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Ballardian presents Andrew Bishop’s previously unpublished interview with artist Brigid Marlin, who created for Ballard two of the more enduring symbols of his career: reproductions of lost paintings by Paul Delvaux,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.

The panel. From left to right: Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

“Hello Barcelona. I hope everyone there is enjoying the show, if I’m allowed to call it that. Vale is taking charge of everything, and I leave him to represent me.”

J.G. Ballard, from Vale’s opening video.

Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the Kosmopolis 08 literary festival, the panel was chaired by the Spanish critic Jordi Costa, the driving force behind the CCCB’s magnificent ‘JG Ballard – Autopsy of the new millennium‘ exhibition.

Jordi began with a Spanish-language introduction, and then Vale followed with a 15-minute video detailing his relationship and collaborations with Ballard. Jordi’s questions were in Spanish, and they were translated for us and the audience via earpiece. Our friend Tim Chapman was in the audience and he has kindly transcribed the discussion from his recording, although his Spanish was not sufficient to recall Jordi’s questions in English.

So here it is, two years late, but hopefully still of interest: ‘Myths of a Near Future’.

Jordi Costa: [a question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Bruce Sterling: I’m of the school who believes JG Ballard really is a science fiction writer, and I think he made very wise choices in the sciences he was interested in. He did in fact work on this engineering and technology publication for quite a while. He was famous for saying that the rubbish can of science was the gold mine of science fiction. That’s certainly something I learned a lot from. But while a lot of science fiction writers were interested in topics like space flight and robots and atomic power and nuclear physics, Ballard was always interested in medicine, and psychotherapy, and extremes of human behaviour, and hysteria, and panic, and weapons.

I think his chosen scientific topics had more literary value than the ones that were chosen by his colleagues in science fiction. That’s why his work has lasted, and that’s why he was able to capture something about the nature of society that lets us use terms like ‘Ballardian’. He just had a better literary understanding than most of his colleagues, a better set of tools, deeper insights that were better expressed, and that’s why he’s a major cultural figure while most science fiction writers are genre writers.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [another question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Simon Sellars: I think the adjective ‘Ballardian’ will become immortal, because I think that, to take what Bruce has said about the way Ballard turned from the traditional notion of science fiction from outer space to inner space, I think that was a very prophetic move. He saw the way technology was heading. There’s a famous phrase of his that he wanted to explore the next five minutes rather than the next 500 years. To me, that says that he saw that technology was creating a turning inward in a psychological sense. He saw the democratisation of technology, in terms of technology that – in a phrase of Bruce’s from the cyberpunk era – would stick to the skin rather than being something else. He would write about this stuff rather than the modernist aesthetic of rockets and outer space. I think that was a very prophetic move.

Also, he saw the way that we’re entering this globally homogeneous space, a sort of eventless present as he likes to call it, where you virtually can go to any country in the world. He talks about the areas around motorways and airports as a metaphor for this homogeneous space, and I think he saw the implications of where this is all heading. He also reacted against it, so I see his work as a resistance against this sort of corporate culture, and against the drive of, I guess, late capitalism to classify and categorise everything.

To me, the most important thing about Ballard is providing this space that he evokes, that preservation of inner spaces and autonomous zones. I’ve been reading a lot of mainstream newspaper articles recently, talking about the colonisation of inner space and the way we’re really crowded with information. The terms that were used and the arguments they were making were the things that Ballard was talking about in the ’60s. In that sense, I’d say there was this philosophy of resistance to a political culture. To me, that’s a sort of ideal for living.

Costa: [a question about future perceptions of Ballard]

Sterling: I think what you’re asking there is, like, is his work due to date because he’s a period figure. No, I don’t think so. Like the work of William Burroughs, there are aspects of Ballard’s work which will be very frightening and even astonishing to people in a hundred years. It’s true that some things that he foresaw have become everyday things among us, but there are aspects of Ballard’s work which are really intensely visionary and are never going to be seen in everyday experience, like say The Crystal World disaster novel, or something goes wrong with the structure of time and people are overwhelmed by this cosmic disaster. As a young man, that was one of the touchstones of my literary experience – it’s by no means a realist novel, but it had a really powerful, emotional, liberating effect on me as a teenager, just because it was showing me the scope of things that it’s possible to imagine.

Ballard has a tremendous power of imagination which the passage of time is not going to be able to dim. There are topics of his which will become out-dated, like Marilyn Monroe or John F Kennedy that are going to be period figures. In a way he’s a lot like Kafka – even though Kafka writes about the experience of the 1930s, when we say ‘Kafkaesque’, we know what that means, that no real bureaucracy will be as ideally horrible as a Kafka bureaucracy, no disaster (although we have plenty) can ever be as ecstatic and total as a Ballard disaster.

Costa: [a question about the Ballardian implications of the global financial crisis]

V. Vale: You know, Ballard is a very wise man in his judgement, and I’m thinking that of course when he starts taking in the input of information about the financial crisis, what is he thinking about. He’s not really thinking about himself, he’s thinking about the welfare of his children and grandchildren, I think. Also, he knows who his audience is. I’m also a parent. This may sound strange, but he actually heartened me with his response. He more or less said to me, regarding the current state of financial chaos, downturn, whatever you call it – he said you know, I remain optimistic. I was really happy about that, regardless of whether there’s any foundation or not.

I think it is important to preserve a sense of optimism and hope. In many situations, I think, one can only hope. There certainly isn’t any point in just becoming very depressed, because that takes away your power, especially the power of your imagination which Ballard himself has demonstrated and incarnated in his life. He walks down the street and every time he does, it might be the same street but the street is transformed in his imagination. This is something we can all do – we don’t have to take reality at face value. There has to be another dimension of inner space and inner strength we can tap, and that’s got to be built up in each one of us by a sustained exercise – daily, hourly, minutely – of the imagination. Please, never take anything at face value, you never accept any of these mass media notions of reality.

Sellars: I think that’s true, and that’s why Ballard’s books are optimistic. It’s a misreading when people say they’re a negative vision of the world – you hear that so often about Ballard’s work. But for the reasons you say, the characters are trying to make sense of chaos, and that transforms the world.

Sterling: I completely agree. He is a fantasist, he’s not a realist writer. I find his work attractive because of the sense of liberation and inspiration and release that he gives me. Really, as a young man of imaginative bent, when I was reading these early books of Ballard in the 1960s, I was never depressed or upset by them for a moment. To me, they were one torrent of good news. They were like sunlight through a [brick?] wall in the existence I had as a young teen in a small Texan industrial town.

This is someone who really is a grand master of the imagination. Yes, he does have black humour, and yes he very much enjoys pulling the legs of the bourgeoisie, he likes to make harsh jokes at the expense of power figures, and he’s really a clinician of the psychopathology of everyday life. There are a lot of things that people do in our society which are irrational and bad for us. He had a great deal of personal experience of that, and there are aspects of his own experience which are universal.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

He’s not a tremendously popular figure, he’s not the author of Harry Potter, but he’s by no means a minor figure. Certainly, in the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation – cyberpunks and humanists and so forth – this was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see that the peak of achievement that he had reached. It was not like the slough of despond, that’s just a rhetorical tactic.

To call Ballard depressing, it’s like a Christian fundamentalist who says ‘If I didn’t believe Jesus was watching me, I’d kill myself’ who then argues that therefore you must be suicidal because you don’t have Jesus to help you make breakfast. You’re not suicidal if you understand JG Ballard. On the contrary, this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

Many science fiction writers have – even [Homer?] nods, it’s common for a writer to do something unworthy of himself and you have to overlook that. In Ballard’s case, I can’t think of a single work. Even his minor work is very polished, very assured – he’s never hasty, he’s a consummate professional, he’s really in charge of every sentence on the page. It’s really no accident that he’s being honoured at this event. I must say that I am enjoying the show, as he urged me to do, it’s a lot of fun to see this happen.

Vale: I think another thing about Ballard is, during my 32 years in publishing I’ve pretty much concentrated on the interview or the conversation format for a very simple reason. You don’t give the questions in advance, and you just use your intuition to listen carefully and observe how the author responds in real-time to something completely unexpected and how they improvise answer. You’re not even improvising if you’re JG Ballard, this is just coming out of you without pause.

Really, the amount of editing I’ve had to do on all the people I’ve recorded and transcribed, the amount of editing was absolutely the least I’ve ever had to do with JG Ballard and, of course, William S Burroughs. Their conversations are practically extensions of their writing. I wish we could all be like that.

Sellars: Vale, can I ask did you get the sense through the interviews that Ballard was testing ideas that he would later come back to in his writing?

Vale: I don’t think he tests, I really think there’s almost a perfect marriage in his soul between – as soon as he starts talking and thinking and expressing himself, it’s beyond some rational process level. It’s just coming out, he has such an incredibly detailed and complete philosophy, such an evolved vision of the universe, unlike most of us he doesn’t have to censor himself or choose his words carefully or any of that, it just comes out. One reason I like him so much is because you really think that he’s considering your feelings, you really think that unlike 99 per cent of writers out there, he just tells the truth. I can’t explain it any other way. I mean, how rare is that?

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Well, I wouldn’t call Crash a jolly book by any means. It’s a very sinister work which is well informed by a deep understanding of human psychopathology. In some ways, it’s like expecting a medical textbook to be optimistic. If you read a medical textbook, it’s usually a long list of terrible things that can go wrong with people. By the time you reach the end of a medical textbook, you’re looking at yourself for symptoms – is it my liver, could it be my eyeballs?

I don’t think that work in itself is a happy work, but when you put it down the sense of escaping that world gives you a strange uplifted feeling. It’s like being subjected to a really violent massage, something on the edge of pain, and when it stops you have this sense of achievement and joy. It’s like, what’s the worst thing that can happen to me during the rest of my life? Will I be involved in a sexual cult involving crashed automobiles? Probably not, you know, and that’s another reason to go on.

Vale: A writer often takes you – if you have an idea or a fantasy, I think you ought to take it to the utmost limit. It’s only writing, it’s not real life. In writing, you can kill people, you can do sexual things that you might not do in real life, but it’s just writing, it’s just words on paper. I think you have a duty to yourself to carry an obsession, any obsession is valid, to its utmost extension in writing, on paper, in the realm of the imagination – I’m not saying to do any of that in real life.

Ballard and Vale, in a still from Vale’s opening video. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: I really don’t think that’s the ultimate extension of this particular problem. There are probably people in Nascar who are worse off than the characters in that. There are probably fans of monster racers in the United States who are more psychopathological than the characters in Crash.

To me, the thing that I find really useful about that book is that most science fiction writers, if you asked them to write science fiction about cars, would write about, say, a flying car or a car that’s also a submarine. They would not write about an intense psychosexual fixation with cars, or the car as another method of being, or people who are so dependent on cars they can’t get through a day without cars. They certainly would not illuminate the truth about cars, which is they kill more of us than wars.

There’s probably not a person in this audience who hasn’t had a loved one injured or maimed or killed in a car. That’s just the truth about cars, but we are very rarely shown that truth. Certainly not by the car industry. Sometimes there will be a mention of car safety in a car commercial, like your child is safe in the back seat, but you will never see a major car company of any description, from Fiat to Toyota or General Motors, apologising to the people who die in their vehicles, any more than you would see an armaments manufacturer saying, you know, I’m sorry people were killed by handguns. But it’s true. It’s not even like sort of true, it’s kind of like a vast open scandal in our society that so many of us are murdered, I mean just slaughtered, by cars.

Sellars: But it’s very ambiguous with Ballard, isn’t it, because he’s also aware of the seductive nature of cars and technology and speed.

Sterling: Well, we love our cars. But there’s something wrong with a society that is so in love with something so destructive. I don’t even know if it is wrong, it’s a statement about the nature of mankind that we love that which destroys us. We’re more interested in poisonous snakes than we are in rabbits, we’re fascinated by things with the potential for menace, we find them arousing and exciting. The same goes for political leaders. Really, someone who promises to simply pave our streets and look after our children will be immediately thrown aside for a person who promises us blood and sweat and tears and toil and death and a sense of exultation. Ballard talks about this openly many times, about the attractive psychopathology of cult leaders. They have command over us because they can tap into our urge to harm ourselves, and we do.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's methods]

Vale: Well, there’s a huge component of theatre in everyone’s life. Ballard was the first that I read to point out how the invention and widespread adoption of the cellphone has led to almost everyone becoming a sort of actor. As they talk on their cellphones in public, they’re acting a lot of the time, with their gestures, and it is kind of shocking to me how cellphone users will talk about the most intimate details of their lives while other people can overhear them.

The thing is, what a book can do, it can, like, let you know in a pretty universalising way that you’re not alone in any of your sexual fantasies or whatever, no matter how extreme you might have thought them. Your participation, even if just in your imagination, with these theatrical fantasies, you’re just not alone. I suppose it’s a form of justification to make your life easier for you. We do look to writers, I think, for help in navigating very perplexing times such as now when we have so many options for everything in our lives. What are some core values which can last when we’re assaulted with so many contradictory media images, and they’re usually either sexual or violent in nature, how do you sustain some kind of inner compass or barometer so we can survive all this?

Left: Bruce Sterling. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: Some of Ballard’s greatest inspirations were surrealists in the 30s and pop artists in the 60s, and they were both very big on the power of the unconscious and the libido and urges which did not surface within consciousness. There was an ideal there that if you could speak to these urges directly and break the code of bourgeois behaviour and liberate something deep.

Ballard is not a sex writer in the way that say Henry Miller was a sex writer, I don’t really think that’s one of his major interests. He mentions it, he’s kind of deploying it in the way that Max Ernst might put a nude in a collage, but there aren’t really long intimate sex scenes in Ballard novels, he’s not really that interested in what happens between individuals. It’s more like his lasting interest in celebrity worship, which is something that shows up in his work all the time. It’s like some kind of very intense social, emotional, sticky and vaguely unhealthy allegiance between people’s unmet emotional needs and a figure like Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe or Princess Di. It’s somebody you’re never going to actually have sex with, but it’s somebody who’s going to come up in your erotic imaginations sort of like the Loch Ness Monster.
That’s the kind of thing that Ballard finds as a totem and a touchstone. He’s kind of deploying these things against us – he wants us to disrupt our sleep with these images, he’s not trying like Miller to get to the core of the erotic impulse, that’s not really his major line of work.

Sellars: He also foresaw that whole anti-celebrity thing, that celebrities now don’t have the lustre or starpower they used to. Those surgical fictions with Princess Margaret and Mae West where it’s cutting up these celebrities in a very clinical medical way, it’s very prophetic of the end of that particular paradigm.

