J.G. Ballard in front of Paul Delvaux’s ‘The Violation’ (as reproduced by Brigid Marlin). Photographer unknown.

Interview by Andrew Bishop.

Ballardian presents Andrew Bishop’s previously unpublished interview with artist Brigid Marlin, who created for Ballard two of the more enduring symbols of his career: reproductions of lost paintings by Paul Delvaux, which adorned his Shepperton home and formed beguiling conversation pieces for many a visiting interviewer. Ballard was frequently photographed in front of Marlin’s Delvaux recreations, and Delvaux’s art was referenced in Ballard’s novels and short stories, representing for him the blasted environment of his boyhood Shanghai, ‘a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces’. In this interview, Marlin expounds on her work, on Delvaux and on the surrealist movement, and offers her impressions of Ballard’s life and work, thereby filling in the background behind one of the most persistent elements in Ballardian mythology: those ever-present Delvauxs.

The interview was conducted on 8/6/10 in Berkhamsted, shortly after Marlin had met with both Iain Sinclair, conducting research for his book Ghost Milk, which features an exegesis of Ballardian mythology, and John Baxter, researching his Ballard biography The Inner Man. Here, Marlin initially seems preoccupied with Ballard ‘the myth’, perhaps unsurprisingly after submitting to Sinclair’s method and the somewhat more controversial technique of Baxter. When The Inner Man was published in 2011, it drew widespread condemnation from reviewers and Ballard’s immediate family, principally for its distortion and exaggeration of the word of secondary sources.

Reading this interview after Baxter’s biography, it seems that Marlin’s reminiscences suffered that same fate. Rather than the sniping, gossipy tone generated by Baxter’s selective paraphrasing of her words, in fact her ambivalent feelings about Ballard’s legacy reveals genuine admiration for his writing and a touching fondness for Ballard ‘the man’, nonetheless tinged by her strict condemnation of his worldview, which stems from her deeply held spiritual beliefs.

For Ballard’s written appreciation of Marlin and Delvaux, see here. [SS]

From Andrew Bishop: thanks to David Pringle for help with the preparation of this interview.

The art of Brigid Marlin describes a visionary world of almost unlimited dimensions and self-sufficiency. Fifteen years ago, when I first saw The Rod, one of her most ambitious paintings, reproduced in a magazine, I was so impressed by its imaginative sweep that I sent an enthusiastic letter of appreciation to her, the only fan letter I have ever sent to a painter. The sense of a clearly realised poetic universe, in which every detail, however modest, was accorded equal attention, was what most gripped my imagination.

J.G. Ballard, Brigid Marlin: An Appreciation (2005).

LEFT: Brigid Marlin. Photo via the artist.

ANDREW BISHOP: There has been quite a lot of interest in Ballard in the past week or so.

BRIGID MARLIN: Since he died there’s been a huge amount written in the press and, to my surprise, two professional journalists requested me. John Baxter is a journalist and film critic who is actually writing a biography of J.G. Ballard [since published, controversially, as The Inner Man]. The other one, Iain Sinclair, writes poetry and other books and he is writing a sort of poetic version of Ballard.

Ballard wrote a testimonial piece praising your paintings.

Well, shall I just tell you how we met and do a chronological thing? Because it all evolved. The first thing that happened is I have a dwarf friend who actually just died, poor fellow. About four feet two inches, or something. He was called Richard [Jones] and in fact he was a film actor. He was the Mad Hatter in the Alice in Wonderland film [Dreamchild, 1985], and so on. Anyhow, he was an avid science fiction reader, and I never cared for science fiction. But I did a painting called The Rod, and when Richard saw that he said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to submit that to the Science Fiction Monthly competition. They’re having a huge competition of visions of the future.’ So I sent it off and Richard took a terrific interest.

The Rod (1973) by Brigid Marlin.

I started getting fan mail because I won the competition. I treated Richard to a Japanese dinner with a few other friends to celebrate the fact that I won. I would never have gotten the money if not for Richard. He said, ‘Have you got any fan letters?’ I showed him all these and he said, ‘My god, you’ve got one from J.G. Ballard!’ I said ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘He’s only the best science fiction writer there is. You write him back and thank him for his letter’ – which I hadn’t been doing. So I wrote him back and thanked him for his letter and said, ‘I believe you’re a wonderful science fiction writer.’ He then wrote a very nice thing about my work – a really nice appreciation, and then said, ‘If you ever have a show in London, please invite me. I’d like to see more of your work.’ I put the letter in a safe place and couldn’t find it for about ten years.

Then we were having a show in London and there was a bag of old correspondence. I sifted through it, and there was J.G. Ballard’s letter. I thought ‘What a fool I’ve been, I should have contacted him ages ago.’ So I wrote him and I said we’re having this show. He phoned me and asked when I’d be there. We liked each other right away. He wrote me afterwards asking if he could commission me to recreate a painting by Paul Delvaux that had been destroyed in the war ['The Violation', aka 'The Rape']. I’ve never liked Delvaux because he mixes black with other colours and makes a grey mess. His colours are terrible. He puts skeletons in his work. His women look like cows, they look like sex blow-up dollies. They look dreadful. But I didn’t like to say ‘no’.

‘The Conversation’ (1944) by Paul Delvaux.

His tastes leaned particularly towards the experimental and bizarre, and Kerans often wondered how far his personality and its strange internal perspectives had been carried forward into his granddaughter. Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th-century Surrealist, Delvaux, in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bonelike landscape.

Kerans threw her a mock salute and strolled over to look at the painting by Ernst at the far end of the lounge, while Bodkin gazed down at the jungle through the window. More and more the two scenes were coming to resemble each other, and in turn the third nightscape each of them carried within his mind. They never discussed their dreams, the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962).

I changed the colours because he only had a tiny little black and white thing, and he wanted it full size, so I had to enlarge from this to that. I did it all, because that was the one picture of Delvaux’s that I liked. It was just the nudes and the sky and fields. It was easy to guess the colours of those, and I left out the black. So it looked actually very nice. It’s a much nicer picture than Delvaux’s would have been. Then he wanted another done ['The Mirror'], and this was a particularly difficult one to do and boring with quite ugly wallpaper. The women weren’t well drawn. The clothes – the folds looked ridiculous, like corrugated paper. I suddenly had a brainwave. I said, ‘I’ll do this picture for you for the usual money, but you have to sit for me.’ He said, ‘What!’ ‘You have to agree to me doing your portrait.’ ‘No, I don’t sit for portraits.’ ‘Fine, I don’t do the picture.’ ‘You can have a lot more money!’ ‘No, you’ve got to sit.’ He finally rang me up and said, ‘Alright, when do I have to sit?’ I said ‘You sound like you have to go to the dentist,’ and he said, ‘Seems to me like it is going to the dentist. You don’t know what a recluse I am. I never go out, I never leave.’ I was very unsympathetic. He came over and sat down, and then got up and moved around.

Portrait of J.G. Ballard (1987) by Brigid Marlin.

It was like trying to paint a caged animal. All the time I was trying to paint him he was supposed to be sitting still. He wouldn’t stay in his chair, and his mind wouldn’t stay still. All the time he was sitting there and I was trying to paint, his mind was going all the time. ‘When did you start painting? How did you learn? Where did you start? Show me some work you’ve done!’ I was flattered, so I got the work from art school. He said, ‘That’s when you were older, show me some early work.’ I got these tiny little books I did when I was about six and showed them to him. They were not bad, you see. He looked at them and he gave up. He said, ‘You were born with it.’

In many ways, my novels and short stories are a series of described paintings. Had I had the technical ability, I would have become a painter. I had just enough skill, draughtsmanship, as a boy to lead me to think that I could become a painter. I never had the flair. I did have a certain flair for writing, so I became a writer. I very much see my novels and short stories as I write.

J.G. Ballard, as interviewed by Lynne Fox, from J.G. Ballard: Conversations (ed. V. Vale, RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Behind it all was this perfect wish. He really wanted to be a painter. It was very strong in him. I said I would give him lessons, I’m a good teacher. We sat together at the table with an apple and a glass of water. ‘Come on, here’s a pencil. Just draw it and I’ll help you. I’ll correct it, but you have to draw it.’ He was very funny, he did a ‘C’. That’s the only mark he made on that page. He did it like he was trying to steal something, or as if he was electrocuted by the page. He was so frightened. Then he said, ‘Listen, I have an idea. Why don’t you teach me by telephone?’ [Laughs] It was grotesque, the idea of teaching anyone by telephone.

Ballard in front of Delvaux’s ‘The Mirror’ (as reproduced by Brigid Marlin). Photo by David Levinson.

Ballard was a very strange man. He lived in this small house. He started writing downstairs first. And then in only one room. And finally in one half of the room. And then only in the corner of one half of the room. It was getting worse. And the didn’t clean his house, ever. He said, ‘After the first three years it doesn’t get any dirtier.’ It was really funny. He criticised the portrait all the time. He didn’t give much of himself, so it was extremely difficult to extract him. The fact was all the time I was trying to paint Ballard he was trying to write me. In other words, we were each trying to suck the other one into our own fantasy worlds. I was trying to do a surrealist one of him and he wouldn’t be sucked in. At the same time he was trying to write me in one of his bloody books, and I wouldn’t be sucked in. The two of us were at an impasse. It was very funny. The thing that really burned me up was he then published an article about the Delvaux pictures saying that he felt he’d done them [see quote at the end of the interview]. I thought, ‘Grr. You did not do it. I did it, and it was hard work!’

Ballard visited your studio as you painted the Delvaux reproductions.

There was quite a funny moment. The first one I didn’t mind doing because it was quite easy. It was just a landscape with these doll-like women in it. I enjoyed cheating Delvaux of his black, making beautiful colour instead.

What did he think of that?

He stood there. My heart was beating, because the £500 was important to me at the time. I wasn’t very rich. He started swearing. He said something like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, he hates them.’ I looked at him in consternation, and he said, ‘How did you do it? It’s amazing!’

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Mirror’. Photographer unknown.

Did you ever visit his house?

No. People were never invited. Even people who really knew him well, like Iain Sinclair. He would always be at the door waiting if he couldn’t drive. They were never invited in. I never even attempted to be invited in. From his own admission, it was going to be quite dirty and unattractive.

He said that a house can be cleaned in ten minutes if you don’t make a fetish out of it.

From what he was saying to me he didn’t clean his house for ten minutes. He didn’t clean anything. But I’ve been told that’s a myth he liked to create. I remember something he wrote somewhere about how he and his little family would go and visit people with their beautiful houses and then they would flee back to their little dirty nest in wherever they were.

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Violation’. Photographer unknown.

Did he ever try to paint at home?

Yes, I heard this. Iain Sinclair said that it was very funny because he did some bad sculpture. He wanted to paint like Salvador Dali. He wanted the detail. This is why he was so enraged. He couldn’t get the detail. He used to lean over me when I was trying to paint and he’d say, ‘You’ve got this wrong’, and I’d say, ‘I’ve just started.’ He said, ‘I know I’m a Mr Buttinsky, my children are always complaining.’

One thing I noticed about his face as I was painting him: it was very feminine, because he had to be a mother. He was actually writing his next novel. He brought it for me so I could do a painting of the manuscript. He always wrote longhand, because he wasn’t inspired by machinery. A very funny man.

I asked him if he would help the society [Society for Art of Imagination], but he was a recluse. He said that if I produced a book of my work he’d write a foreword. That’s pretty nice.

Do you think he would have been a good painter?

That reminds me of Pride and Prejudice: ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.’ Ballard would not have been a good painter because he couldn’t even make himself draw an apple. As far as I’m concerned, he is not a painter. His skill was with words. Everything about him showed that. He had an enormous head full of thoughts. He wrote things almost before he could read. He was brilliant, and could express himself perfectly well in words. He didn’t need to paint, and he couldn’t do it. That maddened him.

I think Ballard had a sense of power. He was a sort of Napoleon. I used to dig at him a little. He would say that he was unaffected by his fame. And I’d say, ‘Oh yes, you’re completely humble, aren’t you!’

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Mirror’. Photographer unknown.

‘The Echo’ (1943) by Paul Delvaux.

In the students’ gallery hung the fading reproductions of a dozen schools of painting, for the most part images of worlds without meaning. However, grouped together in a small alcove Halliday found the surrealists Delvaux, Chirico and Ernst. These strange landscapes, inspired by dreams that his own could no longer echo, filled Halliday with a profound sense of nostalgia. One above all, Delvaux’s ‘The Echo’, which depicted a naked Junoesque woman walking among immaculate ruins under a midnight sky, reminded him of his own recurrent fantasy. The infinite longing contained in the picture, the synthetic time created by the receding images of the woman, belonged to the landscape of his unseen night.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Day of Forever’ (1967).

Ballard said that he mistook you for a new generation surrealist.

What he didn’t know was The Rod wasn’t just a random painting. It’s about a spiritual journey, and Ballard wouldn’t know a spiritual journey if he fell over it in the dark.

You say on your website that The Rod can be interpreted as a prediction of the first Gulf war.

That’s true, it can. But that didn’t interest me so much. I’d come to a crossroads in life. I’d come to the end of ordinary living. My son had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and I couldn’t go on living at an ordinary level. There are times when you either have to go down or up. You can’t go on your ordinary way, because your son is dreadfully ill. In fact he died. I realised the only way out was upward.

I tried to find help. In the Catholic church everyone seemed to be reading out from the Catechism instead of offering me some real help. So I went around the world. That’s what my book [From East to West: Awakening to a Spiritual Search, 1989] is about, trying to find an answer to these questions. Why should my son be born to a life of suffering? That’s what The Rod is about.

There’s a person in a great stress, and there’s a desert of unknowing behind her. Beyond that, on a higher level, is a landscape with an ocean. Water means truth, but you won’t find it on an ordinary level. You have to make the journey and we can’t raise ourselves up; something higher than ourselves calls us. If we’re lucky we’re drawn up. It’s not our right, we have to earn it. You have to set out on the journey, and it’s the only worthwhile thing to do in your life.

I learned to cope, and I got through those seven dreadful years. Benny first attempted suicide when he was fourteen. He tried many times to kill himself, and at 21 he died. It was hard. When I met Ballard, Benny had just died. Ballard was full of unsorted-out complexes. He’d seen too much as a little boy, his parents gave him no direction, no feeling of anything. He escaped from this strange world we live in. He was a good father to his children, but I think he took refuge in having as many women as he could. Let’s say he grabbed at life’s pleasures greedily rather than trying to lift himself. It was one of the things we argued over. I was divorced but I wasn’t going to be promiscuous. He was a naughty man. We had a few ding-dong battles, but we were friends. I liked him, after all.

Paul Delvaux. Photographer unknown.

The aircraft had vanished, disappearing across the desert. Franklin drove along the Strip, turning in and out of the hotel forecourts. In an empty car park he saw one of the ghosts of the twilight, a middle-aged man in a shabby tuxedo, some retired croupier or cardiologist returning to these dreaming hulks. Caught in mid-thought, he stared sightlessly at a dead neon sign. Not far away, a strong-hipped young woman stood among the dusty pool-furniture, her statuesque figure transformed by the fugue into that of a Delvaux muse.

J.G. Ballard, ‘News from the Sun’ (1981).

‘The Sleeping City’ (1938) by Paul Delvaux.

During that week, Anne Godwin did her best to help Sheppard construct his ‘machine’. All day she submitted to the Polaroid camera, to the films of her body which Sheppard projected on to the wall above the bed, to the endless pornographic positions in which she arranged her thighs and pubis. Sheppard gazed for hours through his stop-frame focus, as if he would find among these images an anatomical door, one of the keys in a combination whose other tumblers were the Marey chronograms, the surrealist paintings and the drained swimming pool in the ever-brighter sunlight outside. In the evenings Sheppard would take her out into the dusk and pose her beside the empty pool, naked from the waist, a dream-woman in a Delvaux landscape.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982).

Do you see any link between your work and surrealism, as Ballard did?

What I became interested in above all is meaning. The whole point about surrealism is that they tried to abolish meaning. At the very root we differ. I’m not a surrealist. I’m hoping I developed something that hadn’t been developed before. Each bit of my life is expressed by a painting. Maybe it could be called ‘visionary’.

What are your influences?

Oh, that’s easy. I began with being taught at fifteen by the last druid in Ireland. Have you seen the Book of Kells? All the letters swirl, and all my deserts do this swirling. Secondly, Ernst Fuchs. He taught me this special technique, that was my next big influence. And when I was a very small girl the Victorian illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Brilliant guy. Those are my three painting gods.

‘The Tarot‘ by Brigid Marlin.

While we were searching for that misplaced painting in your studio I saw a big round painting, The Tarot.

Yes, that’s my son Desmond asking his fortune, and those are the tarot cards.

It reminded me of Central and South American mural art.

Yeah. There’s a certain thread there. I can see that.

Your paintings seem to focus on figures. Usually young people, young women.

Well, actually, I’m doing an old guy playing the harp right now. One of the reasons is you love your children and you want to paint them. Secondly, they tend to represent a stage which you already know. The painter in one is always a child. In that sense you never grow up as an artist, because your child is still alive.

You seem to have painted lots of distorted churches.

I wouldn’t call it ‘distorted’. They are distorted, of course, but the word sounds cruel. I painted transformed churches.

That’s better.

Watch your language, young man. I’ll give you a book [Visions of Venice, 1999] that explains exactly what The Flight of the Churches means, and how I did it. The Flight of the Churches was caused by me feeling a grief that the old order is changing, the old certainties are gone. Even though I myself experienced that I had to find my own spiritual path and that the Catholic church was not an answer. Nevertheless it was a grief to me to see the falling away of the old traditional beliefs. They gave a meaning, a kind of ceremony. ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, as Yeats would say.

Now we live in a world with few graces. People are burned and put into little teapots. Weddings are in Las Vegas with god knows what. There’s no reverence. I’m not saying I ever revered the queen, but it was a rather lovely thing to see old men take off their hats and stand. Kind of beautiful. At schools the children reverenced and thanked the teachers. That’s gone, and instead everyone’s defiant.

‘The Flight of the Churches‘ by Brigid Marlin.

I think that television and so on has a lot to answer for. It comes like this: a young reporter or programmer wants to make his name. ‘How do I make my name? I shock people, then I’m in the headlines. Let’s shock people, it doesn’t matter how it affects children. The important thing is I get famous.’ So he shocks. The next one comes along: ‘He got famous, let me shock!’ They’re going on and on and they don’t see the damage. This sort of oily viscous pseudo-civilisation is seeping in, and the ceremony of innocence is drowned again. Then they say, ‘How can this be? Little children of ten are raping little girls. How on earth did they get the idea?’ They don’t even look at their own television set. What is it? Sex, sex, sex. And not loving sex. All the people who wanted to shock, they’ve all gone on television. I think it’s very sad. They don’t know what they’ve thrown out. Mary Whitehouse was very funny and we all made fun of her, but what’s the result? There’s absolutely no purpose or meaning in anything, because the people who believe in God and believe in meaning are all squashed down by these loud sophisticated non-believing people. So I actually don’t approve of Ballard. No, I don’t.

He said we should watch three or four hours of TV a day.

Well, look at the effect it had on him. I rest my case.

Your painting The Drowned Cathedral seems to be thematically close to one of Ballard’s novels.

Yes — The Drowned World. It’s quite funny, because it came from another source. There’s a symphony called The Drowned Cathedral by Debussy. Because of the wickedness of some people the cathedral was drowned, but every hundred years it comes up. You can hear the music coming up. That’s much more like it, because what I do always has a meaning. I’m not at all influenced by Ballard.

‘The Drowned Cathedral‘ by Brigid Marlin.

The Drowned World (1962) by J.G. Ballard. Dragon’s Dream edition (1981).

Have you read many of his books?

I happened on Crash, of all things. Ballard was so upset that I read that. For goodness sake, why did he write it if he didn’t want me to read it? He said, ‘Don’t read that, read The Unlimited Dream Company.’ I thought that was just as bad. A man eats a little girl for breakfast. I didn’t think that was wonderful, either. He seemed to think it was his great spiritual book. He had no judgement. I really loved his one great book, Empire of the Sun. That was magnificent, a classic. It’s an extraordinary book. It had poetry, realism. It was marvellous.

What did you think of Crash?

He told me that he wrote Crash because he wasn’t earning enough money with his ordinary science fiction and he had to feed the children. He deliberately wrote a pornographic novel. That’s a true story!

I haven’t heard it told like that before!

Well, that’s what he said. Whether he was lying or not I don’t know.

Was that side of him obvious to you?

One of the reporters [presumably - and revealingly! - John Baxter. SS] was a bit envious for his attraction for women. He said, ‘Was he attractive to women?’ Yes, curiously enough. He had the most marvellous voice. He could have been a great singer if he hadn’t been completely unmusical and tone deaf. This voice was like a barrel organ. It was mellifluous. He would be interested in you and this voice would wrap you round. It had a kind of caressing quality. I think women fell like ninepins. He had a curious animal magnetism. He wasn’t handsome – you wouldn’t rush towards him because he was so beautiful or alluring. But there was a profound animal magnetism. It was like being in the presence of a temporarily tame tiger.

He wrote a book called The Kindness of Women.

Yes he did. Another thing that was annoying was that he would take friend’s names and pop them in in the most nasty places. I know other people who were really annoyed to find their names used.

He did that to you!

He used my spelling of my name in The Kindness of Women. I thought, ‘the cruelty of men!’ Sod the kindness of women. I thought that was dreadful. People would assume all kinds of things. The nerve!

‘Prewar and wartime Shanghai was a huge Surrealist landscape,’ says Ballard, waving a hand at the Delvaux. ‘It was a time of sudden changes; regimes changed all the time. Atlanta was burning in a poster for Gone With the Wind, while just beyond, real fires tore through the city. There was a complete transformation of everything, complete unpredictability, while formal life went on, just as in Bunuel’s films or Delvaux’s paintings – a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces.’

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Luc Sante, ‘Tales From the Dark Side’. New York Times Review of Books, September 9 1990.

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Mirror’. Photographer unknown.

Ballard was often photographed standing in front of one of your Delvaux reproductions.

I was very touched by that, and even more touched when they had a show in Barcelona. They wanted the painting of the woman looking at herself in the mirror naked, the Delvaux I didn’t like. Ballard said it was the most precious possession he had, and he wouldn’t lend it. They asked me to recreate it again. That bloody wallpaper!

I said, ‘Okay, but you’ll have to pay me £2500.’ I didn’t charge Ballard that. I only charged £500, before I found out how rich he was. I thought writers were poor. I didn’t know he’d just sold the rights of his book to Steven Spielberg. If I’d known that I would have charged a hell of a lot more. The Spanish people didn’t want to spend that much, but they really wanted the picture, so they bought it. I had to do the bloody thing again.

You had a woman in clothes looking at herself in the mirror, but the reflection is naked. Beyond that there’s a garden. This woman in the house is surrounded by dingy wallpaper that’s peeling off. The house is so ugly. I was thinking it’s really Ballard himself. You remember, inside every man is a woman. This is inner spirit. He was living in this awful house that he said himself was ugly and dirty. Things peeling off. And he’s looking at himself in the mirror, as it were, and that’s the bit he can’t get at, because he can’t bear to bare himself. He’s always surrounded by his own complex nature. He looks in this mirror and there’s a woman calmly bared.

That’s the picture he liked most, but the other was better. He liked this one because this claustrophobic situation is him looking out at the world. He sees reflected back a hope of the fields beyond, and this woman who is able to bare herself. I feel there was some significance there.

Marlin’s second reproduction of Delvaux’s ‘The Mirror’, commissioned for An Autopsy of the New Millennium, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), 2008. Photo by Rick McGrath.

Did you go to Barcelona for the show?

I hated that picture and I wasn’t proud of doing it. I didn’t want to go and look at it again.

They still have it?

Don’t ask. They bought it. Whatever they do with it is their business.

Do you see your portraits as part of the same body as your visionary works?

This has been a dichotomy though my life. The tussle between realism and imaginative art. I’ll just do one, and then do the other, and not bother my head about whether they’re different or not. It gradually evolved that they come together. My visionary paintings get realistic, and my portraits get surrealistic. They’re joining up as I go on.

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Violation’. Photo by Richard Croft.

There was a rumour that Ballard was painted by Lucian Freud.

After I finished painting him he could have done anything and I wouldn’t know. But from the years that I painted him, he said he hated it and would never sit for anyone again. We were very good friends when we were doing the picture, but after that I didn’t see him. He was pretty occupied, and very involved with his own work. He was obsessional about his writing.

He was obsessed with all sorts of things.

