reynolds’ and Fisher’s efforts all in vain?

Rogers describes psychogeography as ‘the study of the spooky effects of the geographical environment on individuals’, which is quite the paraphrase…

‘Psychogeography is the study of the exact effects of the geographical environment, controlled or otherwise, on the affective behaviour of individuals’ — Guy Debord.

What was that Sinclair said about creating a monster?

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Bluewater, Round 2
+ Your mission…
+ ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’
+ Iain Sinclair’s Ballard biography
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ ‘This most astonishing penumbra’: Will Self on J.G. Ballard
+ Random Ballard: Will Self/JGB mashup

All photography by Simon Sellars.

In May 2007 I found myself in England for the J.G. Ballard conference at the University of East Anglia. With that out of the way, I did what comes naturally. I took the train to Shepperton: Ballardian Ground Zero. I had intended to take photographs of the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on JGB’s privacy. So, no shots of his house and street here. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (while avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word), the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories.

In the end, despite Shepperton’s reoccurrence across Ballard’s ouevre, just one book coloured the day, so brilliant is its corona: The Unlimited Dream Company, that beautiful, mad, lush waking dream wrenched direct from Ballard’s cerebral cortex. In the book an airport worker, Blake, seeking to escape his mundane life in London, steals a Cessna and crashes it into the Thames River in Shepperton. He is rescued from drowning by a troupe of locals and discovers that he is unable to leave the town; there seems to be an invisible psychic barrier that denies him egress. Giving in to it, he learns that he now has strange powers. He can fly unaided (although still unable to leave the town boundaries) and he can shapeshift into different animals: birds, whales, deer. He can also conjure into being menageries of birds and packs of wild animals from thin air, or even from the orifices of his body. His sexual appetite grows polymorphously perverse and he attempts to mount anyone and anything. Galvanized by his raw libido, the townsfolk forget about their London office jobs and their safe suburban lives, and a cult soon forms around Blake as he teaches them to fly, to reject their hyperreal consumerist lifestyles in favour of a journey into the sun, an ultimate realm in which they would celebrate “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Throughout, Ballard allows Shepperton to glow lysergically before the mind’s eye, a flaring vision of the suburbs and post-industrial liminal zones that threatens to negate the entire world. It’s no wonder he’s such a powerful influence on artists and filmmakers: the writing has a pure visionary quality that, as I’ve always maintained, transcends literature, that bends time and space (but of course). Here, then, are my photos and commentary from my trip to Shepperton — my small tribute to this remarkable book and the marvellously vivid quality of Ballard’s work, my attempt to provide an on-location correlation for the film of The Unlimited Dream Company playing in the cinema of my mind.

I must thank Jo M. for her company throughout the day. Jo’s marvellous insights into the town and her knowledge of Ballard’s work enriched the experience, and her maps and keen navigational skills greatly surpassed my own wretched sense of direction.

This feature is presented in two parts. In Part 1 we set out from the train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake was unable to do, we make our way to the film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). In Part 2, due next week, we explore the reservoirs near the studios, also a prominent feature of the book, before crossing back over the motorway and into town, and then on into Old Shepperton where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

Outside the railway station the last of the office-workers were once again making a half-hearted attempt to set off for London. But as I approached they gave up all thought of work. Ties loosened, jackets over their shoulders, they strolled through the holiday throng, their sales conferences and committee meetings forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

I live in Melbourne, where if you travel in certain directions 40 minutes out from the centre you find outlying suburbs and satellite towns that are basically parched-concrete aprons with brick-veneer boxes on them in which entire families somehow cohabitate. Parks are rare, greenery is sparse and everything is geometric and regimented, with great swathes of freeway cut through the middle. (Here is an example of the type of ennui this leached Australian suburbia can inspire; here is another.) Somehow from reading Ballard I expected similar of Shepperton, 40 minutes from the capital by train, especially given that most people who interview Ballard at his house remark on the dominance of the motorway and the terminal nature of the town.

Ballard himself has been known to play this up, as in his 1988 interview with Paul Rambali. “Post space race, when the moon was discovered to be merely dust,” Rambali writes, “his novels caught the imagination of a young generation that sensed an imminent everyday apocalypse, the future shock of the homogenous new suburbs”:

“I fear this is the future,” says Ballard… He is talking about Shepperton… “Driving through the suburbs of Germany in the Seventies I could see it. Everything is controlled. Even a drifting leaf looks out of place… 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.”

But Ballard continues to live in this suburb where time has stopped, a sort of self-imposed alienation. In this, he is like a character from one of his novels, accepting the entropy that surrounds him.

Paul Rambali, “Visions Of Dystopia”, The Face (1988).

Thus I was a bit taken aback upon arriving at Shepperton station to be greeted by what looked like a picturesque town with a homely village atmosphere, winding streets with real-ale pubs smack in the middle of them, greenery galore and heritage-style red-brick housing. Sure, time has stopped but it’s hardly the dehumanised non-space of Ballardian lore. I’ve certainly seen far bleaker residential areas elsewhere in the British Isles. Still, it’s what’s under the surface that counts in Ballard…

Completing my transformation of this suburban town, I walked along the main roads leading to the perimeter of Shepperton. To the south I threw my semen at the foot of Walton Bridge. Standing in the centre of the main road to London, I ignored the hornblasts of the passing drivers. Once again I was sure that none of them realized I was naked, and thought they were looking at an eccentric villager trying to throw himself under their wheels.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In 2004, why did the stars align in such a cataclysmic way in Surrey, the county in which Shepperton nestles? As the Shepperton sign above indicates, it was a bumper year. But that’s not the whole story: in 2004 Surrey was in the top 10 for child road deaths in Britain. What would 2006′s final tally be? The sign’s single interrogation point for 2006 almost begs us to beat the 2004 record. Death Race 2006, perhaps?

Is Surrey, and Shepperton, somehow responsible? Is there any truth to the rumour, spread by Mikita Brottman in her introduction to the book Car Crash Culture, that Ballard in Crash “charts a parallel between road intersections and astrological signs”?

Perhaps the truth is rather more prosaic, yet far more disturbing:

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?

Ballard, Crash! (short film; 1971).

[The] demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures… our apparently limitless powers for conceptualisation — what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

Ballard, “Introduction to the French edition of Crash” (1973).

For some reason known only to the interior of my head I was trapped in this riverside town, around which my mind had drawn a strict perimeter, bounded on the north by the motorway, on the west and south by the winding course of the Thames. I watched the traffic moving eastwards to London, certain now that if I tried to leave by this last door of the horizon the same queasy perspectives would unravel in front of me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Ian Allan Ltd. is a travel agent based in Terminal House just near the station. “The Terminal Beach” (1964) is one of Ballard’s finest stories and the blueprint for The Atrocity Exhibition. Set on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, which has been blasted into an undifferentiated slag by American nuclear testing, the story follows a possibly irradiated ex-US airman who wanders around on the island attempting to find the beach that reminds him of where he was born. Detaching himself from reality, he communes with the dead and reinvents — and destroys — himself according to the “any space whatever” of postwar globalism, represented by the sad spectre of the nuclear-poisoned island.

Before we ventured further into the dark heart of Shepperton, I was tempted to ask Ian Allan himself if he would later sell me a ticket to “the white leviathan, zero”, as the spirit of a dead Japanese man describes the terminal beach. But inside I suspected that like the travel agent in The Truman Show, he would conspire to ensure I could never leave Shepperton, that the only journey I would be undertaking would be deeper and further into my skull.

“Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve,” said Ballard in 2000. “A place of refuge for the endangered mind.”

The helicopter had retreated to the water-meadow across the river. Swept along towards the church, I saw Miriam knocked from her feet by the running crowd. As she knelt on the grass she was seized by the young women, a group of secretaries who happily stripped the clothes from her shoulders and lifted her into a head-dress of feathers.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

At the end of Ballard’s street is a walking trail that passes through verdant parks and meadows. It’s completely unexpected as you follow the winding road and come out the other side. We pictured Ballard, on first arriving in Shepperton, exploring his environs, going for a walk to the end of his street and discovering this wonderland that is like a theme park torn from its context and thrust into the middle of suburbia, like the geodesically preserved forests in Silent Running. The effect is quite unreal, and gazing into these ponds I was summarily transported to that mystical long shot in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which vegetation ripples and sways under flowing water, at once completely artificial in the intensity of the film’s colour and focus but at the same time so organic it transcends reason and logic.

Everywhere a macabre vegetation was emerging. Strange predators moved through the grass. Snakes climbed from the banks of the creek. A plague of spiders cast webs of pus across the trees, drawing silver shrouds over the dead flowers. Above the grave white flies festered in a halo. As a pale dawn filled the meadow I could see shrike attacking the last of the hummingbirds and impaling them on the thorn-bushes. The whole of Shepperton was sickening, poisoned by the despair flowing from me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge… the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Where we found ourselves, a tiny river cuts under concrete slabs and leafy vegetation snakes around motorway pedestrian bridges. The sound of trickling water blends with the Doppler effect of speeding vehicles. Here, where we found ourselves, “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate”, the absolute state to which Blake craves, would be fully apparent to a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, in fact would appear fully formed. How many of his books were inspired by walks through this backstreet terrain? The Drowned World, with its vision of a lush, overgrown London? The Unlimited Dream Company itself? Even Concrete Island, despite the austerity of its title?

According to Peter Linnett:

The island isn’t concrete at all. It seems to live, organically. Admittedly it overlays the ruins of some old streets, a cinema, an air raid shelter; but on first sight: simply grass.

Linnett, “The Greening of Ballard: A Review of Concrete Island” (1976).

An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Braun Headquarters, Melsungen 1986-92 by Stirling Wilford & Associates with Walter Nageli. Photo courtesy BD Online.

I’m supposed to be participating in a documentary on car parks. Right now I’ve no idea what I’ll be banging on about precisely, but I do know I’ll be following the Iain Sinclair guide to modern living, with its single rule: “When in doubt, quote Ballard.”

To prep myself I’ve compiled this Ballardian Primer to Car Parks, with photos lifted from Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking, a book Ballard said he wanted for Christmas. I’ve only looked at the novels, which was exhausting enough. I might get to the short stories at a later date.

Note how Atrocity and Crash feature the most examples (and even at that, I haven’t listed them all), almost an unhealthy obsession for JGB at the time, and how 20 years later in Super-Cannes he actively ridicules his obsessed former self, with not one put two choice put-downs directed at Super-Cannes’ narrator: “‘We’ve all noticed. You’re the Ben Gunn of our treasure island. I thought you were writing a social history of the car park.’” and “‘He thinks you need a lobotomy. He told me you’re obsessed by car parks.’”

Of course Ballard was to do the same thing in Kingdom Come, in which a character describes that book’s narrator as ‘beyond psychiatric help’, a little in-joke directed at his former self and the novel Crash, which was famously rejected by a publisher’s reader with the words: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

“Thousands of inverted buildings hung from street level — car parks, underground cinemas, sub-basements and sub-sub-basements — which now provided tolerable shelter, sealed off from the ravaging wind by the collapsing structures above.”

JGB, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

“Talbot looked up at his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park. Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“From the window of his office, Dr Nathan watched Talbert standing on the roof of the multi-storey car park. The deserted deck was a favourite perch. The inclined floors seemed a model of Talbert’s oblique personality, forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Already, without touching her, he knew intimately the repertory of her body, its anthology of junctions. His eyes turned to the multi-storey car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“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; the mysterious eroticism of the multi-storey car park, a Krafft-Ebing of geometry and posture…”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“As they left the cubicle beside the kiosk he followed them towards the car park. The angular floors rose through the fading light, the concrete flanks lit by the neon signs of the bars across the street.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Deliberately he had allowed Vaughan to take command, curious to see where they would go, what junction points they would cross on the spinal causeways. Together they set off on a grotesque itinerary: a radio-observatory, stock car races, war graves, multi-storey car parks.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Parking Facility No 1, Chicago 1955 by Shaw, Metz & Dolio. Photo courtesy BD Online.

“Travers had become more and more withdrawn, driving her along the motorway to pointless destinations, setting up private experiments whose purpose was totally abstract: making love to soundless images of war newsreels, swerving at speed through multi-storey car parks (their canted floors appeared to be a model of her own anatomy), leading on the mysterious film crew who followed them everywhere.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“As she sauntered along the verge he became aware of a sudden erotic conjunction, the module formed by Vaughan, the inclined concrete decks and Karen’s body. Above all, the multi-storey car park was a model for her rape.;

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Vaughan followed them everywhere with his camera, zoom lens watching from the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal at the airport, from hotel mezzanine balconies and studio car-parks.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park. Disturbed by a police patrol, we had forced ourselves through a hurried sex-act. Reversing out of the park, I struck an unmarked tree. Catherine vomited over my seat. This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

Marine Parade, Worthing. Photograph: Sue Barr/Thames & Hudson.

“An immense peace seemed to preside over the shabby concrete and untended grass. The glass curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“All the hopes and fancies of this placid suburban enclave, drenched in a thousand infidelities, faltered before the solid reality of the motorway embankments, with their constant and unswerving geometry, and before the finite areas of the car-park aprons.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Vaughan was staring at the terraced cliff of the car-park, his eyes following the canted floors, as if trying to recognize everything that had passed between himself and the dark-haired girl.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine were with him — she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned In advance of itself.”

JGB, Concrete Island (1974).

“Wilder pressed on. “I know Charlotte has reservations about life here — the trouble with these places is that they’re not designed for children. The only open space turns out to be someone else’s car-park.”

JGB, High-Rise (1975).

“The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

“The street lamps shone down on the empty car parks, yet there were no cars or people about, no one was playing the countless slot-machines in the stores and arcades.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

Parkhaus am Bollwerksturm, Heilbronn 1997-98 by Mahler, Gunster, Fuchs. Photo courtesy BD Online.

“Two vehicles occupied opposite corners of the car-park, breaking that companionable rule by which drivers arriving at an empty car-park place themselves alongside each other.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces, or roamed around the vast car parks. The lines of silent vehicles might have belonged to a race who had migrated to the stars.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘I’m on holiday. It’s lasted a little longer than I planned.’

‘We’ve all noticed. You’re the Ben Gunn of our treasure island. I thought you were writing a social history of the car park.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘He thinks you need a lobotomy. He told me you’re obsessed by car parks.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘They like that. They like the alienation.’ Gould took my arm, a teacher relieved to find an intelligent pupil. ‘There’s no past and no future. If they can, they opt for zones without meaning — airports, shopping malls, motorways, car parks. They’re in flight from the real.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“Acres of car parks stretched around me, areas for airline crews, security personnel, business travellers, an almost planetary expanse of waiting vehicles. They sat patiently in the caged pens as their drivers circled the world. Days lost for ever would expire until they dismounted from the courtesy buses and reclaimed their cars.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“This was his real terrain, a zone without past or future, civic duties or responsibilities, its empty car parks roamed by off-duty air hostesses and betting—shop managers, a realm that never remembered itself.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

Pydar Street, Truro. Photograph: Sue Barr/Thames & Hudson.

“There was a forest of signs helpfully guiding the visiting motorist to the car parks, though it was unclear why the town should have so many visitors or why they would want to park there.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“‘His job was to wait here.’