Sterling: I’ve been saying Paris Hilton is a very Ballardian figure. Here you have somebody whose major reason for being a celebrity is this kind of unsought sexual transgression which was blown up through the media. It’s not really like that fantastic an act of sex that Paris Hilton has, it’s not like she’s a sexual athlete of some kind, it’s merely that she’s a minor celebrity who became a major celebrity and was able to work it, to industrialise that and build upon it with the perfume and the record and clothing line and the Los Angeles celebrity life, really just construct a life out of elements of 1960s transgression.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sellars: It’s a kind of system of circular time that Ballard uses, that sort of eventless present that’s always a symbol of oppression in Ballard’s work. He reuses events from history and his own personal history and re-inhabits them and re-interprets them throughout his whole career, and I think that’s a very liberating force as well. It becomes a sort of parallel history in a sense, something that runs counter to the main narrative.

Sterling: I think Ballard knows a great deal about the work of the surrealists in the 20s and 30s. So much so, that he is almost a surrealist writer. He quite frequently chose surrealist canvases for his own work, and they make a lot of sense. I think he also has a deep knowledge of modernist design and urbanism and architecture. He’s very aware of the roots of that in the 20s and 30s and how it developed, and the successes of the modernist programme and the failures of modernism, and the oncoming and rush of postmodernism. To be a good futurist, you need some kind of roots in the past. I think those are his roots, and those are the things he was looking at when he was quite young and he really is a scholar in those fields, and I think that has helped him a lot in his prognostications.

Left: Simon Sellars. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's influence on visual art]

Sellars: I think it’s like Bruce and Vale have said, that Ballard has a surrealist background, has a very visual mindset. I think that aside from using that to explore his ideas of the subconscious and inner space, I think that in the 60s he saw how advertising was becoming basic in how we were shifting towards a visual culture. He has sort of encoded this into his writing. As we’re starting to see this happen, I think that aspect of his work is becoming more and more influential and people are really picking up on that.

He is a visual person to the extent that he’s created his own collages, he’s starred in his own film, and I think he was working on a theatre play in the 60s, so he was really interested in breaking the frame of his fiction to create something that was in a sense a prototype for a multi-media society, and he was doing that a long time ago. If you look at that visual work that Ballard did today, the collages, they’re still very strong graphic works that really re-use the tricks of advertising against itself. When I started up the website, that’s an aspect that really interested me a lot, and we started to find a lot of examples of people who were really quite influenced by that. We’re still continuing to find a lot of people who are really influenced by that aspect.

Sterling: I think he has a great friendliness for the artist. Like his short story collection Vermilion Sands is set in a future art colony and he takes artistic work seriously. I think artists and musicians respond to that. When they find a novelist who thinks that painters are important, they think well of him. Whereas most science fiction writers are much more in love with scientists than they are with artists, Ballard is the kind of guy who would actually go hang out with pop artists and go to their openings and befriend them and be kind to them and chat things over with them and learn with them and trade things with them. He was never a philistine, he’s actually quite sophisticated in that way, and still has the dapper look of a ’60s pop artist gentleman in his neat little kitted-out white suit and snappy white fedora. He’s won the friendship of people in other lines of work.

Vale: He has constructed a whole universe and whole world, and the world always needs a soundtrack. What would this be – it would not be something mainstream so much as something unusual. Grace Jones at one end and you could have Joy Division at the other, and in the middle there’s the Teddy Bears Picnic. The thing is, the spectrum of music is – I have to confess I’m going to reveal a small secret, I hope she doesn’t mind, but Claire Walsh [Ballard's partner] did tell me that she suggested one of the numbers on the [Desert Island Discs] list, one of the 10 pieces on the list was actually suggested by Claire Walsh as a sort of prank. They certainly puzzled me, those two classical pieces, which is where it’s at to me. You always want to have an aspect of mystery about everything you do, even if it’s by chance that something happens. I think Ballard, again as a surrealist, is very open to the miracle of a chance encounter or a chance suggestion. He is open to that, in the same way the surrealists were.

Sterling: He’s someone who doesn’t just facilely admire Dali or Ernst, he’s actually read Dali and frequently quotes Dali. I think he probably learned quite a lot from Andre Breton. Similarly, I read Andre Breton because I thought Ballard took him seriously. Many people say Breton was a rather downbeat figure as well, but that was certainly not what occurred to people in Breton’s immediate circle. They all called him the torch who lights our steps, they considered him an organising and enlightening figure, not someone who was on the fringe of society but someone who was leading them into sunlit uplands.

I think that comes across very strongly in his work, he’s not really interested in the arts, he’s interested in how artists think and how they approach reality, and that’s what gives him a well-rounded sensibility. There are a lot of pop writers and comicbook writers and so forth who are very into pop music, and heaven knows cyberpunks love rock and roll, but to have a whole wider sensibility that really appeals to a great many people in many different lines of creative work, it’s more like surrealism which is almost a philosophy, a way of life, rather than a painting, a poetry, a form of sculpture, a form of music, that’s a way of being.

Left: V. Vale. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Vale: I agree with that. Surrealism is definitely a way of life, a philosophy, a consciousness with historical art roots that’s something living, the potential is far from extinguished. You just have to read the hundreds of books, that’s a start. Most people – they didn’t get taught surrealism in my art history class. I hope things have advanced since then.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Stunned, the audience stares at one another…

Audience question: [about preventing horrible futures]

Sellars: Only if we read more Ballard books, it’s the only way…

Sterling: I really think probably the critical moment in Ballard’s literary life was the two years he spent in Canada, when he was in the Royal Air Force in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He described his period at this air force base as being paralysingly boring, and the only outlet he found there were copies of these American pulp science fiction magazines which by some strange accident had ended up on this military base. You have to imagine this young very asocial man who’s basically flunked out of medical school and joined the military, and having lived in China is now in an icy camp somewhere in Canada reading American science fiction for a lack of any other alternative. From that experience which is frankly rooted in boredom we get the greatest literary artist of the science fiction genre, and probably the most visionary science fiction writer of the 20th century. Boredom can be the seed of great things.

Vale: Well, the imagination is obviously the antidote to any boredom, and it’s always there ready to be deployed. Imagination and brains are our secret resource which makes everyone in the audience an artist, because in your dreams you’re a complete film director, you’re the scriptwriter, you’re the set designer, you’re the make-up person, you create everything and it’s all happening when you dream every night. It’s really kind of a miracle.

Audience question: [about film adaptations]

Sterling: I know he enjoyed appearing as an extra in his own film. In Empire of the Sun, there’s a period where Ballard appears in the movie as an older figure. He’s always lived in Shepperton which is quite close to the Shepperton film studios which in Britain are famous for the films that are made and the sets that are made. But I don’t think he’s either disturbed or enthusiastic about it, I think he’s had a very mature response to his unsought cinematic success. I don’t think he was either disappointed or shocked or chagrined. He did the wise thing by letting Hollywood do what it wanted.

Costa: [closing comments]

[applause]

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ ‘Unblinking, clinical’: From Ballard to cyberpunk
+ Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
+ Kosmopolis 08: Switching stations
+ Negative acoustic space: Ballardian sound art
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium: Press Release
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona
+ ‘Child of the diaspora’: Sterling on Ballard

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

by Mike Holliday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballard in interview, 2006.[7]

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

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

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

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[11]

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

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

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

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

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

Ballard in interview, 1997.[19]

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

Utama shopping centre, Malaysia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballard in interview, 2006.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[53]

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

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

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

Ballard in interview, 1997.[56]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

Slip-case designed by David Pelham for a Penguin boxed set of four 1974 Ballard reprints.

by James Pardey

The idea that the world and everything in it is made from the four ‘elements’ of earth, air, fire and water endured among philosophers from antiquity to the Renaissance. All things, they said, were a combination of these four building blocks, and whether something was one thing or another – a rock, say, or a leaf – depended only on the relative amounts of each element in it. The idea was not so naïve as it seems, for when wood burned it was seen to release fire, air and water, as steam, until only earth remained as ashes, and in one sense the philosophers were not so very wide of the mark, since nowadays these ‘elements’ are known as solid, liquid, gas and energy.

It has often been said that J G Ballard’s quartet of disaster novels published in 1962–66 draws on these four classical elements for the natural catastrophes that destroy civilization in each of the books. In The Wind From Nowhere a global super-hurricane (air) reaches speeds of several hundred miles an hour, toppling trees, reducing cities to rubble, and darkening the skies with debris and topsoil. In The Drowned World rising sea levels (water) have flooded most of the Earth’s populated areas, and London lies submerged beneath steaming lagoons and primeval swamps that are ringed by jungle and overrun with reptiles. The Drought presents a future where rain is a thing of the past and the Sun (fire) has dried up the lakes and river beds, creating a parched landscape of ghost towns and burning cities. And in The Crystal World a bizarre transmutation of matter (earth) is turning everything into a coruscating mineral realm where plants, animals and people are mutating into sculptures of glass and quartz.

This analogy is almost always noted without further comment, although in fact it may be taken further. For just as Plato and Aristotle had posited the existence of a mysterious and immaterial fifth element, or quintessence, that suffuses all things, so something similar pervades much of Ballard’s early fiction, which, in addition to the four novels, includes two collections of short stories, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare in 1963 and The Terminal Beach in 1964. So what in a Ballardian context is this quintessential element?

Ballard himself pre-empted the question in a guest editorial that he wrote for the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1962. In it he argued that it was time for sf to turn its back on outer space and its standard paraphernalia of rockets, ray guns and aliens, and strike out in a new direction that, by analogy with outer space, had become known as inner space. This was not a reference to the hollow earth stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs as Brian Aldiss later quipped[1]. The term had previously been used in 1953 by the English novelist J B Priestley whose essay, They Come From Inner Space[2], presented a critique of sf as he saw it at the time. Priestley argued that the move into outer space was a move ‘in the wrong direction’ and maintained that sf should instead be ‘moving inward’ to explore ‘the hidden life of the psyche’. He singled out the American writer Ray Bradbury as a pioneer of inner space[3] and added that although Bradbury used traditional sf motifs such as spaceships and Martians, he did so in order to ‘show us what is really happening in men’s minds’. Priestley held that men are not as rational as they like to think they are, but are also driven by the desires, urges and irrational instincts of the subconscious mind. For Priestley, the idea that people’s actions are dictated solely by their conscious selves was akin to the equally fallacious assumption that ‘what can be seen of an iceberg is all there is of it’.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

Priestley saw the flying saucer legend and sf’s other trademark tropes as a product of society’s collective unconscious. Rocket ships, he wrote, ‘no longer represent man’s triumphant progress’ but instead have come to symbolize his attempts ‘to escape from himself’. Likewise for aliens, which as metaphors for humanity’s ‘deep feelings of anxiety, fear, and guilt’ can be traced back to the scientific romances of the nineteenth century[4]. So inner space is not a physical space at all but a psychological one. It is the dimensionless world of the subconscious mind or, as Priestley called it, the Unconscious.

Ballard’s editorial, Which Way to Inner Space? [5], did not mention Priestley’s essay but may nonetheless be regarded as a sequel to it, for he took up where Priestley left off, describing Bradbury as ‘a poet’ and reiterating that ‘it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored’. But Ballard did more than merely echo Priestley. He also argued that for sf to avoid falling by the wayside it must discover new routes to inner space that draw on more abstract, speculative and experimental techniques like those used in other media such as modern art. As such, he was not just offering a commentary on the state of sf, he was issuing a manifesto that would need to be adopted if the genre was to secure its place as ‘the literature of tomorrow’.

Ballard ended his editorial with an anecdote about Salvador Dalí delivering a lecture in a diving suit. When asked how deep he proposed to descend, the artist had announced, ‘To the Unconscious!’ and Ballard’s editorial was a unilateral declaration of his intent to follow Dalí there[6]. That he was true to his word may be seen in the novels and many of the short stories that followed, though by the time his editorial appeared he had already made a few forays into inner space with stories such as ‘The Waiting Grounds’, ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Overloaded Man’. A notable exception is his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, which was also written before his New Worlds editorial but was structured as a conventional action adventure. Ballard later disowned it and referred instead to The Drowned World as his first novel, and it is here that inner space comes to the fore as a quintessential force in his fiction.

The Drowned World is a lushly atmospheric novel that takes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the lagoons and jungles of post-diluvian London, where half-submerged hotels and office blocks rise out of the water, and cars sit rusting in the streets sixty feet below the water’s surface. Reptiles now dominate the submerged city and the jungle teems with an even greater profusion of wildlife. Alligators patrol the lagoons and iguanas bask three deep in the upper windows of department stores. With humans gone, the flora and fauna are reverting to that of the Triassic period some 250 million years earlier.

Cover painting: The Palace of Windowed Rocks by Yves Tanguy. Penguin Books, 1965 paperback edition.

Amidst this febrile environment, Dr Robert Kerans and several other members of a survey team begin to experience strange dreams, like distant echoes of their surroundings, prompting one of them to ask, ‘Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons’. From this the realisation follows that the dreams are being triggered by primitive organic memories within their collective unconscious. These ‘neuronic’ memories were encoded in the nervous systems of man’s earliest ancestors during the original Triassic period and have endured at a cellular level through the ensuing epochs of human evolution. But now, in response to the emergence of a new Triassic age, these dormant memories are finally resurfacing, leading the earlier questioner to conclude that ‘we really remember these swamps and lagoons’.

As these dreams and memories take hold so those affected become increasingly introverted, and when the survey team departs these few individuals remain behind. Left alone, they avoid each other and withdraw into their own internal worlds, accepting that ‘their only true meeting-ground would be in their dreams’. Thus they regress through ‘archaeopsychic time’ and ‘a succession of ever stranger landscapes’ towards the prehistoric past of their cellular evolution, until ‘the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable’.

This exploration of inner space continues in The Drought, a novel that is thematically similar to The Drowned World and may even be seen as a reworking of it with a new catastrophe, a change of location and other nominal differences. For example, Dr Robert Kerans is now Dr Charles Ransom, and the deluge has become a drought that has scorched the earth and turned the landscape into a cracked desert of dead trees, long- gone lakes and empty rivers. Dust chokes the air, as do clouds of ash and smoke from the burning towns and cities whose populations have departed in a mass exodus to the coast. Here they eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in makeshift settlements around the water desalination plants that the government has set up.