He was a very obsessed man, yes. A very curious man. I’m glad I met him. I’ll tell you what, I knew Stanley Kubrick. Ballard and Kubrick had certain things in common. Obsessiveness is one. And also a touch of genius in both. They weren’t unlike. Ballard was fascinated by Kubrick, but I don’t think Kubrick knew of Ballard’s existence.

They never met, then?

I don’t think so.

You said Ballard was very unusual. Are there any other memories you want to share?

He said something very funny. Well, the first bit isn’t funny. He was grieving for his wife and then suddenly he went to a party. It was the sixties and he got laid, so to speak. He said he suddenly realised this rush of relief, and that had been part of the problem. After that he said the sky was the limit…

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Violation’. Photo by David Levinson.

J.G. BALLARD: I’ve always been a great admirer of the Belgium surrealist Paul Delvaux, and about six or seven years ago, thanks to Empire of the Sun [the film of Ballard's novel], I had a little spare cash. My first thought was to buy a Delvaux, but I discovered, sadly, that his prices had moved into the stratosphere. Anything up to a million pounds each.

So it then occurred to me that, rather than try to buy an existing Delvaux, what I would do was to pay an artist to reconstruct two Delvaux paintings which were destroyed during the Second World War, from the black-and-white photographs that exist of them. And that I did.

I heard of an American artist, Brigid Marlin, and I asked her, ‘Would you be prepared to accept a commission to paint these, to reconstruct these lost paintings?’ She agreed, and they’re now my proudest possession.

The originals of the two paintings were destroyed in London during the Blitz in 1940. Both were painted in 1936, and had obviously been brought to London by a British collector. Brigid, with a little interference from myself, had to choose the right colours for the paintings. Fortunately, Delvaux uses a limited palette – for instance, his buxom women tend to wear burgundy dresses – and we picked colours consonant with the colours in existing Delvaux paintings. So I think we’ve got it just about right.

One of the paintings is called The Violation and the other is called The Mirror. The Violation, I think, is my favourite. Its sort of a dream landscape populated by naked, or half-naked, women, who are beckoning towards the viewer, inviting him into their magical domain. Sitting in front of this painting, I feel that I am about to accept their invitation. I think that, in a way, I’ve already entered the painting and gone to live with these magnificent women.

Brigid Marlin was a very religious woman, and I think she thoroughly disapproved of the Surrealists and disapproved of my interest in them. I think she thought it was bad for my soul. So she offered to paint for me an exact copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, which exists, of course, in the Uffizi art gallery in Florence. And Brigid said to me, ‘You could put it in your bedroom, Jim. You know, the first thing you see in the morning when you wake up.’

I was tempted. Then, a few years ago, I visited Florence and went to see the Annunciation. I found that the painting is about nine feet long by four feet deep. I thought, well, it might be a bit intimidating.

I’ve thought of having one or two more Delvauxs – lost Delvauxs – because I think it’s a nice idea to bring back to life paintings that have been destroyed. I would never sell my two Delvauxs, they’re much too precious. They’re probably more precious to me than a real Delvaux would be. In fact, I’m the sort of secondary creator of them. I mean, I almost feel that I painted them.

Ballard quoted in uncredited interview for the Independent, 29 January 1994.

‘Proposition Diurne (la Femme Au Miroi’; 1937) by Paul Delvaux.

Slideshow: The Art of Paul Delvaux (YouTube upload by shivabel). Music: ’1/2′ by Brian Eno.

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

review by Jamie Sherry

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 1 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Runtime: 18 mins
Voice: Ermanna Montanari
Sound: Davide Sandri
Music: Egle Sommacal
Editor: Benedetto Lanfranco
Photography: Alvise Renzini
Animation: Alvise Renzini
Script: Lucio Apolito (based on the short story ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ by J.G. Ballard)
Director: Alvise Renzini
Producer: Opificio Ciclope

NOTE: An English translation of the voiceover can be found here.

In discussion about his adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (1984), the director Volker Schlöndorff famously remarked that ‘if I make a movie which Proustians celebrate for its fidelity, I will have failed as a director’. Predictably, the film was widely criticised for misrepresenting the source material and for perceived acts of violent reductionism. It was these issues that framed my viewing of the Italian animation Grande Anarca, based on my favourite Ballard short story, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985). As a devotee of Ballard’s post-60s short stories, I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the film, regardless of my interest in the idea of adapting such an un-cinematic work of prose. The film ended up actually exceeding my expectations, deviating from the demands of a faithful adaptation, yet finding a life of its own amongst the wider architecture of the Ballardian.

The study of literature on film has largely liberated itself from the confines of the ‘fidelity debate’ and aesthetic judgements regarding how close the film is deemed to be to the ‘spirit of the book’. Cartmell and Whelehan’s Adaptations (1999), Stam and Raengo’s Literature and Film (2004) and Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), amongst others, have done much to progress the study of adaptation, a field that has privileged the status of literature over film. For too long film adaptations have been viewed as misrepresenting, reducing, despoiling and ultimately failing to capture an essential essence somehow contained in the source text. Film adaptations are judged by what they fail to do, or what they omit, rather than what they achieve, or add. Within an atheistic, post-structuralist view of adaptation, the novel does not contain a ‘spirit’, but is rather an intertextual assortment of many precursor texts that make up the bricolage landscape of culture. It is with this more open and democratic approach to adaptation that Grande Anarca should be approached, appreciating the intertextual methodology that has been employed in the adaptation process.

First published in Ambit 100 (Spring 1985), ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ is a fascinating, if unlikely, choice of source material for a film adaptation. Very much an understudied story, it sits alongside ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) and The Index (1977) as Ballard’s most experimental and playful self-contained short stories, whilst also sharing many of his central themes concerning madness and incarceration. Eventually published together in the compendium War Fever (1990), these stories mischievously subvert classical notions of structure, form and content, unifying Ballard’s playful deployment of paratexts as narrative medium. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette coined the neologism ‘paratext’ to describe subsidiary and secondary material such as prefaces, post-scripts, footnotes and illustrations, which illuminate, but are ultimately subservient to, the principle text. As Ballard himself noted in Paris Review (Winter,1984): ‘lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel’.

Ballard sets out to exploit these paratextual narrative devices to self-consciously confront the reader, and include us in an ironic discourse with the text. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (not to be confused with the chapter of the same name in The Atrocity Exhibition) commences with a lone 18-word sentence; the rest of the story comprising eighteen footnotes cited from each word, the sentence savagely deconstructed by a mental asylum inmate into its constituent units. The story is reminiscent of, and arguably indebted to, Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictional novel Pale Fire (1962), a narrative famously comprised of a character’s foreword, index and commentary on a murdered poet’s 999-line poem. As Pale Fire progresses, rather than shedding light on the elliptical poem, these fictional paratexts instead begin to illuminate the delusional psychological state of the annotator.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Continuing these techniques, the use of the classical paratext as a vehicle for story is probably best encapsulated in Ballard’s The Index. The narrative is conveyed via the listed index to an imaginary autobiography that, as the short introduction informs us, is missing, or may never have existed at all. Small snippets of information in the index ultimately converge to form narratives that spectacularly reveal Ballardian obsessions with mental breakdown, sexual deviance, murder, psychological spaces and institutional confinement.

It is these themes that also dominate ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, a piece that functions more by exclusion, than inclusion. Employing the metafictional technique of showing only the answers to questions set by an unknown authoritarian presence, a narrative becomes clear that would traditionally far exceed the limitations of a short story. As the answers progress, we learn that the interviewee is a man living surreptitiously in Ballard’s beloved Heathrow Airport:

1) Yes.
2) Male (?)
3) c/o Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow.
4) Twenty-seven.
5) Unknown.
6) Dr Barnado’s Primary, Kingston-upon-Thames; HM Borstal, Send, Surrey; Brunel University Computer Sciences Department.

Sometimes the answers are deliberately obtuse, with no obvious allusion to a potential question. At other times the answers are detailed in an ironic way, completely out place with the sequence of narrative events (see answer 14 below). We soon learn about the interviewee, including his criminal history:

10) Manchester Crown Court, 1984.
11) Credit card and computer fraud.
12) Guilty.
13) Two years, HM Prison, Parkhurst.
14) Stockhausen, de Kooning, Jack Kerouac.
15) Whenever possible.
16) Twice a day.
17) NSU, Herpes, gonorrhoea.

It becomes clear that the interviewee believes he befriended the second coming of Jesus within Heathrow Airport, and begins to help him with his project to provide mankind with the power of immortality:

27) I took him to Richmond Ice Rink where he immediately performed six triple salchows. I urged him to take up ice-dancing with an eye to the European Championships and eventual gold at Seoul, but he began to trace out huge double spirals on the ice. I tried to convince him that these did not feature in the compulsory figures, but he told me that the spirals represented a model of synthetic DNA.
35) When he was drunk. He claimed that he brought the gift of eternal life.
61) He stated that synthetic DNA introduced into the human germ plasm would arrest the process of ageing and extend human life almost indefinitely.
81) Government White Paper on Immortality.
82) Compulsory injection into the testicles of the entire male population over eleven years.

The protagonist accompanies this man, as he meets with members of the royal family, politicians and celebrities in a bid to raise money for the Immortality project. The plan clearly gets out of control for the interviewee, as he takes matters into his own hands:

88) Assassination.
89) I was neither paid nor incited by agents of a foreign power.
90) Despair. I wish to go back to my cubicle at London Airport.
97) I was visited in the death cell by the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
98) That I had killed the Son of God.
99) He walked with a slight limp. He told me that, as a condemned prisoner, I alone had been spared the sterilising injections, and that the restoration of the national birthrate was now my sole duty.
100) Yes.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 2 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Ballard’s investment in us as active readers also allows meaning to be gained from absence. Ballard finds his preoccupations and themes best explored through the paratexts that traditionally surround culture’s dominant storytelling mediums. A list of answers, an index, and the footnotes of a single sentence become vehicles for the Ballardian. It is within this free interplay with the reader that we are able to construct a narrative, regardless of how unreliable the protagonist may or may not be. Within these empty spaces and narrative vacuums, the reader is empowered to create meaning. The dichotomous function of these omissions provoke us to address the character’s mental state, and serves to further problematise the role of the unreliable narrator/s within. As the author Ursula K Le Guin states in her review of War Fever, Ballard opts for storytelling in which we see the ‘condition of fictional bones without flesh — crystals without molecular instabilities to cloud the clarity’. Ballard uses metatextual techniques to highlight the devices of fiction and in doing so, provokes the reader to dwell on the relationships between fantasy and reality, concepts central to ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’.

It is these narrative devices so rooted in the literary form of the story that potentially problematise a cinematic adaptation (yet also make the concept very alluring). Conceived from the perspective that the source material is merely a starting point, Alvise Renzini’s short animation Grande Anarca diverts from ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ in a number of notable ways. Although strongly influenced by the unusual structure of Ballard’s original text, the film completely dispenses with the central storyline of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, ignoring the second-coming, immortality project, murder of Jesus plot points. However, there is continuity in the film’s eerie voiceover, as the omnipotent narrator answers a set of unheard questions. Replacing the Jesus narrative with a story regarding a genetic experiment carried out on the inhabitants of a block of flats, the film also manages to confront and adapt the medium-specific tropes encoded in the literary form of the source material.

Although Renzini is credited with photography, animation and direction, the film is clearly a group effort, produced under the ‘joint tradename’ of Opificio Ciclope. Producers of various media forms, including music videos, TV graphics and documentaries, the Italian collective purports to have a ‘shared interest for interacting, mixed techniques and hybrid formats’. It is certainly this mastering of art/media forms that bestows Grande Anarca with a unique visual complexity.

The film is literally multi-layered, the images painstakingly built up in successive levels. Firstly, the background is hand-illustrated, the images then photographed and projected as slides. These slide projections are then shot using 35mm film, the individual frames then serving as a canvass to be painted and etched upon. Finally, digital post-production provides the last layer to complete the film. This inter-medial technique for building a film layer-by-layer brings to mind the German short film Copyshop (2001) in which a photocopy shop worker begins to literally replicate himself in an endless cycle. The short is produced by filming almost 18,000 photocopies of digital frames. It could be said that these animation devices, particularly well executed in Grande Anarca, in which the viewer is confronted with the mechanics and textual processes of the medium, somehow mirror the self-conscious literary referencing of Ballard’s original story.

And it is within this visual process that Grande Anarca evokes much of its drama. Dark fractured imagery blends onto inanimate objects which drift into our vision, as obscured tower blocks meld into shimmering close-ups of cells and bacteria. Distorted alien-like bodies glimmer before us, gasworks flash, abject bodies morph into DNA structures. Buildings vying for dominance over nature obtain a hallucinatory quality as swift editing coupled with repetitious music (dramatic repeating violin chords) compliment the images of tree like cells inhabiting cityscapes. The film ranges between stark black and white before displaying sepia tinted browns and blues. Although ostensibly an animation, the film does feature real footage of apartment blocks and abandoned train stations. The geometrics of man-made, Vorticist shapes mingle haphazardly with biological structures. The calm, dispassionate voiceover and the melodious repetition of the music almost produce a feeling that we are watching a propaganda film, benevolently advertising a social experiment, only the visuals offering a sinister reminder that all is not well.

The story that unfolds in Grande Anarca is clearly a major deviation from Ballard’s source story, but it is the narrative replacements that really illuminate the film-makers application to the task. The answers start off relatively dull, though are notable by their contrast to Ballard’s original text:

01) Corals.
02) Light.
03) A face-shaped flower vase.
04) Glaciers.
05) Emerald green.
06) Science fiction books: Fritz Leiber, James Ballard, Stanislaw Lem.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

As the film develops, it becomes clear that the narrator was involved in a complex genetic experiment on the inhabitants of a huge multi-storey building:

20) Tenants were selected from thousands of applicants.
21) Yes, I think it was a crucial event in my life.
22) Apartments were identical in shape, size, and decors. The building was divided into 22 units, identified with a letter. Each unit had 8 floors. Each floor housed 64 persons in as many apartments. The whole of the tenants were divided in 4 groups: A, T, C, G. The building contained 5632 persons.
23) I was part of the original project team, and I came up with several of the ideas in the experiment.

Importantly, the inhabitants of the building are represented by the protagonist as being both co-operative and willing participants:

30) All the tenants were aware of the nature of the experiment in different ways. I would not therefore paint in-house relations as unconscious.
31) They were deeply involved in the experiment, and they talked about it regularly: when they met on the stairs or in the garden, or during building meetings.
32) Each tenant had to spend 4 hours with the other three individuals on his team, then 8 hours on his own. He had to write 4 pages a day. In the early stages, that was how we looked for similar descriptions, cross-references, reoccurring words. At a later stage, they were forced to write about their personal desires. Finally, about their dreams.
33) In each apartment, a pneumatic system provided food rations in exchange for the reports. Locks were automatically operated. To open the doors, tenants had to deliver their daily reports.

Eventually we see thematic cross-overs with Ballard’s original story, as the synthetic depiction of DNA creates a startling psycho-pathologic relationship:

36) The building was a to-scale replica of the DNA from algae. Tenants represented nucleotides.
37) We wanted to communicate directly with the DNA, with no go-betweens.
38) We wanted to endow it with some sort of awareness.
39) By collecting the tenants’ dreams.
40) We measured everything: heartbeats, the patterns created on the windows by electric light, decibels. Everything.

As the voiceover draws the film to a close we start to view the possibility that Renzini is sourcing more than just one Ballard text, with allusions to the effects of the building architectures acting as a kind of Tarkovskian Zone:

48) During the third stage, the building started to emit a frequency at night, while the tenants slept. The wave reached a range of over 20 kilometers. Suddenly everyone was aware of the experiment.
49) The wave from the building reverberated through the dreams of whoever lived in the area. It was those obsessive dreams that spurred the riots.
50) Lies, now as before, you keep repeating your lies.
51) That was not our purpose.
52) I would rather not talk about that.
53) Several such buildings were destroyed by mistake.
54) Scientific research is not a democratic system, nor should it be.
55) The experiment could be repeated.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 3 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

In Grande Anarca we see the narrative structure of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ married to the Ballardian tropes of urban alienation, techno-surveillance, sociological experimentation and the psychological consequences of man-made environments, as best exemplified in High-Rise (1975). So whilst the film may break free from the plot points of the source story, it still exists within a wider Ballardian universe. We see the moral complexity of social experimentation, the actions of a closed community reverting to a primal state and the symbiotic relationship between man and urban structures. As Rick McGrath states in his affectionate and incredibly detailed analysis of the novel, ‘Reconstructing High-Rise’:

The horror of meaningless acts piled high with Ballard’s trademark detatched omnipotent narrator. High-Rise can both shock and exhilarate its reader, and its insistence that the ‘ends justify the means’ reinforces Ballard’s geometry of violence…

Further to this we see textual equivalents in the actions of individuals acting as a group, and the type of belief systems (religious, political and moral) that can become normalised in the reverie of community psychology. McGrath again illuminates these notions of the intoxicating myth:

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society…

The compliance of the subjects in the film to willingly engage with these socio-scientific experiments, even though their food can be kept from them if they do not co-operate, draws on some well explored Ballardian areas. What is exposed in both High-Rise and Grande Anarca is a pathological willingness to be imprisoned or otherwise confined in institutional regimes. As Ballard puts it in a 2001 Literary Review article, we can see ‘hints that a benign version of a Sadeian society is still emerging, of tormentors and willing victims’. Ballard explores the willingness to be dominated by these architectures of control, as the character Sinclair notes in Super-Cannes (2000), these ‘totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong’.

Unfortunately, Grande Anarca is far from perfect, and at least for me, fails on one quite fundamental level. In most cases I am an admirer of extreme deviation from the adapted source material, but Renzini, like so many others, appears to disregard or ignore the ironic humour that saturates most pages of Ballard’s writing. From the opening line of High-Rise, through to most of the chapter titles in The Atrocity Exhibtion, Ballard is able to infuse his stories with subtle but biting wit. Taking ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ as an example, many of the protagonist’s answers are nothing more than in-jokes as Ballard plays with the edges of humour in ways that are reminiscent both of Bret Easton Ellis and William S Burroughs:

33) Porno videos. He took a particular interest in Kamera Klimax and Electric Blue.
34) Almost every day.
36) At the Penta Hotel I tried to introduce him to Torvill and Dean…
37) Females of all ages.
38) Group sex.
58) He had a keen appreciation of money, but was not impressed when I told him of Torvill and Dean’s earnings.
63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal.
71) He wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile.

The humour found in Ballard’s work is usually satirical, sometimes surreal, and always illustrative of the moral malaise infused through the story. To ignore Ballard’s humour, as I feel the makers of Grande Anarca have done, is to reduce Ballard to less than the sum of his parts. But these actions could be considered deliberate aesthetic acts, removing humour for the sake of some artistic achievement.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Traditionally, fans of Ballard’s writing have had an uneasy relationship with adaptations of his writing. It seems that for some, films that explore Ballardian themes, or which have influenced Ballard, can offer more comforting routes to understand his work. These include both Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Solyaris (1972), Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lucas’ THX 1138 (1971), and of course the most potent Ballardian film, Chris Marker’s remarkable short La Jetée (1962). All benefit from their potential to be arguably more useful cinematic texts with which to contextualise Ballardian tropes, than actual official adaptations of his own books. These films are liberated from the compare-contrast analysis that dogs literal Ballard adaptations such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition (2000), amongst a host of others. The confining responsibility of fidelity can raise the stakes for the Ballard reader, in which we are not always able to read these films either objectively or fairly.

Cronenberg, both in Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash attempts to decant experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language (albeit an idiosyncratically unorthodox one). Perhaps to the point where his earlier films Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) could be seen as a more fitting arena to explore the Ballardian. Likewise, Spielberg’s moral subjectivity, a kind of revisionist 50′s idea of ‘Boys Own’ heroism and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, constrains his adaptation of Empire of the Sun. To the point where many, as before, may find more interesting material in his Duel (1971) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with which to better understand the relationship between Ballard and cinema. It is left to one’s imagination to wonder what could have occurred if counter-intuitively, Cronenberg had taken on Empire the Sun, and Spielberg tackled the auto-erotic allegories of Crash.

I believe that Weiss’ over-faithful use of iconic 60s imagery in his bold reworking of The Atrocity Exhibition makes the film stand out for me, in contrast to some who believe that these images lack cultural punch due to their sell-by-date expiring. In contrast to this, Renzini instead prefers to place further abstractions onto the source text. However, what the film does share with both Cronenberg and Weiss is a desire to inhabit the universe of the Ballardian. Far from slavishly conforming to Roland Barthes’ battle-cry that the ‘birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,’ Renzini pursues a thornier path – casting aside the author’s original narrative and replacing it with something that is loosely Ballardian, rather than strictly Ballard.

Perhaps there is something inherent in Ballard’s writing that actively resists successful adaptation. McGrath’s previous mention of Ballard’s trademark ‘detatched omnipotent narrator’ could be regarded as a profoundly uncinematic central character. Taking this further, McGrath expounds on the dynamically impotent character of Laing in High-Rise and the way in which he ‘survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation through isolation and passivity’. Again, perhaps cinematic narratives resist passive characters, demanding more open, morally unambiguous, actively obstacle defeating heroes. This in marked contrast to the types that survive the carnage of High-Rise simply by keeping their head down, staying quiet and isolating themselves from the mayhem. It could also be argued that some adaptations fail because the source material is so prescriptive; readerly texts that imprint visual codas onto the reader, allowing little in the way of artistic flourishes for the adaptor. However, with Ballard the opposite could be true. The moral ambiguity, detached solipsism, and exclusion of characters’ first person psycho-dynamics mean that we can only form vague (yet highly personal) ideas of main protagonists. When we encounter these people on screen, in the flesh, saying words, and reacting to external agents, it is possible that we balk at both the unavoidable physical humanity before us, and the distinctly un-Ballardian theatrics of film-acting which we excluded from our original reading.

Grande Anarca enjoys a curiously dichotomous romance with Ballard. The aims seem contradictory: rejecting Ballard’s authority over the story, yet clearly conforming to the author’s recognised signifiers and themes. In the process of leaving the story behind, the makers of this film enter into a new dialogue, re-inhabiting and re-acquiring universal themes of the Ballardian, displaying what the Collins English Dictionary famously describes as ‘dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

… MORE INFO:

+ Information on Grande Anarca at Opificio Ciclope

… GRANDE ANARCA:

+ Grande Anarca Part 1
+ Grande Anarca Part 2
+ Grande Anarca Part 3

+ English translation of the voiceover.

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

ABOVE: Richard Gere as Blake: more vapourware…

None of my books are being made into films at the moment, all is quiet. A lot of Philip K. Dick’s books have been filmed; they fit the American mood. His novels are very paranoid and I think that touches a nerve in America.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed in SFX magazine, 2007.

I have been working my way through a stack of Ballard interviews from the 70s and 80s, and one consistent note is JGB’s regret at never cracking the American market. But his US stocks might have been very different if a few more of the film options taken out on his books had come to fruition, an observation brought home to me after reading David Pringle’s 1990 conversation with Ballard (published in Fear magazine and kindly sent to me by Martin J.).

In this interview there is much tantalising detail about these vapourware films, including the news that Steven Spielberg’s partner Kathy Kennedy was keen to option Running Wild a couple of years after Spielberg’s film of Empire. Ballard, however, feared it was “slightly too strong a dish for Spielberg” while speculating that “one of those John Carpenter directors might have fun with it”. He also talks of stalled development on a proposed film of The Day of Creation, before bemoaning the fact that “nobody has ever got it together” to film Concrete Island, despite the fact it has “been continuously optioned ever since it was published” and that it “would be quite easy and cheap to film”. The latest option on Concrete Island (at the time, 1990), Ballard reveals, was from someone in Australia!

But the biggest revelation is that Richard Gere wanted to make a film of The Unlimited Dream Company. According to Ballard:

Richard Gere … has taken an option on The Unlimited Dream Company with a view to playing the hero himself. I met him in London and was very impressed by him — highly articulate, thoughtful, serious-minded. He’s very interested in Buddhism, does work on behalf of various Buddhist missions. Reincarnation through one species to another is very much a part of Buddhist thought, and obviously that is what intrigued him about the novel. What would have been the insuperable obstacle of filming the flying sequences is no problem these days — they can do that extremely convincingly. But one must assume, to be sensible, that nothing will come of it.

Richard Gere as Blake! The mind curdles! I wonder if Gere intended to keep the Shepperton setting? Perhaps it would have suffered a fate similar to the remake of The Wicker Man, sadly ripped from its pagan context on a remote Scottish isle and relocated to a “repressive matriarchal” island off the coast of Washington. In any case, Gere’s star was soaring at that time, riding on the back of Pretty Woman, so I imagine the film would have exposed Ballard similarly, the way Spielberg pulled him into his slipstream.