‘Job? What exactly? Taking communion in a car park?’”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“He stopped when he reached my Range Rover and glanced at his reflection in the black doors, the pale nimbus of a head floating behind the cellulose as it had haunted the trees in Bishop’s Park, Munch’s Scream resited to some long-term car park of the soul.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“I had left the Jensen in the multi-storey car park that dominated the town, a massive concrete edifice of ten canted floors more mysterious in its way than the Minotaur’s labyrinth at Knossos — where, a little perversely, my wife suggested we should spend our honeymoon.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘A bad actor howls from the roof of a multi-storey car park and we think he’s a seer.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy, a shrink-proof shaman of the multi-storey car parks, Kafka in a tired trenchcoat, a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

Calderwood Street, Woolwich. Photograph: Sue Barr/Thames & Hudson.

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been uploaded.

This is one of the stranger JGB-related films I’ve seen; ‘documentary’ is not quite the word for it, even as it functions as a biography of both Ballard and Shepperton.

Basically, it’s the story of Thomas’s doomed attempt to interview Ballard. He takes a taxi to Shepperton, and before he knows it is in a parallel dimension, being driven by a gruff hoodlum with clear contempt for his passenger. Shepperton motorways pass by, but only as a front projection; there is no taxi, just a car seat pretending to be one as Thomas and the driver go nowhere fast. The taxi driver, who is French speaking, tells Thomas he needs clearance to visit Shepperton, which is now the ‘new capital of the galaxy’, and we recognise the obvious nods to Godard’s Alphaville, in which Lemmy Caution similarly travels through ‘sidereal space’ in his Ford Galaxie. Finally, Thomas ‘lands’ in Shepperton and attempts to ring Ballard, but is rebuked, whining ‘I’m not an amateur’.

Weaving in and out of this is the story of Ballard’s life, told via newsreels and family snapshots. Basic canonical facts are strung together: Ballard’s time in Shanghai, his arrival in England and his settling in Shepperton, his studying of medicine, his siring of three children, his writing of Crash and Empire of the Sun…

There is an English-speaking narrator, who does quite a good job of impersonating Ballard, letting forth with some very well-chosen JGB quotes, the clack of a typewriter underpinning this prophecy of the ages.

We see what is supposed to be Ballard’s house; strange shapes and apparitions emanate from it.

Then Thomas appears to find himself in a Tarkovsky-style zone, and ‘Ballard’ tells us that:

Shepperton is nowhere, that’s its great appeal for me. There are film studios here, and it lies within the psychic catchment area of London airport so it expresses transience, classlessness, alienation and a complete lack of traditional reference points. It’s the way of the future.

Thomas, wandering aimlessly around Shepperton, interviews residents: an elderly lady shopkeep, a Lotus car salesman, a young guy playing snooker, who laughs when asked, ‘What is there to see in Shepperton?’ None of them mention Ballard or seem to know who he is; one chap, talking about ‘stars’ in the area, mentions Edward Woodward! These interviews are skilfully contrasted with Thomas’s own science fictional glimpses of the suburb, which suggest something altogether stranger below the surface of this placid riverside town. Although he gets no closer to meeting Ballard, he is beginning to hotwire the Ballardian signal directly into his frontal lobe. Then he is attacked and beaten by uniform-clad thugs, and the familiar front projections return, images of suburbia taking over from the real thing, and we are back in the zone again.

A French-speaking woman emerges, called ‘Karen Novotny’ no less — the name, of course, of the cypherwoman from The Atrocity Exhibition (all the weirdness is in French, appropriate since these sequences worm their way inside the brain of the Thomas character, who is of course from France). She informs Thomas that she and her sub-militia are attempting to wrest psychic control from Ballard, whom she calls ‘the Unlimited Dreamer’; the ‘whole city is controlled by the Unlimited Dreamer’s thought waves,’ she says.

Cut to more biographical detail. ‘Ballard’ intones, ‘We live inside an enormous novel’, which is the green light burning for more high weirdness, and we finally end up in the ‘psycho-geographic area of the first spaceport in America, opened in 2010′…

All up, this is an inventive short film, displaying considerable verve and skill, especially in its juggling of three separate time tracks: the story of Ballard, of Shepperton, of Thomas. Rather than trying to cover up the lack of budget, they’ve made a virtue of it, with the front projections standing in for unstable reality. I’m also assuming the crew actually did try to interview Ballard; rather than give up the film when that didn’t come off, they’ve weaved a story around his reclusiveness. Plus, the acting is really good — the actor playing Thomas does a great line in self-deprecation — the sound design and score is effective, and the film is faithful to the power of Ballard’s work. Rather than trying to intellectualise or contextualise Ballard, it presents his vision as ‘felt’, as experiential, as utterly mysterious as a multi-storey car park, as banal as a Shepperton high street, as transcendental as a pirate radio wave.

For Thomas Cazals, the power of J.G. Ballard’s writing is important for the transformation it wreaks on the everyday, for its power to remake the world in thrall to personal fulfillment. He is clearly in awe of the Seer from Shepperton, and has found a thoroughly unique way to parlay that into a tribute to the man. We might even be able to read the film as a parody of the typical starstruck fan who visits Shepperton hoping to catch a glimpse of his hero, and is mesmerised by the surrounding motorways and the dull suburban sheen that is now so recognisably Ballardian.

Recently, a reader commented elsewhere on this site:

Perhaps we have to take seriously the (diffused ambient) notion that Ballard’s writing really does access and stimulate previously un-tapped regions of the brain. A new organ, better fitted to understanding the monolythic psychological blandscapes of, eg. The Atrocity Exhibition (which is itself a cryptic blueprint for the construction of a unique time travel device). We have to do more deep theoretical R&D into Ballard: as fresh, varied, radical, and disturbingly alive as the source itself.

I’d say Cazals has done exactly that.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Shepperton’s Oracle.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

Mike Bonsall

Mark Lawson: The work of the novelist JG Ballard divides fairly neatly into two sets, there are the novels which draw clearly on his own experience of the world, including the Booker prize-winning Empire of the Sun, which describes his internment in a Chinese prisoner of war camp during World War Two, and The Kindness of Women which fictionalises his experience post-war of being widowed with three young children. And then there are stories which take place in a distorted, warped, surreal version of the modern world, such as The Unlimited Dream Company and Crash — about sexual fantasists involved in car wrecks, which became one of the few modern movies to be widely banned. But confusingly, books of both kinds are likely to include central characters called Jim Ballard. Readers and critics though, who are policing the line between Ballard’s life and writing, are now helped with their enquiries by the author himself with the publication of his latest book, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, an autobiography. To discuss it, I’m joined in the studio by the writer Iain Sinclair, whose books include Downriver, and from Oxford by the writer and critic Professor Hermione Lee. Iain Sinclair, we have to get this out of the way really, for any readers of Ballard, or admirers, the book contains a shock. In that calm voice that he’s used about so many terrible things, he explains he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, his oncologist has made it possible for him to write this book. It’s another example of the unflinching way in which he can describe what happens to him.

Iain Sinclair: Yes, and he holds that revelation back until the end of the book, although in some senses it underwrites it, because this is a very generous book, it’s amazingly warm hearted, and although it is very similar to Empire of the Sun in some ways, and other books, there are these little glancing details that give you more of himself than he’s offered before. The parents appear in the prison camp, the sister appears. It’s very subtly done, I think it’s wonderfully crafted and in the classic Ballard way; it’s also a tremendous page turner.

ML: Hermione Lee, he’s always played, as we’ve said, with the boundaries between fact and fiction — Jim Ballard — in books which seemed autobiographical, and ones which almost certainly can’t be. He does, as Iain says, he does provide useful footnotes here.

Hermione Lee: Yes, it’s terribly interesting to set it against Empire of the Sun, which came out in 1984, when he was in his 50s, and which, as you say, drew on that childhood experience of being, you know, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, and being in the internment camp. And what Ballard fans remarked on then, when that novel came out, was how close the images of that experience were to the fantasy novels, novels like The Drowned World. And now he goes over that time again and shows how haunted he’s always been by that mental furniture — as how could he not be — but also what’s gripping about it is that he shows what actually he made up in Empire the Sun, you know, which people said — oh, it’s much autobiographical than the other novels — and here, now you can see from, as Iain says, the extra things he tells us, how much he actually invented and imagined in Empire of the Sun. So it’s really fascinating to hold the two together

ML: Iain, having discussed that, give me an example of something that you learned from this that you hadn’t known about him… Or which changes the way…

IS: Um… the figure of his sister for example; I didn’t know about. And then there’s this extraordinary surreal image of the sister — when he’s a child — he builds a plywood barrier that goes onto the dinner table so that he doesn’t have to look at his sister, it as a peep-hole in it — this is like something out of Dali. And underwriting everything Ballard does, goes back to a remark he made many many years ago, which was that he tries to obey the surrealist formula, which is — to place the visible at the service of the invisible. And this is a very visible book, but beneath it are these shadows of the invisible that he’s releasing for the first time, and I find that quite moving.

ML: Hermione, on that point of surrealism…

HL: Yes, I was just going to say, that’s such a brilliant image to pick up, because that little spy-hole, which is so weird, is actually like Ballard’s eye, because elsewhere there are little tiny places that he crawls into, like the cockpit of a disused plane, and he’s looking out, he says, as if through a small window into a dream, and he talks very fascinatingly about the influence of dissecting corpses when he’s a medical student and Francis Bacon and Kafka and film noir. And he talks about Freud and surrealism as the key influences on his work and he calls them: ‘a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world’, so he’s really giving you a kind of interpretation of his whole work here.

ML: And Iain, he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian — lots of writers used that after the death of Princess Diana, in that week. The artist Marc Quinn, on Front Row the other day, who’d made these impossible flowers, he said: ‘I think of them as Ballardian’. And he has — it’s apparent throughout this book, and the others, as Hermione was saying — that way of looking at the world and describing it.

IS: Yes, he says, often, he wanted to be a painter. He was a great friend of Paolozzi, Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor, and I think the dominant figures in his influence over the years were Paolozzi and Chris Evans, who was the kind of rogue scientist who provided him with outprints of scientific matters and who is the figure behind Vaughan, to some extent, in his novel Crash. Ballard really is like a kind of Delvaux — famously he has an imitation Delvaux in his house — and here, I think that there are key images that come back repeatedly in his fiction, as with the famous drained swimming pool. There’s also the figure of a Chinese man who’s strangled with wire on a railway station, who comes back in this book and comes back in the fictions. There’s, as Hermione said, there’s this moment when the boy gets onto an airfield and climbs into the cockpit of a plane. There is the bicycle ride through the streets of Shanghai — these things just come back again and again and again…

ML: Also, Hermione, the amazing revelation that he almost died in a car crash after writing Crash, and he reflects on what would have been made of that, in his life, if it’d happened.

HL: Absolutely extraordinary, he writes his own obituary — as in a sense he’s doing here, I feel. I mean, there is a kind of — benign benediction — going on in this book, but that, what I’m left with is this sense that, when he was a little boy, the mothers of his friends used to complain that he was always rearranging the furniture in their in their houses, and this is what he does, he rearranges the furniture.

Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons, Kirsty Wark, Julie Myerson and John Harris.

More Miracles discussion… Here’s a transcript of the Newsnight Review segment on BBC 2. Not as revealing as the interviews, and having Tony Parsons say that Empire is ‘possibly the great novel of the 20th century’ isn’t necessarily a good thing. Still, all publicity is good…

Mike Bonsall

Kirsty Wark: The writer JG Ballard responded to the diagnosis of advanced cancer in 2006 by writing his autobiography. He says Miracles of Life is the last story he will ever tell, and it’s one of early sensory overload, beginning in Shanghai, the place of his birth in 1930, and his home until the age of fifteen. Shanghai fuelled his imagination for novels, starting with sci-fi, to more modern dystopias. His time in a Japanese internment camp was the inspiration for his two semi-biographical novels; Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women; with death as a part of his life in occupied Shanghai. His preoccupation with violent sex and death resulted in his 1970 novel Crash, later to be one of the most controversial films of all time. Miracles of Life: from Shanghai to Shepperton, is the key to JG Ballard’s extraordinary life.

Reader: In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now that my main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came to England after the War, a world that was almost too real. As a writer I’ve treated England as if it were a strange fiction, and my task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood self did when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks and temples without doors.

KW: Tony, I think I’m right in saying that, for a long time he said he wasn’t going to write an autobiography and he has, for you, did it illuminate his writing more?

Tony Parsons: Well it did, I mean, if you love Ballard, as I love Ballard, then you’ve certainly read Empire of the Sun, and you’ve seen the Spielberg film, and you’ve almost certainly read The Kindness of Women. So, when I was reading the early part, and the Shanghai years, there were so many images that seemed incredibly familiar to me; the beggar expiring at the gate of the family home, the young Chinese peasant who’s being tortured by Japanese soldiers at the end of the war, the boy, the English schoolboy who’s never been to England, riding round Shanghai on his bicycle. And I did have a sinking feeling, you know, I was worried that I was going to be disappointed, that so much of this stuff was familiar to me, but the glory of it is, it fills in the gaps, between what he is — you know his parents were with him in the prisoner-of-war camp — and he’s very illuminating round around about why he left his parents out of Empire of the Sun, but they were actually there. And when he gets back to England, it’s always — it’s a life that’s permanently dislocated, it’s always out of step, you know, he loses his wife at a tragically young age, he becomes a single father — at a time when there are no single mums around — and just does — I mean he’s a genius, and he’s got the genius eye for the killer detail, after his wife dies, he sees a happy couple embracing in the car in front of him and he sounds his horn with anger.

Newsnight Review: Julie Myerson and John Harris.

John Harris: Um, Ballard’s writing style, and I sort of had to remind myself of this by going back to the books of his that I own; I’ve read Empire of the Sun, Super-Cannes and um, another, name of which I’ve forgotten…

TP: Crash?

JH: … No, it’s the other piece with that. Anyway, very, very dry and dispassionately he writes, but the imaginative conceit behind what he writes is, what, kind of, enlivens it and renders it spectacular. Clearly, in the case of his real life, large parts of it are so spectacular that the same thing happens but it is written fantastically dryly and dispassionately and there are occasions when you start to think that it was written under duress and in a hurry, he does, he does race through. I mean he could have written his autobiography about twice as long; a good example is the early death of his wife which is dealt with in a matter of paragraphs, but you have to take into account that it was written under duress and in a hurry because he’s very seriously ill; once that’s happened, I’ll cut him all the slack in the world because I can’t think of anybody who’s had as interesting a life as him.

KW: There are some extraordinary scenes aren’t there, in Shanghai?

Julie Myerson: Oh yes, so many. I haven’t read any of his novels and this makes me want to read them; obviously I have an awareness of what his novels are. I came to it, sort of, not knowing about his novels and also, actually not knowing about the cancer diagnosis, so when I got to the end, having really got to know and like this extremely likeable man. It really took me by surprise, that did. I didn’t know his wife was going to die either and he does deal with these things with great economy and he’s not at all self-indulgent and he’s had the most extraordinary life, so, lots of things, first of all Shanghai but also, becoming a single parent. I think he’s writing Crash, looking after three young children, making bangers and mash, between bangers and mash and Blue Peter he’ll write a chapter and as a writer you so identify with that and he said ‘my greatest ally was the pram in the hall’.

TP: That’s an incredible line, that’s an unbelievable line…

JM: There is a warmth to him, he’s passionate about family and children, and what I love best about this book, even, not having read any of his books, is that it’s the story of someone who had quite an undernourished childhood and found huge artistic fulfilment through writing, but also found joy and fulfilment through family life, despite his wife dying, he’s really got something from family.

KW: And I suppose what happened was, that he had this extraordinary childhood that almost gave him enough in his bag to write for the rest of his life without having to do other extraordinary things.

Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons and Kirsty Wark.

TP: And it’s extraordinary too that I think it wasn’t uncommon for people to come back from China, or India, or Hong Kong, in their mid-teens, never having seen this place — and this is home — you’re home — you’re home now, and then moving from, I mean, you know, he had both extremes in Shanghai, he was in a prisoner of war camp and he also had armies of servants indulging him and so he’s always been dislocated, he’s always been out of step. I would urge you, and I would urge anybody, to read Empire of the Sun because I think it’s really, it’s possibly the great novel of the twentieth century.

KW: You talk about him writing very dispassionately but what he writes about is the most extraordinary — for example the Buick is going through — the families go out of the international settlement, and go through the old battlefields and there’s bodies lying here — and he’s only ten.

JH: The best illustration — Cocaine Nights was the book, I forgot — the best illustration of why dry and dispassionate writing often serves its subject matter well, is the occasion when he gets out of the prisoner of war camp and he goes to find Shanghai again and he’s on a railway platform, and he watches a party of Japanese soldiers slowly murdering a Chinese man — and he’s not florid — he doesn’t have to ladle on metaphor, he just says I was, what, nine or ten years old and this is what I saw, that’s so powerful…

TP: That’s one of the key scenes of Empire of the Sun and when I was reading this — and that’s when I thought — am I going to get the same stuff all over again but it’s…

JM: One of the most amazing things about the book is the way his experience in Shanghai, the way it comes back through his life in unexpected ways, so it isn’t till when he’s cutting up dead bodies as a medical student in Cambridge that he realises he’s embarking on a kind of moral and emotional journey to deal with that.

TP: He loves Shanghai, despite all the horror and death, he calls it the magical place, he calls it.

KW: Well, Miracles of Life by JG Ballard is published by Fourth Estate.

Vale & J.G. Ballard, 1982. Photo courtesy RE/Search Publications.

RE/Search Publications are currently offering 25% off on a pack of their four Ballard titles: RE/Search 8/9, the illustrated Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard Conversations, and J.G. Ballard Quotes. The four would normally sell for US$80, but are being offered for US$60.

They’ve also onlined a series of colour photos of Ballard from 1982 and 1987, some recognisable as accompaniments to the interviews in RE/Search 8/9. They’re great shots, featuring Ballard clowning around in his living room under his aluminum palm tree (hardly a suitable image for the storied, psychopathic genital mutilator of Crash, now is it?), in his study, and with RE/Search publisher Vale in JGB’s backyard.

There are also lots of photos detailing the contents of JGB’s very disorganised bookcase, significantly featuring a load of art books (Dali, Picasso, Bacon, Munch, Ernst, Delvaux), Le Corbusier, a few Burroughs, Hitchcock by Truffaut, and a book on Crash Injuries. There’s nary a novel in sight, including his own. There are some novels in sight, including his own!

J.G. Ballard, 1982. Photo courtesy RE/Search Publications.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Enormous thanks to Mike Bonsall, who once again has transcribed a Ballard interview from the BBC’s latest round of Miracles of Life promotions. From the Nightwaves program on Radio 3, it’s my favourite from this latest batch. The interviewer, Philip Dodd, engages JGB in such a way that a different spin is applied to the familiar elements from Ballard’s life. But he’s also wise enough to avoid the ‘Ballardian cliches’ that we know so well from Empire of the Sun, instead focusing on the really interesting strata of the autobiography where new and revealing information can be found.

His reference, “‘The skull beneath the skin’ as Eliot said of Webster…”, is to Eliot’s poem Whispers of Immortality that starts:

Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

…Webster being the gruesome Jacobean playwright of The Duchess of Malfi (who I only know from ‘Shakespeare in Love!).

I originally thought PD was saying that Walter Benjamin had written an essay called ‘The German Jew’, but that’s a description of him. The idea of the Angel of History comes from his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Which does sound suitably Ballardian!

Finally, the reference to ‘the growing good of the world’ is in Middlemarch by George Eliot. Sorry if you already know all that, but I’ve learned a lot!’

M.B.

Philip Dodd: …Just two riveting writers on tonight’s programme, first Martin Amis ‘a man with acid in his inkwell’, to quote the New York Times, and second, JG Ballard — in my view, Britain’s greatest living novelist — who’s written a mesmeric autobiography:

J.G. Ballard: I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on the 15th of November 1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world. Over dinner she would often tell me that my head was badly deformed during birth, and I feel that for her this partly explained my wayward character as a teenager and young man (though doctor friends say that there is nothing remarkable about such a birth).

PD: …Now if Martin Amis, who was born in 1949, knows war and violence at second hand, It’s arguable that JG Ballard was marinaded in them. In his novel, Empire of the Sun, he wrote a fictional account of his childhood days living in Shanghai under Japanese occupation. Now he’s written his memoir, Miracles of Life, which offers an extraordinary account of the daily killing that the young Jim Ballard witnessed during the occupation, when for a time he was interned with his family. Reading Miracles of Life, it’s clear that those Shanghai years were the defining ones for the novelist’s imagination. It’s there that he first encountered a disintegrating city, an image that’s become such a powerful part of his iconography in novels such as The Drowned World, about a city dying into a beautiful lagoon. Miracles of Life is subtitled ‘Shanghai to Shepperton’, and it takes in not only his childhood years in Shanghai, but also the shock of coming to live in England in the late 40s, his time as a medical student at Cambridge — his description of the pathology class is worth the price of the book alone — his life as a door-to-door salesman, and in the RAF in Canada. But the book also includes very personally painful subjects, from his alienation from his mother and father, to the death of his young wife. When we met in a wonderfully noisy flat, I suggested that Shanghai, and his experiences there, clearly provided the stage for what would become his preoccupations; spectacle, sex, violence and death.

JGB: Death was everywhere, in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. We lived in a suburban house — beggars died on our doorstep. And it’s impossible to imagine, living in Shepperton for example, or Tunbridge Wells in a comfortable house with nine or ten servants, and some elderly beggar, leaning against the wall in a drive and quietly dying, without anyone coming to his aid. Unbelievable, here, but it was all too believable then, I mean, it was routine.

PD: Was it because they were Chinese who were dying that your parents, in a sense, just took their dying for granted?

JGB: Yes, I think the fact that they were Chinese played a large part in it. Firstly of course there were so many Chinese; there had been civil wars from the 1920s onwards. From ’37 onwards there was the Japanese invasion of China. Millions of Chinese, destitute peasants for the most part, were struggling to get into Shanghai; why I don’t know because there was nothing there for them, nothing at all. Tens of thousands died on the streets every year; cholera, smallpox, typhoid were rife. I mean it was a place that sort of challenged every conceivable assumption that we now make about what constitutes civilised life.

PD: There’s this small boy, you, Jim Ballard, cycling his way, kind of, round the city and, you know, in this book you’re very tender towards your own children — after all the book is called Miracles of Life in response to your sense of the importance of children — and yet you as a child kinda face this and, the way you write about it, as if it’s just the wind blowing through the streets. This death, this boy – you — the younger self just kind of — just like rain.

JGB: I’d never known anything else; one has to bear that in mind. As far as my parents were concerned, they must have been shocked to the core when they first arrived in Shanghai in, whatever it was, 1929. I was never really able to draw from either of my parents any sort of answer to the question: Why didn’t we help that old beggar who was dying on our doorstep? What Shanghai proved was that kindness, which we place a huge value on — there, things were completely different. It’s very hard to convey — a kind of terminal world where all human values really have ceased to function. Every conceivable kind of, you know, entrepreneurial venture capitalism going full-blast. It’s very difficult to visualise a world were, sort of pity, didn’t really exist. Kindness didn’t exist, and could be dangerous. I think that’s something I learned very early on as a boy, to place too much reliance on kindness is a big error because it’s such an intangible thing, and the supply of kindness is finite and can be switched off.

PD: One of the things that’s very powerful in the book, and I think one of the things that binds together Shanghai and Shepperton is the sense that the world is a stage. Shanghai is this extraordinary stage that gets destroyed through the war and Shepperton, this blessed English suburb is a place where films are made, and this sense that actually beneath this staging is just that violence and to put it in the most blunt sense, just death.

JGB: I don’t want to give the wrong impression of the book but I think coming to terms with death is one of the main themes of the book. I mean, the death all around me; as a boy, in Shanghai, the death of Chinese, countless Chinese at the hands of the Japanese military, during the war itself, personal tragedy that brutally crossed my own life, the death of my wife, but also the experience of say, dissecting cadavers when I was a medical student in Cambridge, a very important phase of my life in fact, where I think I was trying to carry out my own work, a sort of — I don’t know how to describe it — a sort of restorative pathology. I was trying to sort of, analyse, what had happened to all the dead Chinese I’d seen, and used the cadavers in the dissecting room as, sort of, exploratory vehicles almost.

PD: ‘The skull beneath the skin’ as Eliot said of Webster…

JGB: Webster, yes.

PD: …is something very powerful in this book,

JGB: You know war is — a world war — is so dislocating, it shatters everything. Also one has to accept that violence in many ways is quite seductive, particularly when you’re in your teens. It’s not the glamour of violence that you see in Hollywood films. Violence — very clearly defines itself. The brutality of, say, Japanese soldiers towards Chinese civilians was really a matter of routine, you knew exactly what was going to happen. A couple of bored Japanese sergeants ride a rickshaw all the way from Shanghai, quite a journey, and then decide they don’t want to pay; more than that, they decide they’ll have a little fun, kick the poor rickshaw coolie’s only source of livelihood into matchwood and then they turn on him, kick him to death. I witnessed such an event. I mean, I think I knew exactly what was going to happen and everybody else did. Violence is very — it’s almost settling — there is no disputing it. It’s seductive in that it has a logic of its own — one almost misses it when it’s gone — a terrible thing to say, but there is an element of truth in that. One tries to recreate episodes of violence because they do tell a kind of truth — a final truth — about human beings and what we are.

PD: When you came to England, you register very well in the book, the kind of cataclysmic or non-cataclysmic shock of arriving in this place. The word that keeps coming up in the book is ‘it needed to change’ was that something you palpably and viscerally felt then?

JGB: Absolutely, I mean, I was so shocked when I arrived. You’ve got to remember that I was brought up on a huge and extremely potent mythology, the mythology of Chums annuals, of the Just William Books, AA Milne, Peter Pan, to some extent, the image of a middle-class England. I think there was a sense that this country had collectively decided to believe these nostalgic fantasies about itself, that shook me. Why on earth would anyone want to believe all this nonsense? Slowly, change arrived, actually I think it came across the Atlantic; supermarkets and motorways, it really didn’t change in a really radical way until the 60s.

PD: The word change now being polluted by a kind of a — Whig liberalism — a slow incremental change for the good; what George Eliot rather wonderfully once called ‘the growing good of the world’. I can’t think of anybody less, who believes in that than you, and one of the things — reading this book — I felt was that you want change and you’re future oriented, but actually you’re like the angel of history, Walter Benjamin’s great essay, the German Jew, who said actually that the angel of history is blown towards the future, but looking towards the past.

JGB: I think past and future were just so entangled in the minds of the English after the war. I don’t think they knew really which way they were facing. Some people can cope with nostalgia, I think the French, for example, do it very well, I think the Americans do. I think we, the English, do not cope well with nostalgia; it is used and exploited to buttress the class system.

PD: But somehow you’ve been formed, haven’t you, by the past, it’s not something you can let go of; you’re not a Whig historian who can just forget the past.

JGB: The past sits astride me like a — like a sort of crashed aircraft straddling a railway line, or a tank that’s sort of thrown one of its treads, the crew can rotate the turret, but not much more. I think I knew that change would eventually arrive. Because I’d been brought up in this ultra-modern city; I’d seen American cars, I’d seen modernity, whether in the form of art Deco architecture, cinemas, nightclubs and the like. I’d seen consumerism in Shanghai, going full blast, and I knew that it would arrive sooner or later. I remember going to see the This is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Gallery in, I think, 1956. That had an enormous effect on me. I’d just begun writing science fiction and Hamilton and Paolozzi’s exhibits in particular at the Whitechapel firmed the direction that I felt my own writing should take. They were celebrating consumerism — they were celebrating the art of the street — neon canopies over cinemas and the like.

PD: But that’s only half the truth of you because — I’m going to reach into a bag — where I’ve brought a book, which is an early book of yours, called Disaster Area, mid-60s book, rather wonderful book from mid-60s, but on the front is a charnel house on top of which are sat a few of Edgar Allan Poe’s ravens — there’s a darkness in you…

JGB: I didn’t pick that picture.

PD: …No, no I’m sure, but it’s a fair reflection of what the book’s about — there’s a dark side to you isn’t there?

JGB: Well, I mean a large part of my fiction has been an exploration of, you know, the dark side of the sun. Consumerism, you know, lights up the world — but it has its dark side. You know a large part of my fiction has been an attempt to show what happens at midnight, when the lights go out and a different set of lights — rather more lurid — come on. My more recent novels, over the last ten years, I’ve looked hard at what I see as the, sort of, the psychopathology of the city and the sort of social structures, the big office complexes and the like that, you know, that we now inhabit.

PD: There’s another book inside Miracles of Life, we’ve spoken very much about your — what I call the ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. But there is another book which is the book of two families. There’s the family you grew up in, and there’s the family that you had, your own children. And the early part of the Shanghai is an extraordinary kind of Proustian Remembrance of Things Past and then there’s a bluntness about your account of your parents that I found quite shocking.

JGB: I try to explain it in the book. I try to suggest that a lot of what seems to be callousness in my parents actually reflected a different, sort of different role, that childhood played then. Childhood was a gamble; it was a gamble for the child, but it was a gamble for the parents. So many children died in the era before antibiotics, so many children died without ever leaving childhood. Whereas today we tend to measure our success as human beings by our success as parents, parents felt, I think, to some extent detached. Parents felt towards their children in many ways — though it sounds bizarre — the way people would feel towards domestic pets. You love your Labrador dearly, but if it catches some ghastly, dog disease, and dies, you don’t blame yourself.

PD: I suppose the reason I ask that, I often think you’ve spent a lot of your writing life — flirting with confessional. I mean in Crash, 1973, you call a character after yourself; in Empire of the Sun the boy is called Jim. You’ve sort of outed yourself, at this late stage of your career; and even the cover of the autobiography there’s the picture of you, and a picture of you and your children on the back cover. What’s kind of compelled this revelatory, because you’ve always been the most frugal of people it strikes me with information about yourself?

JGB: I’m not sure if that’s altogether true. I think there’s no doubt that my ordinary, everyday life — my children have played an absolutely central role and have been much more important to me than being a writer really.

PD: You really believe that?

JGB: Yes, because whenever there’s been as a choice between the two, family life came first. You know, if they wanted me to watch Blue Peter, I watched Blue Peter — willingly; I wanted to watch it with them, even if that meant that I wouldn’t be able to type out a short story I was working on. I felt a commitment to my children once my wife had died that dominated everything. You know we’re all mysteries to ourselves, most of us have only a hazy notion of who we are we really are. Writing the particular sort of imaginative fiction that I write does tend to expose you to all kinds of hazards, you know, very easy to slip off the edge of the sidewalk and find yourself in the gutter. It’s very hard to understand, and I remember my wife — and I had a happy marriage — but I remember my wife reading some of my early short stories, and saying, ‘Why are there all these tormented marriages, with these strange and rather unappealing women – where do they come from?’ Poor husband sort of would hide behind his typewriter and say: ‘Errrr – well, you’ve got to understand; I’m not a realistic writer.’ But it is a point, you know — where do they come from? I wrote this Miracles of Life when I was 76, quite an advanced age, you know, I realised the very strange currents that make up a life.