But beneath this superficial similarity there is a deeper divergence, for while The Drowned World describes the internal landscapes of Kerans and his colleagues, The Drought takes a more oblique approach as Ballard turns his attention outwards to focus instead on the external landscape and the wreckage that is strewn across it. This change of perspective is echoed by the reader, who switches from an observer of The Drowned World to a participant in The Drought. As an observer, the reader is psychologically detached from Kerans and reads his dispatches from inner space like those of a Reuters correspondent. Ransom, however, has less to say about his state of mind in The Drought and is more like a tour guide, taking the reader with him during his journey to the coast, his ten years of ‘dune limbo’ and his eventual return inland to the ruins of the town in which he once lived. It is a desolate journey, fraught with danger, through an alien environment ravaged by destruction and decay. Abandoned vehicles clutter the highways, boats sit high and dry on the sun-baked river beds, and everything that was once familiar is now being destroyed. This in itself is bad enough but in fact it merely sets the scene, for the novel’s core concern is existential and its theme is the uncertainty of physical and psychological survival. Death lurks everywhere, and prowls the landscape in the form of wild animals that were once caged in zoos, while psychosis threatens in the unpredictability of others – men whose minds are disintegrating like the world around them. As such, The Drought does not present a single, Ballardian version of inner space like the neuronic memories and archaeopsychic time of The Drowned World. Instead it sends its readers there, for it is their responses to this nightmarish world that the novel elicits, their feelings of alienation and vulnerability that it evokes, and their inner spaces that it explores. Like The Drowned World, The Drought is a psychic odyssey, but one that must now be undertaken by the reader.

Having examined inner space in terms of both its internal and external landscapes, Ballard adopted an altogether different approach in his next novel. The Crystal World is an extended version of ‘The Illuminated Man’ which had appeared in his second collection of short stories, The Terminal Beach. In the story a man named James B— travels to the Florida Everglades to investigate reports of a bizarre phenomenon that is turning the region and everything in it to crystal. Similar outbreaks have been reported in the Pripet Marshes of Byelorussia and the Matarre region of Madagascar, and it is the Matarre to which Dr Edward Sanders travels in The Crystal World, although by then Ballard had relocated the Matarre into Cameroon in a move that recalls the story’s famous precedessor, as Sanders journeys upriver through the steaming jungles of West Africa towards a new Heart of Darkness.

Cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst. Panther Books paperback edition, 1968.

The crystallization process is similar to a cancer and seemingly unstoppable. As the ground underfoot and the slow-moving waters of the river begin to vitrify, so too do the flora and fauna. Like a game of animal, vegetable or mineral with only one outcome, everything succumbs and nothing is immune. This strange metamorphosis is in some way connected to reports by astronomers that distant galaxies are ‘doubling’ – a phenomenon that is dubbed the Hubble Effect and attributed to the mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter. These subatomic events are cancelling out the equivalent temporal components of time and anti-time, thereby ‘subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time’ and depleting ‘the time-store available to the materials of our own solar system’. So time is quite literally running out, and as it does the plants, animals and people in each affected area change into scintillating new forms that freeze them in ‘a landscape without time’.

This emphasis on time is a recurring theme in Ballard’s fiction. He had given notice of it in his New Worlds editorial, where he cited time as ‘one of the perspectives of the personality’ and it is this subjective sense of time that shapes The Drowned World, as archaeopsychic time, neuronic time and a ‘descent into deep time’. It is present in The Drought to a lesser extent, but in The Crystal World it again takes centre stage, transforming the external landscape as vividly as it does the dreamscapes of Kerans & Co. in post-apocalyptic London.

The Crystal World is also an intensely visual novel and the inspiration for it is easy to establish. For in 1966, the year that the novel was first published, Ballard wrote an article for New Worlds titled The Coming of the Unconscious[7] in which he equated ‘the images of surrealism’ with ‘the iconography of inner space’. It was a view he reiterated in his 2008 autobiography, Miracles of Life, describing inner space as, among other things, ‘the psychological space apparent in surrealist painting’[8]. But this belief that surrealism offers a window onto inner space was not confined to two statements made more than forty years apart. His writing repeatedly references artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy[9], and their paintings feature frequently in his fiction. Notable examples include a cameo for The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, in ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ and an appearance by The Echo, Delvaux’s time-lapse painting of a ‘triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city’ in ‘The Day Of Forever’[10]. Likewise ‘The Overloaded Man’, which extends the images of inner space to the neo-plastic compositions of Piet Mondrian. These provide a powerful metaphor for the mental breakdown suffered by the story’s protagonist as ‘object by object, he began to switch off the world around him. The houses opposite went first. The white masses of the roofs and balconies he resolved quickly into flat rectangles, the lines of windows into small squares of colour like the grids in a Mondrian abstract’[11].

As in his short stories, so in his novels. The Drowned World features a Delvaux painting ‘in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bone-like landscape’ while on another wall ‘one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious’. Later in the novel Kerans reflects on how the jungle around him increasingly resembles the one in Ernst’s painting, while the dreams that he and his colleagues are experiencing are ‘the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting’. With Ernst and Delvaux[12] featuring prominently in The Drowned World, the use of a Tanguy painting, The Palace of Windowed Rocks, on the cover of the paperback edition published by Penguin Books in 1965 might have seemed off-key were it not for The Drought which also appeared that year. Two of the novel’s chapters, Multiplication of the Arcs and Jours de Lenteur, take their titles from paintings by Tanguy, and like The Drowned World there is a feeling that the external and painted landscapes are converging, as Ransom sees in his surroundings the ‘drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time’ in Jours de Lenteur.

Given these and other references to art and artists, their absence from The Crystal World may at first seem surprising. Readers who have come to expect such references may see in the novel’s two main themes a tacit connection between ‘the petrified forest’ and Ernst’s painting of the same name, or an allusion to Magritte’s Time Transfixed in the depiction of a world without time, but the novel makes no mention of these or any other paintings and the reason for this soon becomes apparent. Ballard excluded the art of others because its presence would have obscured the bigger picture that he was creating, for if a picture paints a thousand words then in The Crystal World it is the other way round and greatly magnified. The novel reads like a journey through a surrealist canvas, and its resemblance to one in particular seems more than coincidental. In The Coming of the Unconscious Ballard had singled out Max Ernst’s painting, The Eye of Silence, as one of ‘the key documents of surrealism’ with ‘a direct bearing on the speculative fiction of the immediate future’. For Ballard, the painting’s ‘frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp’ have ‘the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are – the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness’. With this in mind it is hard to ignore the resemblance of Ernst’s jewelled ceramic structures and bright green biomorphic forms to Ballard’s crystalline forest ‘loaded with deliquescing jewels’ and living statues ‘carved from jade and quartz’. The painting is suffused with a timeless, dream-like quality that is shared by Ballard’s novel as the forest and everything in it slowly solidifies. This convergence of painted and written landscapes recalls those in The Drowned World and The Drought, though unlike these two novels it is not made explicit. As time is removed from The Crystal World it becomes increasingly surreal, until finally all movement ceases and like Ernst’s painting there is silence. If, as Ballard believed, the painting is a window onto inner space then Sanders in the novel climbs through it, pulling aside a curtain of tinkling lianas and shimmering glass foliage to penetrate deep into the heart of the petrified forest. He eventually re-emerges, but at the end of the novel he is seen heading back upriver, and it is tempting to imagine what he might discover on his return. For somewhere, glimpsed perhaps through a gap in the trees, there is surely a remote clearing surrounded by organic rocks and vitrified vegetation. It is the source of the outbreak, and it looks just like The Eye of Silence.

Given this similarity between Ernst’s painting and The Crystal World it was no surprise that when the novel was first published it was The Eye of Silence that filled the dust jacket, as it did the front, back and spine of the paperback edition published by Panther Books two years later in 1968. It was an improvement over the lurid sf imagery used on other covers[13] though it was not without precedent. The idea had first been introduced in 1963 when Penguin Books launched a new sf series. Penguin’s then art director, Germano Facetti, had noticed a similar connection between The Eye of Silence and A Case of Conscience by the American writer James Blish and used a detail from the painting on the book’s front cover. This use of twentieth-century art became a defining feature of the Penguin sf series and, in addition to the pairing of Ballard and Tanguy mentioned earlier, Facetti studiously matched Ray Bradbury’s The Day it Rained Forever with Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Trap, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity with Tanguy’s The Doubter, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s Fifth Planet with Magritte’s The Flavour of Tears and so on, extending the idea to other artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Picasso[14].

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

For Ballard the images of surrealism served a more specific purpose as one of many possible routes to inner space. Such images informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre. That was inner space in its wider, quintessentially Ballardian form and to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself. The books were sold individually or as a boxed set in a slip-case that Pelham also designed, and it is these iconic images that have become most strongly associated with Ballard’s fiction.

So why is this? The answer is three parts English to one part French. First, Pelham was already familiar with Ballard’s work and a great admirer of it, being drawn to what he later described as its ‘apocalyptic imagery’ and ‘depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay’[15]. Second, it no doubt helped that Ballard and Pelham were friends, having been introduced some years earlier by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. The three men met regularly at Ballard’s home in Shepperton, a suburban town south-west of London near to Heathrow Airport and the M25 motorway so, third, Pelham was able to discuss his ideas for these new covers with the author himself. Add to this Pelham’s fourth ingredient – a generous amount of je ne sais quoi – and the results were more than merely eye-catching.

Pelham’s covers featured a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth as the backdrop for an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly[16], these machines depict ‘the debris of our society’. Pelham, the article explained, ‘finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now’. But the paradox of Pelham’s artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half buried or submerged, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. They are icons, but only of man’s arrogance.

An American WWII bomber lies abandoned and half-buried by the shifting sands on Pelham’s slip-case[17] while its payload – a sister to the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and the mother of all UXBs – rests nose down in the sand flats of The Terminal Beach. The bomb’s tail-box tilts skywards like the flower of a strange fruit whose hard shell hides an exotic interior. In the belly of the bomb are the seeds of mass destruction, two stones of a ripening plutonium core waiting for the conditions that will trigger them to germinate. But unapproachable and unknowable the bomb is quantum uncertainty writ large; it is Schrödinger’s cat inside Pandora’s box. This atom bomb sitting in the sand is as surreal as Dalí’s melting clocks or Einstein’s theory of relativity, for all are part of the same chain reaction. As mankind cowers with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, so both bomb and slip-cased bomber have their heads buried in the sand, as if in denial of this nightmarish world and the roles they have played in its creation.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

In contrast to this The Drowned World presents a peaceful scene. The surface of the water is flat as a millpond, a sea of tranquillity broken only by the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building which, like the crown of a colossal King Canute, bears silent witness to the deluge that has turned Manhattan into a man-made reef and New York into a new Atlantis. Elsewhere The Wind From Nowhere makes a mockery of a spotless Centurion tank, while The Drought has turned a Cadillac Coupe de Ville into a memorial of chrome and streamlined angularity, its rocketship rear styling and flared tail fins an epitaph to the flamboyance of the American automobile.

The use of such icons to signify apocalyptic ruination is nothing new of course. The Statue of Liberty, in particular, has borne the brunt of numerous cataclysms that have left it in various stages of burial, collapse or decapitation. Ballard himself could not resist the temptation in The Wind From Nowhere, while the Statue’s cameo in the final scene of the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes, is one of the most memorable denouements in cinematic history, a classic twist in the tail that still cools the blood today. Such images may thrill and perhaps even shock, but the explanation is invariably straightforward because the machine, the artifact, the icon is in ruins. Where Pelham’s images differ is that they defy such explanation. The scene is apocalyptic but the machine is immaculate, and the two are not easily reconciled. Aesthetically these images mesmerise, and on closer inspection they tantalise, but as in Ballard’s fictional worlds, answers are avoided and ambiguity abounds. And this is perhaps the key to Pelham’s images, for they occupy a twilight zone between the landscapes of the outer world and those of inner space. Like the contemplation of a surrealist painting it may take several attempts to ‘get’ Ballard, but Pelham got him to perfection, creating a union of text and image that has never been bettered. With these classic covers the art of J G Ballard reached its apotheosis.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2009 issue of Vector magazine. Reproduced with permission.

NOTES

[1] Brian Aldiss. Billion Year Spree. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p.162.
[2] ‘They Come From Inner Space.’ In: J B Priestley. Thoughts in the Wilderness. London: William Heinemann, 1957, pp.20-6.
[3] Ray Bradbury may have been the first sf writer to visit inner space but an earlier pioneer outside the genre was Joseph Conrad in his 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness.
[4] Perhaps the best example is the invasion of Earth by murderous Martians in H G Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, which reputedly caused widespread panic in the USA when a radio adaption narrated by Orson Welles was broadcast in 1938.
[5] ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ New Worlds, May 1962. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.195-8.
[6] Ballard playfully alludes to Dalí’s lecture in his novel, The Drowned World. As the central character is putting on a diving suit he is told that he looks ‘like the man from inner space’ and is warned not to ‘try to reach the Unconscious’ as the suit ‘isn’t equipped to go down that far!’.
[7] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious.’ New Worlds, July 1966. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.84-8.
[8] J G Ballard. Miracles of Life. HarperCollins, 2008, p.215.
[9] Mike Bonsall’s concordance of Ballard’s oeuvre lists 110 references to Dalí , 40 to Ernst, 22 to Magritte, 14 to Delvaux, 11 to Chirico and 9 to Tanguy (http://bonsall.homeserver.com/concordance).
[10] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2. HarperCollins, 2006, p.151.
[11] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 1. HarperCollins, 2006, p.336.
[12] Paul Delvaux was a particular favourite of Ballard’s and in 1986-87 he commissioned the artist Brigid Marlin to reproduce two Delvaux paintings, The Rape and The Mirror. Both were painted in 1936 but were thought to have been destroyed during the Blitz in 1941. In fact The Mirror had survived the war and was auctioned by Christies of London in 1999 for a hammer price of almost £3.2 million. Marlin’s portrait of Ballard, also painted in 1987, is at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
[13] Many of Ballard’s book covers are displayed in Rick McGrath’s Terminal Timeline at www.jgballard.ca/terminal_collection/terminal_timeline.html.
[14] The relationship between text and cover art in Penguin’s sf series is explored in a series of three articles in The Penguin Collector; see ‘Not Quite Nowhere Backwards’ at www.penguinsciencefiction.org.
[15] David Pelham, speaking at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in June 2005. A transcript of this talk appears in Penguin by Designers. London: The Penguin Collectors Society, 2007, pp.127-53.
[16] Science Fiction Monthly, September 1974, pp.6-7.
[17] In 1974, the year that Penguin published this boxed set, a short story by Ballard appeared in Ambit magazine. ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ tells of the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space and his convalescence at an abandoned resort where he becomes obsessed with excavating an American B-17 Flying Fortress that lies buried beneath the sand dunes.

+ More by James Pardey on David Pelham’s cover designs for Penguin’s Ballard reprints.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. As an alternative biography, then, of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult fame, inner space … and Ballard. In the preface to the book, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’, and with further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit can be purchased direct from the publisher.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

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

Interview by Mike Holliday.

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

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

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

LEFT: David Britton.

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

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

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

Mike Holliday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hours passed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they sent him to prison.

Warren Ellis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Michael Butterworth.

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

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

Photo: Simon Sellars.

Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer problems and a lengthy spell of writer’s block. But mainly it was the richness and how to process it. Kosmopolis was the best literary festival I’ve attended for the intrigue in the program as well as for the organisation — even as one of the lesser participants (in terms of career and achievements), I was made to feel like a king. The Kosmopolis team are a genuinely interesting, creative and dedicated bunch and this transmits into every facet of the show. Thank you Jordi, Miquel, Barbara, Teresa, Juan, Marta and everyone else!

Arriving in Barcelona is a sensory delight. The rhythm of the city is completely different to Melbourne. You get a valid sense of this via traffic flow, the true index of civility. In Barcelona cyclists are treated as road vehicles with equal rights on the tarmac, and traffic signals for both vehicles and pedestrians are adhered to insofar as it facilitates smooth egress for all. This does not mean a nation of automata. When there are no cars, for example, pedestrians cross against the lights, and vice versa it’s the same with vehicles. The police don’t seem to mind. It’s organised chaos (the traffic flow is dense and perpetual, and seemingly balancing on a knife’s edge) and it works. This idea of ensuring harmonious flow by treating rules as guidelines, with the safety of right of way observed above all, seems a simple and obvious point, but in Australia in inner-city areas traffic flow can often be bloody chaos with everyone lockstepping onto their neural GPS to the total exclusion of the rights of others. When I compare the two situations, I think of Barcelona as an organism that knows how to breathe in, and when to breathe out, and that can regulate its breathing for an easier life and stress-free relaxation; I think of urban Australia as a heart-attack victim with fatty arteries and severely constricted breathing.

This can also be indexed by the approach to alcohol. If people were drunk and out of control on the streets of Barcelona, they kept it very well hidden. Is binge drinking popular there? I wouldn’t have thought so. In Melbourne, smashed beer bottles are a common sight on the streets and broken glass is everywhere in the inner city following Friday and Saturday nights. In Australia the government wants to tax alcohol to combat this, to make it so expensive that it will be prohibitive to have more than a few drinks, thereby taking out as collateral damage those who are responsible and who can handle their drink. This is the Nanny State in motion, proffering band-aid solutions that do nothing to get to the heart of the problem, which is cultural and is rooted in Australia’s frontier approach to binge drinking. Try to limit people’s enjoyment of wine in Spain and see how far you get. Alcohol is not the problem in Australia — the problem is social. I felt safe walking around Barcelona at midnight, because there’s none of the paranoia and edginess that is increasingly a feature of Melbourne street life. Instead, there is conviviality — more on that later. I’ll even declare this despite having my wallet stolen on La Rambla just two days into my stay. I was with Mike Bonsall, who was in town for the festival as a punter (along with Tim Chapman and Mike Holliday; great to see you all!). We’d ingested a few drinks and I just didn’t think. Stupidly, I put my wallet in my back pocket, even though I’ve worked as a travel writer and I’ve written on travel scams and dangers — including putting your wallet in your back pocket on La Rambla. So, before we knew it, we were running the gauntlet of a large group of young women who began groping us (!) — ‘Oooh la la, come home with me, baby’. We would have been in their clutches for no longer than a minute before breaking free, but I knew straight away my wallet had gone. The girls had gone, too, melted away into the crowd. But it didn’t ruin my trip because Barcelona’s delights far outweigh its petty crime. Every city has its hazards and I was warned about this one, but I let my guard slip. I don’t think I should blame Barcelona for that idiotic lapse in concentration. Besides, there was an upside. The next day, Teresa from Kosmopolis took me to the police station and gave me a guided tour of the neighbourhoods we passed through, pointing out beautiful historical architecture on the way and filling me in on the unique character of each area. Thank you so much, Teresa — for your wonderful company, it was worth losing my wallet.

Detail from Andrés Hispano’s ‘Autoscan’ installation, at the ‘Autopsia del nou Mil.leni’ exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona. Photo: Tim Chapman.

For the first few days I explored the Ballard exhibition. Unfortunately I had an unfamiliar camera with me so my most of my shots, taken in low light, were unsatisfactory. Of course, Rick McGrath was at the opening of the exhibition back in July and he took many excellent photos, so please refer to his batch in lieu of mine. As for descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail given that McGrath has covered the ground thoroughly in his report, so well in fact that much of it felt very familiar on first visit. What I will say though is that it is an impressive achievement, and one of the most imaginative displays of its type that I’ve seen. I saw the Kubrick exhibition when it came to Melbourne and this matches it, perhaps even surpasses it, because it gives free reign to creative interpretation of Ballard’s metaphors, and all on a budget a fraction of the Kubrick. Jordi and his team have allowed their imaginations to run wild and this has resulted in something quite stunning, in particular the skeletal car body buried in sand. One thing Rick didn’t really comment on was Ann Lislegaard’s black-and-white computer-art rendition of themes from The Crystal World — I spent almost an hour sitting in a darkened room watching this creation, with its looped 3D scenes of interiors and outdoor scenes bathed in an ambience that morphs from light to shade, seemingly crystallising at the meridian into shards of solid, jagged matter. Punctuated with quotes from Crystal, one of Ballard’s most lyrical works, this was a stunning monument to the fashion in which JGB attempts to reorder the senses to provide a deeper, more meaningful existence that cuts against the grain of convention.

Jordi Costa on the left, me on the right. Photo: Tim Chapman.

LEFT: Claire Walsh, circa 1968.

In a very pleasant surprise, Claire Walsh, JGB’s partner, was a last-minute guest of the festival and I was thrilled to meet the face of two of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements. Jordi Costa and the CCCB’s Miquel Noques took Claire on a guided tour of the exhibition and V. Vale and I were able to tag along. Claire was full of interesting background regarding some of Ballard’s most famous works. For example, discussing Ballard’s crashed-car exhibition, a focus of one of the autopsy rooms, she echoed JGB’s description of the confrontational aspects of the show. Claire was at the event and she emphasised that it was meant to shock, that it was meant to jolt people out of their complacency. According to her, JGB’s oft-repeated descriptions of a drunk, confused and enraged audience were no exaggeration — the public had never butted up against a man of Ballard’s dark intelligence before. Intriguingly, the effect was echoed in the present exhibition, held under similar circumstances — I’m told that in Spain Ballard is virtually unknown, and that many people attending this exhibition were witnessing his work for the first time. Combine this with the fact that Jordi and his team pulled no punches in framing Ballard’s work, presenting often queasy images of medical procedure, wartime horrors and mediated violence, and the effect sometimes approached a similar level of outrage. In the guestbook, there were examples of patrons expressing their anger at the imagery on display — ‘The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen!’ (on the same page as another quote: ‘This is the best exhibition ever’); ‘Scandalous!’; ‘This man is sick!’ — nestling comfortably alongside the words of praise (which far outweighed the negatives, of course). There were also, perhaps predictably, just a few too many examples of mutilated and mutated penises.

‘Frank Ghery [sic] rules’: guestbook hijinks at the Ballard exhibition. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Before we entered the exhibition, I realised I’d forgotten my camera battery so I raced back to the hotel to get it. Downstairs I saw Lou Reed, Kosmopolis’s star guest, sloping laconically through the CCCB lobby followed by a tightly coiled media scrum. He looked very bored in that distinct Lou Reed way, and I was struck by the image of him standing stock still against a Kosmopolis banner while scores of paparazzi took pictures, their flashes firing simultaneously. At one point Reed stretched his palms slightly outwards, while retaining the same rigid face, before puffing his chest out. This image made me recall old interviews where he would talk about channelling feedback from his guitar in the same breath as he would eulogise the mech-human jolt of messing with the nervous system through systematic methamphetamine abuse. Watching him bathed in a hundred flashes, I saw him as a creature raised under electric light, feeding off the popping bulbs, absorbing the photo-synthetic light into his body, allowing it to course through his veins to produce a pure artificial being harnessed to the electric sun and to the raw power of the media. The ever-popping flashes illuminating his body were so rapid and intensive, I expected his bones to start glowing beneath wafer-thin skin.

LEFT: Lou Reed: electro-shock therapy. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

This was on the Thursday, and until his performance with Laurie Anderson on Friday night, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, in and around the CCCB courtyard, heading his entourage, a study in ‘jaded’, causing a commotion with the crowds, at one stage roped off in an enclosure like a zoo exhibit, bored and expressionless, waiting while the fans lined up for his book signings and while rubberneckers like me watched him studying his fingernails. I’m not the biggest fan of his music, save for the Velvets, but his real-life presence was so inorganic, so bloodless in a completely compelling way, it had to be tracked and followed. It was pure celebrity reaction in action (although, funnily enough, I’d never imagined Lou Reed as inhabiting that rarefied level; he always seems ‘cult’ to me… let’s face it, he’s no Jagger) and I noted the delicious juxtaposition of the virtual Ballard on the top floor of the CCCB, a man who has dissected the celebrity process with clinical and unerring precision. I imagined his presence radiating pure waves of insight down on the proceedings below.

On Friday night Lou and Laurie read Catalan poetry and writing, which was utterly bizarre. I’m not sure of the background of this event, or of how and why it happened. Do Lou and Laurie have a connection to Catalonia? I can’t say. All I can tell you is that Lou was on stage at Kosmopolis while Laurie was at the University of California, Berkeley, reading her parts in a live video feed projected on a massive screen behind him. No music, no singing. Lou sounded as if he was reading from the usual tales of heroin, transvestites and Warhol back in NYC — there was that same, familiar raspy drawl that everyone associates with him — whereas Laurie was more engaging and injected multiple personalities into her reading. The whole set up was so strange. When Lou would turn to her, dwarfed by her image, and she would smile benevolently back at him, it seemed like a fairy tale in which Lou, a dark knight, had been shrunk to size by a Queen who wanted to keep him all for herself. But they are in love, I know it’s not like that, I just had a sensory blipvert channel jump induced by the scale distortion and the jumbled spatial dynamic.

Lou and Laurie: telepresent love. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

There was a funny moment when Lou mispronounced a list of Spanish surnames and place names, and the audience erupted into laughter. But the biggest cheer was reserved for the duo’s reading of the Yellow Manifesto (1928), written by Salvador Dali, Lluis Montanyà and Sevastià Gasch. A futurist ode to the extremes of the imagination and to the beauty of machinic art, it occurred to me that it was surely an influence on Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’:

We have eliminated from this MANIFESTO all courtesy in our attitude. It is useless to attempt any discussion with the representatives of present-day Catalan culture, which is artistically negative although efficient in other respects. Compromise and correctness lead to deliquescent and lamentable states of confusion of all values, to the most unbreathable spiritual atmospheres, to the most pernicious of influences… Violent hostility, in contrast, clearly locates values and positions and creates a hygienic state of mind.

After reading through the Manifesto, with its litany of things to be smashed, Lou quipped: ‘I wonder what they’d think of the internet?’ With its call to dismantle bourgeois complacency and the blandness of youth in favour of Catalan independence based around the beauty of enigmatic art, the Yellow Manifesto is a powerful call to arms that clearly still has relevance in today’s political climate. Indeed, I saw anarchist and independence graffiti everywhere in Barcelona, as in the following example, which was stencilled onto a series of mobile-phone advertisements. At first I thought it was actually part of the ad, in a depressingly familiar instance of corporations co-opting revolution, because it was so accurately placed in the exact same spot each time, until I twigged that the stencil artist had actually targeted this particular ad for whatever reason.

‘Anarchy in Catalonia, it’s coming sometime and maybe…’. Photo: Simon Sellars.

When they’d finished their performance, Lou looked up at Laurie and they had a little telepresent moment together, strong love coursing through a hi-def internet link; Laurie gave Lou a radiant smile and made little pincer-like movements with her fingers at him, clearly some kind of secret sign, and he smiled sheepishly at her, this woman who is perhaps the only person in the world that can make Lou Reed self-conscious.

The Ballard segment of the festival kicked off with a panel, ‘Postcards from the Interior Space’, chaired by Jordi and featuring Marcial Souto, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Marta Peirano and Toby Litt. Unfortunately no one told Mike B and I that the translation of the Spanish/Catalan speakers was being transmitted through portable headsets, so we sat through most of the session in bemusement, perking up when Litt spoke in English. This was a Ballardian experience in itself. Understanding Litt only, we attempted to decode the questions and replies from other speakers that led to Toby’s answers. Sometimes we got it and sometimes the old brain would go into freefall, much the same as it does when it reads Ballard and must submit to the process of unworking the similes and parallel narratives that form the shifting strata of his work. Litt told the audience that the foreword he wrote to a forthcoming volume of academic essays had been rejected on the grounds that it wasn’t likely to entice people to read more Ballard, given his position, which is that it’s impossible to truly understand or truly ‘get’ Ballard’. From there, Toby suggested that all academics have got Ballard wrong. He then read the rejected foreword (which he revealed was finally accepted as the afterword to the book), which built an extended metaphor around the notion of Ballard tunnelling out from the ground under his Shepperton house. Funnily enough, perhaps even appropriately enough, given Toby’s main point about academia, I can’t pretend I fully understood the analogy.

‘Postcards from the Interior Space’: Marcial, Agustin, Marta, Jordi and Toby. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Litt also referred to psychogeographical interpretations of Ballard, mentioning Will Self, but said he had problems with this angle, with writing about London in this way. I have sympathies with both academic/theoretical and psychogeographic readings of Ballard, but I also agree with Litt when he says that Ballard translates because he maintains a floating parallel world on top of the ‘physical’ world of his novels. It’s a good point, but why then criticise specific readings of Ballard? Surely the indeterminate, open-ended nature of JGB’s writing supports, even encourages, this in its drive to resist categorisation? Well, that’s my position anyway, that this open-endedness generates a program of resistance. Litt also critiqued readings of Ballard that accept Ballard’s version of his life as the truth — I presume Empire of the Sun is the reference — and said he wished that Ballard had never expanded upon his Shanghai childhood in interviews, so that readers would be forced to confront his parade of surrealist war imagery and violent technofutures on their own terms. I do understand what he means — I’d read Atrocity, Crash, High-Rise and Concrete Island before Empire or the bulk of the interviews, and they did seem like the work of mad genius bleeding through into the frame from a parallel dimension. But even now, with the full weight of Ballard’s history informing my study of his work, I see his autobiographical retellings as another fiction to be decoded. His obsessive restaging of the Lunghua theatre is a form of circular time that again resists definition, resists commodification, resists classification — a guerrilla war against the type of ‘eventless present’ that he sees as a by-product of consumer capitalism and its drive to erase history and collapse the future into the present.