Well, with all this new info addling my brain, I thought I’d compile a list of Ballard’s brushes and near-brushes with the film world. If anyone has any more info, I’d be glad to receive it.

BOOKS

The Drought (1964)
According to JGB in 1976:

I … wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it.

And 20 years later:

People have tried to buy [the rights] back from David Frost, but he’s put an incredibly high price on them, so I’m afraid that novel will remain unfilmed… Hazel Adair [who bought the rights with Frost] read the novel, and she was very familiar with my stuff. She just wanted to film it straight, as it was. She saw it as exotic, with a strong story — when the taps run dry what do people do? You take it for granted that you’ll be able to find water somewhere if the taps run dry, but if the rivers run dry as well you’ve got a problem on your hands. Against that background, there is this urban disaster story going on, with the characters losing their suburban virtues and becoming more and more archetypal. So I think she saw it as having good roles, and all the rest of it. But, ah well, this was 25 years ago; I think it was ’69 when they bought the rights, and by then, of course, the British film industry had just fallen through the grilles in the floor.

Quoted in Ballard’s 1996 interview with David Pringle for SFX magazine.

The Crystal World (1966)
According to JGB (again, from the 1996 Pringle):

The Crystal World has been optioned quite a few times over the years. I think the film-makers are attracted to the visual possibilities of the crystallizing forest, and crystallizing helicopters and crocodiles and the like, but it would be very difficult to portray convincingly.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Filmed by Jonathan Weiss in 2000.

Crash (1973)

ABOVE: Jack Nicholson in Crash: “Heeere’s Vaughnie!”

1) Filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996.
2) B.C. (Before Cronenberg), Ballard told the RE/Search crew:

I’ve seen a filmscript of Crash by a very good English writer named Heathcote Williams. Some film company wanted Jack Nicholson to star in it. This version was set in Los Angeles with American characters, an American landscape — obviously that’s where the money is to make movies. It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — “Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!”

Concrete Island (1974)
1) According to JGB in 1976:

I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film.

2) Option from someone in Australia, as above (1990).
3) According to JGB in 1996 (SFX interview):

A French company holds the option at present, and is developing it: whether they can actually get the money together to finance it I don’t know.

High-Rise (1975)
1) Currently in development hell with Vincenzo Natali attached.
2) Optioned in the 1970s with Nic Roeg as director and Paul Mayersberg as scriptwriter. Roeg and Mayersberg of course made The Man Who Fell to Earth, a bittersweet reminder of what might have been: sweet because it’s such an amazing film, bitter because it’s not Ballard.
3) Bruce Robinson, writer/director of Withnail and I, wrote a High-Rise script in 1979. According to an IMDB commenter:

Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.

The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Optioned by Richard Gere, as above.

Empire of the Sun (1984)
Filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987.

The Day of Creation (1987)
1) “Some interest”, as above.
2) In a 1987 interview, it was noted: “There are no immediate plans for a movie version of The Day of Creation, although Ballard says, ‘My film agent is getting a lot of response from directors and producers.’”

Running Wild (1988)
1) Interest from the Spielberg camp around 1990, as above.
2) In 2003, Samuel L. Jackson was bitten. Running Wild was supposed to be filmed by David Leland (Mona Lisa, Wish You Were Here), starring Samuel as “a forensic psychiatrist who investigates an unusual crime on a Pacific Northwest island. Running Wild is slated for production summer 2004 on Vancouver Island. The producers have partnered with Alliance Atlantis for this project.” Although the film was headed for the Wicker Man route, relocated to an American island, it, too, disappeared off the face of the earth.

UPDATE…
Sam is back in the game!

Cocaine Nights (1996)
1) Last year, Andy Harries, one of the producers of The Queen, optioned Cocaine Nights with Peter Webber (Girl with A Pearl Earring; Hannibal Rising) attached as director.
2) According to my snout, Tim C., Paul Mayersberg was set to write a Cocaine Nights miniseries for ITV. It never came through, of course.

Super-Cannes (2000)
In 2002 Jeremy Thomas (Naked Lunch; Crash) optioned Super-Cannes for John Maybury (Love is the Devil; The Jacket) to direct from a script by Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth; Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence; Croupier). At the time Thomas said, ‘Until we have a finished script there can be no decisions on casting, budget or start of shoot.’ Can we assume that Mayersberg never delivered that script, since the production has completely disappeared off the map? By the way, in Ballardian terms, that makes three strikes for Mayersberg: Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. None of them happened.

SHORT STORIES

The Vermilion Sands stories (1957-70)
According to Tim C., in 2000 the BBC planned a series based on Vermilion Sands:

This from a posting to the JGB list (no one ever managed to dig up further details): “The BBC is producing Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence and working on adaptations of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You, JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands and Alex Garland’s Tesseract.”

‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
As Tim C. notes, there was a mooted “BBC opera version of ‘The Sound Sweep’, as mentioned in Judith Merrill’s anthology England Swings SF (1968) and nowhere else.”

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
Filmed by Peter Potter in 1964 for BBC television.

‘Minus One’ (1963)
Filmed by Simon Brook in 1991.

‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
Filmed as Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude by Solveig Nordlund in 2002.

‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
Filmed as Home by Richard Curson-Smith for BBC television in 2003.

Special mention must be made of Crash!, the 1971 short film made by Harley Cokliss for the BBC. It stars Ballard and is based on fragments from The Atrocity Exhibition as well as drawing from various ideas Ballard was working on at the time. I always assumed Ballard wrote the script, but in the SFX interview he reveals it was in fact Cokliss:

The screenplay, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t written by me; it was written by Cokliss. So I just did what he told me. He’d say, ‘walk across the roof of this multi-storey car park, Jim, and get into that car,’ so I’d do that. I think I wrote a voice-over, which I remember recording at Ealing Studios. But I can scarcely remember the film. I’ve no idea whether it was any good or not. The past is another country.

I’d say Ballard did write the voiceover, not Cokliss, given it features concepts that would later pop up in his non-fiction pieces and in the introduction to Crash. We’ll give Harley credit for the actual shooting script, though.

ORIGINAL SCRIPTS

‘Gulliver in Space’ (1964)
Original script for this episode of Jackanory, the British children’s show. According to JGB: “I really wrote it for my children, who were keen viewers at the time.”

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

ABOVE: “Ooooga Booga…” Imogen Hassall as Ayak, Magda Konopka as Ulido and Victoria Vetri as Sanna in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. “No dialogue, just a lot of grunts” said Ballard.

Screen treatment for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler. According to JGB in a 1991 interview with Pringle and Richard Kadrey:

Back in the 60s, Hammer Films made a remake of the original One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch. The remake was a success, and they decided to make a sequel to their remake. They asked if I would do the original treatment, which I did. This was a film without dialogue, you would just hear a lot of grunts. I didn’t actually write a script; the shooting script was written by the director. For my treatment, I got a ‘screen credit’, my only screen credit up till Empire of the Sun. I’m very proud that my first screen credit was for what is, without doubt, the worst film ever made. An appallingly bad film that only distantly resembled anything in my original treatment.

While in Miracles of Life he really goes to town:

I was contacted by a Hammer producer, Aida Young, who was a great admirer of The Drowned World. She was keen that I write the screenplay for their next production, a sequel to One Million Years BC… She steered me into the office of Tony Hinds, then the head of Hammer. He was affable but gloomy, and listened without comment as Aida launched into a chapter-by-chapter account of The Drowned World, with its picture of a steaming, half-submerged London and its vistas of dream-inducing water.

… Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had given little thought to the project, but on the drive from Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas. I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we want that Drowned World atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing less than the story of the birth of the Moon — in fact, one of the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction, which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain. ‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going out! All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful, already moving on to the next stage of production, casting the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them. I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex relationships between the principal characters, difficult to envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment, some of which survived into the finished film, along with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that they misspelled my name in the credits [as 'J.B. Ballard'].

NOVELIZATIONS

Alien (1979)
Ballard was offered $20,000 to write the novelization of Alien, Ridley Scott’s classic film, a job which went to Alan Dean Foster in his stead. As Ballard told Pringle in 1984:

It was surprisingly easy to turn down. I wouldn’t mind doing the novelization of Alphaville, or even Huston’s Moby Dick or Hawks’s Big Sleep (Welles’s Macbeth would pose some problems).

(Still, there does appear to be some evidence that Ballard gave the Alien project more than a glancing thought…)

But despite what Ballard says in the Miracles quote above, that “the film industry was not for me”, in the SFX interview he actually regrets not being more closely involved with film. In fact, he sounds a little down about it. This is another interview I’ve just come across recently, and from it I was rather surprised to learn that Ballard’s burning passion was to write original screenplays and to collaborate with a gun director, forming a similar partnership to Graham Greene and Carol Reed.

Let me just catch my breath for a bit…

Someone really, really should have made that happen.

(But then again, precious egos would be at stake: today’s director’s are far too focused on writing their own scripts, to the detriment of good storylines.)

Here are Ballard’s closing remarks from the SFX interview:

I’ve had a lot of invitations, in recent years, to write a drama series — or to write original plays in the days when they existed. But I’ve always declined them because I’m not at my best working with a committee, and television is a world entirely made up of committees. It’s a huge collaboration. That doesn’t suit me. Cinema is quite different, actually; film is entirely driven by one or two people at the most — usually the producer first. The creative importance of the producer is underestimated by people who think that cinema is entirely the work of the director.

Not true: in my contacts with the film world, the producers have been more important than the directors, really (Spielberg and Cronenberg are virtually their own producers). Films are driven by (a) the producer, and then (b) the director, and you’re dealing usually with one person. I’ve never worked in film, and I regret that very much. Because I’ve always responded so to film, I regret that I’ve never been able to collaborate with a director I felt close to or in sympathy with — in the way that, say, Graham Greene was able to collaborate with Carol Reed. It’s a pity, but it just never happened, partly because most of my career as a writer has coincided with a period of two or three decades when the British film industry has virtually ceased to exist. Had my career as a writer begun 20 years earlier, say in the 1940s, probably more of my novels would have been filmed and I might well have got involved with some sort of simpatico director. But now it’s too late.

Written & directed by: Simon Brook.
Based on the short story by: J.G. Ballard.
Produced by: Susanna Virtanen.
Music: Joshua Zaentz.

Starring: Alfred Hyslop, Paul Ravich, Earl Hagen, Bob Arcaro.

I’m probably biased, but in my estimation Ballard has hardly released a clunker — at least in novel form. Granted, The Wind from Nowhere is even in Ballard’s own analysis, ‘just a piece of hackwork’, knocked off in a matter of weeks to get a foot in the door, but still it has its moments. And the ones the critics loathe — Kingdom Come, say — reflect more the sour prejudice of mainstream media than they do Ballard. I find resonance with Kingdom Come each time I set foot outside my door. How many other 78-year-old novelists can we say that about?

But if we turn to the short stories it’s a slightly different matter, at least early on. ‘Now: Zero’ (1959), for example, was predicated on a last-sentence twist that was as corny as it was predictable. Ballard was big on the surprise reveal in those days, yet when it paid off the reward was secure. ‘Concentration City’, a classic short published two years before ‘Now Zero’, hinged on the sneak attack of the last line and was all the better for it. Even so, the feeling lingers that Ballard, pre-Atrocity Exhibition, was somewhat inconsistent, reinforced by the fact that ‘The Subliminal Man’, one of his very best stories (either novel or short), came out in 1963, the same year as one of his weakest efforts, ‘Minus One’.

‘Subliminal Man’ is quintessentially Ballardian: its sharply delineated descriptions of motorways, flyovers and shopping malls haven’t aged at all. As with the vision of urban panic in ‘Concentration City’, it works precisely because of the taste and restraint Ballard dedicates to the mise en scene; both stories are imbued with an uncanny resonance, the power of suggestion, as much for what they don’t reveal as for what they do. But ‘Minus One’, contextualised with the rest of the oeuvre, is completely baffling. It barely feels like Ballard at all, straining to make its point with considerable overkill.

‘Minus One’ is set in Green Hill Asylum, which ‘serves the role of a private prison’, catering to the very rich who dump their mentally defective relatives and lovers there — ‘abandoned casualties of the army of privilege’ — safe in the knowledge that these outcasts will not be seen nor heard from again; the asylum promises they won’t be re-entering society, presumably from a cocktail of drugs and shock treatment. But when a patient, Hinton, goes missing, the asylum’s director, Dr Mellinger, panics. Fearful of losing his job, he manages to convince his staff that Hinton never existed in the first place.

Although it’s not a bad premise, paradoxically the very nature of that premise reveals the story’s greatest flaw: it’s just too talky, with its tedious description (rather than depiction) of events. Yes, that’s necessary, given Hinton apparently doesn’t exist and therefore his ‘backstory’ can’t be shown, but it hardly makes for great writing. Ballard toys with the old ‘what is reality and who defines it?’ conundrum, and almost trips over his words describing Mellinger’s examination of Hinton’s ‘total existential role in the unhappy farce of which he was the author and principal star’. Perhaps we can detect the elements of a failed experiment here, the story’s overblown dialogue and interior monologues leading to a much more pared down and streamlined prose in Ballard’s late-60s works. But then again, even Ballard’s student story, ‘The Violent Noon’, written some 12 years earlier, seems to have a sharper blade. Maybe ‘Minus One’ was simply an aberration, reminding Ballard of the need to refocus; remember, ‘The Terminal Beach’, his stunning document of postwar malaise, came just one year later…

In ‘Minus One’ Ballard clearly has a point to make about the nature of psychiatry and its insular cabal but his heart just doesn’t seem in it, as when Mellinger meditates on Hinton’s file:

He refused to accept that this mindless cripple with his anonymous features could have been responsible for the confusion and anxiety of the previous day. Was it possible that these few pieces of paper constituted this meagre individual’s full claim to reality?

Unfortunately, the concept is not really developed beyond the ‘few pieces of paper’ analogy, and ultimately there is never any doubt that Hinton actually existed; the Ballard of just a few years’ hence would undoubtedly have heightened that ambiguity. Eventually the whole thing limps to a halt with yet another of Ballard’s patented twists in the tail, and while I admit I didn’t see it coming, after it unfurled itself I found it rather banal: potentially mindblowing, but, again, undercooked in its execution.

So, why did documentary filmmaker, Simon Brook, choose this story, this runt in JGB’s litter, as his first foray into film in 1991? I don’t really know, but I do know that ever since I saw a listing for it on IMDB I had to see it. So I tracked Simon down and asked him to send me a copy. (Note that as Simon now lives in France, he has requested I also upload a version with French subtitles, alongside the version you see at the start of this post.)

The film is undeniably stagey, but I’m guessing that had to have been a chief reason for Simon choosing the story; with a cast of four, set in a psychiatrist’s study, you won’t be needing a massive budget. Offsetting that, Simon’s fluid, restless camera extracts the maximum mileage from close angles and slow backward pans, relentlessly tracing the study’s cramped interior, mimicking the asylum’s stuffy worldview. Plus he cleverly mixes up the eyeline matches; the scenic parameters between two characters engaging in dialogue are never simply a matter of reversing the shot when one character is speaking to the other. Instead, we see perspectives from the side, from above, from everywhere. It’s a brisk cinematographic pace, but sometimes the pacing works against the film; if you slacken your concentration for a second or two you might actually miss the final twist.

The acting magnifies the overtly rhetorical language and vaudevillian aspects of Ballard’s story, an effect further intensified by Joshua Zaentz’s faux-chamber-music soundtrack. I can’t say any of that is to my taste. Alfred Hyslop, as Mellinger, eye-pops and mugs for the camera, veering dangerously close to Carry On territory, while Paul Ravich, the actor playing Booth, Mellinger’s main underling, comes to resemble the spaced-out astro-hippies in John Carpenter’s Dark Star. It’s all a bit much.

I can’t help wondering what the results would have been like if the film had played up the dark secret of the asylum, with its habit of making people disappear. There is a hint of this, when we learn that Dr Normand, who doesn’t go along with Mellinger’s methodology, has been lobotomised; that’s a great touch that wasn’t in Ballard’s story, but I’m really talking about mood and tone, and the acting and music, mainly. Combined with the twist in the end, enacted in Mellinger’s claustrophobic study, and Simon’s camera breathing down everyone’s necks, the effect could have been rather disturbing.

Still, this may well be the only time you will see Ballard played strictly for laughs. And for that, Simon Brook certainly deserves his place in the pantheon of unsung directors of JGB, alongside Potter, Cokliss, Scoggins and Cazals.

It’s not all Cronenberg and Spielberg, you know…

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.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

An Interview with Paul Plamper and Niklas Goldbach
by Dan O’Hara

In July on the roof terrace of the Ludwigsmuseum, the major museum of modern art in Cologne, I attended a ‘screening’ of a radio play. I say ‘screening’ because a film had been made to accompany the play, the combined effect of audio and film a little like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Called Hochhaus, the play was a three-part adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. A faithful rendition in terms of plot and themes, it transposed the action of the novel to Berlin in the near future. The programme described the play as follows:

Berlin, 2013. A star architect has built in the capital the tallest residential building in Europe. There he wants to create a social Utopia: the Neokommune K 13. Nothing is wanting in this autarchy, a completely self-sufficient closed system. But the high-rise becomes a pressure cooker of neighbourhood enmity and rampant, uninhibited class warfare. In the blink of a camera’s eye, this modern super-community regresses into a biotope of primitive lifeforms. Based on J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel, Paul Plamper has produced a horror radio play of pressing sociological relevance, which could take place in every German home. “Never forget: You are Hochhaus!”

With the Kölner Dom looming behind the roof terrace, and a panorama of the city stretching away towards the west, some fifty or sixty people settled down to listen for three hours to the German version of High-Rise. At nine in the evening, the sky was at first still too bright for the audience to see much of the film, so many of them sat with their heads down or eyes closed, concentrating on listening. In any case the film appeared to be merely a static image of a huge skyscraper, a carbuncle of a compressed city, a futurist mockery of the Gothic Cathedral at our backs.

There were some very interesting angles taken in terms of adaptation – the film was made in parts of the old GDR, and there were persistent echoes of and references to Nazism, Speer’s social engineering through architecture being one of the more telling ones. I spoke to the author, Paul Plamper, and his colleague Niklas Goldbach, a video artist who made the accompanying film. Radio plays or ‘Hörspiele’ are hugely popular in Germany – the original broadcast, on WDR in November 2006, reached around 100,000 listeners – and Ballard is relatively unknown, so this radio adaptation would introduce Ballard’s name to an audience that had hitherto encountered him only through Cronenberg and Spielberg’s films. I wanted to find out why Plamper and Goldbach had chosen to adapt High-Rise. What relevance did Ballard’s 1975 novel have, in their view, for the Germany of the near future?

Dan O’Hara teaches English & American Literature at the University of Cologne. He is currently working on a monograph on J. G. Ballard.

NOTE: Performances of Hochhaus are due to restart on 12 January 2008 at the Theater Mannheim. See the endnote for more information.

DAN: Can I ask you first of all why you chose to adapt High-Rise? Because, as far as I’m aware, Ballard’s not very well known in Germany.

PAUL: No, he’s not that well known, actually. At least not when I was searching for a German translation of High-Rise a few years ago. There were some rare copies of an old edition being traded on the internet. I got hold of one of those and was immediately attracted. In Germany, the cultural establishment builds up a strong frontier between what they call ‘culture’ and what they call ‘entertainment’, and I think some, uhm, stupid intellectuals put Ballard more in the ‘entertainment’ Schublade, the entertainment category. But on the other hand you also have thinkers like Heiner Müller being admirers, so…

DAN: Really? I didn’t know about that. Heiner Müller, the ‘Hamletmaschine’ author?

PAUL: Yes, the dramatist. He liked science fiction and he liked crime literature. So, as you see, you find Ballard in different cultural circles. The science fiction and fantasy communities read him, and from time to time an open minded intellectual. That’s what I like about Ballard, he’s not easy to put in just one bracket.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: So what was it particularly about this one novel? What did you have in mind when you adapted it?

PAUL: Well, concerning the themes, I was looking for material for a ‘horror’ radio play. I wanted to do a monster radio play without monsters, but with humans. I discovered that Ballard is rather a specialist in this subject, and that his well-cultivated and very sensitive paranoia really makes him somewhat of a prophet; you know, he wrote the novel in 1975, and now the novel is being slowly caught up by reality. He was paranoiac enough to know what was going to happen.

I’m also looking for interesting acoustical situations for my radio plays. In High-Rise there’s a small society in a very condensed space. If you just look at social interaction: when it’s silent, you hear your neighbours in your room. The wall is something that separates you from them but the level of audio is really what separates you the least. You don’t see them but you hear them. So the sort of social pressure which has to be related is really well-suited to a radio play. I’m always searching for interesting topics, but most of all for subject matters that must be a radio play and no other medium, film, or whatever.

DAN: You move the action to future Berlin; I’m very intrigued by this shift.

PAUL: Well, since Ballard wrote High-Rise, things that happen in the novel now really happen in the middle of society, in public, in the media. So we thought, we won’t put the building in a suburb, as Ballard does – in the novel it’s in the outskirts of London, hidden away, where these terrible things can happen because nobody takes notice of it. We put our house right in the middle of Berlin, and it’s a prestigious project run by an architect who is a very adept publicist. He’s played by Martin Wuttke and we named him Philip del Ponte, a character like Daniel Libeskind or similar, you know, people who make grand architectural gestures and yet who are at the same time extremely clever in developing cute ideas to sell their architecture and to be in the public eye. We moved the whole story to the border of the Spree – this is actually 100 metres from here, where I live. Where before, there was the Wall, now there’s a gap at the river, and there are vast areas where a new centre is being developed for the media, MTV moved there for example. And there are gated communities. They’re like a virus spreading in Berlin. They have all these phony names like “Prenzlauer Gärten”. Well-to-do creative people start these projects like community projects; everybody has his financial interest, buys part of the building and thinks he invests in a social project.

NIKLAS: But there’s a new meaning to ‘social’ for these people. It doesn’t have anything to do with the social vision of Ballard or anyone in the ’70s for example…

DAN: It’s not to do with community?

NIKLAS: No. Well, maybe it is, but not with the idea of a social system where the stronger help the poor, for example. I don’t think you could find anything like the social system Ballard presents in High-Rise nowadays in Berlin.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: When I think of gated communities in England, the ones that Ballard’s talked about for example in Running Wild, his 1988 novel, in which some children living in a gated community kill their parents, such gated communities are very upper-middle class, and people choose to live in them apparently because of fear. These are high-security environments with surveillance cameras, private security guards… I wonder if it’s the same sort of thing in Berlin?

PAUL: We’re talking about something new. This certainly exists, but what interests us right now even more is that you have such gated communities combined with the fact that you can buy being a ‘good person’. You can purchase a good feeling by moving into a living community of house owners. In the 60s and 70s there was the start of the Kommune in Germany, Kommune Eins and so on. Now it’s part of the market, and there’s no contradiction at all. Communal feeling has been absorbed by the market. It goes together with the fact that, yes, of course these people live gated, because they say “ok, I’m moving near Kreuzberg, how exciting, a real ghetto, so I have to protect our stuff a little bit. Generally I’m open minded, come on, I was punk in the 80s, but still, I don’t want to get robbed.” They’re not really frightened, they think they’re just rationally pragmatic.

NIKLAS: And also I think what’s kind of key for Berlin, I mean, you live Dan in Cologne, right?

DAN: I do now, yes.

NIKLAS: Cologne has a completely different structure as a city from Berlin, obviously, because of the separation and the Wall. Berlin was for such a long time a kind of playground for people to try out new social structures, but lately there’s this gentrification process in Berlin that’s really overwhelming. In Kreuzberg, which was or which still is an alternative quarter of the city, now there are rich people moving in and all these condominiums being built. I saw one house where you can park your car in front, on the same level as your apartment, to make it safer for you. So there are all these weird architectural ideas popping up, and then there are other areas like Prenzlauer Berg which is in former East Berlin, where you have a real gentrification melting point, where only families live and everybody behaves as if they live in a small village. So especially from that point of view, it makes total sense to put High-Rise in Berlin. Where else in Europe right now? Probably in East Europe soon, but right now this is the place where most of the gentrification is happening, or where it’s visible. A lot of money moved to Berlin because it’s the capital, and there are so many real gated communities: there’s one right in the middle of the city for example, next to a park, the ‘Volkspark Friedrichshain’; and they have a doorman. You can only get in if you pass the doorman, and then you have a street, and a pool, and little houses, like a suburb. And this is happening in 2007 – in the center of Berlin; Paul makes Hochhaus happen in 2013, not that far away. And I don’t think it’s that much of a utopia.