PD: You could have ended the book other than you did, I mean, you’ve even shared with the reader that you’re ill, that you’ve got cancer and I kept trying to just work out — what had possessed you to do that — and I was thinking of Philip Larkin who didn’t even want to be told he’d got cancer.

JGB: People who’ve watched me sort of evolve as a writer know that my fiction is full of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels that, you know, are highly significant elements in what makes up my world. I only wrote the autobiography because I knew I had advanced cancer. In fact my consultant, who looks after me, urged me to write. Once I’d embarked on telling the story of my life I had to press on until, sort of, the final chapter, and there was no point in hiding, hiding behind vague hopes of the future, because basically I hadn’t got a future. I think I discovered things about myself which I might not have done otherwise, particularly in my relationships with my parents. I think I have to face the fact that I didn’t really like them very much. I tried in my earlier fiction — and in my earlier life — I mean, to maintain a kind of neutral stance, particularly towards my mother. I mean it is perfectly possible she wasn’t a very nice human being, I don’t think she was. I don’t think either of them had that big an influence on me, one habit I’d learned from the the war, was that I’d have to look after myself. You couldn’t really rely on other people. One of the huge sustaining myths is that you can rely on your parents in a time of crisis, WWII showed me that this isn’t the case. I think that I was right to be honest, there would have been an element of deceit if I’d not mentioned it. After all, the final chapter is only two pages long, and it places everything in its proper position.

From amazon.co.uk:

Synopsis

‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of the events which would profoundly influence his work. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He explores his subsequent involvement in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, and the adjustments to life following the premature death of his wife. In prose displaying his characteristic precision and eye for detail, Ballard recounts the experiences which would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing an striking social analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. ‘Miracles of Life’ is an utterly captivating account of an extraordinary writer’s extraordinary life.

From the Back Cover
‘I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim-hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world’

For almost half a century, J G Ballard has been one of the country’s most important writers. In this revelatory autobiography, bookended by time spent in Shanghai – the city of his childhood and internment in a WWII prison camp, and setting of his novel Empire of the Sun – he charts the course of his remarkable life.

Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of ‘that magical place’, Miracles of Life takes us from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp to his arrival in a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He recounts his first attempts at fiction while stationed in a frozen airbase in Canada, his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s and his lfe as a single father after the premature death of his wife.

In prose of characteristic precision and wit, Ballard recalls the experiences that would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing a striking analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. Miracles of Life is a captivating account of the extraordinary life of an extraordinary writer.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

Original photography by Steve Double (Ballard) and Jerry Bauer (Self).

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall has kindly transcribed the Will Self segment on BBC Radio 4′s Open Book program; listen to the entire program on the Open Book website. Mike says: “Interesting to note the ‘quote’ from Millennium People at the start (and probably the second one), isn’t taken directly from the text but I’m guessing is a slice from an adaptation which ran some time ago as a short serial on Radio 4.”

The interviewer is Mariella Frostrup, the regular presenter of Open Book.

Reader: Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance. A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors, led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side. They planned to invade the new studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

Not the staff response to Mark Thompson’s recent BBC cuts, but JG Ballard’s vividly imagined revolt of the middle-classes in Millennium People. Will Self will be telling me about that book, and his passion for the work of JG Ballard…

Mariella Frostrup: …there’s a new book … from the novelist JG Ballard, but this is non-fiction. An autobiography dealing with his childhood in Shanghai, the trauma of World War Two, his family’s internment by the Japanese, his eventual move to Britain and a productive life spent writing in Shepperton. Much of this Shanghai story was included in the Booker nominated novel Empire of the Sun. But alongside more autobiographical work, he’s also renowned for his Science Fiction novels and more recently a string of very engaging books about the malevolent influence of a technologically obsessed society, the moral vacuum at the heart of modern life, and a middle-class who are, quite literally revolting. Well, to offer a reader’s guide to Ballard, and to help me pick my way through his work, I’m joined by one of his best-known fans, the novelist Will Self. Will — welcome. Ballard has produced a lot of work though; seventeen novels, and many many more short stories, so where would you invite somebody to start?

Will Self: I’ll declare my colours, I think he’s probably the most significant and influential — or among a handful of the most significant and influential — writers of the English language since the second war. So, why not read them in order? You could do that and get the full development. Perhaps an easier way in, and there’s nothing wrong with sometimes taking things easy, is a kind of autobiographical way into it. I mean many people — when Empire of the Sun came out and then a second sort of quasi-autobiographical novel, The Kindness of Women, which came out in 1991 — felt that these works recapitulated and explained a lot of the themes, the motifs, the kind of currents that ran through his more, in a sense attention-grabbing, fictional work, they saw what the genesis was. So you could start with those two novels and then work into the fiction from them.

MF: Because the books that preceded Empire of the Sun had mainly been what we might call, for shorthand, science fiction, hadn’t they? And they had been sort of post-cataclysmic novels about dystopian futures.

WS: Mmm, they are kind of apocalyptic. I mean he kicks off, Ballard, with this book The Drowned World which is astonishingly prescient like a lot of his science fiction. I mean Ballard, to get this straight, has always viewed his sort of science fiction as being concerned with inner, rather than outer space. He’s not death-rays or weird aliens or anything like that at all, he’s very much writing about parallel worlds that mutate out of our own or are latent within our own. And in the Drowned World, which really showcases this preoccupation, you have a strange journey, through a very recognisably drowned Britain really — so very astonishing prescient about global warming.

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

WS: ’62 is The Drowned World, and then you have The Burning World (or The Drought), The Crystal World, and then you get to another kind of thematic break in Ballard’s work, when he publishes The Atrocity Exhibition, which doesn’t have a conventional narrative, it contains some of his most extreme imagery of, kind of, physical discorporation. It maps out the territory of what Ballard has described as the Death of Affect, this kind of — I think like a writer who he was friendly with in the 60s and who he knew fairly well, William Burroughs — Ballard’s view was that in the post-Hiroshima era there had been this kind of death of feeling in western culture, and a lot of his shock-tactics and his extreme imagery, are aimed at mapping this landscape. Contained in the Atrocity Exhibition, is the kernel, the germ, of perhaps one of his most famous novels, Crash — there is a section of the Atrocity Exhibition entitled Crash — and then he goes on to publish Crash in 1973.

MF: Described by one critic as ‘the most repulsive book I’ve ever read’!

WS: It’s a book that carries with it this most astonishing penumbra. I know that one early editor that read it sort of suggested that Ballard sought psychiatric help. As many people will know, it’s a book about the relationship between sexual excitation and car accidents. It begins with this incredible description of how this man who pursues sexual kicks through car crashes, achieves his aim:

Reader: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

WS: Now, around this time another major theme I think begins to develop in Ballard’s work, which is this idea of a kind of dystopian critique of contemporary society and it begins with a novel called High-Rise. In High-Rise a war develops between the kind of lower-class tenants of the building and the upper-class tenants on the top. And this kind of social, almost political critique, Ballard develops through a series of books and it kind of goes on into the later kind of — tetrarchy, trilogy, I don’t know what – quartet, of novels which begins with Cocaine Nights in 1996 and is still running; it’s gone through Millennium People, Super-Cannes, and now on to Kingdom Come. That kind of social critique is another thing.

MF: One of my favourites, I have to say, is Millennium People and the notion of this kind of disenfranchised middle-class who decide finally that enough is enough. We’ve got a reading from that as well, maybe we’ll play it then I’d love to hear your thoughts on that book.

Reader: The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the surrounding neighbourhood, as executives and middle-managers gave up their jobs; there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalised and the council street-cleaners, traditional working-class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Slone Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

MF: It’s enough to have you setting your four-by-four alight isn’t it Will?

WS: Yes, it’s difficult to tell with Ballard exactly how far his tongue is in his cheek, or whether it’s wrapped right the way round the back of his head. I think the interesting thing about Millennium People perhaps, as opposed to the two precursor books, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes — which are kind of a piece — is that it’s very funny. It’s very, very sly and very, very funny. And he himself has been absolutely unashamed in professing his contempt and hatred for the metropolitan bourgeoisie, he’s always had this thing that he lives out at Shepperton.

MF: I can’t let you go — seeing as his new book, coming out in February, is an autobiography — without talking a bit more about the autobiographical work. Was that very straightforward in comparison? I mean Empire of the Sun — a pretty classic novel in most aspects?

WS: I think the thing about Empire of the Sun is that it is relatively straightforward; it seems to be a naturalistic novel. But in a way I’d sort of urge people coming fresh to Ballard perhaps not to leap in with Empire of the Sun. Read a couple of the other ones first, because it’s fascinating to come to Empire of the Sun and see that this is the crucible of his perspective of the world. His father worked in Shanghai; they lived in the kind of English canton there in a kind of wealthy upper-middle-class atmosphere in the late 1930s, and then the cataclysm of the collapse of Chinese society, of the invasion of the Japanese from the north. And he, you know he would see people dead on the streets on his way to school, the dead and dying, and then of course the internment by the Japanese. And so all of these images of, kind of, dystopian, run down, fractured societies and indeed his imagery of hyper-shiny technological futures comes out of the war. So all of that imagery is there once you’ve read some of the other books to kind of see what its genesis is in Empire of the Sun.

The companion book to Empire of the Sun is Kindness of Women. And many people feel that Ballard is perhaps a bit too heavy for their taste, a little too disturbing, a little too warped. Kindness of Women is all of those things and it’s also an extremely affecting book about love and about the impact of love on somebody’s life. This is a novel that actually kind of made me cry and that’s not something that I can say about many things apart from people treading hard on my feet.

Still from Hari Kunzru’s interview with J.G. Ballard. © Waterstone’s Books Quarterly.

Waterstones is featuring a video interview with JGB, conducted by Hari Kunzru to promote Miracles of Life. There are no surprises here. Kunzru asks Ballard about the relationship of Miracles to JGB’s semi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, and Ballard replies that, of course, the novels are filtered versions whereas Miracles is something like the unvarnished truth.

Ballard also repeats old anecdotes familiar from Empire and the various interviews surrounding that book, including his view of wartime Shanghai as a stage set, the way in which slums challenge teenage boys to become dominant, his distaste for notions of ‘Englishness’ and for the class system, how he admired the Japanese during the war, how he views the distinction between inner and outer space, and how humans are dangerous with their reserves of psychopathic behaviour bubbling below the surface. But there is one memorable quote:

I was very attracted to science fiction because it had huge vitality. Meeting British and American SF writers of the period I felt a sort of ferment of ideas and possibilities which I never had meeting mainstream English novelists. All they induced was a kind of overpowering headache and a wish to leave for the South Seas.

Ballard seems noticeably weary, distracted and drawn as a result of his illness; there’s clearly not a lot of time to engage in lengthy discussion.

I don’t believe we can expect any new revelations from Miracles, but never mind. Anyone interested in Ballard must get used to the idea of repetition after all, in all its guises and in every iteration — for multiple personas are the key to Ballard’s fractured take on supermodernity.

Instead, I’m looking forward to Miracles for the fact that it is a precise summing up of the career of a writer who has had a profound impact on my life and work. As John Gray so astutely recognises, ‘Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism.’

That is precisely the guidance I receive from Ballard’s work.

And so the new book means that, reassuringly, that pulse — that jolting, sharding signal disturbing the atmosphere and breaking up the vertical hold — is still beaming out from Shepperton to the global dystopia, however weakened the signal is these days (whether through JGB’s illness or his marginalisation in the strange scheme of literary mores).

Weakened it may be, but that only reinforces the fact that this pulse must nonetheless be tapped, trapped and magnified, and passed on by all who read this new work.

Are you with me?

After much pushing and prodding from me over a period of months, Sam Scoggins has finally digitised his ‘lost’ quasi-doco on Ballard, loosely structured around themes found in The Unlimited Dream Company. Sam has posted it over at blip.tv, and it’s a special work, with wonderful fictional interventions interpolating passages from The Atrocity Exhibition with close ups of Ballard discussing his fiction.

Great sound design, great effects, and it also features an astounding section in which Ballard responds to “90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient, each of which Ballard answers Yes or No”. Ballard is clearly amused, but also deeply absorbed, and the minimalism of this interrogation is actually quite revealing, saying a lot about the man’s character, as when he’s asked if he “locks the house up at night” — to which the reply is “no”. Sometimes he hesitates, as when asked if manners are important (“yes”); other times he answers quick as a flash, such as when asked if he would dodge taxes if he was sure he wouldn’t be caught (“yes”). The nature of both responses, in different ways, betray the rough grain of Ballard’s anti-establishment bias. There’s a real sense that this format, as minimal as it is, is far more revealing than some of the more recent, overblown and repetitive interviews with Ballard, in which he seems fed up with answering the same biographical questions from journalists over and over again. Stripped to the bone in this fashion, we inhabit Ballard’s psychology in extreme close up…an effect mirrored by the camera, which inches ever closer as Ballard ploughs his way through the questions.

I have tentative plans in the near future to do an interview with Sam about the film, but for now, here’s some info from RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard:

The Unlimited Dream Company, written, edited & directed by Sam Scoggins. 16mm, 24 mins, color, 1983.

“The British science fiction writer J.G. BALLARD talks about his life and work. Meanwhile a crashed pilot stalks the landscapes of his dreams. The film is concerned with what constitutes an adequate picture of a person, the role of the imagination in transforming the world.”

Cast: J.G. Ballard, Tom Pollock. Credits: Camera, Ian Duncan; Assistant Camera, Bryan Morgan; Art Director, Charlotte Humpston; Sound, Tom Pollock..

Scoggins’ own description of the film follows:

“There are two main types of material intercut in the film:

1) A big close-up of Ballard’s face. He talks, looking straight at the camera,

2) Ballard’s alter ego wearing a ragged flying suit wanders through “Ballardian” landscapes and in each makes a portrait of Ballard from things around him.

The landscapes are:

a) The jungle (past). He makes a portrait from feathers.

b) Motorway/Scrapyard (present). He makes a portrait from crashed cars.

c) The Beach (future). He draws a huge spiral in the sand.

These sections were shot in black and white, then printed each in a different monochrome, i.e. a green, b) red, c) blue.

There are other bits of material in the film!

i) Tracking shots through Shepperton ending up on Ballard’s house with him standing outside,

ii) The same repeated but in negative color while Ballard talks about The Unlimited Dream Company in voice-over.

iii) Shots from different sequences of the film cut to the “Captain Kirby” quote.

iv) Single framed images from TV while Ballard talks about the latent and manifest content of TV.

v) A 6 min. duration very slow zoom in from a head and shoulders shot of Ballard to a very large close-up of his right eyeball. Off camera a voice asks the 90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient, each of which Ballard answers Yes or No.

vi) The last sequence of the film is a zoom out from some clouds to a shot of the whole earth, which match dissolves into Ballard’s eye as the zoom out continues until we see the whole of Ballard’s head.

On one level I hope the film is a fairly straightforward introduction to Ballard and his work, but on another level the film (at least for me) is concerned with two things:

1) How can you make an adequate picture of someone;

2) The way in which the imagination/film transforms “reality.”

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN

+ ‘A Home and A Grave’: Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.
+ The Unlimited Dream Company: bibliographical entry.

Above: the Ballard family’s former house, now lit up in the colours of capitalism. Photo: Rick McGrath.