There, I’ve just given you the gist of what I spoke about on the panel the next day with Jordi, Vale and Bruce Sterling, where I felt unusual, but happy, appearing as the ‘academic’ among two larger-than-life personalities. Vale showed a 10-minute film of his work with RE/Search and the relationship with Ballard he has forged, and then talked about Ballard’s role as visionary and dreamer. Bruce talked about Ballard’s influence on his own writing and on cyberpunk. But I’ll leave further summaries for now, as I believe Tim C is preparing a transcript of the talk which I hope to post here soon.

‘Myths of the Near Future’: Me, Bruce, Vale, Jordi. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

After the panel, we had a beer in the courtyard. In another welcome surprise, Iraklis from Athens showed up, with his mate Antony! Iraklis is a long-time reader of ballardian.com, from around 2005 onwards, so it was great to meet him. We had an interesting chat about the public perception of Ballard; it seems the situation in Greece is the same in Australia in that he is still regarded as a ‘cult’ author. Perhaps he is. I think Mr Ballard should be proud of getting under people’s skins so thoroughly. It was here that we saw Robyn Hitchcock wandering around with his guitar. He was due on stage that night but was serenading random strangers in the meantime, and we watched him perform a Doors song for a small child, who was clearly delighted and/or bemused by this colourful man. The next night I saw a selection of Catalan poets at the CCCB’s Cafe Europa, and they were doing very interesting things with collage sound and sampled voices. My favourite was the guy who attempted to replicate the way we hear our own voices and the process by which it is filtered through the vibrations of the skull and ear canals, rendering it completely different when heard on a recording. I hate hearing my recorded voice, so this was repellent and fascinating for me. He related all this to the way we cannot trust our own interior voices and memories, which may or may not be creations and constructs of the media — Catalan poet, meet J.G. Ballard. Another poet repeated combinations of words and phrases and looped them through a bank of samplers, creating music from the beauty of the Catalan language. I find it a nice language to listen to, and I chose not to hear the translations on the portable headsets this time. I wanted to free-float and concentrate solely on the musicality of the phrases and intonations, the meaning of which I was clueless, but the poetry of which I immediately and instinctively responded to.

Robyn Hitchcock does his wandering troubadour thing in the CCCB courtyard. Photo: Tim Chapman.

Afterwards, talking to the MC, this poet said something interesting, about how he prefers ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ because with ignorance, interesting ideas emerge. He gave the example of people who believe that white wine removes blackberry stains or that spirits are good for headaches; in the gap between perception and recognition, ignorance occurs and new and surreal juxtapositions emerge that inspire radical art and thought processes. These performances again put me in mind of the Yellow Manifesto and how it really sums up the appeal of Kosmopolis, with its focus on grassroots, independent, innovative and creative literary ideas. There were no real superstars at this festival, but instead successful writers and artists who have proved that you don’t need to sell your soul to make it. In this respect Ballard, a true maverick, is the perfect fit.

Lydia Lunch at Cafe Europa. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Lydia Lunch was also appearing on this night, as she now lives in Barcelona. She performed a spoken-word piece to a fractured jazz-rock soundtrack, typically angry and very ‘fuck you’ and all about the war on terror and global conflict tied in with Spain’s history of conflict. After, she said to the MC that she chooses to live in Barcelona because in the US she would be reminded every day of the hypocrisy of that society and the violence it wreaks on its citizens. In Barcelona, by contrast, she says that every day people wake up and forget about the horrors of the past because each day is seen as a new chance to drink, fuck and forget. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with this angry and loud American called Lunch: there is indeed a mood of relaxed optimism in this city and it touched me even on my brief stay. It invigorated me in fact, and in the week-and-a-half since my return I’ve been inspired to make a number of important and long-delayed changes to my life and lifestyle, which are already in motion, a direct result of my nine days in Barcelona and the deep impact it and Kosmopolis had on me and the possibilities I can now envisage for creative work that is symbiotic with a healthy inner life.

ABOVE: Kafkaesque. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: Brechtian. Photo: Simon Sellars.

If you are a writer, or literary minded, how could you fail to love this city? I came across stencils of Kafka, and graffiti that quoted large chunks of Brecht. It’s a city made for walking, for inspiring thought. The back alleys and side streets are immersive and the architecture across all styles is superb. I walked many kilometres each day, directionless but always finding something to inspire. I did so much walking and uncovering of back streets that I didn’t make it to any of the Gaudi attractions (I’ve been to Barcelona before, and did the whole Gaudi thing, so I’d subconsciously made the decision this time around to see the more of the quotidian fabric of the city instead).

Gala, is that you? Photo: Simon Sellars.

It was during one foray into a back street that the lady in this shot came into view. She saw me taking photos of buildings and stopped right in front of me, extending her walking stick out towards me, smiling radiantly all the while but not saying a single word. Look at the amazing way she is dressed and that face that knows all: she looks like a female Dali. She struck this pose as soon as she saw me, as if to say: ‘Hey! What about me? I’m the finest architecture here’. For a moment I wasn’t sure what she was doing and then I realised she was offering herself as a model to be photographed. As soon as the shutter clicked, she turned on her heel and walked briskly away, still smiling that same brilliant smile, still uttering not one word. And that is what I love about Barcelona, the casual surrealism that is woven into the fabric of the place. Included with the pack given to Kosmopolis participants was a series of monographs published by the CCCB that explored urban space and the need for a vital public space in order to maintain a healthy society. One, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’ by Ash Amin, is especially relevant. Amin writes about the need for a ‘post-human perspective’ on urban space that brings together ‘the most promising examples of surplus made to work as such’:

These would include bazaars and shopping malls in which difference is treated as a virtue, streets and squares of free and safe mingling, parks and other recreation spaces resonating with vitality and mixed use, libraries and schools that sustain public interest and reach out to the reluctant, bus shelters and car parks that are not the dumping ground for the dregs of society, buses and trains that work and offer a pleasant experience to the travelling public. Here, the qualities of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarity and maintenance can be expected to crowd out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of shared space.

It is no accident that Amin had been commissioned by the CCCB to write about public space. He repeatedly emphasises conviviality as the key to a healthy and dynamic urban fabric, and as I was reading this, I thought, ‘That is Barcelona’. Whatever problems there may be with the Spanish government or economy, what Barcelona in particular has is convivial public space, and I, like Lydia Lunch, would be willing to give up many other things to experience that on a daily basis.

I have a final observation about Barcelona: I have never seen so many young men on crutches in any city I’ve visited. Are Catalan males very sporty, are they just really clumsy, or do they have very brittle joints?

The Dali Museum. Photo: Simon Sellars.

On my last full day in Spain, I travelled to Figueres to see the Dali museum. I am staggered by how popular his work continues to be. The queues and crowds were massive and the whole complex was like a warped theme park, Disneyland nightmares for the masses. There were plenty of school groups there and I could only think that being introduced to Dali at a very young age must be a very good education indeed, exposed to images of young virgins being auto-sodomized by their own chastity and labia-faces. This is what I mean by casual surrealism, which appears to be threaded into the Catalonian DNA.

And now it’s encoded into mine. On the way home, I picked up some British newspapers at Heathrow to find that the UK was in the midst of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs scandal.

And every time I read the name ‘Georgina Baillie’, I was convinced they were referring to ‘Georges Bataille’.

ABOVE: Barcelona street scene. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: The thrill of it all: nu-architecture at Port Olympic, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

..:: Soundtracks to inner space: Future Engineers, ‘Studio Mix 2007′; Underground Resistance, ‘First Galactic Baptist Church’; The Martian, ‘The Stardancer’; Simple Minds, ‘Themes for Great Cities’; PiL, ‘Radio Four’; Lalo Schifrin, ‘Jaws Theme’; Ennio Morricone, ‘Come Maddalena’.

ABOVE: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, 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.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ‘spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

..:: MORE INFO:
+ Hard Mag

by Rick McGrath

ABOVE: Rick talking to CCCB Director-General Josep Ramoneda on opening night. Photo by Christian Mauri from Spain’s El Mundo newspaper.

Hola, Simon, and buenos dias from Barcelona.

I’m currently standing in the Carrer de Montalegre, a narrow street deep in the university section of Barcelona. Behind me is the university’s Dept of Philosophy, and I’m standing in the overbright sunlight, looking at an imposing 18th century building which is currently the home of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)… and even more currently the home of the very first museum exhibition ever dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard.

It’s a great place to be…

I’ve been here two days now, and have toured the show three times in different guises – as it was being finished, once with the Press, and finally at the Grand Opening with Barcelona VIPs – and to tell you the truth, I’m feeling a little late with this report, as I’ve already read all the various and sundry exhibition press releases you and the rest of the world’s media have published. And besides, I was out each Barcelonian night with a short story of fellow Ballardians, and one must follow one’s obsessions. So I thought I wouldn’t cover that ground again. Instead, I’d like to treat you to an overall taste of the experience – a sort of old-fashioned slide show with commentary – a visual tour of what visitors to this extraordinary exhibition will see and experience.

OK, you ready? Visitor’s pass showing?

ABOVE: CCCB exterior.

The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital. What better place to perform an Autopsy of the New Millennium? Crossing the street we enter the building thru an archway – to the left is the Museum’s administration offices, to the right the ubiquitous gift shop. Ahead is a huge courtyard, empty save for a few trees and student-filled lounge chairs. The building retains its ancient decorations on three sides, and these walls face an angled wall of glass, which rises and tips protectively over the courtyard.

ENTERING THE EXHIBITION

ABOVE: Spain’s longest escalator… a sort of Kingdom Come message to rise into the imaginary…

The trip into the exhibition itself is a Ballardian experience of corridors and obsessively angled floors. It’s a maze. You first walk along the left wall of the courtyard, noticing what must be medical slogans from the 1700s painted on the ornate tiles, then you’re suddenly at a hidden entrance. Turning right, you walk down a long, slow incline, mirrored on the right wall, to a set of hidden doors. Entering, you reverse direction and descend again down another long incline which empties into to a large auditorium with information booths, ticket sales, and a large screen showing the CCCB’s specially-made promotional video for the show.

You’ve already commented on this vid, Simon, so we’ll pass thru here and then climb a series of long, open stairs, which leads us into the new glass tower and onto Spain’s longest escalator – a three-story monster right out of Kingdom Come – which delivers us to the Exhibition’s entrance and a charming young lady who would like to see our passes, por favor.

ABOVE: Martin Amis pontificates; the media records.

We’re here. I’d suggest we put on our surgical masks and rubber gloves now. The first room we enter is actually not part of the Autopsy itself, but a sort of literary introduction to what follows. What we see is a video projection onto a wall that features a number of writers, English and Spanish, French and Catalan, extolling the influence and seductive qualities of Ballard’s work. John Clute, Martin Amis and Catherine Millet I recognized, and once your mind has been properly attuned and your Ballard glasses are in focus, it’s time to enter the Autopsy Rooms proper.

AUTOPSY #1: What I Believe

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.

This section is called “Credo”, and it’s a multimedia effort with a wall of words and hidden, tiny mirrors, JGB’s dulcet tones, and three video screens repeating what JG says he believes in Spanish, Catalan and English. It’s a repetition of JG’s piece in the January 1984 issue of Science Fiction magazine, in which he summarises his obsessions and their often-disturbing logic.

If you stand in precisely the right spot, the words on the wall before you also reveal tiny mirrors reflecting the light from an electric candle. The words that appear on the TV screens also melt and fade, ebbing and flowing with the tidal resonance of Ballard’s musical speech. It’s a fascinating experience, and I noted both the press and VIPs were mesmerised by the incantory nature of this first cut into the body of our culture.

AUTOPSY #2: From Shanghai to Shepperton

ABOVE: After the 1937 bombing.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

From Credo we dip back in time to JG’s youth in Shanghai and Lunghua camp where the Japanese interned JG and his family for three years. This display begins with a loop from Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, where young Jimmy attempts to bring the young Japanese kamikaze pilot back to life, and then settles into the real thing in a cleverly-constructed room which shows scenes from the camp on one wall, and opposite, separated by prison-like planking, scenes from the destruction of Shanghai.

ABOVE: Watching Shanghai Jim.

Against the far wall runs a continuous vid of Shanghai Jim, JG’s BBC-produced return to Lunghua in 1991. The CCCB organizers (I’ll laud them later) have done a terrific job of assembling period photographs of Shanghai under siege, and many of these photos I’ve not seen before… but have unconsciously experienced in JG’s work. The camp is represented by a series of soft watercolours, in stark opposition to the black and white photographs of war, and I was pleased and surprised to see the image of Lunghua camp survivor Irene Duguid in two of the photos – I had the pleasure of sitting and talking with her at her home in Surrey just four days earlier.

AUTOPSY #3: Landscapes of Dream

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

This is one of my favourite autopsy rooms. It begins with a short quote from Miracles of Life printed just inches from the floor on a black wall: “At the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges I was hesitating to cross.”

This room contains just three exhibits, but powerful ones they are: a photo of JG in his home at Shepperton in front of his Delvaux painting, a new version of the painting specially done for this show by Brigid Marlin (it’s dated 2008), and the piece de resistance, an incredible surreal image generator! As the CCCB press release says: “His writings not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies – superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations – in order to explain the profound structure of the real.”

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

These strategies are all visualised in this very clever display: ten or so sheets of thin, white muslin cloth have been suspended from the ceiling, approximate three feet apart. At each end a projector illuminates a slowly changing series of images from famous surrealist paintings onto the cloth. Walking back and forth and up and down between the sheets reveals an endlessly-changing collage of images from the likes of Dali, Ernst and Delvaux, spinning endlessly thru impositions and mutations. I spent a lot of time in this room. You will, too.

AUTOPSY #4: Inner Space

ABOVE: Pixelated Ballard.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

Now we’re moving into more familiar territory – this section deals with the ramifications of JG’s 1962 New Worlds editorial, “Which Way To Inner Space?” Visitors are treated to wall-projected vids of JG’s favourite SF movies (Alien, Alphaville, Barbarella, Close Encounters, Dark Star, Dr Strangelove, Forbidden Planet, Silent Running, The Man Who Fell To Earth, and The Road Warrior) and opposite these imaginary images we move to the real with vids from Cape Canaveral space program projected upon the opposite wall – but in reverse… then you note the large central display case is mirrored and the visuals magically right themselves.

ABOVE: From Rick’s JGB collection.

In this display case are souvenirs of JG’s 1969 trip to Rio for the International Festival of Cinema, and, oh look – some items from my collection have made an appearance: early SF pulps from the 1950s, various magazines, such as Interzone, and literary newspapers such as Bananas. The only thing here I had not seen is a rather Hollywood-inspired photo of JG, looking young, round-cheeked and rather smug in his pressed white shirt and cool shades.

AUTOPSY #5: Disaster Area

ABOVE: Drought car in sand.

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.