PAUL: We have a doorman called Weingarten in the radio play, played by an old actor from the East who I met at the Berliner Ensemble, Heinrich Buttchereit. He has a Stasi pass in the play; he’s been hired by del Ponte because he has the best techniques in surveillance and security… They’re just very well trained. At one point, when there’s an escalation of the situation in the house, Weingarten says: “it’s just as before: we don’t have the Wall in a vertical sense anymore, now it’s horizontal, in the house, between the upper class and the lower class.” He says “ok, now I have my Wall back!”

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: There’s a great deal of political content in your adaptation; and with these references to Weingarten being ex-Stasi and, also, Niklas, I think you said you’d filmed some parts in the ex-GDR, was that right?

NIKLAS: Yeah, that’s true.

DAN: There are echoes – deliberate echoes? – of the GDR, of the Stasi and of Nazi Germany. What’s the point of these echoes for your audience? What are you trying to say to them?

NIKLAS: Well, Berlin has changed so much, at least for me. My background is that I’m a visual artist, a video artist, and most of my work is about the role of the individual in a world on the edge of dystopia. Maybe this is a very pessimistic view – let’s say it’s an artistic view, it’s maybe not only my personal view. I’d worked with Paul before, on another radio play called Release that actually took place in a prison. He told me about his new play, and invited me to a pre-listening session, and I thought about images that could occur within the three acts of the audio play. First of all I went straight to the point where Paul’s fictional high-rise would stand, between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, right on the border where the Wall was. I went and took photos. It’s a vast area, and I thought, well, what kind of architecture could be in this area?

All the three parts of the radio play are filmed in the former GDR, there’s not a single West German building. I think there are several reasons for that, but one reason is for example that the GDR system seems like a mixture of dystopia and utopia to me – it started as a utopia – of a social project. Del Ponte, the architect in the radio play, his idea is to make a social project that combines different classes of people. And this is actually what the GDR system had in common with del Ponte – maybe. His idea is to get rid of classes in this building; and that was also an idea of the GDR – West Germany never had that idea.

PAUL: You know, Ballard puts a big focus on the social classes in his novel, and at first you think, oh, the social classes, nowadays those concepts sound really seventies, but actually my thoughts are the exact opposite. West Germany since WWII has tried to have this soziale Marktwirtschaft – a social market economy – and until the beginning or the middle of the ’90s, it worked quite well. Do you have this expression, the ‘social scissor’? It’s a like a scissor that’s wide or narrow: you have the classes drifting apart from each other or closer to each other. Up to the `90s, the scissor was half closed, but in the last ten years, this has been completely, outrageously reversed. Now you have the underprivileged again; you have a small upper class getting richer and more powerful. I thought that we had to start talking about classes again. Ballard wrote about them in 1975, and now it’s back, it’s a very hot topic again.

Part two of the radio play is really about this. And at the same time it’s like a fast-forward history of the extreme Left in Germany. From the initial spontaneous protests in the sixties, the fun Sponti actions, up to the Red Army Faction in the late seventies, which got to be rather violent and militarily organized. The camera-man Andreas Lang – in the novel he’s called Wilder – lives on the ground floor. Lang, played by Milan Peschel, is accused of having killed the first human in the house, the second victim after the dog. Lang’s first reaction to the accusation is to gather people around him, to play Skat, a card game. As an act of political protest, they play cards in front of the supermarket on the 23rd floor, and then their protest gets more violent. Lang moves from being a buddy of the underprivileged, to being their leader. He leads a Feldzug…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: Like a battle, a campaign.

PAUL: They go up the high-rise, trying to burn the food stores of the upper class. Barricades have already been built from sofas and so on, so that there’s no access to the upper floors anymore. Lang and his followers succeed in burning the food stores, and in a very irrational moment they announce hunger for the whole house.

NIKLAS: Their slogan is “Solidarity with the hungry people in this world”.

DAN: When I’m looking at your original blurb for the Ludwigsmuseum, it’s called a ‘Horror Hörspiel’. And yet…

PAUL: A sociological horror Hörspiel…

DAN: … yes. And yet there’s a huge amount of political content here.

PAUL: Ballard is a political author for me. Many pages in the novel are about the class system. I like his political content; but at the same time I fear that we sound like a couple of humorless Germans now, who do heavy, grey, intellectual type stuff, but don’t get us wrong, the radio play is meant to be pure entertainment; it has the rhythm of an action movie…

NIKLAS: This is what we said in the beginning about Ballard himself, that this is an entertaining book which also has the quality of political comment. It’s supposed to be entertaining, but there’s obviously a deeper meaning to it. For example, look at the function of del Ponte, the architect, as opposed to Andreas Lang, the leader of the revolution. Especially in 2007, I think a lot of different types like del Ponte are out there, you know, private people or private investors who take over functions of the state. He’s a private person sponsoring the lower class like, for example, some celebrities or rich people today give some of their earnings back to the lower class. So it’s a bit ambivalent, what he’s doing. To the outside world he looks like he’s a really good guy but in the end, he’s the one who’s living in the penthouse.

DAN: I wondered if you also had a sense of the fact that, in the book, there’s a very specific relationship between Wilder and Anthony Royal – between Andreas Lang and del Ponte in Hochhaus – there’s this Oedipal backstory in the novel. In a sense it’s as if Ballard’s using that psychological backstory to make a political point.

PAUL: Well, we have the same two characters – the big antipodes – and we pretty much go along with Ballard’s narrative. In the end, Andreas Lang, our Wilder, when he’s already quite animal-like, mounts to the upper floors and kills del Ponte. It’s almost the same story. And then he gets eaten by the women, by the Matriarchat.

When I read the novel, I felt that Ballard really likes to develop the characters and their steps in a psychologically logical order. He has plenty of time to explain what could be the psychological background of Wilder doing what he does, and of his regression into animal status and so on. But in a radio play you don’t have that much time; and also I had the sense that in 2006 you don’t have to explain why people freak out, it’s so obvious, that utopia is, I don’t know… I have the impression that Ballard still felt some sort of friction with a positive utopian vision of a society, and so he described its regression into a barbarian state. Sometimes I thought that Ballard in the novel places his figures in a kind of sociological chess game. This figure moves from here to there because of this and that. I didn’t feel it necessary to explain so much in our radio play. The dynamic is a musical dynamic.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN:I can see that perhaps you don’t need so much narration. But you did introduce a narrator, didn’t you? There’s an extra-diegetic voice.

PAUL: Yeah; the great Volker Spengler is the narrator. You might know him from his films with Fassbinder. Like in Greek tragedy where you have the person who sees things and advances them, his narrator seems to know everything. He’s the transcendent voice. Volker just does it merely by his great personality and his destroyed voice, which breathes a lot of what he has lived.

DAN: Yeah, he has a wonderful voice. What specific narrative changes did you make in the adaptation? You introduce an external narrator; you shift to a straight chronological narrative…

PAUL: A listener can’t grasp 30 people like in the novel, he has to concentrate a lot to get to know even 10. So my co-author, Kai Hafemeister and I tried to take as few characters as possible, so that we still could see this as a small society that evolves. We have eight or so main characters, and not many very small parts, because I personally have a big aversion to this ‘protagonist and many small parts’ thing. We try to create an emotional involvement with each character. We wanted to have characters that you want to get to know better with each episode, because they were broadcast on three consecutive Fridays. So we had to make you want to continue to spend your time with these horrible people.

DAN: And what function does the voice-over narration serve?

PAUL: He’s telling as much as is needed, as seldom as possible. When we call it a sociological horror radio play, he’s the horror part – supported of course by the soundtrack, which is by SchneiderTM. Spengler’s voice… It’s so difficult to describe it. Like a field in which an atomic bomb exploded… He has a post-World War Three voice…

DAN: It reminded me of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee…

NIKLAS: He’s the same kind of character…

PAUL: At the end-credits, Volker always says, ‘And remember: You – are High-rise…’ This is an allusion to a recent campaign of the CDU government in Germany. They wanted to try to impose more national feeling on us. You had all these stupid billboards – saying ‘You Are Germany’ everywhere. So Volker concludes each part – they get more and more horrifying – with ‘You Are High-rise’.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Are you concerned about nationalism at the moment? In Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, he’s turned his attention towards specifically English nationalism.

PAUL: Yeah, I understand that. We recorded our radio play right before the soccer World Cup in 2006. There were young Germans with flags and the national colours on their faces, a new kind of ‘pop nationalism’. After what happened in the Nazi era, Germans thought they could finally show an non-violent national feeeling, just as in other countries. They had the feeling that everybody steps together, that we are a stronger society. This also infected our way of telling High-Rise, that people are trying to create this new community. And then you see what happens to it. Which would lead you, as a society as a whole, to the next war. In High-Rise, it leads you to the terrible end. I don’t know; I look at history as something cyclical, and not so much as a regression into a barbarian state. We tell the story of only one high-rise, and in the end we put a bigger accent on the fact that the women take over, as after WWII it was the Trümmerfrauen, the ‘rubble women’, in Germany who rebuilt society, and really started the German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. After WWII, it was the women who cleaned up the men’s mess. Like the Matriarchat in the novel. We emphasized this; you see there’s a new order evolving; it starts again, a cycle.

We have a saying, vor der eigenen Tür kehren – to take the brush and clean in front of your own door – and that’s what Kai and me are trying to do. We’re trying to tell the story as close as possible to us, as if it could happen next to us, as if it could happen within us. Of course that’s something that is much bigger than the rise of nationalism right now. It’s like High-Rise being an image for a deliberate prison, and this prison which is self-chosen just displaces your view of another prison, which is Homo sapiens not getting out of his monstrous skin. Homo sapiens has this trait of this monstrosity; let’s face the fact. It’s a very Ballardian thought. Goya once said ‘I don’t fear witches, or poltergeists, or ghosts, or braggers or giants, or evil men; I fear no creature but one – the human.’ He said that in 1790, and I think Ballard could have said the same thing. It’s really about human nature, High-Rise. All these allusions in Hochhaus to the downfall of the socialist system, or how they killed their own ideals in socialist realism – all of these elements are products of, and evolve from, human nature.

DAN: I don’t know if you came across Concrete Island, the novel before High-Rise? For a later edition, Ballard wrote a new introduction in which he refers to both Crash and High-Rise. He says something very close to what you’re saying, and what Goya said; he writes: “[A]s well as the many physical difficulties facing us there are the psychological ones. How resolute are we, and how far can we trust ourselves and our own motives? Perhaps, secretly, we hope to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities.” Which is precisely the point you’re also making, no?

PAUL: Yeah. And he also talks in High-Rise about the suppression of anti-social behaviour; the anti-social as something we have to suppress. But regarding Philip del Ponte, our architect, why he’s called that. It’s because there is an original for High-Rise. It’s called the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. This is why in the beginning I was talking of Ballard as a prophet, because in Johannesburg you had in reality what Ballard’s story depicts. The Ponte Tower is 173m high, 54 floors high, with 2500 people living there and 470 apartments, and it was founded in the seventies too, as the most prestigious tower in town. Up to 2004 it was the biggest building south of the equator. In Johannesburg, you can see it from everywhere. It’s round, and in the middle you have this cylindrical space; it’s like a gigantic trash bin. After a while the Ponte Tower was full of drugs, gang wars and people throwing themselves from the floors – many, many people killed themselves by jumping into the building, into the middle – and everybody threw his trash in the middle so that there was three floors of trash. The whole building stunk terribly. Things were out of control at the Ponte, completely out of control. People trying to hire other people who owned guns to go out and do their shopping for them, because it was too dangerous; the elevators not functioning; child prostitution – it was incredible. You think, ah, Ballard must have known about this, but then the Ponte was founded in 1976 – Ballard wrote High-Rise only one year before. So our architect is called Philip del Ponte because of this tower; though he has an aristocratic ‘del’ in front of the ‘Ponte’…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: To correspond with the ‘Royal’ of Anthony Royal, I suppose, yes?

PAUL: Yes.

DAN: It’s an unusual format; a radio play with a film accompanying it. Is this part of a bigger project, or a general direction you’re taking with your own work?

PAUL: We did the radio play first, and then I thought of how to present it in public because I thought it could be interesting to show it at the Hörspielzentrale, in a series of radio play events at the Hau, a theatre in Kreuzberg. Then of course I thought of Niklas, because he’s a specialist in architecture. We should describe the videos, no, Niklas?

DAN: I did want to ask you about the film for the first episode. There’s a sentence in High-Rise: “They would film the exteriors from a helicopter, and from the nearest block four hundred yards away – in his mind’s eye he could already see a long, sixty-second zoom, slowly moving from the whole building in frame to a close-up of a single apartment, one cell in this nightmare termitary.” Which is more or less exactly your first film, no?

NIKLAS: Yeah it is. But to be honest this is a coincidence… When Paul asked me to join Hochhaus, my first intention was to read the book, and then we decided, maybe it’s better if I don’t read the book… So instead I tried to concentrate on the characters in Paul’s version of High-Rise. And, as Paul said, most of my work is about the human environment and urbanism, and it has some formal characteristics. In my video work, for example, one of the characteristics is the manipulation of time and the control of the image, and the use of of post-production. It’s mostly about personal feelings of alienation or mass cultural fantasies; the key themes of the latest works are the contradictions between public and private spheres. I try to examine how this comes down to a personal level, and try to use video – this is a cheesy metaphor, but maybe it’s allowed – to use video as a temporal microscope, trying to capture the moment where the subconscious shifts objectivity. This is why I was completely blown away when I listened to the first version of Hochhaus, because what Paul had done on the audio level was actually what I’m trying to do on the video level in my work, because Hochhaus is highlighting the political tensions between these visions of utopia and the subjective experiences of individuals. Also, I think that humans mostly use architecture to express their power, in every form of society, and some of my videos are about the failure of architecture, about the failure of a utopia and its turning into a dystopia.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Could you describe the three films, which accompany the three episodes?

NIKLAS: Ok. The first one, where you just said that there’s this zoom that’s described in the book. First of all it was a weird process to visualize this building because it should be mostly in the head of the audience, you know, you should imagine this building and it could have all different associations, but then I found the buildings at Ernst-Thälmann-Park, which is a socialist building park in former East Berlin. Ernst Thälmann was the leader of the Communist party during, I think, much of the Weimar Republic and his buildings are actually like a small version of what’s described in High-Rise. They were like small high-rises, but with a park around them and the buildings were on a hill so that everyone who was living in that building had a very good view, which is a kind of social idea. Obviously there are also bigger apartments on the very top and you had to be member of the socialist party to live in them, so there’s again this hypocrisy; I guess it’s a very hypocritical way to invent a social structure, when there’s power involved, anyway. I went first of all to the area where Paul’s version of High-Rise was supposed to take place, and Paul had already said that it’s close to this area where MTV and other big companies have started to have their flagship stores or their company buildings. I took pictures of one vast area where there was previously a club, and where now they’re building a big, multi-functional stadium. This is right where our imagined high-rise is, in the image in the first video. So what I did is I went to Ernst-Thälmann-Park and just stacked the buildings there on top of each other. This is obviously a metaphor: stacking these socialist buildings on top of each other to get a bigger idea of the whole thing.

PAUL: He did it almost like a plastic surgeon – from one house he makes a Tower of Babylon; it’s beautiful.

NIKLAS: It changes a lot of the content, I think. Regarding the technical aspects: at the beginning, the zoom, it’s a digital zoom, because the whole building itself is a Photoshop building. It’s combined with video in the background: the sky that’s shading from daylight into night is real; and also you see the skyline of Berlin, you see the TV tower in the background of the video, just to make the whole thing look a bit more real but also a bit like a comic. It looks like a fantasy building but it has this weird mixture of reality because it’s made from real images. The concept of the first part is that it begins in daylight, whilst in the radio play we’re listening to a TV show where the architect is talking about the building. He’s describing what you can see in the video; you look at my building, and listen to what Del Ponte says about his building. There are some parts where it’s really fitting and some others where it’s not fitting, which is good because then you have the idea that this is not the building: it’s just a placeholder for the building, in a way. When the first part of the audio play ends, it ends in the dark, at a party, and the first human dies. But this is happening at night, and so as the video image slowly zooms into the building, you end up at the entrance hall of the building, so metaphorically by the end of the first part you’re in the nightmare. It starts as a TV show, and in the end you’re in complete darkness, surrounded by the light of the windows – and you’re part of that building.

PAUL: Yeah, and the camera is right in front of the building, you know, in the entrance where the first dead person is thrown from the top floor…

NIKLAS: …out of the window…

PAUL: … that’s where the image ends…

NIKLAS: …yeah. And the people in the audio play are also looking out of the window, so they look down to the ground. This is where you find yourself at the end of the video.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

The second part was filmed in a building on the German island Rügen, a Nazi seaside resort. I think it’s the longest building in Europe: it’s 4.5 kilometers long, and it was the KDF building, which was built by the Nazis. It was part of the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ programme. It was supposed to be a hotel for so-called ‘good Germans’. It was never finished; it actually ended up as a ruin, but then after WWII the GDR used it as an army barracks, where the army of the GDR was stationed. And then after the Wall came down it was used as a youth hostel, and it still is – they had stopped using it as a youth hostel, but I read recently in the news that it’s re-opened, which is such a weird idea. When you listen to the audio play, the second film corresponds to what is really happening in the building, whereas the first film is derived just from the structure of the audio play. The first part introduces us to the house and the people, whereas the second part is where everything is turning from a utopia into a dystopia, or from a funny audio play into a horror scenario. In the audio play when a new chapter starts, you hear the sound of the elevator. So, in the second film, the audience is actually stuck in this elevator that you hear all through the audio play. It’s actually spectating what’s happening in the building, and you can see how everything’s falling apart literally in the image, when there’s this very slow fade from the intact floor of the building, which was actually Photoshopped, to how the building in Rügen looks today. So it fades from a fictional image into a real image, whereas the audience is just stuck in the elevator, and through the elevator doors, they’re forced to watch the process of decay.

PAUL: There are several buildings in Prora-Rügen, that are exactly the same size and so on. Some are well-kept, because there’s the youth hostel inside, then there are others which are just ruins, at least on the inside, you have all these cables sticking out. I think Niklas broke into one of those…

NIKLAS: …yeah, I did break in, I brought an axe…

PAUL: …to film the ruin, and so you see in 50 minutes a fade from a nice long, intact, well-kept floor, to the same floor as a ruined chaos of cables. The video does nothing but that.

NIKLAS: But in fact I used three images, because the floors that are intact where the youth hostel was don’t look as nice as the high-rise should look before the revolution or the battle starts. So I photoshopped it; the very first image when the elevator opens in the video is pure photoshop. And then it goes to the real image: how the intact floors look today. And then I fade into the parts of the building that are completely falling into disrepair.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: And then the third film, which reminded me of bits of Chris Marker, or Tarkovsky…

NIKLAS: I was really happy when I read that, because both of these visionaries are like real heroes of mine. So thank you for that…

DAN: Well, it’s a very clear visual echo. Ballard himself is a real fan of Chris Marker.

NIKLAS: Yeah, I can totally believe that. So, the third part is filmed in Rechlin. It’s a very, very small village in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), so also former GDR. The houses you can see in the video were model houses for Germania, built by Albert Speer. They’re four or five-storeys high, and they look like miniatures of high-rises. You find them completely abandoned in the woods, and there are no signs for how to find them. I knew about the buildings from a documentary, so I went with a car, and I really had to search. There are no signs because there are still a lot of mines in that area from the war. What happened is that the Nazis used the buildings as test buildings, and they dropped bombs on them, because the buildings themselves were a mixture of a house where people were supposed to live and a bunker. They’re massive, made out of concrete. So that was their function; and now you find these four buildings in the middle of the wood, completely abandoned.

There’s a wild garden on top of the filmed ruin – and the end of the audio play is also taking place on the roof – this is where the women build a new society, a Matriarchat. But the video actually starts in the ruins of the building, whereas the audio play starts in this Circus Maximus arena, when Andy Lang is fighting against all the others and becomes the leader of the lower class by physical violence. Then the architect, del Ponte, comes downstairs and says, well, if you are a gladiator, I am Caesar. So there are all these references to ancient Rome; and these ruins in the film, if you look really close at them they have a similar kind of patina. But when you zoom out you see that they are part of a vision of another time in history. The building on Rügen and Speer’s buildings were part of a vision that didn’t include the human being. So for me they are an architectural metaphor of a society, or a reference to a model of society in which the human actually can’t survive.

PAUL: Because Niklas uses these extremely slow-motion fades, you look at the image, but you don’t see the change. It’s a very dramatic change, but it’s not obvious when you look at it in real-time. You feel that something changes, but you can’t really grasp it. It’s so perfidious, it’s subtle, and it’s absolutely not Hollywoodesque. It has a different kind of tension. Because the radio play is so dense – yet the videos give you the freedom to have your own image of the characters. At the same time the videos show the big process, what I talked of as the evolutionary cycle.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: When I made the videos, there was this question about how you do a video to a radio play and not turn the whole thing into a movie. When I first listened to the radio play I wrote down a lot of images, but they’re all just details. In the end there was the decision to in fact just show one image in each video that’s slowly changing. 55 minutes is quite a long time for a video – and I think if you just use one image, and look at it for a long time, it kind of disappears and gets replaced by other images. Warhol said that if you look at one image and you think it’s boring, just look at it for ten minutes and if it’s still boring, look at it for like 20 minutes and so on… In our case, you’re looking at one image for 55 minutes, and there’s a change happening, but you also have the audio that’s guiding you through a completely different world. I noticed that some people during the shows were closing their eyes; it was fun for me to watch their reaction when they opened their eyes again because all of a sudden the video was at a completely different point. I think some people thought, oh, it’s just one image, I don’t have to look at that, and then after a while they noticed that a lot has changed.

DAN: Absolutely. I actually rather enjoyed the fact that, during the first part, it got dark on the video as it was getting dark in Köln.

NIKLAS: Yeah, it was. I was really happy that the screen itself was not on the side of the Dom, because that would have been really tough competition…

Dan O’Hara, 2008

Hochhaus is currently touring Germany; the next dates will be on the 12 January 2008, Theater Mannheim, and in February 2008 at the Kampnagel Hamburg. Eventually it will be available to buy at Paul Plamper’s future outlet for radio plays, Hörpark.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Paul Plamper
+ Niklas Goldbach

World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952.

Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) limited edition book, with the possibility of it being published in a more commercial format being explored.

For more information on the work, please see Part One.

INTRODUCTION. 2
J.G. Ballard’s Auto-Creation [21]

Many critics describe the surprising proliferation of ‘Ballards’ in recent years, numerous doubles of the author, ones who people pages of other critics’ studies and who seem to be quite different persons: an avant-gardist, a science fiction reformer and a mainstream writer of post-war classics. To me, this uncanny multiplication seems to result not only from the diverse criticism of essayists representing separate literary groups (the science fiction field, London’s literary establishment, French postmodernists, American theorists of science fiction etc.), but also from Ballard’s own journalism. In each stage of his long career Ballard was explicitly defining his artistic aims and describing the art of the writers, painters and filmmakers who influence him most, thus defining the context of his own output. During those years Ballard’s ideas and likes have continuously evolved.

Ballard wrote essays and reviews for various literary magazines and daily newspapers; his journalism, collected in the 1996 volume entitled A User’s Guide to the Millennium, reflects changes in his artistic fascinations and literary style. Initially he wrote for the ambitious counter-cultural SF magazine New Worlds, in the seventies he moved to Ink, Vogue and Drive; after the success of Empire of the Sun he started to collaborate with the and the Daily Telegraph and, occasionally, to contribute to thematic anthologies of essays. Read chronologically, his essays and reviews show both his development as a writer and the way in which he creates his own image, for example, by choosing and presenting his gurus – ones such as Salvador Dali or William Burroughs.

Ballard’s journalistic debut took place in New Worlds, a magazine intending to educate its readers. Apart from experimental fiction, Moorcock insisted on publishing Guest Editorials, reviews and articles that were meant to introduce to SF the artistic manifesto of the ‘New Wave’. J. G. Ballard soon became his major essayist, and Moorcock called him ‘the Voice’ of the movement. From 1964 to 1970 Ballard wrote numerous articles in which he described all the factors he saw as shaping contemporary artistic sensibility. His choice of subjects reveals his own fascinations, while the exuberant, metaphorical style of these articles imparts them with the unique character of revolutionary manifestos.