“Do you believe in synchronicity?” Andy asked. “That’s the 10 o’clock signal for today’s national anniversary. Sirens are blowing all over the country right now.” He leaned in, conspiratorially. “It was precisely 70 years ago today the Japanese attacked China and bombed the crap outta Shanghai. Tuesday, September 18, 1937. The beginning of the end for everyone living around here. And Jim’s childhood.”

I was dumbfounded. No, gobsmacked. What were the odds of this happening on the one day I was here? It was like some temporal shift was taking place, and I was being swept along in a sort of dual timeline. The walls were coming together to form an angle.

Aircraft had always interested Jim, and especially the Japanese bombers that had devastated the Nantao and Hongkew districts of Shanghai in 1937. Street after street of Chinese tenements had been leveled to the dust, and in the Avenue Edward VII a single bomb had killed a thousand people, more than any other bomb in the history of warfare.

Rick McGrath has onlined the travelogue detailing his visit to J.G. Ballard’s former home in Shanghai, the sovereign domestic zone that played host to a number of resonant scenes in Empire of the Sun.

In 2006, using Google maps and good old snail mail, McGrath nailed the location. Later, I received an email from Andy Best in Shanghai: “Did you know Ballard’s former house is now a restaurant?” Knowing of Rick’s obsession, I forwarded it on. Rick was in touch with Andy, and then Rick was gone.

Arriving in Shanghai, Andy is his guide. They eat at Ballard’s house. The restaurant’s proprietor gets interested in a potential tie-in with the building’s unique history. They explore ‘other sites of Ballardian temporal archaeology’, including Lunghua Civilian Assembly Camp (now Shanghai High School), where Ballard and his family were interned.

The journey is surreal. Ballard freefalls in (non)space. The experience of Shanghai and Shepperton colours everything Ballard writes, or at least, everything he writes colours Ballard’s experience of Shanghai and Shepperton. Geographic boundaries dissolve in a mesh of psycho-spatial coordinates. But now, Rick McGrath is in the perfect position to weave a scale cartography of the inside of J.G. Ballard’s head.

First phase: ‘doorstepping’ JGB in Shepperton earlier this year. Second phase: Shanghai Central.

..:: MORE

+ Chris Mitchell, of jgballard.com, has an appreciative appraisal of Rick’s Shanghai trip from a travel writer’s perspective at his other site, Travel Happy.
+ Compare Rick’s photos of the house and its innards with Ballard’s own return to Shanghai, as documented in Shanghai Jim.

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

NOTE: The following is a transcription taken from J.G. Ballard’s commentary for the documentary Shanghai Jim. It also transcribes the film’s brief interviews with his daughters, Fay and Bea, and the film’s direct quotes from Ballard’s work.

See here for Pippa Tandy’s appraisal of Shanghai Jim.

A week after Christmas I left Shanghai for ever. Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in the converted meat carrier. My father and the other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (71-2).

J.G. BALLARD: Many people have said to me, ‘What an extraordinary life you’ve had’, but of course my childhood in Shanghai was far closer to the way the majority of people on this planet, in previous centuries and in the 20th century, have lived than, say, life in Western Europe and the United States. It’s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.

I described Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women as ‘semi-autobiographical’, which they are. Many of the events which took place are straightforward transcriptions of what actually happened to me. My first intact memories really date from 1937 when the Japanese invaded China, and all of Shanghai except for the International Settlement, and there was tremendously bitter fighting in and around the city.

Hans Gebruers as young Jim in Shanghai Jim.

I don’t ever remember being frightened. I think it was because we lived very protected lives as the children of Westerners in Shanghai. I was moving around the city, as it were, officially: I travelled everywhere in my parents’ car with a chauffeur. And unofficially, of course, I was always pretending to go and see a friend who lived in Amherst Avenue. And I’d ride on my little bike, I’d ride all over Shanghai in the most extraordinary way. I don’t know whether it was the magic of childhood that gave me safe passage, or the sort of a built-in arrogance of a Westerner who took for granted that he wouldn’t be harmed.

I felt a surge of excitement on entering Shanghai. To my child’s eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme. The garish billboards and nightclub neon signs, the young Chinese gangsters and violent beggars … were part of an overlit realm more exhilarating than the American comics and radio serials I so adored. … My father called Shanghai the most advanced city in the world.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (18, 19).

J.G. BALLARD: This is 31 Amherst Avenue, as it was — the house in Shanghai where I spent my childhood. Coming back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946 has been a very strange experience and of course the house is the strangest of all. I spent my entire childhood here, and I really came something close to adult life here. So it is a strange experience. I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here, and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a sort of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue, as motionless as the wall of dust that hung across the rooms, briefly folding itself around Jim when he walked through the deserted house. Almost forgotten scents, a faint taste of carpet, reminded him of the period before the war. For three days he waited for his mother and father to return. Every morning he climbed onto the sloping roof above his bedroom window and gazed over the residential streets in the western suburbs of Shanghai. He watched the columns of Japanese tanks move into the city…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (45).

J.G. BALLARD: It was very strange walking into my old bedroom on the top floor of the house because that still has its original blue paintwork, and I recognised the little bookshelves where I kept my books, my copies of Chums’ Annual, and Boy’s Own Paper, and all my American comics, and the bathroom attached to it. It was like a sort of time capsule, really, that I’d stepped into after all these years.

So much of ordinary life today is driven by the most peculiar psychological forces. In the case of my own fiction, there is an attempt as well to try to understand the changed nature of fiction and reality that constitutes our world.

Of all the places of wonder, the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII most amazed me, and contained the magic heart of Shanghai within its six floors. … A vast warehouse of light and noise, the Amusement Park was filled with magicians and fireworks, slot machines and sing-song girls. A haze of frying fat gleamed in the air, and formed a greasy film on my face, mingling with the smell of joss-sticks and incense. Stunned by the din, I would follow Yang as he slipped through the acrobats and Chinese actors striking their gongs.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (18).

J.G. BALLARD: All my characters spend their time constructing personal mythologies which can sustain their inner lives. My characters tend to be solitary, which is an unfortunate trait I think inherited from me, and they are experimenting with themselves as if they were…dreams.

Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adruft from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his mind into a deserted newsreel theater. … Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (3).

J.G. BALLARD: Our sense of security in Shanghai came to an end without any doubt after Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese seized the International Settlement. Then it was quite clear that Western power had vanished, to all intents and purposes, and that the Japanese were masters now. I admit I admired the Japanese for their strength. I couldn’t help but compare the Japanese soldiers, and all boys’ hero worship, with the English officers, who surrendered without firing a shot in Singapore even though the British forces outnumbered the Japanese by three to one. I thought of these formative experiences all the time, sometimes without being aware of it, and it certainly filtered through into my fiction, and it’s only in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women that I’ve written directly about my experiences here.

‘This Chinese high school…’; Jim Ballard re-enters Lunghua Camp almost 50 years on.

This Chinese high school, about eight miles south of Shanghai, was known during the Second World War as Lunghua Camp. And here, after Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese entered the war against the Allies, about 2000 British nationals, all of them civilians — a few Belgians, and about 50 American merchant seamen — were interned for nearly three years.

ABOVE: The roof of F Block: JGB shows us the way…

ABOVE: …to the old assembly hall at Lunghua Camp.

We’re standing on the roof of what used to be F Block, the main administrative building in Lunghua Camp. Over on the left you can just see G Block, where I lived with my family. That was one of the small family blocks in the camp. Every room had a family of four people.

This was the assembly hall, the old teacher training college in the 1930s. It was converted to an open-plan dormitory with a maze of cubicles of old sheets hung on bits of string. And I think probably about 100 people lived in there, all bachelors. Just through the trees you can catch a glimpse of one of the dining halls, which were in use for the first two years. Then to the right, the camp water tower. And over here is D Block, which is a larger version of the block in which I lived. That again is another family block.

This building, which housed on the third floor the Japanese Commandants offices, was a whole set of dormitories in which married couples lived. Again, it was a maze of cubicles made out of sheets and old blankets and heaven knows what.

I can remember the day we arrived, brought here in buses with our suitcases, and we brought our own bedding. This room was the room that my mother and father, sister and I shared for nearly three years. It was so crowded, in fact, that during the day my father, who slept there, raised his mattress against the wall so that we had a little space where we’d put up a card table and eat our meals. Otherwise there was just a door’s width between the beds. I slept over there, my mother there and my sister there. In a strange way I quite enjoyed my life here because I had so much freedom, and I was part of this very large nuclear family of 2000 people.

We got on very friendly terms with them. I remember wearing their kendo armour and duelling with them, hanging around their staff quarters, trying to look at their weapons which they were very careful not to let me handle. There was a certain sort of protocol for dealing with the Japanese; you never provoked them in any way.

I know that when the war ended there was an uncertain period of about two weeks when no one knew — the Japanese didn’t know — if the war had ended after the Emperor’s broadcast, or at least for a few days. And I remember deciding to walk to Shanghai, and I climbed through the wire and I set off northwards towards the western suburbs and Amherst Ave and reached a railway line, where I came across a tragic incident in which some Japanese soldiers were tormenting a Chinese to death.

On the concrete platform were four Japanese soldiers… Sitting with his back to a telephone pole, hands tied behind him, was a Chinese youth in a white shirt and dark trousers. Bands of wire circled his chest, and he breathed in empty gasps. … He seemed out of place on this rural railway platform, unlike the soldiers and myself. … The corporal worked swiftly, coiling lengths of wire around the Chinese and knotting them with efficient snatches of his wrists. … The railway line hummed in the heat, a sound like pain.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (55, 56, 61, 59).

J.G. BALLARD: We lived through very dangerous times. I think had not the atom bombs been dropped, there were plans, so we heard afterwards, for the Japanese to evacuate the camp and march us all up the country, to where they would dispose of us before they made their last stand against the Americans at the mouth of the Yangtze. In fact, this didn’t happen because of the sudden end of the war.

In Europe there’d been enormous cruelty during the Second World War, but in a sense it was explicable in terms of the evil of Nazi ideology; it all flowed from that. But in the Far East, where I was brought up, there was no explanation, and this was the curious thing. Enormous cruelty had taken place there. Millions of people had been murdered for no real reason other than an innate streak of violence in human nature. I think when I came to England I had this unfinished baggage. I wanted to make sense of my past life which I’d left behind. By 1949, when I went up to Cambridge, to university, and the Communists had taken over China, I knew I would never go back. But I had this huge, unresolved set of questions.

Originally I wanted to become a psychiatrist and I think it was a case, really, of ‘physician, heal thyself’. Psychiatry seemed one way of coming to terms, of merely understanding what all this was, and to become a psychiatrist I had to first become a doctor. So I spent two years as a medical student, cutting up cadavers. I think every medical student can remember the first moment, walking into the dissecting room: a strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub. It was quite jolting, even though I’d seen a great number of dead bodies, to see them actually laid out under this strange light in this rather theatrical way on these glass tables. In those days they were a faintly green colour, as a result of the formaline.

The strange thing to me, and I think this is true, they don’t actually look like the dead — they look like visitors from another planet. As you begin the process of dissection, you enter literally, and mentally and imaginatively, into the bodies of these dead men and women. I mean, as you separate the nerves and blood vessels and dissect muscles away from the bone, you are getting as close a look at another human being, in the physical sense and to some extent the imaginative sense, as you can ever do. I think it’s an enriching and powerful experience.

Dissection is a kind of erotic autopsy. … I imagined a strange act of love performed by an obsessed surgeon on a living woman, in a deserted operating theatre in one of those sinister clinics in the Cambridge suburbs. I would kiss the linings of her lungs, run my tongue along her bronchi, press my face to the moist membranes of her heart as it pulsed against my lips.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (91, 92).

Michael Troughton, playing a post-Shanghai Jim, prepares to get to the basic truth about humans.

J.G. BALLARD: It seemed to me that by dissecting the body, by understanding how all its various biological systems function, you were getting to some sort of basic truth about human beings. Of course, the brain lay beyond, but at least it was a start, particularly as the human body was surrounded with so many taboos — and still is — and of course in 1951 was surrounded by infinitely more taboos than it is now. It seemed a start, but after two years I’d had enough, and I still hadn’t found myself in England, which seemed to be a very very strange place, so for a few years I embarked on a kind of ‘catch as catch can’ existence, working for an advertising agency for a brief while; I went to Canada with the RAF as a trainee pilot for a while.

I left after about seven or eight months and decided I’d had enough of the air force. Flying had been interesting, and it had given me another set of myths to live by, all of which, oddly enough, fed into my fiction. Flying has always been a very important part of my fiction. I think it stems from my childhood and in particular the air war over Shanghai. I think the first sight of the American B29s, which began to bomb Shanghai in 1944, and then the fighter attacks by Mustangs that flew so low over our camp that I remember looking down at them from the second and third floor of our building during the air raids, flying within ten feet of paddy fields. I accept this idea that flight is a symbol of escape, but I think more than escape, of transcendence. It’s played a very important role in my fiction. My characters are forever dreaming of runways and looking into those skies, where they can transcend themselves, and from which, of course, in the mid- and late 20th century, life and death come in terms of nuclear weapons.

I think I’m assembling a kind of mythology for myself, a kind of substitute. I’d deliberately forgotten my China background by then; I never mentioned it to anybody. My wife, when I married her in 1954 or 55, I don’t think I ever told her that I was born and brought up in Shanghai, or if I did it was only in passing, and I hardly ever described it to my children.

The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and … even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash-meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children … who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (126-7).

J.G. BALLARD: We came here, my wife and I, in 1960. We had three very young children and we were looking for a house where we could bring them up, really in a sort of quiet suburb, so we saw there was a house advertised here, had a look around Shepperton, and found that in many ways it was a sort of tranquil and quite mysterious place. The river, which winds through Shepperton like a sort of great snake, all the gravel lakes here and the great reservoirs of the Metropolitan Water Board — you realise when you fly from Heathrow and look down on the place, this is a marine world. I think it was the right choice at the time, because Shepperton has insinuated itself into my fiction over the years.

I’d arrived at Vermilion Sands three months earlier. … Driving into the desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the highway to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand-reef two hundred yards away … where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert.

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, in The Complete Short-Stories of J.G. Ballard (744).

J.G. BALLARD: When I started reading science fiction for the first time in 1954, I was unusual in that I started writing it at almost the same time. Science fiction I think was dominated by its sociological speculation. It was really interested in the present rather than the very far future, and it struck me that science fiction had the right vocabulary with which to explore the world in which we found ourselves living in the mid-1950s. It seemed to me a new kind of Britain was emerging, the first motorways, and above all the TV landscape that was being imposed on all this.

I mean, all the great issues of the day, at that time — the threat of nuclear war, the development of modern communication systems, in particular television, and the role computers were going to play, the transformation of the whole planet into a media landscape, the changing nature of fiction ad reality within that media landscape — all these were topics that were not covered in any way by, say, the English mainstream novel of the day. It struck me that here was an interesting field ripe for takeover, I felt.

In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Viet Nam war, the Kennedy assassination and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. … The brutalising news-reels of civil wars and assassinations, the stylisation of televised violence into an anthology of design statements, were matched by a pornography of science that took its materials, not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientist.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (190).

J.G. BALLARD: After I got married, and children began to appear, I needed some kind of much more settled life, so that I could write in the evenings and weekends so I took a job on a chemical society journal called Chemistry & industry, a weekly scientific journal. I was assistant editor of it. It was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with its jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material. I certainly remember reading with great interest the first scientific papers on the chemistry of hallucinogenic drugs — that was very interesting to me.