This exhibit begins with a series of small exhibits of clever homages to The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Crystal World, and leads ultimately to one of the exhibition’s strongest images: a huge room filled with sand, out of which protrudes the top of a sun- and rust-ravaged car. The effect is enhanced with off-centre lighting, and this startling image of The Drought is one you’ll remember, and think about, long after you leave.

AUTOPSY #6: Technology and Pornography

ABOVE: Cronenberg’s Crash.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

Now we move into another of my fave pieces of the dismembered millennium… very cleverly organized with each mini-exhibit separated by the white sheets of medical privacy screens. The original use of the building as a hospital is reflected in the ancient arches overhead, and the visuals are pumped up with the addition of a heartbeat-like bass drum slowly thumping in the background. Half of this exhibit is literary, with displays of JG’s “Advertiser’s Announcements”, a copy of the Doubleday Atrocity Exhibition, a facsimile of the “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” handout distributed at the Republican Convention, copies of the Warren Commission Report and the book of car crash injuries (which I must get).

ABOVE: Rick in front of the ‘Project for a New Novel’ (photo: Joanne Murray).

The most fascinating object in this section is the original two-page spreads JG made in 1958 or 1959 which he called “Project for a New Novel”. JG gave it to Ambit editor Dr Martin Bax, who had it framed in two sections, and as far as I know this is the very first time the complete piece has been shown outside the Bax home. As you know, parts of it have been reprinted by RE/Search and New Worlds, but this is the only time all of it has been made available for public viewing. Interestingly enough, they have the pieces in the wrong order.

ABOVE: The big visual wall display.

The rest is video, with each examination room showing excerpts from Cronenberg’s Crash, a fragment of Jonathan Weiss’s movie of The Atrocity Exhibition, with real footage of victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and finally, a huge room showing multi-vids on two walls, with all reflected on a third wall. The effect is startling and cumulative, and on both times I visited both the press & VIPs just stood there, captured by the strength and variety and perversity of the visuals…

AUTOPSY #7: Asepsis and Neobarbarism

ABOVE: Infinity drenched in blue.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

Here the exhibition features the realist phase of JG’s writings, starting with Running Wild and ending with Kingdom Come. The visuals are split into two – the main effect created by a long corridor, mirrored on one side and at both ends, with the symmetry punctuated by overhead text generators which feature copy from Millennium People. On the unmirrored wall are four TV screens, set at child-height level, and they display a series of looping visuals, such as adverts for gated communities in Dubai, and Disney’s fake town of Celebration, Florida. The whole thing is drenched in a dark blue light, and the mirrors reflect all to infinity in both directions. Very cool.

AUTOPSY #8: The Ballard Library

ABOVE: From my JGB collection.

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

OK, here’s where the bulk of the books the CCCB borrowed from me reside, so I won’t go on at length. Suffice perhaps to say this is the first time they’ve been out in public, and I hope they behave themselves. As well as these excerpts from my collection, this area features a series of computer monitors that allows visitors to replay all the videos shown in the prior exhibits, and three tables contain softcover editions of JG’s work which have been translated into Spanish and Catalan. The public is encouraged to pick up and read a little JG for themselves. Good idea. This section also contains filmmaker Solveig Nordlund’s very important interview with JG – “Encontro con o escritor JG Ballard” – and whoa, let’s not leave you out, Simon, as this is where your outstanding, exhaustive and brilliantly commented selection of Ballardian music can be heard. Great job!

ABOVE: Donovan Wylie’s photography.

The end wall contains a fascinating series of photographs taken in 2006 by Donovan Wylie, which were never published, and they reveal JG at home at approximately the same time he received his unfortunate diagnosis. The final part of this particular autopsy report is the staggeringly honest “Answers Given by Patient JGB to the Eyckman Personality Quotient Test”, from Sam Scoggin’s film The Unlimited Dream Company. In it JG quickly and steadfastly answers “yes” or “no” to a series of rapidfire questions while the camera slowly zooms in on his face, finally settling on an extreme closeup of his left eye. Sixty minute zoom, indeed. This video was very popular, and continually elicited grunts, titters and the odd chittering from its always-large audience.

AUTOPSY #9: Ballardian Art

ABOVE: Michelle Lord with her Ballard-inspired art.

I believe in nothing.

The Exhibition ends, fittingly, with four rooms of art influenced by Ballard and the concept of “Ballardian”. We’re first treated to a wall of unsettling and disturbing photos by Ana Barrado, she of RE/Search publications fame, then a captivating video of sunlight changing the perspectives of two rooms by Ann Lislegaard, photos of Michelle Lord’s miniature models of stacked cars, TV sets, and washing machines…

ABOVE: Mike Bonsall’s Ballardian home movie.

…and finally, Simon, the Ballardian cellphone home videos you commissioned last year, cleverly set up so you watch them on a cellphone.

And that, amigo, is the Exhibition. All in all, around 90,000 square feet of Ballardian bounty. We leave the same way as we arrived, by taking a long escalator ride back to the main floor, reminding me in a curious way that we have traveled “up” into the realm of the unbridled imagination, and are now returning “down” to the reality of convention and habit.

You can keep the surgical mask as a souvenir.

THE MEDICAL TEAM

This is an excellent, thought-provoking, informative exhibition, Simon, and one I’m sure which would have pleased JG had he been well enough to attend. Can you give it greater praise? Yes, those responsible should be dragged out and severely congratulated:

Jordi Costa: The Curator.
Hip, intense, knowledable, and an accomplished writer himself, Jordi’s vision and leadership has created the first, and most impressive overview of JGB, his work and influence. Super job, Jordi!

Marcial Souto: The Advisor.
Marcial has translated 10 of JG’s novels and short story collections, plus many other classic SF, outsider and popular writers. He’s an extremely pleasant and knowledgeable man, and is so interesting I’m going to interview him for you later.

Miquel Nogués: The Coordinator.
He’s the man who tracked down and organized all the various elements of the Exhibition, including the original flats for “Project For A New Novel” from Dr Martin Bax, the news Delvaux painting by Brigid Marlin, all the photographs and videos, and more. Basically, he’s responsible for the body that has been autopsied.

Dani Freixes & Pep Angli: The Designers & Assemblers.
These two gentlemen are responsible for the show’s brilliant visual appeal, the use of colour and music and light. It’s a retinal circus, and they deserve lots of credit.

Mariona Garcia: The Designer.
With the assistance of Anaïs Esmerado, she developed the textual look of the show, relying on understated, clean fonts and all the show’s peripheral print, such as the catalogue, posters and handouts.

Cristina Giribets: The A/V.
She is responsible for all the exhibition’s marvelous audio-visual work, and, it should also be noted that the Large Wall of compelling images found in the Technology and Pornography exhibit was created by Andres Hispano and La Chula Productions. Good eye, everyone!

All in all, a most excellent adventure into the mind of JGB… thank you, doctors, for all your hard work.

And that, Simon, is just about it.

From Barcelona, adios!

– Rick.

Rick McGrath 2008.

All quotes excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by JG Ballard. All photography by Rick McGrath, except where noted.

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ More exhibition photography from Rick McGrath
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

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

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

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

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

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

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

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

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

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

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

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

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

INNER SPACE

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

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

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

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

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

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

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

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

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

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

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

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

PRICES

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

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

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

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

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

Photo by Dr Champagne.

Work has started on a Black Plaque for Robert Vaughan, anti-hero of JG Ballard’s Crash. When English Heretic started one of its intentions was to commemorate psychopaths. Of course, the aim was never so obvious as to glorify serial killers in the tired tradition of industrial culture, but to draw attention to the archetype of the psychopath, the immutable weird of the nightmare. There is no better example in modern fiction than Ballard’s hoodlum scientist, fallen TV angel of the M4 corridor.

As part of the project a sister blog has been set up: The Hoodlum Scientist’s Fieldbook.

Though the idea of a Black Plaque for Vaughan was seeded at the beginning of English Heretic, much of the recent impetus and structure for the research has been inspired by the wonderful Ballard related blogs and articles constructed by Simon Sellars at Ballardian, Nina at Infinite Thought, and Owen at Sit Down Man, you’re a bloody tragedy.

The first location research centres around Northolt in Middlesex, which Ballard’s genius somehow manages to transform into the erotic suburb of a Paul Delvaux painting. The following entry is a personal rendering of Northolt through English Heretic’s Ubu absurd lens…the usual obsessions: toponymic conspiracy; Osirian descent, urban Fulcanellian hermeticism…

In carrying out these researches I would love to hear and have join in, collaborators who share an interest and passion for Ballard. The project is a conscious homage to the great man himself.

English Heretic celebrates the self-saucing psychopath, the Hoodlum Scientist, Dr Robert Vaughan, voyaging to the dark heart of Crash, the M4 corridor, in ‘Final Churches of the Northolt Apocalypse’, this oversaturated photo essay, stalking the alien underbelly of tombstone streets and derelict petrol pumps…

I am terribly flattered to be linked to this crew. Both Nina and Owen are writers that make me feel like I’m forever catching up, such is their skill, while English Heretic is one of the more compelling blogs I’ve run across of late.

This photo essay from the good doctor is suitably lurid and pulpy, like the acid scene in Crash. Like Chris Foss’s cover for Crash. A strange and obsessive incantation… and something is stirring beneath the tarmac.

Photo by Dr Champagne.

The cars in the afternoon light look that school of dead dolphins duped into Falmouth bay by Naval sonar or so the conspiracy went.

More at English Heretic…

ABOVE: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’

The photography of Troy Paiva treats us to canted visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases, aircraft ‘boneyards’, abandoned desert towns. The scenarios are all shot at night and the work is presented straight out of the camera, mostly untouched by Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques. Troy uses available light, such as moonlight or sodium light (the latter of course plentiful in the modern-day archaeological ruins he haunts), but he also uniquely marks the shots with his light-painting skills (the introduction of hand-held, hand-applied light during the exposure) and the unearthly effects of red, green and blue-gelled strobe flashes. The cumulative effect is startling: like stills from a David Lynch film in a parallel universe in which Lynch, instead of adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart for his twisted desert noir masterpiece, had chosen Ballard’s Vermilion Sands instead.

Simon Sellars

NOTE: Although I have tried my best to include a representative selection of Troy’s photos, I found it almost impossible to do justice to the scope, beauty and sheer volume of his work. If after reading this interview you find yourself wanting more examples, my advice is to start either at Troy’s official site or his flickr page and work your way from there.

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again… I found a shallow basin among the dunes… The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, first published in 1967, collected in Vermilion Sands (1971).

SIMON: Troy, when we first talked about your photos, you said, ‘People constantly refer to my photography as “Ballardian”.’ I can certainly see the connections, especially with Vermilion Sands and its sense of decadent ruin, a lurid, near-future civilisation lost in the desert sands. But is Ballard actually an influence on your work?

TROY: No. I came to him much later. I enjoyed the Vermilion Sands stories very much when I read them a couple of years ago and I can see why people connect my work with his writing. There is that sense of desolation and isolation, the fetishism of decay and destruction and a general sense of being outside the realm of normal society, as well as the melancholia of straggling on after everything has ended.

Same thing happened with Kerouac’s On the Road. After reading it recently I thought, ‘Wow, no wonder people keep saying that to me.’ Much of my photography stems from massive, epic road trips that criss-cross the southwest, where I cover thousands of miles in a couple of very surreal days. The mythology of The Road figures in a lot of my work. I guess these similarities show that human experience is roughly the same for all of us, we just have different ways of expressing it. See also Philip K. Dick.

The books of my formative years were George Stewart’s pastoral apocalypse classic Earth Abides, Hunter S. Thompson’s surrealist freak-out, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Stand, Stephen King’s pop-epic story of The End. Those three books kinda say it all about where my approach to the road, abandonment and the ‘post-everything’ world lies. And the movie Vanishing Point – that encapsulates my own road-trip mythology perfectly.

HENRY: ‘And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The last American hero, the electric Shinta, the demigod, the super driver of the Golden West.’

TROY: ‘And beans, lotsa beans.’ Man, I love that movie. It’s totally what the desert is about for me.

ABOVE: ‘Color Television’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Behind an abandoned restaurant in the sleepy Mojave Desert town of Yermo, CA. The density of the sky was caused by the October Fires in SoCal. You could taste every breath. Night, full moon 2 minute exposure, natural, yellow and red-gelled strobe and flashlights. Composite of 2 images.’

HENRY: There are other things your work brings to mind, like the Mojave Desert Phone Booth.

TROY: Love it. Wish I’d had a chance to shoot it! I got lost on a series of endless dirt roads trying to find it, many years ago. Almost got stuck and had to give up. It’s been gone for at least five years now.

SIMON: What exactly is it about the desert that appeals?

TROY: I just love the expansiveness and isolation – it’s primal and uncompromising. I love that you can go for days without talking to anyone. It’s a land of outcasts and oddballs, where non-conformists can thrive. An incredible volume of American mythology is based on the desert and Western expansion, from the Gold Rush to Route 66. I’ve even heard my photography described as an epitaph for the mythology of the American West.

Dr Paul Ricci was thinking: So this is New York – or was. Greatest city of the twentieth century, here you heard the heart-beat of international finance, industry and entertainment. Now it’s as remote from the real world as Pompeii or Persepolis. It’s a fossil, my God, preserved here on the edge of the desert like one of those ghost towns in the Wild West. Did my ancestors really live in these vast canyons? They came on a cattle boat from Naples in the 1890s, and a century later went back to Naples on a cattle boat. Now I’m making another stab at it.

Still, the place has possibilities, all sorts of dormant things might be lying here, waiting to be roused.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Your bio says your work is about ‘the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during this country’s 20th century western expansion’. How did it come to be this way?

TROY: It’s simply who I am. When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic ‘wild west’ ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay’ and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the centre of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

ABOVE: ‘Texaco Marine’ by Troy Paiva. ‘North Shore Marina, Salton Sea, 2001. Most, if not all, the letters are gone by now. Night, 100% full moon/star light, 8 minutes, f5.6.’

SIMON: I understand it’s your Salton Sea work that gets most of the Vermilion Sands comparisons.

TROY: Yes. The Salton Sea is an enormous, accidentally created salt lake in a remote corner of the SoCal desert. In the 50s developers built elaborate resorts and golf courses around its shores and the department of interior stocked it with game fish. By the 60s it had become an idyllic combination of Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs, half outdoorsman’s paradise, half retreat for the Hollywood elite. By the 70s, however, two years of record rain caused massive floods and the lake, which has no outlet, began to fester and decay. The smell became unbearable as massive algae blooms died off. Anyone who could afford to move away did. By the 90s fish and birds were dying on a biblical scale – in the millions – triggered by the algae blooms. It’s a horrible, filthy place rimmed with rotten modernist resorts, marinas and trailer parks (most of which have been torn down now), and decaying dead fish and birds. Today the Salton Sea feels very much like the epicentre for the end of the world, a poster child for mankind’s failure to tame nature.