In these articles Ballard chooses his masters: the books and albums he reviews are by authors he admires and wants to be included into artistic canons. In the article ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century’ (1964) [22] he speaks strongly in favour of William Burroughs, whom he considered the second most important writer of the century, second to James Joyce. What he admires is Burroughs’s ability to describe the ‘inner landscape of the post-war world’, as we subjectively perceive it. The ‘man-made wilderness’ of contemporary cities, the ugliness of civilization and paranoid perception of people surrounded by numerous fictions are for Ballard the true literary subject which Burroughs describes in the appropriate technique: his text is full of opposites, juxtapositions, chaotic imagery. Ballard enjoys the apparent contrast between organized, decent society and the psychopathic world of dropouts and, most of all, the way in which the differences between the two blur. Paranoia, fictionalization of media landscapes and hallucinations are characteristic for the contemporary psyche. Fictional elements derived from SF belong in our shared cultural competence and are incorporated into our inner landscape:

What appear to be the science fictional elements… in fact play a metaphorical role… The sad poetry of… the whole apocalyptic landscape of Burroughs’s world closes in upon itself, now and then flaring briefly like a dying volcano, is on a par with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s requiem for her river-husband in Finnegan’s Wake. (Ballard 1997b: 128-129)

Ballard admires Burroughs for his presentation of SF as a part of the general consciousness long ago absorbed into the mainstream of culture. His books are given as an example of the late 20th-century fiction that reflects the contemporary human mind and is not afraid of taboos and the truthful presentation of chaos. Ballard’s tone is didactic; he instructs the readers of New Worlds in a very authoritarian way. [23]

His even greater early fascination is surrealism: visual art, but also poetry. He strongly advises the readers to incorporate this aesthetics into SF. ‘The images of surrealism are the iconography of inner space’ (ibid.: 84). With this sentence he opens his famous early article ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ (1966). Admiring surrealism for its ability to appeal to our innermost often-subliminal feelings and advocating its ‘landscapes of the soul, the collage of the strange and familiar, and all the techniques of violent impact’ (ibid.: 84), he indirectly postulates what literature, SF included, should be like.

Trying to persuade his readers that surrealism is the key to the 20th century experience he goes on to present its sources. He starts by describing the Dada movement and its protests against war, society and art and then goes back in time to the symbolists and expressionists of the nineteen-century. Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry and Apollinaire are able to reflect the whole human experience – sciences, physiology, even dreams and subliminal longings [24]. Ballard considers them the harbingers of psychoanalysis and compares their art to Rorschach tests, ‘with [their] emphasis on the irrational and the perverse, on the significance of apparently random associations’ (ibid.: 85). Writing about André Breton and the First Surrealist Manifesto he implies similarities between the surrealist movement and the ‘New Wave’: in imagery, language and attempts to reach to the deeper levels of the human mind.

The major part of Ballard’s article is devoted to various surrealist paintings that for him are the best presentations of states of mind. A good example of his exuberant style is the paragraph on one of the very famous paintings by Salvador Dali:

Dali: ‘The Persistence of Memory’ The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time is no longer valid, the watches have begun to melt and drip. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time. The most remarkable elements are the two rectilinear objects, formalizations of sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with our own four-dimensional continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of our own consciousness (ibid.: 87).

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931).

It is in the language of psychoanalysis that Ballard talks about thoughts and perceptions. Surrealism, the artistic movement that developed partly in response to Freud, is for him the ultimate 20th-century art. Three years later, in his article exclusively on Dali ‘The Innocent as Paranoid’ (1969) [25], he divides the output of this painter into periods on the basis of references to different cultural phenomena (psychoanalysis tops the list). He maintains that Dali, ‘with Max Ernst and William Burroughs … forms a trinity of the only living men of genius’ whose ‘paintings constitute a body of prophesy about ourselves unequalled in accuracy since Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents’ (ibid.: 91).

The prevailing references to Freud and psychoanalysis may seem strange in a SF periodical such as New Worlds, but according to Ballard at present only science fiction and surrealism are able to give an imaginative response to science. Psychoanalysis together with other schools describing the human mind are becoming one of the most important contemporary sciences [26]. He continues this line of reasoning in his most famous Guest Editorial in New Worlds, ‘Which Way to Inner Space’ (1962), considered to be the fullest artistic manifesto of the ‘New Wave’. In that text he postulates a rejuvenation of SF: replacement of outer space exploration and technological detail with interest in the inner space of the human mind. He sites Ray Bradbury as an example of the very few authors who are able to ‘transform even so hackneyed a subject as Mars into an enthralling private world’ (ibid.: 195), but criticizes lesser writers who have made SF synonymous with fantastic stories for small boys. Nevertheless, because of the inherent lack of limits and restrictions:

SF has a continuing and expanding role as an imaginative interpreter of the future… The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of SF has been towards the physical sciences – rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences (ibid.: 197).

Ballard goes on to postulate abstract science fiction, uninterested in dramatic stories, but rather in the oblique presentation of phenomena such as the human experience of time, genetic memories, subliminal drives, and archeopsychic time. Science fiction should develop a vocabulary to deal with the social and psychological problems of tomorrow and, Ballard fervently claims, it has chances to become the intellectual and artistic avant-garde.

In the second half of the decade, long after the decline of the ‘New Wave’, Ballard was slowly recognized as one of the theorists of contemporary society and postmodernist culture. Always placed on the margins of the mainstream and associated with scandal and artistic provocation, he was nevertheless often asked his opinions on SF, futurology and different aspects of contemporary life. No longer restricted to avant-garde magazines, he published his essays and reviews in a wide range of titles. His most interesting journalism of this decade is concerned with the status of art in a world dominated by mass media and the numerous fictions of urban landscape such as commercials, billboards and ever-present TV screens. Leitmotifs of these essays are the latent artistic potential of science fiction, the regrettable decline of this genre, the prospects of future life in postmodernist society and the new kind of imagination shaped by the late 20th century: the Moon landing, Vietnam and the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.

Aware of the rapid changes in culture he formulated a whole new artistic program for the future SF writer. Our reality is now full of people filling the environment with all kinds of fictions, therefore a writer cannot just produce fictitious stories, but has to ‘out-imagine everyone else’, analyze the minds of contemporary men, and create situations and images able to move, excite and reach to the unconscious. Such an artistic plan soon proved too idealistic. In subsequent years Ballard witnessed the rapid decline of intellectual SF, the commercialization of the genre and the dominance of visual media.

In his review of Star Wars, ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977), his criticism of this film (‘totally unoriginal, feebly plotted, instantly forgettable, and an acoustic nightmare’) is only a pretext to examine the condition of science fiction: a genre, which is becoming passé as its intellectual values resist translation into cinema:

Although slightly biased, I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. SF has been one of the very few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. Why, then, has it translated so uneasily into the cinema? (ibid.: 14).

J.G. Ballard (photo courtesy RE/Search publications).

The commercialization of culture maims both SF film and SF literature. Ballard is aware that in the 1970s there is no place for ambitious writing of the ‘New Wave’ kind. In ‘The Cosmic Cabaret’ (1974), a review of Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree, he announces that modern SF has come to an end. ‘Anything that happened five minutes ago is already the centre of a cult, embedded in Lucite and put on a display shelf. Modern SF… has already become a victim of this nostalgia’ (ibid.: 203). There is no interesting new movement and the tendency of more ambitious writers is to come back to stylized ‘retro’ poetics. The authors who ten years earlier had been the ‘New Wave’ abandoned SF and their postmodernist experiments are being misunderstood,

One of the most inaccurate jibes leveled at the so-called ‘New Wave’ is that its writers suffered from delusions of literary grandeur, that they took themselves far too seriously. In fact in my own personal experience, it is the absolute reverse that is true (ibid: 203).

Such a decline in science fiction is for him the result of a huge civilizational change that is taking place in America, the centre of the world’s science fiction. Concepts for the future no longer cause excitement, stress falls on the present day and, moreover, the huge moral and imaginative reserves possessed by the USA in the first part of the century are exhausted. In times of pessimism, distraction and social entropy there is no place for a literature exploring the excitements of tomorrow. The post-Vietnam world abandoned the future and then SF. This process was enhanced throughout the decade, and, at the beginning of the 80s, Ballard’s voice sounded even more pessimistic. In ‘New Means Worse’ (1981), published in the Guardian, he wrote:

In fact, science fiction today… is entering the most commercial phase it has ever known. The ‘New Wave’, along with almost all the more intelligent magazines and anthologies, has long since been inundated by a tsunami of planet fiction, sword-and-sorcery sensationalism… What science fiction needs now is a clear, hard and positive voice (ibid.: 190).

Nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and its stupid escapist fables made Ballard concentrate on the history of SF rather than its present state. The ability to probe deep down into our psyche is the ultimate goal of literature. Nevertheless, in the 1970s something wrong happened to SF and culture at large. For some years Ballard kept toying with SF ideas in a playful and less serious way. A good example of this kind of journalism is his cooperation with Vogue, where in the late 1970s he published several impressions on the future. Easy and nice to read, they described a make-believe 21st century. In ‘The Future of the Future’ (1977) he talks about a world dominated by TV. Each one of us lives in a room full of TV screens that report on our daily life and bodily functions. People spend their evenings editing the material recorded by cameras – their own talks and interactions with the family and friends. They live keeping in mind the film we continuously are making. Gradually they step back into our rooms and perform our work and family life via the TV screen, unable to cope with un-mediated reality.

LEFT: The young Ballard (photo courtesy RE/Search publications).

This article is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, soon thereafter Ballard used this idea to write two short stories – ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) and ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978), both picturing a society in which people live separately in screen-filled studios. Secondly, it is worth noticing that 1977 is long before the creation of virtual reality, and that Ballard quite rightly anticipated the development of media. Thirdly, compared with earlier texts on SF – engaged artistic manifestos teaching how to write, read and think – this article shows his disappointment in SF, which he now treats as a plaything only. Lastly, we can see here Ballard’s growing obsession with TV screens and media culture, something so very characteristic of his fiction (and journalism [27]) at the time.

In the second Vogue text, ‘The Diary of A Mad Space-wife’ (1979), he describes life in one of the hundreds of satellite cities in Earth orbit. The future’s life, entertainment and abortive work lead people to depression and space-madness. The article combines science fiction-like ideas and descriptions with bits and pieces of real-life astronauts’ memories and recorded dialogues. The atmosphere is sad and nostalgic, and the article shows that the Space Age is really over, no one dreams of space conquests, and what we are left with is TV. The beginning of the eighties is for Ballard the end of artistic involvement with science fiction (he never abandons the genre as a writer of fiction, but ceases to see it as means of social education and artistic experiments) and he turns to quasi-autobiographical writing.

The tremendous artistic success of Empire of the Sun marked a sudden breakthrough in Ballard’s literary career. After nearly thirty years of continuously writing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction he was finally recognized as a modern classicist for writing an autobiography and World War II novel. Set in pre-war Shanghai and the Lunghua camp, where the Japanese interned British civilians during the war, the novel was generally received as a confession of the real-life sources of Ballard’s literary fascinations and obsessions [28] and was often confused for a factual account of his early years. His popular image as an orientalist (enhanced by the acclaimed Steven Spielberg film Empire) prompted the numerous essays and reviews having to do with China and Japan that he was asked to write in subsequent years.

Some of this non-fiction is explicitly autobiographical. For example ‘Unlocking the Past’ (1991), written for the Daily Telegraph, is a report on Ballard’s visit to Shanghai, which took place during the making of the Spielberg film. Ballard writes this text for readers who know his novel: there are implied comparisons of Shanghai at the end of the 20th century and the city described in the Empire. Ballard visits the places important for Jim, his fictitious persona (without referring to the book or summarizing it), and the suspense works only if we wait for him to trace his prison room. At the same time the article has certain features of a travelogue:

The first day I moved around Shanghai in a daze. Memories jostled me like the Chinese crowds who surrounded the film crew. Watching as the Belgian lad cycled past the Cathy Hotel, where Noël Coward had written Private Lives, I remembered the Shanghai of gangsters and beggar-kings, prostitutes and pickpockets. I had opened a door and stepped into a perfectly preserved past, though a past equipped with a number of unattractive reflexes of my own – walking along the Nanking Road, I caught myself expecting the Chinese pedestrians to step out of my way (ibid.: 175).

Ballard creates his own image here; partly an elderly English sentimental tourist, partly a boy from half a century earlier with his imperial ways of a colony dweller and describes the modern, exotic city from such a perspective. We read about his walks throughout the city, the visit to the former Ballard house, and a trip to Lunghua, his search and the final retrieval of memories of his younger self. All of these adventures are described in such a way as to emphasize the real life details which he had incorporated into Empire of the Sun. This article is in itself a piece of fiction, a footnote to this novel, in which Ballard presents his half-literary persona: the writer of Empire of the Sun, an English intellectual with the vivid though naïve memories of a rich European boy in the colonial China. [29]

This persona is used in numerous other journalistic texts that Ballard wrote in the nineties: from this perspective he judged Chinese books, discussed the history of Asia, the Second World War and recent political changes. A good sample of this style is the beginning of ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992), a review of Wild Swans, a Chinese woman’s memoir [30], published in the Sunday Times;

I can remember the bad-tempered amahs of my childhood, ruthless and hard-fisted little women darting about on their bound feet. At the other end of the social scale were the dragon ladies – tycoon’s wives or successful businesswomen – in their long fur coats and immaculate make-up, who could petrify a small boy at fifty paces with their baleful stares.

Returning to China last summer, I was startled to find an advance guard of dragon ladies apparently waiting for me in the Cathy Pacific lounge at Heathrow. But there were none in the streets of Shanghai, and, fortunately, their places were taken by thousands of relaxed and cheerful young women (ibid.: 36).

A similar procedure can be found in a group of texts that deal with the powerful Asiatic politicians and royals [31]. In ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993), written for the Daily Telegraph, it is Ballard’s recent visit to China compared with the mental picture of pre-war Shanghai that give him a background to talk about political issues. Reviewing Richard Evans’s Deng Xiaoping and the making of Modern China Ballard juxtaposes references to Empire of the Sun and the making of the film with the revolutionary changes described by Evans. His comments on Hirohito in ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989), published in the Observer, discuss the emperor’s policy line during the war from the perspective of China, not Japan.

Therefore, the readers of Ballard’s fiction and non-fiction in the early 1990s grapple with a small mountain of autobiography material encompassing Empire of the Sun, its 1991 sequel The Kindness of Women and a body of journalism. The resulting confusion of facts and fiction made Ballard write in ‘The End of My War’ (1995), in the Sunday Times, the exact account of what happened to him (and not to Jim, the protagonist of Empire of the Sun) in Shanghai in the 1940s.

The end of the war is here viewed from the perspective of the Lunghua Camp (a place described in detail in Empire of the Sun). This time instead of Jim (the war-name adopted by the protagonist of the novel when he is separated from his parents and left to his own devices in the middle of the war) we have Jamie, who spent the three years of internment with his parents;

Then at last it was all over. The day after Hirohito’s broadcast, we heard from the Swiss Red Cross that the war had ended. The Japanese armies had agreed to lay down their arms. We were told of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had vaporized both cities and brought the war to a sudden halt.

‘Is the war over?’ I asked my father. ‘Really, really over?’

‘Yes, it’s really over.’ My father stared at me somberly. ‘Jamie, you’ll miss Lunghua’ (ibid.: 284).

In a similar way the events described in Empire of the Sun are here briefly narrated from Jamie Ballard’s point of view, thus demonstrating artistic distortions in the novel. Camp life, the English school in Shanghai before the war, the small boy’s memories of colonial times – this autobiography encompasses all aspects of Empire of the Sun. The very fact of being in Asia during the war gives Ballard the moral right to judge the American decision to drop the bomb:

As a nation the Japanese have never faced up to the atrocities they committed, and are unlikely to do so as long as we bend our heads is shame before the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The argument that atomic weapons, by virtue of the genetic damage they cause to the future generations, belong to a special category of evil, seems to me to be equally misguided. The genetic consequences of a rifle bullet are even more catastrophic, for the victim’s genes go nowhere except the grave and his descendants are not even born (ibid.: 293).

His scandalous works from the 1960s and 1970s forgotten, Ballard started to enjoy the privileged position of an authority on literary and moral issues. The success of Empire of the Sun made Ballard write its 1991 sequel, The Kindness of Women, in which he describes Jim after the war: a young man who does not fit into the world of post-war Britain. He thus created the next chapters of his autobiography. In his journalism he refers to them from time to time; all this writing, regardless of the chronology of its publication dates, forms one intertextual whole.

The cultural shock of leaving Asia for Britain is best reflected in numerous articles about the books he read as an adolescent. The sharp comparison of dull English life and the Far East he found in Greene, as he remembers in ‘Memories of Greeneland’ (1978), was written for Magazine Littéraire:

“I first began to read Graham Greene in the mid-1950s, and will never forget the sense of liberation his novels gave me… whether serious or ‘entertainments’ as Greene likes to call them, [they] had the tonic effect of stepping from an aircraft on to the airport tarmac of a strange country” (ibid.: 138).

‘Memories of James Joyce’ (1990) is concerned with the same period, the 1950s, and describes the young Ballard who then studied medicine, but wanted to be a writer, just like the protagonist of The Kindness of Women:

James Joyce’s Ulysses had an immense influence on me – almost entirely for the bad. I read Joyce’s masterpiece as an eighteen-year-old medical student dissecting cadavers at Cambridge, then a bastion of academic provincialism and self-congratulation… Ulysses convinced me to give up medicine and become a writer, but it was the wrong example for me, an old-fashioned storyteller at heart, and it wasn’t until I discovered the surrealists that I found the right model (ibid.: 145).

The most revealing in this context is the piece ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (1992), written for the anthology edited by Antonia Fraser entitled The Pleasure of Reading. Here Ballard juxtaposed each phase of his life with the books he remembers enjoying at that time. In the pre-war polyglot Shanghai he read the Victorian children’s classics and American comics together with the Latin Primer, described in Empire, just like the books and magazines which circulated among the prisoners of the Lunghua Camp.

Arriving in England in 1946, I was faced with the incomprehensible strangeness of English life, for which my childhood reading had prepared me in more ways than I realized. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature lay waiting for me, a vast compendium of human case histories that stemmed from a similar source (ibid: 181).

He finishes the article with a list of his favourites and his own characterization of a reader of other people’s books.

In recent years his fiction and non-fiction together influence his image: his preferences, ideas and opinions are often made public. Sometimes an interesting intertextual links join his novels and essays, like in the case of his descriptions of Shepperton [32], the Great London village where he lives:

Shepperton, like most Thames Valley towns, is now a suburb not of London but of London airport, and one can see the influence of Heathrow in the office buildings that resemble control towers and the huge shopping malls whose floors remind the visitor of a terminal concourse… we live in the TV suburbs, among the video shops, take-aways and police speed-check cameras, and might as well make the most of them, since there is nowhere else to go (ibid.: 183-84).

This quote comes from ‘Shepperton Past and Present’ (1994), published in the Guardian, and is a good example of his journalism in the nineteen-nineties. The impressions and descriptions of the contemporary world and post-modernist culture mingle with personal memories and ciphered allusions to his books. The devoted reader of Ballard is now faced with a maze of cross-referential allusions and remarks, which together form his imaginary autobiography.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

..:: Back to Part One.

Previously on Ballardian:
+ Review: Grave New World, by Rick McGrath.

ENDNOTES

[21] This sub-chapter is based on my article ‘From the Avant-Garde to the Autobiography: The Journalism of J.G. Ballard’, in Anglica 2005, pp. 39-52

[22] Re-printed in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1997). All quotes of Ballard’s articles (unless stated otherwise) come from this edition of his journalism.

[23] His tone changes over the years, but his admiration for Burroughs remains intact. Nearly thirty years later he reviewed Burroughs’s biography and the collection of his letters for the Independent on Sunday and the Guardian. Though these do not read like enthusiastic manifestos, Ballard still compares Burroughs to Joyce.

[24] Ballard’s admiration for Jarry at the time can also be seen in his short stories from the 1960s, first and foremost ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, which is an intertextual echo of Alfred Jarry’s ‘The Crucifixion Consider as an Uphill Bicycle Race’.

[25] In 1994 this article was revised and reprinted as ‘Introduction’ in Salvador’s Dali’s Diary of a Genius.

[26] His analyses of psychopathology in this magazine even include a review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he compares Hitler to Oswald and, surprisingly to Leopold Bloom – a self-educated man in the streets who tries to control the cross-referential knowledge he acquired.

[27] Compare: ‘The Kennedy assassination alone, it seems to me, makes 1963 the most important year since the war. Kennedy’s murder, the greatest mystery of the twentieth century, was the crime for which television was waiting, just as Vietnam was the war that TV needed. Together they freed the medium from the airless, studio-bound realm of stilted news announcers and staid game shows, transforming the screen into a global media landscape that soon became a direct competitor with reality itself, and may even have supplanted it (ibid.: 243), he wrote in his memories of the year 1963 in ‘The Overlit Carousel’ for the Guardian.

[28] Such as the recurrent imagery of disaster and desolation in his prose, the leitmotif of finding dead pilots in crashed aircraft and an abundance of violence.

[29] Ballard is nevertheless very careful to avoid political commitments. He turned down a prestigious offer of membership in the Royal Society of Literature (because he did not like the adjective ‘Royal’). Offered a ‘Commander of the British Empire’ medal he also turned it down. Thus he builds his public image in a consequent way, he wants to be seen as somebody ‘on the outside’, a keen and intelligent but non-committed observer.

[30] Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, a Chinese woman who after years of life under the Mao regime managed to emigrate to the UK, describes the atrocities of Chinese governments from the point of view of a person who, just like Ballard, knows both the Far East and the affluent West. The great success of this book in England in the early 1990s is perhaps partly due to the general interest people had in China after the publication of Empire of the Sun in the mid-1980s .

[31] Or other celebrities: see for example ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991), his text on Akira Kurosawa in the Guardian. Moreover, he is an unquestionable authority on Shanghai, its history and its present day, which he discusses on many occasions, a good sample of his style might be found in ‘A City of Excess’ (1991). This text written for Daily Telegraph juxtaposed the review of Harriet Sergeant’s Shanghai with the account of the 1941 evacuation of the Ballards’ house.

[32] The town of Shepperton has a very special place in Ballard’s fiction: the protagonists of Crash and The Kindness of Women live there, the action of The Unlimited Dream Company takes place there. Ballard is very fond of talking and writing about Shepperton, it seems that he purposefully wants to be associated with this town and by notoriously describing it in his novels he blurs the reality/fiction dichotomy and seems to be saying: ‘these books are about me’.

In my interview with BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh, I mentioned that I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine, so who knows … I would jump at the chance to lead a class like that!’

Now, all our dreams are coming true with the news that Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture are actualising this concept. For the academic year that’s just started, Nic and Simon’s Unit 15 will be conducting a programme called ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’. Using film, video, animation and motion graphics, Unit 15′s aim is to explore ‘new architectural modes of representation and practice’ with a current focus on ‘examining speculative, narrative architectures, based on the work of the writer J G Ballard’.

Here’s the Unit 15 preamble:

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenburg’s ‘Crash’ and Jonathan Weiss’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s ‘Empire Of The Sun’, we shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’. In short we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered ‘BALLARDIAN’.

There’s been a good deal of interest in the architectural elements of Ballard’s schemata in recent times, providing some of the more stimulating appraisals of his work, a true testament to the interdisciplinary appeal of the man’s writing. I heartily applaud Nic and Simon’s initiative.

More information here.

Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun (more at YouTube.)

by Pedro Groppo

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich

Whereas the sensibilities of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, who directed Crash (1996), seem to overlap and complement each other, one would be hard-pressed to think of someone like Steven Spielberg as the ideal director of a Ballard adaptation. Empire of the Sun (1987) was the first of the more mainstream adaptations of Ballard’s work, and still remains today the most widespread and popular work based on his fiction, even if it is Spielberg’s least successful movie to date in box office terms. It is however, a landmark in the development of Spielberg’s sensibilities as a director and in the popularization of Ballard.

LEFT: Bale, Spielberg, Malkovich.

The novel had met relative success upon its publication in 1984, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winning the Guardian Prize for Best Fiction, and David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) was at first interested in making a film of it. Spielberg was asked by Lean to acquire the rights and produce the film, which he hoped to direct. Interestingly, after a year of preparation, Lean abandoned the project because he decided the book “lacked sufficient dramatic structure for a film and dropped the project to adapt Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. It was for the better, as Spielberg later admitted he had “secretly wanted to do it himself.” The shadow of Lean hovers over the picture, much like Stanley Kubrick’s would in Spielberg’s later A.I. (2001). Echoes of Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai and A Passage to India figure prominently. Ian Freer notes that Spielberg even consciously echoes Lean’s “sense of scope, sweep, and camera stylings — in particular, Lean’s signature crane shot moving from a lone figure to reveal a mass of swarming people.”

Spielberg was, and still is, associated with a particular kind of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, having directed a number of box office record breakers, such as Jaws, Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones series. His work is often seen as naive, ideological, corny, lacking in subtlety, and even uncritical; but it’s almost a fact that he has a superb visual sense and a genuine flair for storytelling. Empire of the Sun shows a marked development of Spielberg’s abilities and range as a filmmaker, being probably one of (if not the) most mature of his films to date.