In The Kindness of Women I describe the central character, the narrator Jim, taking LSD as I did myself at about the same time in this house, something we all had to do, I think, in the mid 60s. It was a piece of real foolishness on my part — I wasn’t expecting the total derailment of my mind that LSD brought about.

They were soon within the body of the forest, and had entered an enchanted world. The crystal trees around them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. … The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process. The entire length of the opposite shore glittered with this blurred kaleidoscope…

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (75, 68).

J.G. BALLARD: Domestic life, and family life, provided the background to what must have seemed to outsiders a very strange group of novels. But I think that background of domesticity, all the excitement of young children, is the anchor pinning my imagination to the real world.

LEFT: Fay Ballard. RIGHT: Bea Ballard.

FAY BALLARD: I think part of Daddy’s writing is all about how normal everything looks, but actually under the surface it’s not at all normal.

BEA BALLARD: I remember him doing the odd strange thing, like I remember he sprayed his shoes with silver paint one day, and then strolled around Shepperton, and Shepperton being a very kind of bourgeois, boring town, you know, all the local residents, you can imagine, were looking and thinking, ‘how weird’.

FAY BALLARD: When it was hot, I remember Daddy once stripping off and walking around the garden naked, which he thought was quite normal, but of course the neighbours all started looking and thinking, ‘Gosh, who’s that crazy guy next door?’

J.G. BALLARD: I’m very glad I was able to bring up the children myself. And I often say they brought me up. I imagine I had a kind of second childhood — I was able to relive my own lost childhood through them.

FAY BALLARD: I remember one particular point, which was when he obviously remembered a very very bright light in Shanghai, because even on a really hot, beautiful summer day he would have all the electric lights on in the house. And I sometimes used to say, ‘We don’t need the light on’, and he’d say, ‘Oh yes, we do, it’s got to be bright’.

J.G. BALLARD: In fact my wife caught pneumonia and died in Spain in a matter of hours, tragically. It was certainly something that no young father, or young mother for that matter, with two or three children, expects — the spouse to suddenly die without any warning. I mean, I felt at the time that nature had committed a terrible crime against my wife and my children. I think the death of my wife provided me with a sort of renewed impetus to, again, make sense of the arbitrary cruelty of the world.

A gentle conspiracy existed among my friends and publishing acquaintances, as they feigned not to notice that Miriam had vanished through a window of time and space. This silence reminded me of the cruel childhood game in which we pretended, without telling him, that one of our friends no longer existed — the poor victim would be ignored, stared through, excluded from any games.
…
Watching the national mourning of a stricken America after the assassination of President Kennedy, I almost envied his bereaved wife. Every moment of her grief was endlessly replayed and anatomised on television. Her husband’s death, like the murder of his assassin, was recapitulated in slow motion, frame by numbered Zapruder frame. She wore her blood-spattered skirt like a scream of rage at the world that had widowed her.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (174, 175).

J.G. BALLARD: I think it’s true that a lot of the machine-like, alienated sex that takes place in books like Crash or High-Rise is a reflection of my own sort of despair after the death of my wife and the peculiar, affectless quality of life the late 60s began to have, when I think it all began to come apart at the seams.

Each afternoon she would take me into the garden of the trailer park. Undressing herself, she made me memorise the trajectories of her body.

‘Placental Insufficiency’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 45, 1970.

After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.

‘A Neural Interval’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 36, 1968.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’. Advertiser’s Announcement: Sex : Inner Space : J.G. Ballard. Ambit magazine, no. 33, 1967.

J.G. BALLARD: Sensation ruled the late 60s. It was like firing an electric current into the leg of a dead frog — all you were looking for was a larger and larger kick, and this kick could be provided by drugs, or films of car crashes, or pure sensation transmitted through television. People who worry about the violence that’s shown on television now have obviously forgotten the sort of commonplace scenes of dreadful violence that were shown on British television during, say, the civil war in the Congo, and the Vietnam War, and all this had a sort of deadening of the emotions, and it seemed to me that one needed to perhaps embrace this world, to see what would happen, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, in Conrad’s words, and see if one could swim in this new realm.

I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twenty miles to the west of London, and watched the calibrated vehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions that he had photographed with his cinecamera. Sitting in the darkness … we watched the silent impacts flicker… The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Cruising alone on the motorway … I thought of myself at the controls of these impacting vehicles.

J.G. Ballard. Crash (1973; 10).

J.G. BALLARD: In my early fiction I was always much more interested in psychological roles than in what we conventionally think of as novelistic characterisation, because I was always interested in psychiatric case histories. They seemed to be closer to the truth about human nature than the kind of fully fleshed-up, so-called characters that you find in the conventional mainstream novel. In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature — this is what I was interested in.

My characters are all driven by the need to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but it’s salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

He strolled through the … arcades, noticing, as he did each morning, the strange contrasts between light and shadow… Somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal were the missing fragments of himself, living on in their own prismatic medium.

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (174).

J.G. BALLARD: People have said that my fiction has a strong negative strain but of course it’s a matter of perspective. I remember when I wrote my first novel, The Drowned World, the American publisher said, ‘Fascinating novel, Jim, but you have your hero at the end going south towards the sun and certain death, and these primeval swamps that he’s obsessed with. Why not have him going north towards safety, and finding fulfilment there.’ I refused, of course, and I said at the time, ‘Well, of course, he does find fulfilment. He’s living out the logic of his own mythology, of his own dreams. He wants to go south into self-annihilation. This is what the book is about, and what perhaps human psychology on one level or another is about.’ And I think most of my novels, in fact all my fiction, is a fiction of psychological fulfilment.

In front of Jim was Lunghua Camp, his home and universe for the past three years, and the suffocating prison of nearly two thousand Allied nationals. The shabby barrack huts, the cement dormitory blocks, the worn parade ground and the guard house with its leaning watch tower lay together under the June sun, a rendezvous for every fly and mosquito in the Yangtze basin. But once he stepped through the wire fence, Jim felt the air steady around him.

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (167).

J.G. BALLARD: I started writing about it in, I think, 1983, at that time something like 40 years after the events I was describing, which is, I often reflect, an extraordinary long time to wait to describe a crucial experience, a crucial period in one’s life. I think the explanation is that when I left China in 1946 I virtually repressed all memory of my childhood for all sorts of reasons, and gradually I think I realised by the end of the 70s that so many of the moments in my novels and short stories only made sense if they were seen in terms of an attempt to recreate Shanghai.

‘This little room…’

This little room is in fact probably as close as I’ll ever come to home, surprisingly. Since arriving in Shanghai a couple of days ago, we’ve had quite a struggle finding the camp. It’s extremely well hidden now, and of course I’ve really spent 45 years looking for the place, and in many ways this is the most important place in my life, there’s no question about it. I came to puberty here; I left the camp when I was about 15, and I came to something close to an adult mind in this camp. I saw, of course, adults under a great deal of stress, which was an education in itself. But there’s no doubt that this is a kind of settling of account for me, coming here. It is a coming to terms with the past and the sort of dreams that to some extent have sustained me during the last 45 years in England, where I’ve never really been all that at home.

And in fact I certainly, and to some extent, this camp has been my real home, to which I’ve always referred in my imagination.

He stepped onto the gangway, conscious that he was probably leaving Shanghai for the last time, setting out for a small, strange country on the other side of the world… Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (351).

J.G. Ballard, 1991.

Transcribed by Simon Sellars, with thanks to Mike Bonsall. Please be in touch with corrections.

J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier.

Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘Shanghai Jim’ (BBC documentary, dir. James Runcie, 1990).

From 1958 to 1964, J.G. Ballard worked as deputy editor and part-time writer at Chemistry & Industry, the journal of the Society of Chemical Industry. When he started he was also a struggling, disillusioned writer of science fiction; by the time he left C&I he was a successful full-time novelist. MIKE BONSALL discovers exactly how that transition occurred, as he delves into the archives at C&I to uncover ultrarare Ballardiana, including Ballard’s earliest non-fiction reviews, the text of which we present here in full — never before seen outside the magazine itself. As Mike argues, what happened at C&I codified the tropes Ballard was to return to throughout his career — the scientific, technical and imaginative motifs that shape the very essence of what we’ve come to know and love as ‘Ballardian’.

J.G. BALLARD’s grim war experiences were followed by grim experiences in post-war Britain. He dropped out of medical school after two years, then dropped out of English after a year; he quit his flying career similarly. After that came a succession of short-lived, low-level jobs: encyclopaedia salesman, porter and copywriter.

Ballard married in 1955, and his first child in 1956 was followed by two more soon after; he was under serious financial pressure and help was given only stintingly by his disapproving parents. During this time he had sold a couple of short stories to Ted Carnell, who must have twisted his arm to come to the World SF Convention in London, in 1957 — the year of Sputnik, the apogee of space opera. Carnell himself was Chair of the convention and John W Campbell was guest of honour and prize speaker. It was the height of ‘hard SF’ and Campbell was the champion of Space Opera, and therefore the scourge of the New Wave — and Ballard. As JGB later said about the convention, ‘That shattered me, and then I dried up for about a year. For over a year I didn’t write any SF at all. I was disillusioned and demoralized.’ But Ballard would find a host of new ideas, new techniques and new ways of creating within the stuffy confines of Chemistry and Industry.

LEFT: Cover of C&I, 12/7/58. When Ballard began his tenure there, it was a fairly dour journal, still mired in the post-war years.

C&I was an ideal place for Ballard to make a new start: the hours were lax and he was even able to do some creative writing there. Ballard later said, ‘One of the reasons my fiction of the early 60s has a high science content is because I was immersed in scientific papers of all kinds continually’.

The editor of the journal was a chemist rather than a journalist, so, as Ballard later recounted, ‘I did all the basic subbing, marking copy up for the typesetter … doing make-up and paste-up … I used to go on works visits, visits to laboratories and research institutes. I wrote a few articles — scientific reporting — and I reviewed scientific books.’ Ballard’s time at C&I is key to his development as a writer: he learned new skills, was given the freedom to experiment, and had time to shake off the feeling that hard SF was the only kind of speculative fiction that was acceptable.

The C&I Offices in Belgrave Square (photo by Tim Chapman, who held Ballard’s former job in the 1990s and may even have inherited Ballard’s desk!).

In 1958 Ballard made a series of photocopied collages — ‘Project for a new novel’ — that were, he says, ‘sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.’

The few pages he did actually produce are obviously influenced by his new-found skills in layout work:

Detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Ballard has said he was inspired by the bold typography of C&I’s sister journal, Chemistry and Engineering News (C+EN), the journal of the American Chemical Society, and that he used text from this journal as ‘filler’ in his collages.

Detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

I was fascinated by the possibility of disassembling these Burroughsian ‘cut-ups’ into their original forms, and by the possibility of seeing the roots of some of Ballard’s earliest and most lasting obsessions.

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Although influenced by C+EN, Ballard’s typography seems rather to prefigure advertising from a later C&I (2/6/62):

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Ballard later said, ‘I was very proud of those pages. Moorcock published them in New Worlds three or four years ago. They were like chromosomes in a way, because so many of the subsequent ideas and themes of mine appeared in those pages. Kline, Coma, Xero — they’re all there. I don’t know. I used to make these things up!’

The pages were in fact published in a special New Worlds edition of mostly visual material in summer 1978, where they are described as ‘displays’. (Interestingly the middle two pages are transposed in New Worlds compared to the photograph of the hoarding at the start of this article.)

Detail from ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Sadly, despite a thorough search, and although the body text of the pieces is obviously taken from an American chemical journal, I was unable to find any evidence of them in back editions of C+EN from that time.

About this ‘filler’ text, Ballard later said, ‘Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow became fictionalised by the headings around them.’ This is the kind of technique Ballard was to return to repeatedly, for example in his ‘plastic surgery’ pieces [collected in RE/Search's reprint of The Atrocity Exhibition], where the insertion of a celebrity name transforms the banal medical text, or his short fictions which masquerade as psychiatric reports [eg 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan'] or war journalism [eg 'Theatre of War'].

I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination … ‘

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Pleasures of Reading’.

And there is potent compost indeed in C+EN. The erotic beauty of the tail fin, for example, is much in evidence:

Advertisement from C+EN, 14/4/58.

And there is a near car-crash:

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58.

Did Mr F start out as Hydrogen Fluoride, which forms the most corrosive of acids?

Advertisement from C+EN 14/7/58; plus detail from Ballard’s ‘Project for a new novel’ (1958).

Could the name ‘Kline’, a recurring Ballard character, be taken from Smith, Kline and French, as suggested by Tim Chapman?

Advertisement from C+EN 27/1/58.

Or is he part of the electromagnetic spectrum? In ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, from The Atrocity Exhibition, one of the objects mentioned is a ‘spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium’:

Advertisement from C+EN 6/10/58.

There is also an appearance of that most enigmatic island, Eniwetok, a recurring motif in Ballard’s work. The ‘pace of missile firings quickens’ must have speeded Ballard’s pulse:

Advertisement from C+EN 4/11/57.

Eventually he would abandon the task, and sit down in the dust, watching the shadows emerge from their crevices at the foot of the blocks. For some reason he invariably arranged to be trapped when the sun was at zenith — on Eniwetok, the thermo-nuclear noon.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (ch. 1), in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Some of the C&I adverts from Ballard’s time are also worth noting, as copywriters were looking forward a decade to the fashions of the 60s:

Advertisement from C&I 28/2/59.

Some of the advertising took a slightly surreal turn in Ballard’s later years at the journal, like this example, featuring an oddly disturbing schoolgirl’s biochemical interventions:

Advertisement from C&I c.1962.

Here’s an earlier ad from Chemical & Engineering:

C+EN 19/05/1958.

Desperately trying to make chemicals interesting… ‘Here comes the Managing Director. Anybody want a bloodstained copywriter — immediate delivery?’ (shades of Super-Cannes?):

Advertisement from C&I 30/5/59.

In the second half of his employment at C&I, JGB went part-time and one of his duties was to write short book reviews. Most are factual — short, dry reviews of long, dry technical reference works that seem little more than fillers. But one stands out and is worth quoting in full. Ballard’s review of The Science of Dreams is his longest and most enthusiastic by far:

The Science of Dreams. By Edwin Diamond. pp. 246. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd. 1962. 21s.

The universal experience of dreams, and the conviction that they conceal part of man’s essential image of himself, have made them a subject of unfading interest throughout history, to the most primitive societies and the most sophisticated. One of the oldest written documents in existence, a papyrus of the 12th Dynasty, is an Egyptian book of dream interpretations, and to Freud, in the present century, the dream was “the royal road to the unconscious.” Within the last 20 years the orthodox Freudian view generally accepted in Europe and America has been amplified by work carried out by experimental psychologists in the United States. A popular account of this work is given in “The Science of Dreams.”

The hypothesis that the rapid eye movements observed at intervals throughout sleep might indicate the occurrence of a dream was apparently confirmed by the ability of subjects roused during these periods to recount their dreams with remarkable clarity and detail; this occurred in the case of persons who claimed they had never previously dreamed. Subsequent work suggested that everyone has an average of five dreams per night, each lasting 20 minutes; that contrary to popular belief digestive or emotional upsets do not affect the length or intensity of dreams, but only the ease with which they are recalled; that the majority of dreams are unpleasant and grow more so with increasing age; that even intense professional and domestic anxieties play little part in the subject matter of dreams; and that the congenitally blind experience “tactile” dreams. A curious discovery was that the deliberate deprivation of normal dreaming produced tension and irritability, even during an otherwise adequate period of sleep, and that hallucinations and psychotic collapse eventually resulted.