Ballardian for sure!

Ronnov-Jessen: [In your novella 'The Ultimate City'] one could say that the dynamism represented by New York is actually the dynamism of decay.

Ballard: No, I don’t accept that. The city is abandoned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again, just as in the novel Hello America where the young hero does precisely the same — except he attempts to do it on a continental level.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Against Entropy’, a 1984 interview with Peter Ronnov-Jessen.

ABOVE: ‘Precis’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A flipped Mitsubishi Precis, run over by a tank, in the abandoned base housing at George AFB near Victorville, CA. There were several smashed cars left in strategic lines of sight used for infantry cover during wargames exercises. The engine block in this thing was crushed like an egg. Shot March 2001, 160T film. Night, about 8 minutes, full moon, but overcast, yellow and purple-gelled strobe-flash.’

HENRY: Do you think your photos suggest a cryptic ‘signs of passing’ of American Culture from the world stage?

TROY: I suppose it can’t help but be interpreted that way‚ but I must also say the rest of the world has more ruins and debris left behind than America does. The internet is overflowing with amazing photography shot in the abandoned places of the 21st century. Spend an hour Googling ‘urban exploration’ and you’ll see that the culture is exploding worldwide, so whilst you got the concept right, it’s important to see it as a human, post-industrial thing rather than purely American.

UrbEx is as old as mankind. Humans have always been obsessed with both building and exploration. I’m sure primitive man explored the abandoned caves of his ancestors too. We’re drawn to ruins. It’s just how we’re wired as a species. Whereas the 20th century saw an unprecedented worldwide explosion of construction, by the dawn of the 21st century much of this expansion had failed or become obsolete, leaving the world littered with an amazing array of every type of ruins imaginable. Today we are experiencing a true golden age of abandonment.

SIMON: You describe it as a ‘culture’. That suggests it’s more than simply the illicit thrill of sneaking into abandoned or forbidden territory.

TROY: Yes. UrbEx, or Urban Exploration, is the pastime of visiting TOADS (temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict spaces), but not for scientific, anthropological or nefarious purposes. It’s about absorbing the atmosphere and wabi sabi soul of these places. A ‘finding beauty in decay’ aesthetic. I visit these lapsed spaces for several of the same reasons that normal people visit a serene mountain glen: the soul-cleansing quietude and the sense of feeling very small in a big universe. But ultimately it is an entirely different sensibility. Where most people see waste and blight in TOADS, Urban Explorers see elegant devolution and the weight of time.

Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him … He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project — unstated — but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island … In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing …

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

HENRY: Ballard has a strangely acute, Triassic sense of ‘deep time’ in his fiction‚ especially in short stories like ‘The Terminal Beach’. Similarly, in your book Lost America, you wrote, ‘The stars pinwheeling overhead and clouds smearing across the sky mirrored the compression of time created by the relentless pace of the trip.’ You said you were seeking to ‘heighten the unreality’ of these bizarre, spectral non-places.

TROY: It is a different reality. UrbEx night photography is very far removed from normal life, and my goal is to accentuate this surreal, otherworldly atmosphere in the work. One of the big attractions of night photography is this weird time-space distortion thing. Most of the night shooters I know are philosophical about the process. The exposures are minutes long, giving you time to sit in the dark and absorb the scene. Regardless of whether you are shooting cranes in an abandoned shipyard, or you’re on the top of a windswept mountain shooting thousand year old trees, it’s a wonderfully zen, contemplative experience.

ABOVE: ‘Hot Seat 2′ by Troy Paiva. ‘Shot at the abandoned Fort Ord Army Base in Monterey, CA. I recently learned that most (soon to be all) of the barracks and entire laundry have recently been bulldozed. Hundreds of buildings. Gone. Night, full moon, pink and green-gelled strobe-flash, 3-4 minute exposure.’

HENRY: You must get scared sometimes.

TROY: I don’t really worry about stuff very much. I have yet to see a ghost or the undead, although I’ve had thousands of weird experiences. I’ve shot in many supposedly haunted locations and seen and heard things that some people would pass off as paranormal, but nothing that couldn’t be attributed to wind, settling or vermin in the walls. What I have seen a lot of are big poisonous spiders, three-storey drop offs into the yawning darkness with no railings, copper thieves, rattlesnakes, rotten floors and wasted teenage vandals. I’ve come out of buildings crawling with spiders (I’ve had some very bad spider bites over the years), missed a rattlesnake bite by inches and been chased back to the car by a pack of wild dogs. I’ve been run off by crazy, desert-rat property owners racking shotguns. I’ve been swarmed by a heavily armed platoon of border agents in southern Arizona while I was shooting in a pet cemetery. I’ve had countless cuts and bruises and sprained and twisted ankles, and I once gave myself an excruciating second-degree burn while light painting with fireworks in a sandstorm.

Doing this is a whole lot of fun, but there are a lot of very real ways to get hurt or killed. The dangerous aspect of UrbEx night photography is just not something I dwell on. If I did I’d never leave the house.

SIMON: In Lost America you wrote about coming across a sacrificial altar used in an occult ceremony.

TROY: Yeah, that was nasty. They had sacrificed a sheep on a makeshift altar in an abandoned Air Force fire station in a remote corner of the Mojave desert. Blood and entrails were smeared everywhere, lots of evil graffiti about how much fun it is to kill. It was a miserable sight. Sad.

SIMON: You said it was part of the ‘growing evidence of downright creepy stuff’ you’ve encountered. Are you implying that this kind of activity is on the rise?

TROY: Is it on the rise, or has it always been there, bubbling away under the surface? I don’t have the answer for that. Remember what I said earlier about the desert being the last place where oddballs can thrive? Some people are just bigger oddballs than others, what can I tell you?

HENRY: I enjoy reading your interior highway dialogues [Troy wrote 12,000 words to accompany the photos in Lost America]. You should definitely do more existential travel essays – you seem to have a feel for it.

TROY: Thanks, but I clearly don’t have as much to offer as a writer that I do as a photographer. Urban Exploration needs a new young writer, this generation’s version of Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson, who can bring it into a modern pop-culture context. I’m not that writer, but I’ll gladly play the photographic role of Ralph Steadman.

ABOVE: ‘Danger Zone’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Building 4900, abandoned. Decommissioned Fort Ord Army Base. It’s all in the details. Shot 1/07, night- totally dark space, red-gelled strobe and ungelled strobe through fenced room.’

SIMON: Do you know about the recent hysteria in Britain, with people being questioned and harassed by police for using a camera in public places under suspicion of terrorism? There has been a huge backlash from ordinary people demanding the right to take pictures in public without being branded a terrorist.

TROY: I’ve heard rumblings about that sort of thing here too, especially in big cities. No question, the climate for photographers has changed since 9/11. The police have all of us on a shorter leash. Here in western America everything is spread out though, so it’s much easier to fall between the cracks if you get out of the big cities. That’s why I like shooting in rural locations. You are a lot less likely to be hassled by the police or unsavoury characters.

HENRY: Ballard has described Shanghai as ‘cruel and lurid, polluted and exciting’. Except for ‘cruel’ this seems an apt description of your photography (I find your work too surreal to be genuinely malicious). Do you feel this same kind of frantic, otherworldly rush as you travel the land in search of… of what, exactly?

TROY: Ghosts. Not Hollywood movie ghosts-actors under sheets waving their arms, but the ghosts of technology, a slice of amazing human history that is already being forgotten as we rush headlong towards… whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards. I don’t believe in ghosts in the traditional sense, but these places carry a spiritual weight that is unlike occupied places or nature. The stillness and atmosphere, especially alone at night, can be an emotionally overwhelming experience. No question, it is a rush.

ABOVE: ‘Canted’ by Troy Paiva. ’1959 Buick at a nameless high desert junkyard near Lake Los Angeles, CA. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon purple and green-gelled strobe-flash. Big and rusty.’

SIMON: Is America really changing as rapidly as your work suggests?

TROY: Yes, it’s changing faster and faster. America is all about speed and ‘the new’ so we’re always replacing things that don’t really need replacing. It’s interesting how the places and objects I find have changed over the years. Twenty years ago it was all about the debris left behind by the finned atomic-age, but now the focus has shifted to the debris of the 70s and 80s: junkyard minivans and wide-body airliners are replacing the big-finned station wagons and 707s. Disposable plastic replacing chromed steel.

Who knows where it’s headed? Surely we’re into another period of contraction in the West as gas tops $4 a gallon, which only means junkyards filled with giant SUVs and more abandonments to explore, but I have no idea where it will ultimately end up.

When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain the people in the future — long after the automobile has been forgotten — will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them. In the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty — we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

SIMON: How did you get interested in night photography?

TROY: In 1989 I was working as a designer/illustrator for a major toy company, drawing and painting every day in a heavily art-directed environment. After several years of that I lost any sense of the artistic fulfilment I was originally getting from the job. The last thing I wanted to do was draw and paint at home too, so I was desperate to find a new personal creative outlet. At the time my brother Tom was a full time photography student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. One of his classes was in night photography. Being my brother, he knew I’d be fascinated by night shooting on a conceptual level, so he snuck me along to some lectures and shoots with the class in the decaying industrial sections of SF. It instantly dawned on me that this was the perfect way to photograph the abandoned roadside towns I was already exploring. After one trip to the desert to shoot at night I became totally obsessed and consumed by it.

ABOVE: ‘Alameda Corridor’ by Tom Paiva.

SIMON: Do you see any similarities with your brother Tom’s work?

TROY: When we were both learning the ropes in night shooting we frequently shot at night together. Now Tom lives in Los Angeles and he has a commercial photography business shooting large format architectural and industrial work. Living 500 miles apart, we seldom get the chance to shoot together anymore. Tom’s aesthetic is the complete opposite of mine; he doesn’t light paint, he doesn’t do the UrbEx-style locations, and his complex and meticulous – and ultimately gorgeous – large-format work is the exact opposite of my quick and dirty, guerrilla-style shooting. My compositional style tends towards a pop-surrealist, melodramatic and cartoony look, whereas his is a more stately and formalist style. His work is cool and elegant, mine hot and visceral. Yes, we’re both night photographers, but our styles couldn’t be more different. We’re very careful to avoid doing similar work specifically because we are both named ‘T. Paiva’ and we both make a conscious effort to avoid stepping on each other’s artistic toes. One way we’re similar though is that we’re both loners, but I think that is a trait that runs strong in most night shooters. It’s funny to watch a group of night photographers descend on a location – they usually say something like ‘meet you here at 1am’ and head off in opposite directions.

SIMON: Who else can you recommend in the field?

TROY: Jan Staller, Richard Misrach, Michael Kenna and Steve Fitch for sure. Studying the lighting work of O. Winston Link, William Lesch and Chip Simons back in the late 80s was really important for me, too. I’d sit there for hours, deconstructing their images trying to figure out how they lit their subjects. But maybe I owe more to David Lynch, Roger Deakins, Vittorio Storaro, Juan Ruiz Anchía, Emmanuel Lubezki, Tim Burton and a trillion other movie artists. I watch a lot more movies than I read photo books.

SIMON: What kind of equipment do you use?

TROY: I shot on film from 1989 to 2004 using cheap, outdated flea-market 35mm gear. It felt right for me to be shooting this forgotten junk with junk. This old work has a Holga-esque, toy-camera lo-fi quality that many find endearing today. I guess I was unintentionally ahead of the curve there too. I stopped shooting for a year in 2004 as the film era fizzled out, frustrated by lab closures, the lack of quality film processing and the low yield of acceptable work with my ancient equipment. In 2005 I moved to digital once I saw that camera technology had advanced enough to allow me to do noise-free time exposures. I now shoot with a Canon 20D and a 12-24mm Tokina zoom lens. I use a heavy, solid Slik tripod because I do a lot of work in wind and rough conditions and I need as stable a platform for the camera as possible. Regrettably, I was forced away from the ‘shooting junk with junk’ ethos by changing technology, but with the 20D already being superseded by several newer models in the past few years, maybe the 20D is already ‘outdated junk’ gear too.

ABOVE: ‘Speedlines’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Mid ’70s Chevy Monte Carlo at the Pearsonville, California Junkyard. This is the last of the Pearsonville work, I wanna try to head back soon tho. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon, blue and green-gelled flashlight.’

SIMON: You’ve described your technique as ‘low cost/high impact lighting’. Is it therefore accessible for amateurs and people beginning to experiment with photography?

TROY: Absolutely. The advent of digital photography and the ability to chimp the shot on the back of your camera as you work has revolutionized night photography and light painting. In the film era you could shoot a whole roll of film and not know that the leader on the film never got picked up by the sprocket, let alone that your exposures were incorrect or your lighting was not bright enough.

All my lighting is done with a single 20 year old Vivitar 285 strobe flash and a collection of flashlights from a tiny keychain LED to a 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight. I have a set of theatrical lighting gels cut to small swatches that I just hold over the light source. Because the exposures are minutes long, I have plenty of time to do multiple flash pops and take my time with my flashlight work. Observers are often surprised by my low-tech lighting technique, asking ‘Is that really all there is to it?’ I have to keep it simple because this is frequently a guerrilla-style of photography. Travelling light is critical, so all my gear except the tripod fits in a small daypack, allowing me to get in, set up, shoot and get out quickly.

You can buy a flash like mine second-hand for $50. All of my flashlights could be bought at any drugstore like Target or Walmart. Every halfway-large city has at least one theatrical supply store where you can buy gel material. It costs about $10 a sheet. The reason for not trying light painting is not because of cost! Look at any of the myriad night photography or light-painting groups at a photo-sharing site like flickr and prepare to be overwhelmed with amateurs doing this kind of work in all sorts of locations. It’s everywhere now. I seem to have created a Frankenstein.

SIMON: Do you work fast?

TROY: I work incredibly fast compared to other night shooters. A lot of that is a product of having almost 20 years of experience, but I am a seat-of-the-pants type of artist in any media. The less thinking and planning and fussing over the piece, the more relaxed and natural it will be.

It’s kind of like a pianist playing a song with thousands of notes without sheet music: if they think about every note, they can’t possibly play the song. Rather, they turn off the conscious part of their mind and just let it flow. Same for painters and other artists. It’s no different for photography. The more you think, plan and try to get the shot, the more likely it will elude you.

ABOVE: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva. ‘The YESCO sign boneyard, Las Vegas, NV. Shot May, 2000. Night, 160 Tungsten film, full moon, sodium and mercury vapor lights, red-gelled strobe flash. That’s the Luxor hotel spotlight. Legendary location seen in many TV shows and movies containing hundreds of old signs. Almost everything here was donated and moved to the Las Vegas Neon Museum across town shortly after I shot here, this lot was turned into more manufacturing/warehouse space.’