As Spielberg has noted:

I really had come to terms with what I’ve been tenaciously clinging to, which was a celebration of a kind of naiveté. … But I just reached a saturation point, and I thought Empire was a great way of performing an exorcism on that period. I had never read anything with an adult setting … where a child saw things through a man’s eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him.

What Spielberg shares most with Ballard is his ability to immerse the viewer in a world of complete subjectivity, adopting the logics and desires of their protagonists in full. There is hardly, if ever, a critical distance between the viewer and the action on screen in a Spielberg film. He or she accepts it and revels on this acceptance of a subjective and even internal world, safe and desirable in its peculiar kind of escapism. The success of many of Ballard’s texts also depend on a similar stance to be taken by the reader, perhaps most notably in the case of Crash.

‘Complete subjectivity’: Ballard’s iconic drained swimming pools make an appearance…

Robert Kolker, in his analysis of American cinema, A Cinema of Loneliness, describes Spielberg’s films as a kind of “encyclopedia of desire, a locus of representations into which audiences wished to be called,” based on their frequency, success, and influence. Spielberg’s success in conveying such subjectivity in such a congenial and influential way has allowed him to become a true mythmaker of the cinema. Ballard is unquestionably a mythmaker in his own right, but Spielberg is in a position, as the most powerful and influential filmmaker of contemporary American cinema, to actually construct and impose his values artistic choices as ideology. In this sense, his films do not present ideology, but become ideology, as it were, a kind of projection of our own desires.

Empire of the Sun is Spielberg’s most realized attempt at a conscious exploration of these ideas. In the recent documentary “Spielberg on Spielberg,” produced for Turner Classic TV, he acknowledged that the novel “made selections of what a child grabs onto with his eyes compared to what an adult chooses to look at,” and that was what caught his interest. He explicitly wanted to make his film very visual, by showing the world through a child’s eyes, and later, the child losing it all because it was a story of “the death of childhood.” Although Tom Stoppard’s screenplay is very clever and literate, with uniformly excellent excellent dialogue, Spielberg tells his story primarily through visual means, and many of the key scenes do not feature any dialogue — and no narrator. Janet Maslin, on her 1987 New York Times review, said even that the film’s “first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film — an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai’s last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding.” In a number of instances, this keen visual sense helps to heighten the drama and translate implicit notions of Ballard’s source very effectively without having to resort to language.

Take for instance the scene where Jim (Christian Bale) is separated from his parents, during the attack on the Petrel (parallel with chapter 4). The panic-stricken crowd at Shanghai is so dense and chaotic that Jim and his mother quickly find themselves separated from Jim’s father, who is going on a different direction, warning him not to let go of her hand. They struggle to get to safety, but in a poignant moment, Jim is distracted by the Japanese fighters flying over his head. He stops to admire them and drops his silver toy plane, and at that point lets go of his mother to retrieve the toy: almost immediately he realizes he’s lost her. In the novel, Jim gets separated from his father after he has been taken to a hospital after the attack. Jim assumes he’s on another floor and never sees him again until the last chapter. Mainly through visuals, Spielberg manages to condense and intensify the sense that Jim is quite able to choose and pursue his own desires over what is responsible, even if he’s not completely aware of the consequences. It foreshadows the air raid on the camp, where he stands on the roof of a tall building, oblivious of the danger of doing so. It also makes explicit the notion that somehow Jim has chosen his individuality, even if that has forced him to abandon the security of his family. These are all ideas from Ballard’s novel, but that are compressed in this single sequence.

ABOVE: The China Odyssey on YouTube.

Spielberg’s understanding of the novel is clearly stated in the China Odyssey documentary on the making of the production: he believes “half of what happened, happened [in Ballard's head]“. The middle portion of the film, parallel to part 2 of the novel, takes place in Lunghua Camp (Soochow in the film). Ballard’s narrative condenses all the action in a single day, beginning with Jim going under the wire (“The Pheasant Hunt”), getting food, doing homework, watching the air raid, burying the dead, and helping out Dr. Ransome (Rawlins in the film). Because they are condensed into a continuous action, these events seem to take place on a different level. The way one event leads to another is of an unnatural fluidity, as if this is Ballard’s artificial dramatization and selection of what would happen in a given day at Lunghua, rather than a faithful account. It suggests in a structural level that much of what happens is informed by Jim’s imagination.

This portion of the film is unfortunately its weakest, as it is greatly expanded, probably to give more screen time to many of the secondary characters, especially Basie (John Malkovich). The action, instead of being continuous and condensed, is put in a conventional narrative frame, losing perhaps too much of its force and rhythm. This is a concern also voiced by the film’s screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, who believed the camp scenes lacked the “compression” and “density” of the first hour, which he thought were “somewhere in the masterpiece class … The balance for me there just seemed to be perfect.” The notion that Jim’s imagination is in full gear, however, is maintained: during the air raid, Jim is on the roof of a tall building at Lunghua, observing with delight the American planes. As he identifies his favorite, a P-51 Mustang, everything stops. In slow motion, the fighter flies in front of him: Jim is ecstatic as the pilot looks directly at him and waves. It’s a powerful moment, and although it doesn’t happen quite like this in the novel, it translates well the concept that what we are seeing is not concrete reality, and that Jim finds liberation and mental nourishment in this hostile but fervent environment.

The ecstasy of the P-51: mental nourishment in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

It is worth mentioning that the most Ballardian character in Spielberg’s entire body of work is Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In this pivotal film, Spielberg shows a man obsessed with an image that he can’t quite articulate — it’s a vague feeling and is supposed to be a sign of a site (a peak in Wyoming) where aliens (who communicated the image) will be landing. One of the most memorable moments is when he builds a huge model of the peak inside his living room, his obsession making him oblivious to his wife and children — who end up abandoning him. In the end, he is chosen by the aliens to leave Earth and go up on their spaceship with them — Roy leaves his family and responsibilities behind to actively pursue his obsession and doesn’t look back. In the TCM documentary, though, Spielberg says he wouldn’t have this ending if he made the movie today, and that maybe his sensibility has changed since 77. Looking at his recent films it’s clear that for him, the importance of redemption by love, camaraderie, and especially the family unit is paramount. Empire of the Sun may be transitional in this shift in sensibilities, as its ending is untypical for Spielberg, although it softens the dread of Ballard’s vision.

Ballard’s last chapter is titled “The Terrible City.” Jim is leaving Shanghai, perhaps forever, and is already estranged from his family and his home. The chapter is about the future, but for Jim, the future is foreboding and perhaps even unimaginable. He has lost his innocence not at Lunghua, but in the seemingly endless last stages of the war (part 3 in the novel) where he couldn’t tell if it had ended or not, and all sense of security had been taken away from him, much more so than when the war began. In a sense it is at this point that the hard times begin: he’s reunited with his family and is safe from harm, yes, but spiritually, he’s dead:

He stepped on to 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 which he had never visited, but which was nominally “home”. Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever, returning on the tide like the coffins launched from the funeral piers at Nantao.

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun.

The image of the coffins, symbolizing the part of his mind that is lost forever in Shanghai, is not only one of death, but an echo of the opening paragraph of the novel: “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 adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.” It suggests that while “dead”, his mind will be always coming back to this place, his memories haunting him. The last shot of the film is a fine visual equivalent of Ballard’s penultimate paragraph (quoted above), as we see Jim’s suitcase floating in the river in Shanghai (which he had thrown in the water during the march to Nantao stadium). We know that inside are Jim’s cherished cutouts of American magazines, the closest thing he has to memories, and aptly echoes the opening shot of a coffin floating in the same river. Ballard’s bookends are maintained, even if with a somewhat different flavor.

LEFT: Wishing he’d never left the camp… Christian Bale in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

The final scene shows Jim’s parents looking for him among other children that supposedly were collected from other camps. Jim is aloof, not interested or it’s as if he has no hope of ever seeing his parents again. As his mother spots him, it takes Jim a moment or two to recognize her. They embrace, and the last we see of him are his tired eyes, closing finally in (a sort of) tranquility. There is a sense that he’ll never be the same again — but Spielberg refuses to look past this moment and consider any kind of closure for Jim other than rejoining his parents and recovering the security of the family unit. It’s ambiguous and circumspect, as if Spielberg didn’t want to commit to the bleakness of Ballard’s original vision or an all-out “happy” ending. It overstates the importance of family, as if what Jim had been through was only consequence of them being separated. It’s the death of childhood, whereas Spielberg’s earlier films were all about a rediscovery of childhood or its celebration, and he even acknowledged that Empire was the opposite of Peter Pan.

Unfortunately Empire is probably the most undervalued of Spielberg’s more serious outings, and it is by far his least successful film commercially. When it was released, it had to compete with the public’s attention with two other films about boys in WWII or Oriental backdrops: John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (about the London Blitz) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (which got the most attention). The general impression is that the film was panned by the critics, but it was nominated for six Oscars, and won the National Board of Review award for Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Juvenile Performance (Christian Bale’s acting is indeed astonishing). Perhaps most importantly, Ballard himself responded quite well to it. In a 2006 interview conducted by Travis Elborough (included in the Harper Perennial 2006 edition of Empire), he said:

I liked the film. I think it is a very impressive piece of work. I see it once every couple of years. … It seems to have got richer and more interesting as the years pass. I see it not as the film of my book but a film in its own right.

He further elaborated his feelings for the film in an excellent article for the Guardian, in which he shared his memories of the writing process and his reception to the film:

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn’t help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else’s. … Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live — and it’s now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp — the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg’s film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it’s all only a movie.

Empire of the Sun being a novel that is a mixture of memories, facts, and imagination, represents Ballard’s attempt to come to terms with his wartime experience. The film adaptation is a reimagining of the same material by someone else, and it can’t possibly fulfill the same purpose for Ballard as the book does. But for everyone else, Spielberg’s film remains a powerful cinematic adaptation of Ballard’s work, unusually clever and subtle for a Hollywood production. It benefits greatly from repeated viewings, as previously unnoticed details suddenly throw new light on Spielberg’s treatment. Although some may feel it’s a little too saccharine or somewhat pasteurized for mass consumption, the film is never cheap and the emotions are all genuine, as great a film as could have been made in mainstream American cinema in 1987.

Pedro Groppo, 2007.

..:: REFERENCES

+ Ballard, J. G. Empire of the Sun. London: Harper Collins, 2006.
—. “Look Back at Empire.” The Guardian. March 2006.
+ Friedman, Lester B. Citizen Spielberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
+ Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.
+ Maslin, Janet. “Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.” The New York Times.
+ McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

..:: MORE INFO

Shanghai Jim: Form Dictated by Time.

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

by Pippa Tandy

SHANGHAI JIM (1991)

Director/Producer: James Runcie
Executive Producer: Nigel Williams
Starring: J.G. Ballard, Michael Troughton, Hans Gebruers

See here for a transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

DOCUMENTARY FILMS about the lives and works of artists have many different functions. They may describe their private lives and relationships, expose scandals, and revise or reinforce received myths. They may celebrate or promote the artist. They may commemorate a centenary or whip up interest in new work.

The most successful, however, use the conventions and devices of film to add something to the work. They show how the artist works by simple critical demonstration. Martin Scorsese’s television documentaries about music and film are good examples. They combine autobiography with critical homage. Successful documentaries always include statements by the artist, but never rely on them, since they are notoriously inaccurate. They collage them together with imagery, spoken texts, re-enactments, file footage and visual, aural or written quotation from the artist’s oeuvre, so that we learn by seeing and hearing. They will often be reiterative, repeating motifs, phrases, images and fragments in new contexts so that the artist’s work and experience revolves in front of us.

Shanghai Jim is rather British and apparently modest in manner. Interestingly, no one is credited with the direction of this film. One assumes it is a ‘chappish’ collaboration between Runcie, Ballard and the crew (possibly a mix of East Asian freelancers and BBC artisans). The settings of Shanghai and Shepperton also provide direction. It succeeds brilliantly by allowing Ballard to talk as he would to a friend. It also takes its cues from his fiction. It completely eschews the usual unhelpful academic talking heads and their desiccated third hand commentary in favour of his first person, first hand moments. The only other interviews are with Ballard’s sweet round-faced daughters. Neither does Shanghai Jim ‘dramatise’ events. It uses actors set in scenes from Ballard’s life and work, not to reenact the past or to illustrate his fiction, but to indicate that this is how it might be or have been, but the viewer cannot go there.

Its form is dictated entirely by time, one of the preoccupations of Ballard’s writing. Since it only has 48 minutes to say what it has to say, it uses cinematic narrative conventions to open up the work, to expand time. Crossovers in time, achieved by montages of Ballard’s monologue, plus re-enactments and archival footage, amplify moments in his life and art. They show how his work brings the two together and propose ways of reading it, new entrances to the space of his fiction.

To make my case it is necessary to describe some sequences from the film.

ABOVE: The Bund, Shanghai, circa 1930, the year Ballard was born.

ABOVE: The Bund in 1991, the year Ballard returned to Shanghai (screenshot from Shanghai Jim; 1991).

The strategy of Shanghai Jim is already clear in its opening sequence: a panoramic view of Chinese ships sailing in front of a view of the old Shanghai skyline, and a reading by John Shrapnel from The Kindness of Women:

Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in a converted meat carrier. My father and 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 the 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 (1991; 60).

What we see, however, is clearly not the Arawa (the official spelling of the ship appears to be ‘Arawa’), nor post-war Shanghai, but rather a boy at a railing looking out from under a Chinese flag, on a boat of some kind, presumably in Shanghai. There is no attempt to illustrate the quotation; the boy is not in costume. A child from the present is placed into the imagined past that is Ballard’s fiction in Kindness, in what is, to use Ballard’s term, a recapitulation. (At the end of the film the present day adult Ballard replaces this child.) A dissolve to Eduardo Paolozzi’s title graphics follows: a collage resembling a turning Taoist wheel with ‘Shanghai Jim‘ written in Mandarin, the title in English superimposed at its centre.

The Paolozzi wheel (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

We then see Ballard packing a slightly battered suitcase, a meticulously folded shirt, a guidebook to Shanghai, a Sony video camera and an old style British passport on top. They are grouped neatly like the collections of objects seen in Ballard’s writing. Surely no one puts their passport in their suitcase. We are being invited to look at these things curiously for a moment, as though they make up some kind of Kim’s Game. Ballard closes and picks up the suitcase, walks to the door and turns to view the room. The camera adopts his viewpoint. We see his houseplants and his copy of his favourite Delvaux, and hear his voice:

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 the Western Europe and the United States. It’s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

In the last sentence Ballard, in one of the film’s manifest anomalies, closes the door on the room and we join him on the road to Heathrow, which dissolves to black and white archival film of the Japanese naval ensign and wartime footage of the Japanese in China as Ballard drives beneath a motorway overpass. A voiceover begins: ‘On the day he publishes the sequel to Empire of the Sun, a highly personal book, The Kindness of Women, Bookmark takes Ballard back to Shanghai for the first time in 45 years.’

Archival footage from Shanghai Jim, the kind that’s clearly the source for a number of scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

The first two and a half minutes of the film contain a densely packed sequence of images and quotations, a collage of Ballard’s writing, his accounts of it, and of his personal and fictional landscapes — the temporal and spatial situations of his work. The film then tracks Ballard through sites of key memories in Shanghai, and recapitulates passages from Kindness in China and England. There is a double purpose here, to trace earlier passages in the fictional life of Kindness, and to show Ballard’s return to the Shanghai he has not seen for nearly fifty years. Accordingly, Shanghai Jim shows writer and writing to have a common cause, not to explain the writing by the writer’s experiences, but to show how his life gave rise to his work.

Although his Shanghai experience is explicit in ‘Too Bad’, from ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969), his return to the experiences of his childhood in his longer works is relatively late. The film allows Ballard to talk about his past, to walk the streets of Shanghai, to sit in a club and watch a Chinese jazz band, and to visit his Shanghai homes at Amherst Avenue and at Lunghua Camp. These scenes are montaged with archival film, and with scenes of the boy (Hans Gebruers) re-enacting Ballard’s bicycle journeys around Shanghai and some of Jim’s actions in Empire.

Ballard’s voyage to Shanghai is framed as atavistic, something that he touches on at the end of the film as he sits in the room said to be his family’s quarters during their internment. He speaks of ‘coming to terms’ with his past, but this reckoning does not lead to comfortable closure. The images of the boy and Ballard (dressed like a film noir expat in a cream linen sports-coat) as they move through the setting of Shanghai make them look dislocated. These scenes are set against archival films of Shanghai, both of war and day-to-day city life, from which Ballard and the boy are patently absent. Neither Ballard nor the boy who stands in for him has returned to wartime Shanghai. It is a strength of the film that there is no such pretence. The effect is to emphasise the importance of both memory and imagery, key aspects of Ballard’s writing.

Ballard appears to be quite breathlessly moved as he stands in front of his old family house and discusses his memories of the place. He describes his entry into his old room at 31 Amherst Avenue with its blue ceiling and childhood bookshelf as being ‘like a sort of time capsule, really, that I’d stepped into after all these years’. And this happens after he has written of his childhood in Empire and Kindness:

This is 31 Amherst Avenue – 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 kind of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

‘A strange experience’: Ballard in front of 31 Amherst Avenue (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

A sequence follows, showing the interior of the house, shots of the boy mounting the steps, presumably to Ballard’s childhood room, and then looking out of the window. This is intercut with a shot of Ballard looking out of a window, but not the same window; rather, a window on the ground floor. Later in the film, a shot of the windows of Lunghua echoes these.

Other shots show an empty room, presumably Jamie’s blue room, with standard fans blowing. It was apparently a hot day, and at one point Ballard seems to wipe sweat — surely not a tear — from his face. We do not see him in his room. Was it too hot to use cameras up there for very long? Had there been someone working at the desk who was politely waiting on the stairs for the film crew to leave? The gaps in this film show us the difficulties faced by the film-makers, but a critical virtue is made of necessity. Just as the Ken Burns effect is the result of Burns’ reliance on still photographs in his remarkable documentary series on the American Civil War, so in Shanghai Jim the difficulties of filming a return to the past strengthen the film’s account of the artist and his work. Shanghai remains potent in memory and in the writing.

ABOVE: ‘Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

ABOVE: Jamie Ballard’s Blue Room (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

In Shanghai Jim I believe we have a rare, if not the only recording of J.G. Ballard reading his own prose. He stands adjacent to the subject of the passage, and reads from what looks like a proof copy of The Kindness of Women:

Of all the places of wonder, the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII most amazed me, and contained the magnetic 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. (KW, 18)

There is something disturbing about hearing this fictional version of Ballard’s experience delivered in his first-person, by-now-familiar voice. He could be describing an actual event, but not necessarily so. The authority and formal distance of his reading distinguishes his delivery from that of his spoken responses, which contain the stresses and pauses of recollection. Artifice and memory combine to reveal the texture of his life and work. More archival film follows, this time of the amusement park, as Ballard’s voice tells us:

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.

As we hear this the boy cycles obliquely towards the camera, then Ballard walks in the same direction among a Shanghai crowd. He looks just a little flustered, perhaps by the heat. He mutters something. We hear what sounds like a bicycle bell and the last of Ballard’s voiceover coincides with his face coming almost to fill the screen.

His expression, slightly worried or thoughtful, matches the voiceover. Rising strings in the background carry over into a particularly compelling example of the use of archival footage, and one of the most interesting sequences in the film: a night scene of burning ruins and water. From slightly above we see a boat with a machine gun mounted on its prow. Armed soldiers aim warily at the shore as the boat moves through water, a Japanese sentry scans the area, a searchlight is rhymed with a shot of the moon emerging from clouds, followed by a return to the burning ruins at the water’s edge. Over this the opening passage from Empire of the Sun is read, and at either side of it we see the hot and bothered looking Ballard, in cream coat and open necked shirt, and Ballard the boy, walking among the crowds in Shanghai. The effect of this is particularly surreal, as the imagery of destruction is countered with its tragic contrary forces, art and youth, in the form of Ballard and an imagined boy-self.

Later we see Ballard (now in panama hat) enter through the gates of Lunghua, the wartime Civilian Assembly Centre where the Japanese interned European civilians. He sits and describes the room that was his family’s home from 1942-45. There has been no attempt to tidy away mess in the room before shooting, but while this might suggest the chaos of camp life it is unlikely that these spaces would have been anything other than neatly ordered. Nonetheless, the mess gives the room the dereliction that Ballard admires in abandoned objects and spaces and helps furnish the mise en scène of his writing.

ABOVE: ‘In a strange way I quite enjoyed my life here’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

Other perspectives of Lunghua are more prosaic. When Ballard stands on the roof of F-Block, ‘the main administrative building’, and identifies the various parts of Lunghua, disappointingly there is no pagoda. What looks like the Shanghai skyline may be seen in the hazy distance, however, rather like the view of Heathrow from parts of Shepperton.

Ballard’s young adult self is re-enacted by actor Michael Troughton, whom we see wandering around Shepperton, engrossed in newsreels and crash tests in the cinema and on television, watching a fighter plane landing at Lakenheath, and dissecting corpses at Cambridge. One sequence shows the real Ballard standing in front of machinery at a gravel quarry. The camera slowly moves from left to right across his thoughtful face, and as he turns and looks across the gravel lake it picks up Troughton, who stands on a small promontory at the water’s edge and returns Ballard’s gaze for a moment. There is a cut to a mid-shot of Troughton who then turns away. The voiceover through this sequence, which follows a shot of Troughton under a willow, and one of a railway worker in Shanghai, is another reading of an edited passage from Kindness:

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. (KW, 126-7)

The result is paradoxical, in that memory is countered at the same time as it is invoked. One wonders what it might have been like for Ballard to stand in front of the camera and turn to view a version of his younger self. On the whole, and despite the courteous diffidence he displays so often, he is remarkably unselfconscious in front of a camera, as Simon Sellars points out in his essay on Cokliss’ Crash!. He is doing this for the same reason that he has done so many interviews, because he takes his work seriously. In front of the Shepperton Film Studios, Ballard speaks of how ‘Shepperton has insinuated itself into my fiction over the years’. We are shown images of gravel pits accompanied by a reading from Vermilion Sands. From these sequences we can see the ways in which the terrors and wonders of the modern world may be present in its apparently most banal settings. Shepperton’s specific location in space and time makes it an exemplar of this effect, but reading Ballard’s work allows us to see it in our own environments. From the juxtapositions in these sequences we can see that the mental landscape of Ballard’s life and art is clearly around him at all times, as it is around us if we care to look at it. In other words, the main achievement of Shanghai Jim is the way that it images the ‘Ballardian’ for us.

‘Living in an endless present’: Ballard turns to look at his younger self (screenshots from Shanghai Jim).

One of the most interesting sequences is that of Ballard’s visit to the scene dock at Shepperton studios. This sequence follows a re-enactment of a younger Ballard watching footage of crash-testing, and is framed by Ballard speaking to interviewer:

In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature, and 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 a common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but its 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.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

Ballard’s voiceover continues as he walks into the Shepperton scene-dock, his gait familiar by now: head slightly tilted to see what is around him and arms loosely by his side, thoughtful, slightly anxious, purposeful, but no harm meant to anyone:

In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature, and this is what I was interested in.

My characters are all driven by the end 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 a common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but its 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.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

The camera scans the area and then returns to Ballard. Whether by accident or design, a number of Ballard’s preoccupations come together here. The scene dock is like an arcade of visual memory, a coalescence of Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Ballard’s The Crystal World, in which Ballard stages some events in a setting of arcades and a market place where Christian and pagan fetishes are sold, and where the light and the dark may be divided in the architectural spaces of the French colonial streetscape.

As he paused by the boat, feeling the crystals along its sides, a huge four-legged creature half-embedded in the surface lurched forward through the crust, the loosened pieces of lattice attached to its snout and shoulders shaking like a transparent cuirass. Its jaws mouthed the air silently as it struggled on its hooked legs, unable to clamber more than a few inches from the hollow trough in its own outline now filling with a thin trickle of water. Invested by the glittering light that poured from its body, the crocodile resembled a fabulous armorial beast. Its blind eyes had been transformed into immense crystalline rubies.

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (1966; 96-7).

As he rounds a corner, two crocodiles appear, one stacked on top of another larger one.

‘The crocodile of memory’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

In speaking of the amphibian life of The Drowned World, Ballard also recalls an alligator in Shanghai Zoo:

Among the characteristic fauna of the Triassic age were both crocodiles and alligators, amphibian creatures at home in both the aquatic and terrestrial worlds, who symbolize for the hero of the novel the submerged dangers of his quest. Even now I can vividly remember the enormous ancient alligator housed in a narrow concrete pit, half-filled with cigarette packets and ice-cream cartons in the reptile house at the Shanghai Zoo, who seemed to have been jerked forward reluctantly, so many tens of millions of years into the 20th century.