Despite the ingenuity and patience of the experimenters, the nature of the mechanisms generating dreams remains as elusive as ever. If anything, these studies suggest that for all its beguiling mystery the dream is merely a low-level psychic activity of little significance, perhaps similar to certain types of childhood play, and that its content, although cast in dramatic form, is of less importance than the act itself. Only where marked aberrations occur is a careful analysis of individual dreams of value to the physician. Even here, as in the experiments described, the role of the observer remains profoundly equivocal.

In view of the vast number of dreams experienced during a single lifetime, the catalogue of dreams which have furnished any major scientific revelation remains remarkably meagre; Kekulé’s vision of the benzene ring is among the few examples. Undeterred, however, the author offers his readers a simple conundrum (complete the series O, T, T, F, F,-,-) by which they can test the deductive powers of their own sleeping intelligences. No more than 15 minutes immediately before and after sleep should be devoted to the problem. Evidently some 80% of subjects tested dreamed of the problem, and a few even solved it during their dreams.

Those readers who fail to solve it may be interested to know that the Abundavita Corporation of America offers a $395 hypnopaedic “package” consisting of a gramophone, speaker and a 25-lesson course on such topics as “Money–What It Is and How to Have Plenty of It.”

J.G.B.

This appeared on 9th February 1963 and has echoes of JGB’s short story ‘Manhole 69′, published six years earlier, in which a group of volunteers have their ability to sleep removed and slowly descend into madness. Even Papa Freud gets a mention in this review. The article is unusually light and jokey, and the very appearance of a book on dreams is unusual — surely it would never have been sent for review to a journal of industrial chemistry? Was it given to Ballard by his friend Dr Christopher Evans, whose ‘computer memory-purging’ theory of dreaming also seems to make an appearance in the review? After this effort, JGB’s reviews begin to appear more sporadically and eventually petered out altogether. Did this unusual review lead to him having his freedom curtailed?

(See the appendix for the full text of Ballard’s initialled reviews).

A particularly significant article appeared in C&I on 1 June 1963, a lovingly illustrated, nine-page article about the brand new Road Research Laboratory:

C&I article, 1/6/63.

Ballard spoke of writing some C&I articles — did he have a hand in writing or subbing this one? While authorship was credited to the laboratory’s then director, Sir William Glanville, Ballard would certainly have seen the article, as there is one of his less-interesting book reviews in the same issue. Was the young Ballard given the perk of a trip out to Crowthorne to see the Road Research Laboratory for himself? Only a few miles west of London, it would not have been out of his way.

With its Observation Towers, Underground Laboratory, Gatehouse, Control Building, banked bend and even a ‘Terminal Area’, the test track at Crowthorne is a gloriously Ballardian territory:

Taken from the C&I article on Road Research Laboratory, 1/6/63.

And the laboratory certainly keeps rearing its head in Ballard’s fiction:

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.’

J.G. Ballard. ‘The University of Death’ (ch.2), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Surely Vaughan himself would have attached himself to the ‘team of experts’ in this extract:

Taken from the C&I article on the Road Research Laboratory, 1/6/63.

Through Vaughan I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twenty miles to the west of London, and watched the calibrated vehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions that he had photographed with his cinecamera. Sitting in the darkness on the floor cushions, we watched the silent impacts flicker on the wall above our heads. The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Cruising alone on the motorway under the yellow glare of the sodium lights, I thought of myself at the controls of these impacting vehicles.”

J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973).

Ballard would have had a good excuse to ask for the Crowthorne job — it’s practically on the way home. In this Google map, the upper right blue flag is the C&I offices, the middle flag is Ballard’s home in Shepperton and the upper flag at bottom left is the Road Research Laboratory:

As an interesting aside, what bizarre ley line must exist in Berkshire to have three ‘total institutions’ in a line within a few miles of each other? The three flags on the left are: the Road Research Laboratory, Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane (which also features in Ballard’s work), and Sandhurst Royal Military Academy – all richly Ballardian territories.

But I digress. I hope this article has shed some light on the mass of ‘invisible literature’ and ‘delicious plankton’ that passed before Ballard, the embryonic writer, and helped form the obsessions that were to feed his imagination and stay with him throughout his life. I think the materials and the new journalistic skills that Ballard discovered at C&I gave him an escape route from the impossibility of writing straight SF and suggested new outlets for his burgeoning creativity.

Mike Bonsall, July 2007.

Thanks to Alex and Will Knight, Tim Chapman, Simon Sellars and other members of the JGB Yahoo group for help with research.

..:: REFERENCES
+ Ballard, J.G. (1997), ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.
+ Pringle, D. (ed.) and Ballard, J.G. (1982). ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, in RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (eds. Vale and Andrea Juno). pp. 112-124.

..:: APPENDIX
+ Complete text of Ballard’s book reviews for C&I.

Life imitates Ballard, forces him out of own house:

‘In 1962 JG Ballard wrote The Drowned World, a fictional account of a flooded London, “a garbage filled swamp”. This week London has been under flood alert, with the water full of human sewage and bacteria. Coincidentally, Ballard’s own street in Shepperton is under threat, and the Environmental Agency has been advising residents to prepare for possible evacuation.’

From the popbitch mailout.”

Bizarrely, at the start of the year I outlined a potential scenario, using ‘dynamic flood maps’, predicting that if sea levels rose, Ballard’s Shepperton would be swamped.

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.

—————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (p13).
—————————————————————————-

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).
———————–

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]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p177).
———————–

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.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p178).
———————–

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]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p14).
———————–

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.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (pp167-8).
———————–

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]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p122).
———————–

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.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p25).
———————–

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.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p26).
———————–

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]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p164).
———————–

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).
———————–

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

+ 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

————————————————
Interview by Mike Holliday
————————————————

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.

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.

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Thank you, Michael Moorcock.
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..:: 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

+ Three lovely Ballardian riffs…

1) Dan Lockton over at the awesome Architectures of Control, a blog that analyses the ways in which products are designed to restrict user behaviour, guides us through a new initiative at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5: the removal of seating so that patrons have no choice but to spend great wads of cash in restaurants and cafes or else stand in extreme discomfort in an atmosphere of ‘excitement, stress, tiredness, and above all, confinement’. Dan ties it all up with a big, bad Ballardian bow, referencing the ‘bleak badlands’ of Kingdom Come.

2) Patrick Cates takes us on a tour of the A12, with its ‘steady stasis of light industry and dark housing. The steady north-south flux of strangers. The steady external gush. The steady internal hush.’ Ballard’s Concrete Island is the guidebook.

3) And finally, over at fretmarks, pluvialis describes driving down the M25 near Ballard’s home town of Shepperton and witnessing a flock of parakeets (or ‘posh sparrows’) darting across the sky. From there she ruminates on their significance: were they ‘extras in The African Queen, or a Tarzan movie, set free at the end of the shoot because no-one could catch them in Shepperton’s vast sound-stages’? Or did Ballard himself have something to do with it:

I love it. Rich, strange, crazy. These parakeets still seem exotic, but they fit so precisely in the Ballardian aesthetic that it’s tempting to think that Ballard himself released the buggers. That strangest and most disturbing of his messianic tales, The Unlimited Dream Company, is full of parrots, bursting into irrepressible life as Shepperton sprouts lush jungle vegetation and our possibly-drowned aviator finds it impossible to leave.”

Apologies for the down time this site has experienced since the Ballard conference. I’m still in England where I’ve experienced many Ballardian and sub-Ballardian moments (and even some non-Ballardian moments, would you Adam and Eve it?) including exchanging views on ‘torture porn’ with Rick Poynor against the eminently bombable backdrop of the Tate Modern; excavating the strata of the late 20th century with Jo Murray amid the lush, green undergrowth that lines the scabby underbelly of the M3 motorway; wandering the terminal sands that sheath the haunted and forgotten seaside zone of Grays Beach; getting lost in the forest and coastal paths of the Isle of Wight with my two brothers, as we searched high and low in the pitch black for the dinghy we had beached that would take us back to the safety of our boat. We stumbled upon a hidden community of nocturnal fisherfolk replete with high-powered torches for eyes and a string of gadgets blinking in the dark from the tips of their enormous rods like cosmic antennae…

But I’ve been too pushed for time to write it all up, as I’ve had some pressing family matters to engage with — the English portion of the Sellars clan is not one I get to interact with much, so I’m making the most of it. I used to have no trouble writing travel blogs on the go, but this time round it seems to have eluded me. Even writing this short entry is highly pressurised, as I must awake in 5 hours 3 hours at the crack of dawn to catch a fishing boat to Sealand, where I’ll be spending a day and a night in a considerable state of isolation. On my return it’s London for a couple of days, probably visiting old Brixtonian haunts, before hopefully visiting the sound mirrors in Kent. The following weekend I’m in Dubai and then I’m pootling off home to Melbourne, where I’ll be writing this trip up in all its glory.

I’ve let intuition guide me when taking photos and have been flabbergasted to discover that there are very few shots of people. Instead, industrial wrecks and new, machine-tooled monuments have dominated, like the old, semi-submerged pier in Brighton, the M3 in Shepperton, and the new lock in Cardiff, with its markings resolving themselves in op-art style allusions.

I know what’s happening, here. I watched Children of Men for the first time on the plane over from Melbourne and was deeply shocked and disturbed by its bleak view of a sparsely populated, near-future, anarchic Britain. That unnerving film has filtered my vision steel-grey every time I’ve looked through my camera lens: I’m finding resonance everywhere I move.

(I also hope to see 28 Weeks Later before I leave — God only knows what *that* will do to me.)

But all that’s to be expanded upon in future posts. I hope you’ll stay tuned for another week or so while I gather my senses and marshall my thoughts and attempt to make sense of this journey into inner space.

Until then, ‘Chant chant love war fear hate… Out of control – mob running wild / All you ever get is all you steal / Side of London that the tourists never see / Angle ambience’ (PiL, ‘Chant’, 1979).

French filmmaker Thomas Cazals has onlined a 10-min preview of his film J.G. Ballard: Shepperton’s Oracle.

Synopsis:

‘On the occasion of the release of the next novel of the English writer James Ballard, two French reporter Thomas Cazals and Thomas Carter are sent to Shepperton, to interview him. In this town in the middle of nowhere, the dreamlike waves of the Oracle of Shepperton throw them in a surrealist nightmare in the limits of the History and the reality.’

According to Thomas:

J.G Ballard: Shepperton’s Oracle declines on two medias. A film and a web site (planned in April) both products by Bruno Sampère from Panoplie and José Correia editor in chief of the website Arte TV. To date, the film has no official TV broadcaster and need a financial help to grow up and find his right place in movie theaters (and) or television.

The extract which you go to see is “squeaky clean” at the level of the rights of the used images (produced or from the public domain), but is not correct for the score, in particular for a song of the group Joy Division ” Atrocity Exhibition ” (rights for the world TV and Movies for 5 years are 7.500 euros). This piece is however very important for the film.

The film will be of a duration of one hour ( English and French version) and certain little things still remain to shoot. We are at present in editing. If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me.

Enjoy!”

Rhys emailed to point my attention to a series in The Guardian entitled ‘Writer’s Rooms’, currently featuring J.G. Ballard:

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. Sometimes I think I have gone to live inside it and each morning I emerge refreshed. It’s a male dream.

There are photos of my four grandchildren (one, along with a picture of my girlfriend Claire, is just out of shot). The postcard is Dali’s Persistence of Memory, the greatest painting of the 20th century, and next to it is a painting by my daughter, which is the greatest painting of the 21st century. On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.

I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour’s cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics.

I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.

————-
JG Ballard
————-

UPDATE: See the backlash to Ballard’s anti-PC statement over here.

Check out these flood maps — dynamic maps predicting sea-level rise around the globe (found via Dissensus).

First, adjust the rising sea level to +14m.

Then focus on London.

Now zoom into Shepperton.

Result: a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Shepperton-based author of The Drowned World.

Friends, you ask me many questions, most of which I cannot answer, but Kate from Brighton wanted to know what my work-space looks like. I like this question. I reckon you can tell a lot about an artist from the environment in which he works. Look at J.G. Ballard. Look at Jack Henry Abbot. Look at Shane McGowan.”

—————————-
Nick Cave, 1995.
—————————-

OPENING LINE:
“In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?”

The Unlimited Dream Company is “one of the titles featured in Anthony Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939″.

It’s also one of Ballard’s most surprising and underrated works, and deeply personal, too, given that it takes place in his home town of Shepperton. Substitute the narrator, Blake, for Ballard, then consider Malcolm Bradbury’s insightful review:

For the citizens of Shepperton, Blake performs strange wonders, spinning abundance and exuding sexual energy, drawing them away from their work and into a new world of polymorphous perversity.

From the Triad/Panther edition, 1985:

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”

I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid in laying out the tracks of his adult life. While it’s actually a fictional ‘reimagining’ of Ballard’s life rather than a straight recounting (which is what all autobiographies essentially are, if only they’d care to admit it), Kindness is essential for anyone looking to delve into the motivations behind works such as Crash and the 70s Ballard that has been so mythologised.

And it’s very funny, too, full of keenly applied and intentional humour, like this description of being serviced by a prostitute (p. 250): “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia.”

I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read this, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Some quotes from the Grafton edition:

Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer I can think of. The book is full of memserising writing, classic examples of the Ballard Style, paragraphs and pages that disturb and enthrall… A force is operating in this astonishing book which is hard to resist.”

William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

“It has a brutal spine — plenty of hardware and violence and graphic and clinical sex scenes. But it is also, in its own chilly way, enormously tender and likeable with huge vision and ambition.”

Sunday Times

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006.

Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It did much to popularise ideas of psychogeography in Britain, and inspired such works as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Alan Moore’s From Hell. His non-fiction Lights Out for the Territories (1997), based around a series of walks through some darker corners of London life and history, brought his vision to a wider audience.

I met Sinclair in the Barbican, the City of London Corporation’s modernist complex of high-class municipal housing and cultural facilities, which hosted the London Orbital theatrical event in October 2002. On the empty, third-floor Sculpture Court, we discussed JG Ballard and more, surrounded by high rises and interrupted only by the sounds of aircraft flying to and from London’s terrorised airports.

– Tim Chapman

NOTE: Video stills of Ballard are taken from the short film Crash! (1971), directed by Harley Cokliss, filmed among the multistorey carparks of Watford and referenced by Sinclair in the BFI book.

Tim Chapman is a writer and journalist based in Halifax, Yorkshire. See www.2ubh.com for more.

When did you first start reading Ballard?

In the 1960s. I think the first book I read was The Terminal Beach, and I kept picking up on him through things like New Worlds magazine. I was a bit at arm’s length at that time — I was very involved with the American Beat writers, and I saw Ballard in the lineage of William Burroughs. The whole notion of English suburbia, Shepperton, was so strange to my experience that I didn’t really engage that closely with it but I admired him very much as a pared-down stylist.

It was probably with The Atrocity Exhibition that I really recognised him as an English master. I think that’s still the book that affects me most — its use of this American material that I was interested in, and the way it puts it under such incredible pressure to achieve this astonishing paranoiac poetic, is still an example to us all.

Would you say he’s been an influence on your own writing?

Not really. I think my own writing is at absolutely the opposite extreme from Ballard’s. It’s singularly failed to be pared down and accurate and precise in physical details as his is, where you always know exactly what’s going on. My writing tends to be much baggier with more clauses tacked on. It’s more related to the kind of writing that his early partner Michael Moorcock was doing.