J.G. Ballard. ‘Time Memory and Inner Space’, in The Woman Journalist, Spring 1963, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 100-101, 100.

The crocodiles in the scene-dock are exemplars of all the other objects there. They are stage properties, like those used in Ballard’s fiction, objects in and through which we image our relations with the world. Whoever chose to include this sequence in Shanghai Jim is making visible to us an aspect of Ballard’s method. Ballard approaches the crocodiles, almost cautiously walks around them and turns to look at them. As he does, he stands in front of a large map of the ‘far-East’, the world of Lord Jim, of Ballard’s youth and the Pacific War. Above him is a pub sign, ‘The George’:

‘Lord Jim’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

Ballard then walks to the other side of the crocodiles, and is here flanked by a piece of scenery, a panel of windows from a passenger jet. As he views the crocodiles and then turns to descend a set of stairs into sunlight, Shrapnel reads an edited passage from The Crystal World:

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

This sequence is another example of the way this film uses documentary conventions to show us how Ballard works. Rather than a dramatisation of a passage from The Crystal World, this film gives us a performance by Ballard in a museum of his writing and memory and of the media landscape. We go backstage, as it were, into the dressing room of Ballard’s imagination, and that of our times.

This seems strange because it appears to be quite separate from the theme of return to Shanghai, and draws particular attention to The Crystal World. Not so strange however, if one considers what the sequence achieves in less than two minutes. It adds to the film by deploying the metaphor of stage properties, drawing attention to the ways in which Ballard makes use of objects and images in the sets of exhibits that he is constantly shuffling and reordering in his writing. The Kindness of Women might be seen as a catalogue of the objects of Ballard’s memory, a dangerously deceptive guide to his creative life and a milder form of the catalogue of experiments in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s visit to a particular object in what is effectively a museum of his place and time seems not so strange if we consider it as a counterweight to the journey into an irrecoverable past. The plenitude of the scene dock ironically mocks the relative emptiness of the room at 31 Amherst Avenue, a room which looks as though it has just been vacated for the camera by its usual inhabitants.

It would be easy to get a documentary film about Ballard wrong. The readings of the texts from Ballard’s collages might have been more effective as voiceovers to a scene of a Shepperton supermarket, rather than the gyrations of a nude dancer. The acid trip visuals are a bit cheesy. A lot of the archival footage is not credited. It would be good to see a shooting script for the film, a full list of credits, and to find out how the whole thing was designed and put together.

Shanghai Jim succeeds, however. It avoids reductive explanations of the work and uses the medium of television well, although most viewers will now see it on their laptop screens via Youtube. It illuminates, and is at times moving. Importantly, it amplifies Ballard’s fiction for us and allows us to recognise the Ballardian nature of our own lives

Pippa Tandy, August 2007

Many thanks to Susanna and Stephanie Shen for their Mandarin Chinese translation, to Liz Harding for scans, and to David Bromfield for editorial suggestions.

..:: APPENDIX
+ Transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

..:: MORE IN THIS SERIES
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon
+ Thirteen to Centaurus

Over on BallardoTube, the “China Odyssey” doco on the making of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun has appeared. Ballard features prominently.

Don’t forget part two.

[ thanks Pedro! ]

————————————————
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
————————————————————————————————————————————————

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

I have only stolen one book in my life, and that was a copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, which I took from my suite at the Beverly Hilton hotel. This was in 1987 when I attended the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. A Hollywood premiere is an extraordinary event, but in many ways it was outclassed by the LA Yellow Pages, which I read during a bored moment. It struck me that I should hang on to this precious volume which transformed my holiday at the expense of Warner Brothers. What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.”

[ thanks, Greg ]

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Geoff Manaugh is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat, WorldChanging, the Oyster Boy Review, the Urban Design Review, Subtopia, Vector, things magazine, and The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection (a short essay in the CD liner notes). He’s also a contributing editor at Archinect, and Senior Editor for David Haskell’s Urban Design Review. And he’s the main man behind BLDGBLOG, a blog devoted to ‘architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures’. BLDGBLOG is very popular — it’s namechecked in the current Blackberry Pearl ad campaign featuring Douglas Coupland. It’s also wildly divergent, eclectic and challenging, and it never fails to command the attention, as Geoff examines the built world from all angles, and even from the upper atmosphere (via Google Earth), leaping around from posts on London’s subterranean system of drains, sewers and bunkers to whole suburbs thrown into space; from Indian superhighways to acoustic landscapes; from cathedrals made of magma to ‘psychovideography’; from military urbanism to sustainable urbanism; from derelict utopias to 3D models of plate tectonics.

I spoke to Geoff Manaugh about BLDGBLOG, and Ballard, and Geoff’s as-yet-unpublished novel, and a lot more.

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Simon Sellars
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SIMON: What motivated you to start a blog devoted to “architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures”?

GEOFF: I was reading Super-Cannes, writing my own first novel, recovering from abdominal surgery, and auditing a university course about Archigram, the 1960s British pop-utopian architecture group; those things just came together somehow – and, one morning, on a whim, I started BLDGBLOG. Now I work on it almost constantly. It’s been two years.

BLDGBLOG became pretty well-defined, with a small but growing readership, and it had a voice, a tempo, an energy, a feel. It was no longer just an ‘architecture’ blog; it had its own direction and orientation, and it was even verging on science fiction in some ways. Short stories in the disguise of architectural theory. Ideas for screenplays. In that regard, BLDGBLOG became more literary – by which I don’t mean to compliment my writing abilities, but to say that the site became its own kind of genre: architectural criticism as a kind of literary form. Somewhere between science fiction, a short story collection, a Don Delillo novel, and a kind of technical catalogue for a world that didn’t exist. Which, incidentally, is how I view a lot of Ballard’s work. So if BLDGBLOG could ever equal Ballard in that regard, I’d be a very happy man!

It’s worth adding that a lot of the architects I admire also use architecture as a form of social critique, or political allegory: Archigram, Rem Koolhass, even Piranesi or Will Alsop. The Agents of Change. Speculative architectural treatises are an extremely exciting, if totally unacknowledged, branch of the literary arts. Look at Thomas More’s Utopia. Or China Miéville. Or, for that matter, J.G. Ballard.

Testing, testing… Is this on… Corporate, automobile test-landscapes. Deserted beach resorts. Ruined stripmalls.

‘Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system’. J.G. Ballard

More soon.

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BLDGBLOG’s first post. Wednesday, 7 July, 2004
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BLDGBLOG has covered diverse territory, but your basic obsessions were clearly set out in your very first post. Can you elaborate on the Ballardian elements in your work?

One of the things I like about Ballard is how he treats architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation.

Ballardian space is psycho-spatial. His books are full of artificial lakes, highway medians, multi-storey car parks, strangely over-air-conditioned corporate boardrooms – and these all take on a kind of menacing, even confrontational, gleam, as if you’ve just stepped into some kind of unspoken mental challenge. The buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where ‘the test’ is the world you and I now live in.

Each day, the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis”.

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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Of course, any built environment has a psychological impact on the people who live there. In Super-Cannes, for instance, the book’s setting – an office park – is haunted by a kind of ‘controlled and supervised madness,’ Ballard writes. One of the characters explains, at great length, how the too-perfect and over-manicured landscapes of this new corporate enclave inspire sexual violence and anti-immigrant raids – a rebellion against the boredom of tennis courts and well-mowed lawns. Every artificial landscape is the diagram of a certain psychological state – even if that just means reflecting the dominant aesthetic of the day. But the idea that the built landscape can be read as an ‘encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis,’ as Ballard writes, crossing generations and countries, just fascinates me.

Space in Ballard’s novels is never deeply textured or deeply described. Instead, you get these abstract non-places – a corporate campus, a media center, a fitness complex. You drive down feeder roads and airport roundabouts and cross-city motorways. You never enter a world of rich, Dickensian details. He’s like the anti-Dickens. You don’t walk past churches and bookshops and local bars and farmers’ markets and whatever else makes a believable urban setting; you’re always out in this weird edge-world of import warehouses and corporate development projects. Sports-car dealerships. The very lack of detail is what makes a setting Ballardian.

That’s Ballard’s fabled inner space, isn’t it — a neurological world unable to be verified beyond the shifting data of sensory input?

Yes and no. I think there’s a shift in Ballard’s work, from the earlier, almost psychedelic concerns of something like The Drowned World — where all the characters verge on an evolutionary regression to this kind of quasi-reptilian psychological state — compared to the more socioeconomic concerns of Ballard’s later novels, like Millennium People.

In other words, I’d agree with you that there’s a mental/cognitive/neurological world at play in Ballard’s work — but I think the larger significance of that world has shifted over the course of his career. For instance, Ballard’s early stories might suggest that one of the characters has an inability to perceive anything outside his own nervous system, for neuro-anatomical reasons; but now Ballard would emphasise something else. He wouldn’t blame anatomy — the human nervous system — but would use instead his own peculiar version of psychoanalysis to say that the reason you can’t understand or fully interact with the outside world is because of sexual repression or cultural hang-ups — or sheer corporate sociopathology — not because of your reptilian cortex, or because of certain hormones.

So I think Ballard’s gone from blaming the body, or neuro-chemical imbalances, on behalf of his narrators to blaming culture and the economy and sexual mores for his characters’ often hilariously bizarre activities.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

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

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
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On BLDGBLOG, you once wrote, “Super-Cannes is a novel – but it’s also a work of architectural criticism”.

Yes — it’s about architecture and corporate real estate as much as it is about the central murder mystery we’re meant to solve. I think it’s a great book. Ballard managed to write a bona fide page-turner, with a genuinely gripping plot and loads of hilarious throwaway lines, and to do so even as he took the same kind of socio-architectural analysis from High-Rise – even Concrete Island – to a new level, critiquing global capitalism itself and not just suburban condo politics. Too often Ballard just comes up with a setting, or an image, while all the rest stalls, like in The Day of Creation, which I think is a failure. There’s nothing there — it’s a military camp in the desert, near a polluted river, with a derelict cinema and an unused airfield and … who cares? The book goes nowhere. Just write a poem, or take a photograph, or use that as one image in a much larger project — because there’s not enough there for a novel.

Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise are often spoken of in the same breath, given that they’re the most airtight, hermetically sealed Ballard novels of all, but I’ve never seen BLDGBLOG quote, or refine, or retool Crash in any way…

I found Crash almost unreadable – not because it offended me, but because I found it badly written and just incredibly obvious. More to the point, it didn’t read like Ballard was having a good time when he wrote it. It reads like he’d rather have been doing something else – and so the book feels dry. It feels sterile. His other books just zip along – and that feeling of effortlessness carries you with it.

I think Ballard said somewhere that if he ever got an erection while writing Crash — because of its weird, auto-centric eroticism — then he would have failed. But I think that’s exactly why the book itself fails: if Ballard actually had created a world of sexualised car crashes and literal auto-eroticism that had succeeded in turning him on, then that enthusiasm would have found its way into the writing. You would have felt it. As it is, the book was empty for me. Even the humour doesn’t ring true. It should have been a short story — because then, of course, I’d be saying it’s brilliant!

I think Crash is maybe too close to The Atrocity Exhibition. To some extent, Crash doesn’t even read like it’s meant to be published in novel form. The Atrocity Exhibition is very upfront with its nonlinear structure and its somewhat improvised – if also completely nonexistent – narrative, and so it works for me; but Crash neither rid itself of that Atrocity Exhibition-like fragmentation nor fit itself fully into the structure of a novel. Maybe it shouldn’t be called a novel: it’s just a text…

What do you think of Cronenberg’s Crash?

It’s alright — but I’m not a big fan. It takes itself way too seriously, for instance, and ends up just boring the shit out of everyone. I think it was miscast, badly paced, and not explicit enough about its themes. As it is, the movie appears to be about a bunch of dull and uninteresting Canadians who get into a car accident one day and end up wife-swapping. Yet, having said that, the movie isn’t funny at all.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

A film of High-Rise is in development, with Vincent Natali attached to direct. But does the symbolism of the high rise really apply to America? It’s not really a ‘high rise’ culture, is it?

I think only in low income, public housing projects — like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green — does high-rise architecture have any sort of psycho-sociological place in the United States. Obviously, you have high-rise living in Manhattan and Chicago and Boston and even L.A. — and Miami, Atlanta, and so on — but I don’t think the buildings themselves have been marketed to their future residents as ‘an experiment in modern living’, or some such, where the narrative of the building itself implies that something will be different there, something will happen there that has never happened before… Which I think was the explicit promise of London high-rises in the 1970s — especially Canary Wharf, later, during the Thatcher years — thus setting up the Ballardian twist: an architectural experiment gone awry. Of course, an American version of High-Rise would undoubtedly be set in a gated Orange County suburb. And I think it’d be brilliant. If I was a publisher I’d commission it, in fact,

Much of the discourse on Ballard springs from English critics. As an American, do you see him as an especially British writer?

Actually, no. I think, aside from vocabulary and punctuation and spelling — and Ballard’s settings, of course — it’s not at all obvious that Ballard is English. You can make points about sense of humour and so on, but Ballard doesn’t strike me as a British writer in the same way that Ian McEwan does, or Iain Sinclair. Or even Iain Banks. Ballard’s book don’t sell well in the U.S., but that’s entirely a top-down problem. I think the American publishing industry is in a state of free-fall, marketing all the wrong books in all the wrong ways. Trying to market Ballard would never occur to them. They want to sell people John Updike novels in hardcover — despite the fact that no one wants John Updike novels, and hardcover books are completely obsolete as a format. So they ‘experiment’ by publishing 900-page hardcover epics about farm life in 1920s Nebraska — and then still seem surprised that no one’s reading fiction in this country.

Short, good, fairly priced, intellectually progressive paperback books — that’s all you need.

Which Ballard book would you like to see filmed?

You’re going to think I’m out of my mind, but I’d like to see Steven Spielberg direct The Drowned World — as long as he didn’t add any kids to the screenplay. Or Danny Boyle film Concrete Island. Or, for that matter, Wong Kar-wai could film Concrete Island, in Chinese, set in Hong Kong. Or Shanghai — a nice bit of Ballardian symmetry there.

Spielberg? Interesting answer.

When I say ‘Steven Spielberg’ I really just mean the budgets, and the production values, and the technical abilities — the sets, the matte painting, the look — that went into something like Minority Report, or even the first forty-five minutes of War of the Worlds. I wasn’t thinking of Empire of the Sun at all, in fact. I think The Drowned World starring maybe Daniel Craig and Christian Bale, directed by Steven Spielberg — although I’m just thinking out loud here — might be good. But who knows. It could also be horrific.

Reversing the question, I’d love to see J.G. Ballard write a novelisation of Panic Room — or something else like that. I wonder if he could novelize Die Hard…?

Do you feel that Blade Runner’s an overrated text as far as architectural criticism is concerned? It always gets name checked, but one thing I feel it missed was the ‘invisibility’ of new technology. It’s probably the last of the old-school dystopian sci fi films, where the city itself was a major character, imposing and present…

As an architectural film, yes: I do think Blade Runner is over-rated. Even as a film about urban design or the urban future. But as a film about the overwhelming sadness of being alone in the world – in that regard I think it’s unbelievable, and deserves its reputation. The self-distrusting madness of thought, doubting your own reality, your own solidity, whether or not what you did yesterday was real: all obvious questions, of course, and all themes already done by the Existentialists, the Romantics, even The Matrix – but what I mean is that, in a world where it’s possible to work and grow old and be completely alone for the whole thing, self-disappearance is an interestingly under-explored phenomenon. And I think Blade Runner really tackles that. It’s a sad movie. It can sometimes be almost unbearable to watch.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Ballard once said that the “future will be boring”. From your enthusiastic mapping out of the future on BLDGBLOG, you clearly don’t agree.

Arguably, nothing’s boring — it comes down to whether you’re alert enough to find something of interest. If you’re willing to embarrass yourself expressing unexpected enthusiasms, for instance, then nothing’s ever boring. Weird things happen everywhere if you look for them. The international departure lounge at the Chicago airport, for instance, may sound like the most boring place on earth, but the whole point of the Ballardian project — the whole point of Ballard’s novels — seems to be to reveal the secret currents that exist in such a space: Freudian/sexual interest, Marxist/revolutionary interest, rightwing/Monarchist interest. Whatever interest. So there’s no real way of predicting whether or not the future will be boring. Arguably, the world will be at its most boring once everyone recycles their tins and eats vegetarian. Perhaps manufacturing AK-47s is the only way to liven things up.

I mean, if bird flu and nuclear terrorism and 9.0 earthquakes in the heart of Los Angeles — or even global currency deflation — all come to pass, then the future will be insanely fucking interesting, even exciting. It will be terrifying, obviously — but then the future won’t be boring at all. And, if you believe Ballard, even after the whole world gets turned into an endless highway system there will still be a million things to look forward to. Mega-crashes being only one of them.

It’s through enthusiasm — not anger — that Ballard’s major characters all discover their strange perversions. Crash, for instance, whether I liked the novel or not, is the ultimate example of this: being willing to admit that you’re sexually fascinated by car crashes. It’s not nihilism, after all; it’s falling in love with totally weird shit.

Can you elaborate on this BLDGBLOG statement of yours: “We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard than we do from Le Corbusier?”

Sure. First, that statement should be contextualised a bit. The ‘we’, for instance, was referring to architects and architectural critics, not to mankind, or the human species. Or primates. That said, it was a comment more about genre than it was about Ballard’s, or Le Corbusier’s, own intentions. Whilst Ballard, to my knowledge, would never dream of designing some new urban development in which thousands of people will live — or a new shopping mall — Le Corbusier had a very naive and vaguely imperialistic earnestness, wherein taking his own ideas too seriously, as architecturally realisable plans, was part of the package. That kind of over-self-seriousness, in my opinion, offers very little to learn from. But Ballard also realised — and articulated, in brilliant ways — what constructing huge high-rise apartment blocks, surrounded by empty parkland, would actually accomplish: domestic violence, race-based social segregation, and utterly pointless rivalries between makeshift gangs over everyday services. Le Corbusier either didn’t care and so he designed those buildings anyway, or he assumed that everyone in the world goes home at night — quiet, well-disciplined, educated and middle-class, listening to Schoenberg … which is quite obviously not how everyone lives.

That’s why I think architects should read Ballard. At the very least, his sarcastic reaction to over-earnest housing plans and suburban mega-malls is quite sobering. Along these lines, I’ve often thought that if the evening news included a daily primer about how to live inside modern architecture — what the actual point of modern architecture was; that it had a point, for instance — then more people would be excited by Le Corbusier. Or by Richard Meier. Or even by Norman Foster. If you don’t understand how a certain blank, white wall, with no windows, is supposed to challenge your ideas of domesticity, then you just think it’s a shite design and you want your money back. Constant dissatisfaction with your architectural surroundings becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst, that Ballard is so good at capturing.

The problem with architecture is that it’s still there in the morning; you can’t turn it off. Unless you’ve been stockpiling bombs.

Of course, this is also why I found the youth riots outside Paris last year so interesting — because almost every journalist covering the story began by all but channelling Ballard. You had major international newspapers implying, or even explicitly stating, that the high-rises themselves were to blame. At least one op-ed even specifically cited Le Corbusier, as if he should be tried in court! It goes without saying that many architects found this deeply offensive, and they instead blamed class tension, French racism, etc. And they had a point, obviously — in fact, a very good point — but the idea that buildings are these innocent shells that can do no harm to anyone is a total intellectual failure. Frankly, it insults the power of architecture! Look at supermax prisons, or Guantanamo Bay. Architecture has psychological effects.

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence”.

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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I’ve long thought Ballard should be taught in architectural schools. How would you design an architectural syllabus based around JGB?

I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine, so who knows. I think it’d be relatively easy, and exciting, to use Concrete Island, for instance, in a course about the history of urban infrastructure. And it’d be hilarious and great to assign chapters from High-Rise to students in a class about public housing, or about Manhattan condo development, or even about the career of Le Corbusier. I would jump at the chance to lead a class like that! Getting urban hydrology designers — engineers of canals and levees — to read The Drowned World. It’d be so much fun — and so incredibly interesting — and the ensuing conversations, I think, would be phenomenal.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Not only do I think more architects should read Ballard but I also think that more Ballard fans should read architectural treatises: Archigram, Superstudio, Rem Koolhaas, Victor Gruen. I think fans of The Drowned World would be totally blown away by Guy Maunsell’s anti-aircraft towers now rotting away in the Thames estuary; fans of The Day of Creation would be awed by, say, the Great Man-Made River of Libya. Look up Drift Station Bravo. Look up architectural Brutalism. Look up the stock prices of firms in the private security industry. Even Halliburton, or the U.S. Department of Transportation: that’s Ballard’s strange race of highway builders right there. The world is already Ballardian.

Take that whole affair with Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son — a few years ago he tried to lead a private coup in Equatorial Guinea. He’s the perfect Ballardian protagonist: right wing, wealthy, elite schooled, a descendent of what amounts to secular royalty, former owner of a race car firm for god’s sake, and then president of an international business consultancy — but he takes all his money and buys helicopter gunships. It’s like he’d been reading Super-Cannes!

The whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent”.

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J.G. Ballard. Concrete Island.
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The architect is a reoccurring figure in Ballard’s fiction. There’s Anthony Royal in High-Rise who hovers over the inhabitants “like some kind of fallen angel”. Concrete Island’s Robert Maitland is also an architect.

I think a lot of this comes out of an era when the architect was a much more influential figure — a kind of Ayn Rand–like utopian world-engineer. In post-war England, in particular — in a country full of bombed cities and destroyed docklands — the importance of the architect was almost hyperbolically exaggerated. There was a war to recover from, and thus a country to rebuild. I think there was a sense that architects could start the whole world over from scratch. They could literally build the future. Architects had power beyond mere aesthetics or land development strategies.

So everyday people — the people in Ballard’s novels — have the air of being mere spectators and unwilling participants in someone else’s social planning scheme, someone else’s utopia. It wasn’t their fantasy, in other words, but someone else’s, and they had to wake up within it everyday. You see that especially in High-Rise, as you say, with its dandyish architect living on the top floor, training his Alsatians, whilst everyone else, on the floors below, have to put up with the inadequacies of the man’s design.

I think the importance of architects in Ballard’s fiction — or, later, psychiatrists and doctors — is a factor of the time period, to some extent. Who would Ballard write about today? Who’s built our world? I suppose that’s the new obsession with multinational CEOs and their ilk. For what it’s worth, by the way, I think Max Barry’s novels supply an interesting next step, in that regard, after Ballard. Not in every way, of course — but it will be interesting to see where Barry goes.

You once wrote, “just about everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture”…

What I really mean is that, in any discussion of architecture, there are these inevitable holes through which you might glimpse something else, something supposedly outside the bounds of architecture entirely: gravity, say, because you’re calculating stress-loads, or plate tectonics as you design a building in an earthquake zone – Tokyo, Los Angeles, Istanbul. For that matter, you have to decide where to put the windows, and so the movement of the sun comes into play – and, thus, you’re talking about astronomy, and terrestrial rotation, solstices, the equinox, constellations. Soon you’ve got the climate, and topography, and even forestry and botany and global trade and labour law – etc. etc. Global economics. The list expands and expands until ‘everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture’. Good moods, bad moods; enclosure, frustration, claustrophobia, imprisonment. Freedom. The price of steel. Natural history. Military bases, oil derricks, mining camps. It’s all architectural.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence”.

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
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Ballard once said, “I’m frightened that the possibilities of a genuine dystopia may be much more appealing than any utopian project that people can come up with”. Any thoughts on that?

Well, I agree. People love to see all hell break loose — look at Hurricane Katrina, for instance, which no one wanted to admit they actually wished was much worse. I think there’s a real curiosity now to see an Orwellian world take shape. What would it look like? How would you feel living there? It’s like taking a holiday into another political system — only dystopia is something you may not ever come back from. Perhaps that’s the appeal: the irreversibility of dystopia.

He also waxed lyrical about Michael Manser’s Heathrow Hilton, saying he waits for the day “when the whole of London resembles this future design classic”. Which architects would you commission for the job of rebuilding London, and what would you build (and demolish) first?

I don’t think my answer will sound very appealing to hardcore Ballardians — especially not to Ballard himself — but if I had to rebuild London, I’d probably use some weird combination of Christopher Wren, G.B. Piranesi, Michael Sorkin, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Palladio, John Soane, Norman Foster, Ed Mazria, Peter Zumthor – and, I don’t know, a million others. Whoever designed Angkor Wat. Angkor-Wat-on-Thames. Even some more buildings by A.W. Pugin. I’d build more tunnels, and more pedestrian bridges, and lots of artificial ruins, and I’d throw up hundreds of industrial-gothic warehouses near the Thames foreshore and add stone statuary everywhere. Meanwhile, I’d open a new private space-port in the southeast, near Eltham Palace; you’d watch international space stations take flight over experimental greenhouses and well-designed, leafy suburbs full of affordable housing.