I started out as a film-maker in the 60s and came back to it much later on in the late 80s and 90s, getting together to make films with Chris Petit. At that time, I really came back strongly to Ballard and I think he was an influence more on the film-making than the writing. Chris himself was clearly and directly influenced by Ballard. His book Robinson is like an aftershock based on Crash. He made a film with Ballard for The Moving Picture Show at that time. By the time we were making films together, Ballard was one of the people we looked to.

I think then when I got to do a short book for the BFI on Crash, my interest was more in Ballard than in Cronenberg. Having met him, we became friendly. My book London Orbital was one that interested him because it was dealing with borderlands, liminal spaces, the motorway corridor, and all the things he’s written about for years. At that point, he really was a direct influence — not in the style of how I write, but more in the way that his vision of England was something that I was extremely drawn to.

You said in the acknowledgements to the BFI book that it was proposed at the strategic moment when you wanted an excuse to meet Ballard.

Exactly. I thought he’d really got it right. It never was science fiction, it was hyper-sharp reportage. His reality of the 60s had now come into place in the English landscape. That kind of world he’s endlessly talked about — retail parks and marinas and executive homes, and this list that pours out of him on ticker tape — all of that was now the landscape of England. I think we are a motorway culture, and he was the prophet of that. I really did want an excuse, if that was the word, to meet him and talk to him. Of course, when you do talk to him, what you get is almost exactly what you know from having read the books and the previous interviews. He’s quite a guarded person, quite contained and very much a solitary voyager. He’s lived in this time capsule and seen everything, and is now in his later career becoming a kind of stoic comedian. I think he’s getting quite funny in the last books — the satire is beginning to bite.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

I’d been reading your books for a while when the BFI book came out, and thought it wasn’t an obvious combination.

Funnily enough, the first actual physical connection was in a film from Mary Harron, who’s now a well-known Hollywood film-maker. She was working for the BBC Late Show and she was commissioned to make a film about Docklands and Canary Wharf as it was being built. I was invited to be one of the voices with Ballard. As the author of High-Rise, he was seen to be prophetic of this landscape, and he was saying that this is a future that he quite looks forward to. He liked the idea of Docklands. I was being quite apocalyptic and gloomy about it, looking at it from a more social and political perspective, and so curiously we were placed side by side in this now obscure and lost film. As the years went on, probably I’ve shifted more to his position.

Harron filmed American Psycho with Christian Bale, who was young Jim in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Yes, she’s an interesting woman. The interesting thing about it was most of these films for the Late Show were made in about two days. But she was tough enough that she had a proper length of time to do this. She was out in this landscape filming for weeks at a time, and persuading Ballard to appear, which is not necessarily always easy either.

I dug out a review of the BFI book by John Gray at the London School of Economics, where he said “the juxtaposition of JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair is far from obvious. Their views on the political and cultural scene from which they are equally estranged are quite different, even opposed”.

I don’t know that they are opposed. Maybe it would have seemed like that at that time, but I think now they would be seen to be quite similar in some ways. I think they’re quite interesting to juxtapose because he’s stayed out in Shepperton since the 1960s and he’s written essentially the same coded arrangements — every single book is a repetition, an extension of the same riff — in the same way that I’ve been in Hackney in the inner city since the 1960s and have also essentially written the same paradigms over and over. Except I kind of felt I’d reached a dead end — the city centre was becoming so heritaged and corrupted, I thought the interesting move was out to the margin, to the motorway, to the M25. As soon as that happened, it’s invading his territory. I certainly felt homage had to be paid. I was walking around the M25 and it was very necessary to stop off at Shepperton and see him, to visit this place of reservoirs and aircraft and future terror.

What was the genesis of the London Orbital project?

I felt quite strongly that with the kind of complicated dense fictions that I’d been writing, there was no place for them in the market. Lights Out for the Territory, which was centred on walks and explorations within London, had been much more successful. I needed to do another book which appeared to be a documentary but went off in other directions. One day when I was out walking up the River Lea to the point where it hit the M25 at Waltham Abbey, I thought this is it. This is the future England. London itself, by being completely enclosed in a motorway, has become a kind of concrete island. The obvious space to explore is this, with this pilgrim journey. It’s a book you can describe in a single sentence — a walk around the M25 — so everything clicked into place. Once I’d taken that decision, the book was there waiting to be written.

The Seer of Shepperton: “I was interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Was Ballard always part of that plan?

Yeah. I thought the main figures I could see emerging from this landscape were Bram Stoker to the east, because of Carfax Abbey and Purfleet which is the point where the M25 crosses the Thames with the QEII bridge; HG Wells’ War of the Worlds out on the other side in Woking in Surrey, where the Martian invasion takes place; and Ballard himself at Shepperton. That was always my triangulation of the three energy points, the three great metaphors that described that topography. Ballard in a sense is reprising and working over Wells, in this sense of terrorism and viral invasion. In War of the Worlds, the invaders come in through Shepperton — they actually cross the river at that point — and the river turns into this red weed which is very much like the atmosphere of The Drought.

Wells is often seen as primarily a science fiction writer, but he did a lot of political and social comment which is often overlooked.

Ballard’s politics are quite curious. I don’t know whether you could call him conservative, with a small ‘c’, because he celebrates the nature of the bourgeois in its exile: the people that live in these kinds of flats that surround us now, who are anonymous and separated from the mob. Whereas his early partner, Michael Moorcock, said he was a man of the urban mob, who celebrates the crowds and smells of cafes and markets and all of that stuff, which is totally alien to Ballard. He’d like to chuck away all the old buildings, pull them down, get rid of all that heavy 19th-century furniture and have everything straight out of an Ikea catalogue. In that sense, I think there’s something conservative, but in other senses there’s something incredibly anarchic and furious about what he does, which doesn’t fit with any contemporary sense of politics. He doesn’t belong, he’s completely an outsider, although when you meet him he appears to be quite an Establishment person. He’s got a very fruity voice and genial persona, and would fit into the colonial society in which he grew up.

He did declare in the late 70s and 80s that he was a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher, but whether that was the politics or the charisma of it…

I think maybe the sort of psychosexual politics of Thatcher, in the same way that John Gray was a member of the Thatcher thinktanks. He was a significant Thatcher admirer and advocate at that period, but had a complete change of heart and is now violently opposed to American policy and all these things she was supportive of in the ’80s. He’s rather embarrassed about it. There’s interesting things happening there politically.

Ballard said a few years ago that he’s getting more left-wing as he gets older.

It’s quite interesting, because usually it’s the other way around. Someone like Kingsley Amis, who was an early supporter of Ballard, supposedly started off as quite socialist but gradually moved to extreme right to become this kind of Blimpish drunk at the end of his career. His feeling about Ballard’s writing also shifts with the years to become much more uncomfortable about where it’s going, as he’s obviously not the science fiction writer that Amis thought he was at the beginning.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Could you talk about the London Orbital event here at the Barbican?

London Orbital was never just a book. It was also a TV film made with Chris Petit. The fact of it being a film meant that it couldn’t follow the procedures of walking, which is what I’d done in the book. The whole point was to walk the motorway spaces, and thereby to suck out information slowly and gradually from the ground. Chris is famous as a maker of road movies, and he couldn’t cope with filming the walking aspect because by the time he’d set up his camera the walkers had gone over the horizon. He shifted it all into the car. Once you were in the car, you were much closer to entering a Ballardian space. We accumulated all this road footage. Chris, in the end, discovered the only way to do it was never to switch the camera off. The only way to make sense of the road was to keep the camera running right the way round the whole thing.

It became obvious that maybe the meeting place between the book and the film would be to do a theatre event here at the Barbican, at which a number of people who appeared in the book would appear as themselves. There would be music, there would be three screens for which Chris went out and shot new footage of continual M25 progression. Ballard was supposed to appear here as the star of the show. He agreed to do that, which was surprising. We were just going to have a little discussion, a conversation, he wouldn’t have to read or do anything else. But on the day the phone rang and he said he wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t going to come. I wasn’t altogether surprised because he really doesn’t like doing these things very much.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

Excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by J.G. Ballard, first published in Interzone #8, 1984

What happened was we made a photographic life-size cut-out of Ballard — there’d been a piece in one of the Sunday newspapers about us and we just blew up that photograph. Chris and I recited alternately this Ballardian screed, ‘What I Believe’, which I think is a terrific take on Ballard. In a sense, his presence was there perfectly. It was not actually necessary to have him physically, and of course he appeared in the London Orbital film as well. At the end of the film there’s this nice moment where he’s saying “Iain, I want you to go out and blow up the Bentall Centre, I want you to destroy Bluewater“, which has now become the subject of his new book Kingdom Come. It’s also been invoked by the present terror alerts at Heathrow Airport which seem to stem in part from places like High Wycombe which is exactly in this Ballardian Thames corridor.

How was the event received?

It wasn’t really received at all — it was an invisible event. As far as I know, practically no one wrote about it. Those that did were kind of uncomfortable because they liked the music, or certain aspects of the music, but didn’t like other stuff, so it was one of those invisible events. The interesting thing was the Barbican was expecting to sell 400 or 500 seats, which is what they’d allowed for, and it completely sold out. It took 2000 seats.

One of the stranger things was within it: there was a whole thing about Essex criminals who were involved in ecstasy and drug wars and Range Rover murders. Some of these figures were in the audience and took a deep objection to the stuff I was reading out about them, and tried to get round the back to kill me. There was a kind of interesting subtext of drama going on. It was almost a Ballardian event in which he was pulling the strings without being there at all. It was actually quite funny.

There’s going to be a repeat of this event here for a book called London: City of Disappearances, for which Ballard has contributed a piece about the Westway. I’ll certainly try and go out and interview him on film, and have a film to show rather than expect him to turn up this time.

The Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman.

It was said at the time that Ballard had never actually been to the Barbican before.

He said that, which was very surprising, but in a sense he doesn’t need to because it’s almost like his mental landscape. He did say to me he’d never really been to the East End of London — he had no real interest or desire in seeing it. He’d done a car trip once to go and have a look at the Millennium Dome but he never got out of the car — just drove past it and went back again to Shepperton.

It’s probably the best way to see it.

It probably is, but this is the absolute opposite of what I feel. Always, the way is that you walk. You start from wherever you are and you walk slowly through the city, and your narrative is revealed. He just doesn’t feel the need to work in that way at all. He fillets from magazines, watches random TV, and looks at technical reports, scientific journals, and just cuts up and accumulates this material. In the 60s, he was using it fairly straight in a fragmented way, and now it’s become finessed into something that’s almost like a standard literary novel, but once you look below the surface it’s something else.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Walking and driving is something you riff on in Dining on Stones: pods versus peds.

I had this insight when I was walking down the A13 when I walked into this Travelodge. I was amazed to see that what I thought was this food dispenser giving you pies was actually filled with books. I looked at this and thought god, all of these writers are either walking writers or driving writers. Most people fit into one or the other of these categories. Moorcock I think would be very much a walking writer, even though his foot has gone now and he’s in a wheelchair. His novels are walking novels, and he never did learn to drive. Whereas Ballard, you can’t really see him getting out of the car. Everything is there in this car journey between Shepperton and West London, where he comes in on a regular basis. I thought most people could be put one way or the other.

With Ballard, it’s not so much driving I’d associate with him as flying — aeroplanes, low-flying aircraft.

There’s a lot of flying — he was a pilot. I think he does have a god’s-eye view of things, he’s able to be right up there. You can see him in this building here, the man on the balcony. He’s very much that, sometimes with a camera. There’s a photograph I used in the BFI book with the woman on the balcony, by Helmut Newton who he admires. It’s looking from inside a flat out to the woman who’s maybe naked from behind on the balcony, and looking down into the street. I thought that foreground-middleground-distance is exactly the Ballardian perspective, which is reprised in the Cronenberg film of Crash, quite near the beginning. That’s why I think he was very happy to see the film move to Canada, to Toronto. That was fine, because to him it doesn’t have to be specific to London, whereas the way that Chris Petit and I think about it is: it’s very much a London book, about the Heathrow gas stations and the backroads between Shepperton and Heathrow. He doesn’t need that.

Since the BFI book, most of your work seems to have been stuffed full of Ballard references. As you say in Dining on Stones: “When in doubt, quote Ballard.”

Yeah — he’s so sharp. I’ve been reading back through the interviews in the Re/Search book, and every little aphorism that was very savage and strange at that moment seems incredibly pertinent to this one. Once I was writing about the edges of London, the A13 corridor, down there his voice is playing in your ear the whole time as you have the queues of low-flying aircraft and the reservoirs, and the idea that you could be blown out of the sky or fly straight into a towerblock at any moment. All of that is his world. And the death of Diana — all the journalists rung him up because it was exactly the kind of thing he’d always been describing or thinking about in terms of James Dean or Jayne Mansfield.

You said in the film of London Orbital that he is an icon now, with his own credo. Is it just the fact that he’s been around so long?

I think it’s partly that. It’s quite interesting that in the 60s he’s very much a marginal figure. He’s got a cult following but he doesn’t really register in the mainstream apart from with one or two writers who support him very strongly. In the ’70s, he’s actually become a kind of pariah — Cape, who were publishing Crash, were wearing gloves to do it. Then everything changes with Empire of the Sun — it’s the moment he becomes supremely visible. There’s a Spielberg version of Ballard, which would have been unthinkable.

Then the general middlebrow consensus swerves round and thinks of him as a different kind of writer to what he actually is. He’s 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 Crash is only a version of what’s in The Atrocity Exhibition which is very rarely referred to, or any of those earlier pieces.

I think he’s been reinvented — not by himself, because he’s carried on doing what he’s always done — but by the literary consensus who have reinvented him and think of him as being something really that he isn’t: this sort of genial but provocative figure sitting out there writing about the Metro Centre and shopping malls and stuff. I can see the reviews even now. But the real early energy and madness is still not appreciated.

James Graham Ballard: “…transcending death, charming motorways, integrating
with birds, enlisting the confidences of madmen” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss)

I think the problem is it’s almost too easy to reduce him to a set of icons — the car crash, the concrete flyover.

That is obviously what’s happened. You see him constantly quoted or brought into catalogues at the Tate Modern and glossy magazines. He’s the first name you think of to underwrite these sorts of things. There was an event at the Serpentine a couple of weeks back with Rem Koolhaas, the architect, doing a 24-hour interview with different people. I was one of the people there. I said I assume you’ve got JG Ballard. He said well, he wouldn’t come here, but he was there as a presence on tape. And yet he’s not really interested in the city, there’s this polemic on the city but the city doesn’t mean anything to him. I don’t think he could describe it, he hardly knows the city. Maybe he comes in to see his publishers or have a meal or go to the Tate, but really it’s of no importance to him and his mental universe.

It’s interesting you mention Koolhaas. At the architecture exhibition here at the Barbican, Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture [1956-2006], there’s an installation of a theoretical work by Koolhaas, Exodus [1972], which is about placing a great strip of ultra-luxury accommodation across London so it divides it in two, and seeing what’ll happen. I thought that’s an unwritten Ballard story.

Absolutely. While other writers were just not thinking about those kinds of things, he was. He didn’t discriminate, he didn’t have this snobbery of being a literary writer. He felt that there were things he could take from the most debased forms of public culture. He would come out and say I think everyone should watch television for eight hours a day in random fashion — there’s no good or bad, you just jump about and let it flow over you, with your glass of whisky. It just meshes together and creates its own strange poetic. Nobody else was saying that a