Everyone would hate it.

I think I’m something of a classicist when it comes to London architecture. Or maybe that’s inaccurate — but it’s a beautiful city, and I wouldn’t want Archigram, for instance, or some group of neo-Brutalists, to redesign the place — despite my incredible enthusiasm for both Archigram and Brutalism. Genuinely liking something — an idea, a design — doesn’t mean you have to build it.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Who else? Single Speed Design, from Boston, do amazing, amazing work — and they deserve much more coverage and many more clients. And they’re very modern, not classicists in any way. I like Andrew Maynard, as well, an Aussie, and think he could do some great new flats. Really great, even. I could go on and on. I just like architecture, so it’s probably easier to say who I wouldn’t hire. And Daniel Libeskind would be at the very top of that list. Followed closely by Frank Gehry. Peter Eisenman would also make my blacklist.

I like density, detail, pedestrianised streets and stonework — quite frankly, the exact opposite of a Ballardian world. But I also like tropical gardens — and perhaps a flooded city themepark, in the very center of the city… And who can resist a purpose-built Ballardian labyrinth of concrete motorways?

When all’s said and done, has Ballard made a difference?

It’s hard to say whether Ballard has actually contributed anything — perhaps a deranged enthusiasm for all things suburban? Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he’s taken something away: the naive belief that modernity leads to anything other than sexual deviance and violent nationalism or corporate sociopathology. Though I feel like a member of the Taliban, saying something like that.

After all, it’s not a rigorous science we’re talking about here — which is why I think Ballard is so good as a novelist. If he was writing social theory — if he was Malcolm Gladwell — he’d be laughed out of the fucking bookstore. Or is the difference really that the Taliban see modernity and they accuse it of sexual deviance and violent pathology — and so they hate it — while Ballard sees modernity, and he also accuses it of sexual violence and so on, but that’s exactly why he loves it so much? Ballard, we can’t forget, is perhaps suburbia’s biggest fan — not because he likes father-son bonding and family picnics and a good barbecue but because everyone comes out of there completely insane.

The Taliban would nuke the suburbs; Ballard would build more of them. Is that the difference? Perhaps the dichotomy’s false, and I don’t know what I’m talking about — but the politics of Ballard’s enthusiasm are definitely worth discussing at greater length.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Can you tell me more about the novel about technology and surveillance you’ve just finished?

Sure. The book follows surveillance camera installation teams around greater London, dropping in on these events they’ve organised, called ‘film nights’ – which is also the name of the book: Film Night.

The two main characters are architects; they went to design school together, and the book begins as they bump into each other more than a decade later at the Barbican. Things have changed. One of them now works as a consultant in private security: he helps London architects make their designs more secure (which means easier to film, basically, using CCTV – designing better lines of sight and so on). Surveillance, in other words, becomes an architectural concern: how easily can this building be filmed? In any case, the guy’s been making short films on the sly, using footage taken from his company’s surveillance cameras, and these are then shown — along with pornos, and car wrecks, and building demolitions, and so on — at the film nights I mentioned. Which almost always take place in abandoned buildings, or in office buildings after they’ve closed down for the day — but always in places patrolled by this guy’s firm. He’s got a key, an access code, a friend on-duty — and so they come back in at night and watch films.

To make a very long story short, then, a larger film project comes along involving the narrator’s newfound acquaintances, and he’s soon helping them make a feature film — without any obvious storyline, using nothing but surveillance cameras, and only cameras that they themselves have installed. Etc. etc. The book is actually quite funny, believe it or not — it probably sounds boring as shit — and it’s short. Full of dialogue. Terrorism, art, surveillance, even some Andy Warhol. Bits of it — little details — are very consciously Ballardian, as you can probably tell. On the other hand, I still have to get the thing published.

Finally, a question that all architecturally minded Ballard fans want answered: does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The angle is just the beginning.

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Many thanks to Tim Chapman, Matt Smith and Joanne Murray for help with the questions.
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..:: LINKS
+ BLDGBLOG
+ Single Speed Design
+ Archigram
+ Superstudio
+ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Rem Koolhaas)
+ Victor Gruen
+ Andrew Maynard
+ Emiliano Granado

OPENING LINE:
“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 adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”

There’s not much left to say about the autobiographical Empire, perhaps Ballard’s most popular book and the work that catapulted him into some semblance of mainstream recognition. Since it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and filmed by Steven Spielberg, it seems that every journalist who has interviewed Ballard must ask him about his childhood in Shanghai.

From the Grafton 1985 edition:

“He is separated from his parents in a world at war. He must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him… In Empire of the Sun J.G. Ballard has produced a mesmerizing, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, which blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the Twentieth Century will be not only remembered but judged.”

Searing .. brilliant … an incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving.”
Anthony Burgess

“The best British novel about the Second World War.”
The Guardian

Read Ballard’s account of the book’s collision with Spielberg:

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can’t easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old’s infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?

I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember. There was always the possibility that my memories of the war concealed a deeper stratum of unease that I preferred not to face. But at least my three children had grown up, and as I wrote the book I would never have to think of them sharing the war with my younger self.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘Look Back at Empire’.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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 at that time. Nobody else liked roads, nobody else liked petrol stations, apart from a few nouveau-pop artists in America. So he’s gone from a position of being right out there and advocating hateful stuff and disliking Ralph Nader and not being politically correct and not being green or ecologically sound, and suddenly here he is as a nice old man.

It’s rather like what happened with Kafka, who was very much a fringe character in his lifetime but later became this iconic figure with his own adjective.

Obviously Ballard has his own adjective in the same way, so he’s very similar to Kafka. Except Kafka was probably even more extreme and much more invisible than Ballard. I mean, Ballard has been there for a very long time in various ways. The interesting thing is that by doing exactly the same things all the time, his status and position have shifted significantly. He’s gone from one extreme to the other. Whereas — and I keep coming back to Moorcock — I think Moorcock was a lot more populist in the 60s, but because his books now are large and unwieldy and complex they’re much less read now than Ballard. They’ve drifted off somewhere where the fans are following him but the general readership just don’t acknowledge him any more. That’s quite a curious thing.

As you say, Ballard’s been doing the same thing all along. Maybe it’s just taken this long for the rest of the world to catch up?

He has done the same thing, but the mode in which it’s done has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.

Cocaine Nights was promoted as summer beach reading.

Exactly, which is good too. And things like Alex Garland’s The Beach clearly derive from Ballard. There is a line now from Ballard through Martin Amis and Will Self and Alex Garland – young, hip writers who have taken their tricks from Ballard. And yet I don’t think any of them have what he had to start with.

Garland also scripted the British zombie movie 28 Days Later — he said that large parts of that were a deliberate homage to Ballard. Alan Warner’s another one.

Sure. He’s one of the generators of this new kind of literature.

Ballard’s also doing a lot of work with newspaper columns and book reviews. In Landor’s Tower, you have a mock book review for one of your characters which you attribute to Ballard.

Right! I’d forgotten that.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

“In the canted floors of these multistorey carparks, rephotographed from surveillance tapes…”

Ah yes. That was written in parallel with making a film called Asylum. In the same way the London Orbital book and film were going on together, this film of Asylum had a very strongly Ballardian presence without Ballard being in it, although Moorcock was in it. It finishes up in the Heathrow motorway corridor with planes flying low with a desperate sense of threat — also the shimmering landscapes of those reservoirs and all of that. So, in a sense, by physically invading this territory to make this film my mind was totally set on Ballard. When I was writing the book at the same time, which criss-crosses its inspiration from the film, obviously Ballard was in mind and I came up with this riff in homage to him.

Did you find he was an easy writer to pastiche?

He’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered.

You mentioned The Atrocity Exhibition as one of the most important books for you. In the BFI book you mention the film of that which was then a work in progress.

Has that finished now?

It has. It’s out on DVD.

I look forward to seeing that. I saw it at the ICA or somewhere as a work in progress. It struck me as probably the most Ballardian of the various films. It worked on his own terms and is therefore likely to be the least popular. I saw Empire of the Sun again the other day, and it’s sort of Spielberg more than Ballard though it’s reasonably close to the book. The Cronenberg is interesting but it’s not remotely in the spirit or the time of the book. But The Atrocity Exhibition I thought was pretty fair.

Simon interviewed the director, Jonathan Weiss. He seems quite an angry man — angry about the film’s mention in the BFI book, and about various things you’d written.

Well, I don’t know. When I saw it, it was certainly a work in progress. It wasn’t finished, and it was announced as such.

You did say in the BFI book that from what you’d seen you thought it was almost too faithful to the book.

I think there was a sense of that. It’s a bit inverted commas, a bit in aspic. They’re treating these literary classics from another era as if they were heritage Dickens. Probably that’s a mistake — you’ve got to really get down and hack it to pieces and find something that really works in film terms, something that honours the spirit of the original book. You can’t just make the film of the book — it doesn’t work.

One thing I find interesting about how you write and how Ballard writes is the way identity is used in a fictional context: particularly in your earlier novels, and with Ballard in Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and, in a very different way, Crash.

None of them are him, and none of them are me. Crash is interesting because there’s this extreme character and he gives him his own name. It’s not him but it represents some avatar of him. When I met Claire Walsh, who he calls his girlfriend, he said here’s Claire, she’s the woman in Crash. It’s quite hard to move beyond that, it’s just a shocking idea. And yet it doesn’t actually mean this is the woman in Crash or this is JG Ballard. It’s just a device, a kind of honest device in a way, and also a convenience. That’s really what I’ve done. When you’re writing fiction, you’re creating a kind of theatre of the world and you push some element of yourself that’s convenient into it.

How much do you distinguish between your books which are sold as fiction and the ones that are sold as documentary or travel?

I don’t at all in terms of writing them, but in terms of presenting or marketing them. The ones that are called travel or whatever now have a kind of market. They can be sold, but the ones that are supposedly just straight fiction really don’t have much of a market any more. I would tend to shape anything I do to pretend to be document or travel even though it probably won’t be. Whereas I suppose most of what Jim has done appears to be fiction, but you could make a pretty good case for it being travel or art criticism or social criticism or polemic — all of these things can be absorbed within what seems to be a fiction. Kingdom Come could have been stripped down to be a series of savage essays or presentations about the motorway corridor with dramatised events happening in the middle.

“Crushed breasts on door handles”: Fiction as a branch of neurology (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard has said in the past that if he had his time again he’d be a painter. It seems now that he almost wants to be a sociologist.

Maybe not so much a painter as a very good art critic — not in an academic sense, but as someone with the language and the eye to break an image down. That takes in being a form of social critic or geographer, an essayist in the sense that someone like Paul Virilio is. There is an interface between the world of the catalogue and copywriting for Mercedes cars and the film script for a porn movie — all of these things intersect in something that he’s not embarrassed to cut together.

Talking about geography, you’re very much associated with the psychogeography movement…

Have you seen this book that’s just come out on psychogeography that tries to incorporate Ballard into that group? You make of him what you will, but I don’t think he’s in any way a psychogeographer, and I don’t think he’d use those terms himself at all. I think the aspect of him they’ve drawn on is the notion of a spatial geography, of particular lines and movements that you make in describing a city’s geometry, which he does with the multistorey carparks and bridges and motorways and all of that.

Which is maybe closer to Debord’s original ideas.

Much closer than to the London occult versions that have appeared.

There’s another quote from Ballard in the BFI book, on the Watford car parks: “I was quite interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics.”

Wonderful. He must have been one of the very first people to get interested in Watford.

The more recent books — Millennium People and Kingdom Come — are more explicitly concerned with London and its environs.

A kind of London. The London that Millennium People is concerned with, and the bits of the centre that appear in Kingdom Come, are so very strange, they’re completely surreal and unlike actual London. He talks about a character in Kingdom Come living in Chelsea and his address is given as Chelsea Harbour, which isn’t even in Chelsea — it’s not a harbour either. It’s an unplaced London, a generic catalogue London that he uses as a shorthand, but it’s not an inhabited city. It’s got no landmarks, nothing fixed, and I don’t think he wants it to be fixed. I think he wants it to be fluid, and he wants a sense of alienation, almost like being in this estranged movie at the edge of things.

Whereas your work is very site specific.

It starts with that, and then it pushes through into whatever’s on the other side of it. But it usually starts with something very very specific and concrete.

Millennium People, and the basic idea behind all this middle-class anomie, seems quite specifically London. I think he said he got the idea from his own daughters’ problems in finding affordable living and maintaining that lifestyle.

Funnily enough, after this I’m seeing someone who lives in the Barbican who’s writing a strange thesis. In it I saw something he quoted from Siegfried Kracauer, who was part of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, talking about how the revolt will come from the middle classes, from the anomie of the middle classes. In a way, that idea is exactly what Ballard’s talking about in Millennium People.

In the context of early 1930s Germany, it seems quite different.

It’s a very different thing, but now Ballard sees fascism arising out of the shopping mall and the airport satellite cities — a fascism based on an advocacy of sport; football hooligans — and blending into that, a very strange picture.

It’s interesting he’s writing that at a time when there’s been a resurgence of BNP support in the eastern fringes of London.

Geographically, in the 70s and early 80s, all of it was based in places like Brick Lane and Bethnal Green at the centre. Those people have now moved out into Essex, and it’s an Essex phenomenon. I don’t think in actuality you’d find any trace of it in those Heathrow satellite towns, but there’s no reason you can’t have it as a literary conceit.

Drowned Barbican. Photo by Tim Chapman.

Do you see Ballard as a London writer? Some of the early novels like The Drowned World were very specifically about the parts of west London where he used to work.

I don’t, no. Obviously London has been one of the locations of his imaginative world, but it just seems like it’s a convenient set. He could just as well have been writing about Lisbon or anywhere else he happened to find himself. He doesn’t thirst for the particulars of the city — he’s not interested in the dust and the detail. It is just a manipulated set, and I think it’s not to do with London but very much to do with being an observer on the edge of things, with the motorways that take you away somewhere else, and the anonymous tower blocks which are a kind of nowhere. He’s a great writer of these nowheres — he’s a defender of them.

With Kingdom Come, as you say, you were given this assignment to destroy Bluewater. Did you fail him? Does he have to do it himself?

I did my best — I gave it a good kicking in the book. Bluewater I thought was one of the most de-energising places on the face of the earth. It’s down in this chalk quarry, which makes it different from any other huge mall. Essentially it’s just a car park — the convenience is that it’s somewhere you can put your car. Shopping is completely separate from it. In fact I’ve never met anyone who could shop there at all — all they can do is walk round the galleries and use one of the many many coffee shops.

He’s never visited, obviously. The Bentall Centre has got these dancing bears which appear in Kingdom Come — I think that’s one of the few places he does go to on a regular basis. In a sense, the specifics of that do re-emerge in this fictional universe he’s created.

Is London: City of Disappearances an edited anthology?

No, it’s a bit more than that. What I did was to feel — in a very opposite way to Ballard, who couldn’t get this idea at all — that London at the moment is somewhere with endless erasures and reinventions and disappearances and amnesia. A lot of important cultural stories and figures were wiped out, buildings would disappear and something else is put up in their places. There’s a constantly shifting landscape, but it’s still very solid and tangible.

I wanted to do a book about that and, rather than me writing a novel or a document from A to Z, it would be much more interesting to invite a whole bunch of quite disparate people to send in their reports. They might take the form of fiction or a document. I had this wad of material and I divided it up partly topographically by zone and partly by theme, and at the end of each section there were gazetteer entries so it’s like a sort of mock guidebook. I tried to shape it like a novel so you could read it right the way through. Where I felt I needed to shift things I’d write a piece myself. I do feel at the end that it makes a new kind of novel, a sort of communal novel which I was editing more in the sense of editing a film rather than editing a book. The result isn’t something I could have prophesied, but it is a new form I think.

“Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard is in there more as a presence rather than with the piece he wrote himself, which is very short; it has actually appeared somewhere obscure once before, anyway. He describes the Westway so that in a sense the landscape around the Westway is what disappears. He’s just interested in this fragment that could have been the beginning of a new city but which was never followed up. It was just left, like the ruins of an Inca monument.

I think I know what you mean about disappearances — I lived down here, close to the old Gainsborough Studios in Hoxton. I went by this morning and didn’t recognise it.

It’s very smart and modernist flats. The whole of the canal has now undergone this Ballardian process whereby all the warehouses have been turned into loft living for city folk. It is actually a city, a water city, even though the canal is decaying into a drought-like condition, undergoing hideous transformation and being choked with weed, but along it is somewhere that is nowhere. People who live there don’t really know where they are, they just get on the canal bank on their bicycles and commute between the City and Docklands. It actually is a new city — I think it should be called Ballard eventually, or Neo-Shepperton.

“Bring Me the Head of Alfred Hitchcock”. Photo: Tim Chapman.

The flats themselves at the Gainsborough are fairly generic — you could see them in Manchester or Leeds — but at the middle of it there’s this huge semi-submerged head of Alfred Hitchcock.

Fantastic. Of course, he made his early silent films in those studios and grew up not far away. Maybe we should have a submerged head of Ballard out in the middle of this, to go with John Milton in the church down there.

Psychogeography is quite a buzzword now; Will Self’s got his column in the Independent…

Which to me has absolutely no connection whatsoever to whatever psychogeography was originally, or in its second incarnation. It was something very specific in Paris in the 50s and 60s — the Lettrists and Situationists had this politicised conceptual movement called Psychogeography. Then it was reinvented into London with people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association, who mixed those ideas with ideas of ley lines and Earth mysteries and cobbled it together as a provocation, and I took it on from that point. Now it’s just become this brand name for more or less anything that’s vaguely to do with walking or vaguely to do with the city. It’s a new form of tourism.

Is there any mileage left in it?

No, I don’t think so, other than if someone can brand it and promote it, which they are doing. Once these little pocket books appear with an easy readers’ guide which can take you back to Ballard or de Quincey or Debord or wherever you want to go, it’s a route map where everything’s laid out for you. It’s very strange. I’m not quite sure why that happened.

What other writers at the moment do you think are worth reading?

Unfortunately I tend to be reading older material that’s related to whatever projects I’m working on. As I’m working on a book about Hackney, where I’ve lived for so long without ever really thinking about it, I’m reading books by forgotten or half-forgotten Hackney writers like Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton, and Harold Pinter’s book The Dwarfs.

Are you working on anything else?

No, that’s all consuming. In the light of having done the Disappearances book, I’m working in a new way, which is going out and carrying out huge numbers of interview. I’m leading the people I’m interviewing to some extent into particular locations and particular figures who I think represent whatever Hackney was in this period before it started to disappear, which I think it will on the back of the Olympic thing. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. It’s going to be partly memoir, partly a series of edited transcripts, partly in essay form — it’ll take its own form as it goes on. After that, for the first time ever, I’ll have reached the end of a contract. I’ll have to stop and think what I can do next, if not back to bookdealing.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Are you planning anything more on the film side?

There’s one thing on the distant horizon. It’s called Beijing Orbital. When I was in Stavangar in Norway at one of these strange conferences, I saw a presentation by an assistant of Rem Koolhaas which was about the China TV building he’d built. He showed this virtual version of a city with seven orbital motorways just spreading out from the centre of this very traditional city into the desert, and the incredible pieces that were going up. I thought my god, it will be amazing to travel around these seven orbital motorways. Of course, that is relatively attractive to be made into a film. I think it will be reasonably possible to get a commission for that, which may also become a book. It will also involve me doing a lot of other things — circling round China as to what China means to different places in Europe, in the sense of Fu Manchu or people being drowned in Morecombe, all these stories, before I even embark on a journey to the place itself.

Have you thought of doing more comics? You worked with Dave McKean on Slow Chocolate Autopsy.

I’d like to. With Dave McKean it was just starting to get interesting. I was just beginning to understand what the form can do. Apart from the comic itself, he’s a terrific designer of a whole book — you’ve got his typography and the way he plays with images. It’d be great to do another one, but I don’t know if the opportunity will ever come up.

Any final thoughts?

I think we’ve covered the ground pretty thoroughly.

..:: LINKS
+ Iain Sinclair at Granta
+ Michael Moorcock
+ The Barbican
+ Bluewater
+ Bentall Centre
+ Chris Petit
+ Stewart Home
+ London Psychogeographical Association
+ RE/Search Publications

Previously in this series:
+ Child of the Diaspora: Bruce Sterling on JG Ballard
+ Seductive Whirlpools: The John Foxx Interview
+ No One Dances in Ballard: An Interview with Mike Ryan (RE/Search Publications)

I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record. I’ve never understood why, because my maternal grandparents were lifelong teachers of music, and my father as a choirboy once sang solo in Manchester Cathedral. But that gene seems to have skipped me.”
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- JG Ballard, Paris Review (1984)
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In 2005 V. Vale and RE/Search Publications launched the JG Ballard: Conversations book with a party featuring ‘Ballardian music’ from DJ Mike Ryan. Mike (who’s also the co-editor of RE/Search’s JG Ballard: Quotes volume) was channelling post punk and industrial music, dropping tunes by the likes of Brian Eno and David Byrne, Throbbing Gristle, Devo, Wire, Gang of Four and Cabaret Voltaire (see the appendix for the full playlist).

It was a timely selection, covering some of the musical and conceptual territory Simon Reynolds outlines in his recent book Rip It Up and Start Again. According to Reynolds, Ballard fused ‘amoral and clinically described avant-porn with Marshall McLuhan-like insights into the mass media…[probing] with forensic precision the grotesque (de)formations of desire stimulated by media overload and celebrity worship… Tapping into this Ballardian vision…Cabaret Voltaire pioneered what would eventually become an industrial music hallmark, the use of vocal snippets stolen from movies and TV’.

I’ve a tin ear, I’m afraid… If my girlfriend’s playing Mozart or Serge Gainsbourg’s lovely songs, I enjoy them tremendously. But on my own I’ve never felt the need — I don’t know why. It’s just some gene that skipped me.”
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– JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1996)
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But what could we have expected if RE/Search had asked Ballard himself to DJ? JGB’s Desert Island Disc selection for BBC Radio in 1992 provides some clues — he lists ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ as a fave rave, along with hit picks by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich (see the appendix). It’s safe to say that the vibe would have been completely different if DJ Jim was behind the decks. So, how exactly did we arrive at Cabaret Voltaire from the Andrews Sisters?

There’s no music in my work. The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns.”
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– JG Ballard, The Face (1987)
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Ballard may claim there’s no music in his work, but there certainly is an attitude, a postpunk, posthuman sensibility – a cool irony providing the backdrop for an ambiguous, detached protagonist, a cipher who may or may not be seduced by the unleashing of technology’s dark side.

Really, it’s technology – the media landscape; the urban sprawl; the self-regulating, self-sufficient cityscape – that’s the main character in much of Ballard’s work, so it’s not that hard to see the appeal of his world view to a bunch of callow, early 80s non-musicians living in the shadow of the urban wasteland with just their synthesizers and reel-to-reel tape decks for company.

I spoke to Mike Ryan about all this and more.
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– Simon Sellars
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Mike, your RE/Search set was publicised as ‘Ballardian music’. Do you want to have a go at defining that?

I’m going to dodge that question, because that was Vale’s label. It was a good idea. I think people saw ‘Ballardian music’ and they thought, ‘What the hell does that mean?’, regardless of whether or not they knew who Ballard is. Of course, I then got stuck with people coming up to me asking that very question, but it was a good way to pique people’s interest.

The idea of ‘Ballardian music’ is ironic or maybe an oxymoron. Ballard does not listen to music. My favourite anecdote about Ballard and music is that he doesn’t understand why anyone would listen to music when they are trying to have a conversation at the same time. He said that if he’s visiting someone and they put something on the stereo, he’ll just sit there and won’t talk until the song is over. I don’t think he’s trying to be funny, but I think that’s hilarious! It’s such an obvious, logical thing to do. If you’re going to listen to music, you should just listen to it and pay attention to it.

I don’t listen to music. It’s a blind spot.”
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– JG Ballard, Search & Destroy (1978)
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I like that Futurist statement of his, that the most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns. But where does that leave us with defining Ballardian music? You can use obvious referential songs like Joy Division’s ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, but is the music itself — that chattery guitar noise — Ballardian? You can use recordings of factories, highways, the Columbine massacre, corporate campuses — but then is that music?

Good point. Given that dilemma, how did your selection evolve?

I was just pulling songs that I thought were somehow loosely connected