Had they any idea that Las Vegas was defended by a rag-tag army of children? In an attempt to blind their camera lenses, Manson continued to turn up the electric power flowing into the city. The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incandescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Funnily enough, given that your signature style is this unnaturally vivid primary-colour palette, I always picture purples and reds when I think of Vermilion Sands, more so Ballard’s Hello America. The gels you use irradiate your scenery – for me it really does evoke the near-future sheen of Hello America‘s abandoned United States, in which whole cities are buried in the desert, a vast continent paved over with accreted hyperconsumerism. But in photography at least, this seems an unusual approach to take with urban ruins – many would rather focus on the grey, rusting aspects of abandoned towns. Perhaps, like Ballard, you are breathing new life into these ruins, recombining them in new and unexpected ways.

TROY: Yes, you nailed it. Most UrbEx photography is a pure documentation of locations weathered to dreary and monochromatic greys and browns, but I’m taking it someplace else entirely by reanimating these places with light. Some say I’m bringing a festive, circus-like atmosphere to these dead places. It’s done in a sort of Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ spirit. My colour choices are usually predicated on the actual colour of the subject and location, not because of some premeditated ‘I must use green tonight’ mentality.

I see it as embracing the idea of death rather than fearing it. It’s about accepting it and having fun with this darker side of the human condition. My work tends to inspire melancholia, especially in older people, because they remember these places from their youth. It reminds them of their own mortality, but I think that palpable sense of transience and loss in these places is actually exciting and inspiring rather than sad or futile. I suspect that feeling runs strong in many urban explorers.

Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution – I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions and overpasses and multi-storey car-parks ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most of them are structures of great beauty.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

HENRY: Ballard has said that his fiction is the ‘dissection of a deep pathology’. Do you also see your own work as a kind of surgical procedure, laying bare the arid and often post-apocalyptically tinged dreamscapes of the USA in all its mythical glory? Or is it more intimate, personal and emotional than that?

TROY: Jeez, these are hard questions. It is a very personal and emotional process for me. It is an artistic process more than an intellectual one. My photography is about these places as they are now, not as they were. It’s not socioeconomic commentary, an anti-technology or anti-military-waste rant, or a warning about rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption, though it has been interpreted as such by others. Put simply, I love these places. I am laying bare this rotten underbelly, but I’m doing it because these places simply move me, not necessarily because of what they were, but because of what they are now. It’s all about the atmosphere and feeling, and I try to enhance this surreal vibe with my time exposures and light painting.

ABOVE: The cover of Paiva’s Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration, published by Chronicle Books.

SIMON: I see that Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG has written the foreword to your forthcoming book, Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. As we’ve previously seen, Geoff shares a Ballardian approach to architecture and urban exploration.

TROY: My editor at Chronicle Books introduced me to Geoff. He was a last-second addition to the project when my original essayist fell through at the 11th hour. Geoff immediately ‘got it’ and wrote a very eloquent and flattering forward, quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition among several other books. I enjoy Geoff’s blog tremendously, especially when the subject of ‘the philosophy and aesthetics of abandonment’ comes up.

Paiva’s images of airplane graveyards, in particular, are all the more evocative and gripping when you consider that his father was a flight engineer, hopping planes from country to country. In his book The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard describes a surreal landscape of crashed bombers, abandoned air warfare ranges, and disused runways. He refers to such images as ‘the nightmare of a grounded pilot,’ or ‘the suburbs of Hell,’ a ‘University of Death,’ across which people wander, stunned by the ruins all around them.

Geoff Manaugh, foreword to Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.

SIMON: Tell us more about the book.

TROY: It’s broken down into five chapters: ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel’, about an abandoned early 20th century resort; ‘16th Street Station’, about a derelict Beaux Arts inner city train station; ‘Decommissioned’, which covers over a dozen various abandoned military and industrial complexes; ‘Desert’, about the abandoned roadsides of the desert southwest; and ‘Boneyard’, a high-desert graveyard comprised of hundreds of junk aircraft.

While it’s as similar to Lost America as you’d expect two volumes of ‘light-painted night photography in abandoned places’ to be, this new one is about specific locations rather than general overviews of types of places. I have the first production copy sitting on the desk in front of me and it really looks sharp. It’s a much higher-quality piece than Lost America. The layout and design is much more sophisticated and refined and the print quality is a vast improvement. I’m frankly floored by it and I’m my own worst critic, so I’m pretty optimistic that other people are going to be floored by it too.

SIMON: What sort of research do you do, in terms of finding out sites to visit and photograph?

TROY: I drive around in the desert and scout locations. I have a collection of old road maps from the 50s, which I’ve studied at length. It’s fascinating to see whole towns on those maps that no longer exist. In the last few years I’ve had a lot of email from people telling me about great locations and I’ve been acting on some of these tips with great results. I’ve also been shooting with a lot of local UrbEx photographers who have introduced me to some spectacular spots very close to home.

ABOVE: ‘Wind Slice’ by Troy Paiva. ’1930s airliner in storage at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled flash. 2-3 minutes.’

He welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him… Who were they, these strange twins – couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them…

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

SIMON: And your favourite shoot so far?

TROY: The aircraft boneyards are still my favourites. I’m an airline brat so I grew up around planes. There is nothing that can prepare you for walking up to half of a 747 laying on its belly in the sand. It’s just epic. I shot the derelict ocean liner ‘S.S. Independence’ earlier this year, days before it left to be towed to the breaker beaches of Asia. That was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shoot.

SIMON: Do you have a desire to shoot outside of America?

TROY: Oh sure: the abandoned industrial cities of Eastern Russia, Gunkanjima – that completely abandoned island city in Japan – the half-finished hotels of the Sinai, the abandoned Formula 1 racetrack at Reims, France… the list goes on and on. Realistically, though, there is more than enough in the American Southwest to shoot for a lifetime.

It’s mainly a money issue. Being a freelance artist in the 21st century is a low-budget lifestyle. Still, with a few deep-pocket patrons I’d be happily winging my way across the globe next week!

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration is shipping on 2 July, 2008 and is available for preorder via Chronicle Books and Amazon.com.

ABOVE: ‘Clipped and Headless’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A mutilated Delta 727 fuselage on its belly at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. 2-3 minute exposure.’

..:: MORE INFORMATION
+ Troy’s official site
+ Troy’s Lost America site
+ Troy’s flickr stream
+ Design Shed, Troy’s freelance design and illustration site

Keith Seward, aka Supervert, is a writer based in New York. He also runs Reality Studio, a website and forum devoted to Burroughs. Reality Studio has had a big impact on ballardian.com in that it’s a template for how to present an intelligent and provocative site about a major cultural figure without descending into the worst excesses of fandom. There is much discussion of Ballard over at Reality Studio’s forum, and some crossover the other way: Supervert submitted an entry to our Ballardian Home Movies competition and occasionally pops up in this site’s comments box, as do other RS regulars. At some stage I hope to conduct an interview with Seward, in which the Ballard/Burroughs nexus will be analysed along with Keith’s various writing projects (but as always with this site finding the time is the factor, although I hope the interview will not be too far away).

I have Supervert’s two books, Necrophiliac Variations and Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, and I find them to be hilariously challenging examinations of the nature of sexuality. Careening through outright farce to science fiction and beyond, these self-published, thoroughly subversive gems have been around for a few years, appreciated by the likes of Mark Dery and i09′s Annalee Newitz.

Dery even managed to draw Ballard into the frame:

Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as exophilia, the “abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth” that is the subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, are starting to sound downright plausible. Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment—the “demise of feeling”—would open the door to “all our most real and tender pleasures—in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game.”

Now Keith has a new book out, a limited-edition hardcover called Horror Panegyric. Published by Savoy Books, this is Seward’s apppraisal of Savoy’s notorious Lord Horror novels by David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The novels tell the story of Lord Horror, who, Seward writes, “is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer”. The books are alternative histories of a fascist England, brutal, bloody, highly confrontational and shot through with a violent Surrealism.

According to Seward:

Lord Horror takes the repository of symbols bequeathed by World War II and pours it into a cauldron boiling over with pop culture. Bigots and death camps get cooked up with rock and roll, comic strips, esoterica. It’s a “what if the other side had won the war” trip like you’ve never seen before.
…
Constant harassment — which continued into the late 1990s — from an obsessed constabulary would have quashed most publishers, but Britton and Butterworth operated under a maxim more along the Nietzschean lines of “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Far from folding up shop or retreating into less controversial publications, the two launched an all-out assault. Though the novel Lord Horror was effectively suppressed and remains difficult to find even today, the character Lord Horror multiplied, made appearances in different media, spawned other characters who in turn featured in their own books, comics, music. In short, the death of the book was the birth of a twisted empire, a reich of deviant imagination that neither Allied nor Axis powers would ever have recognized.
…
Their franchise of Lord Horror productions is provocative, original, visionary, and contains at least one outright masterpiece (Motherfuckers). Young writers should be looking at it the same as they do Naked Lunch, i.e. as a work that shows them what the possibilities are in the hands of a master. Academics should be crawling all over it with their magnifying glasses trying to figure out what it means and what it says about society. Anyone interested in literature should be reading and experiencing the damn thing. A few cognoscenti are there already, snapping up the first editions of Lord Horror before everybody else catches on and prices them out of the market. But the victory celebration hasn’t happened yet, and it is hard to understand why.

The Lord Horror books are now difficult to find, but following Seward’s essay in Horror Panegyric are excerpts from the works that are guaranteed to stoke the fire. Perhaps you might even find yourself sharing Colin Wilson’s reaction:

I think that, as an exercise in Surrealism, Lord Horror compares with some of the best work that came out of France and Germany between the wars, for example Georges Bataille… Britton is undoubtedly brilliant, but when I came to the bit about Horror hollowing out a Jewess’s foot and putting it over his penis, I started skipping. With the best will in the world, I couldn’t give his brilliant passages the attention they deserve because I kept being put off by this note of violence and sadism. No doubt it is because I belong to an older generation that is still basically a bit Victorian.

Horror Panegyric is available online at supervert.com or can be purchased in hardcover. The latter is worth it for the great cover art and design by John Coulthart.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ J.G. Ballard: the Visual Tribute (including work from John Coulthart)
+ The 1st Annual Ballardian Home Movies Competition (featuring Supervert)
+ A Home and a Grave (Mike Holliday’s essay on Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company, analysing it as a “fascist novel” with similarities to Lord Horror)
+ J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview (a republishing of a 1974 Ballard interview from Corridor, Michael Butterworth’s early fanzine)

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The interview below was published in a vast tome, an annual German review of the year in science fiction which came out in July last year. The interview itself was presumably conducted sometime in Spring 2007, after the publication of Kingdom Come and the re-issue two-volume set of The Complete Short Stories.

One suspects, in the end, that Ballard’s playful teasing of his interviewers results from a certain sanguinity about the state of his health; it’s less a callous dissimulation at the expense of his interlocutors than the resolution of the old Lunghua survivor. Evidently by the time of the interview he had already been visiting hospitals, as he notes their science fiction-like hypermodernity, and even advises his interviewers to visit one. I’d rather remember the Ballard of this interview, his sense of mischief intact even in the face of his physical atrophy, than the Ballard who has appeared in recent TV interviews, in which he seems oppressed by less considerate and more parasitical personalities.

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

WERNER FUCHS & SASCHA MAMCZAK: Mr Ballard, last year marked a very special anniversary for you: fifty years ago, in 1956, with the publication of your first story, your career as a science fiction author began.

J.G. BALLARD: Yes, that’s true. But don’t remind me of it! I’m an old man.

Well, your publishers have effectively reminded you of it by newly publishing a thousand-page-plus collection of all your stories from the last fifty years.

Naturally, I was very impressed. After all, that’s half a century of hard work, half my life, if you like. You know, short stories were always very important for me. Like many science fiction authors, I began by writing short stories, which isn’t the norm any more, at least not among British authors today. Today young authors would rather write novels straight off – and that’s precisely why these novels are mostly so poor. In every job you need a certain amount of practice, whether you’re a violinist or a joiner, and short stories offer writers a wonderful chance to acquire the necessary tools. The Mona Lisa, was, after all, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci’s first painting. In any case I learned what it meant to be a writer by writing short stories; what my weaknesses and strengths are.

Today, short stories – even SF short stories – have fallen out of style somewhat.

Yes, one’s become used to these overlong novels in which everything is explained and tidied up. At the heart of every good short story lies a certain ambiguity, a sort of “Yes, but.” That’s very seldom found in novels. And yet this ambiguity is the very stuff of life. Many people tell me I should write more short stories – and I reply that I don’t know where I’d publish them. When I began writing them fifty years ago, it was completely different: nearly every paper and magazine in those days published short stories, some of them even every day. And then there were of course the science fiction magazines, which had an almost insatiable appetite for short stories. The SF magazines in those days were an entirely wonderful training space for budding authors – one could pursue one’s obsessions, one’s fantasies; one could discover what kind of writer one wanted to be. It’s a little like the way that, in one’s youth, one has a lot of affairs: one learns how to make love. It’s different now: most young authors don’t know how to make love, and they don’t know how to write. Oh, well, that’s only the grumbling of an old man.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006. Photograph by Adam Bloomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

How, back then, did you come to write science fiction?

Now, most authors in those days were fans before they began to write professionally. Which means that they’d already written something or other in their youth, mostly for fanzines. With me it was different, I only came to science fiction later. I was twenty-six when I published my first story. Before then I’d scarcely read any science fiction. It was when I went to Canada with the Royal Air Force that I first became aware of SF. We were based somewhere in the Canadian provinces, it snowed incessantly, and there was nothing to do and nothing to read, not a single daily paper. So I started to read science fiction magazines – and I was extraordinarily surprised. It gave me a glimpse of a hitherto unexplored terrain. The then literary mainstream – the stories which the New Yorker or other magazines published – was purely oriented towards the past, both thematically and stylistically. That didn’t interest me. I was interested in the changes around us – the consumer society, the first computers, TV, the fear of nuclear war, gigantic motorway and airport complexes – all of that created a new landscape, an external landscape like the mental one. I wanted to write about that. So I thought, why not science fiction? One could investigate this landscape there.

And of course the nascent space age.

Of course. I remember very well how in 1956 – as I said, the year in which I published my first short story – I heard for the first time on the radio the Sputnik 1 signal: beep, beep, beep. The sound of a new world. So long, past! Hello, future! They were really very exciting years. Years in which, in practice, I wrote exclusively short stories.

Which authors – both within science fiction and outside it – influenced you the most back then?

Within SF, very few – I simply learned too little from them. I was weaned, if you will, on the classical European and American menu, and the one to make the most impression on me was Franz Kafka. He was the most significant writer of the 20th century, far more significant than James Joyce. Edgar Allan Poe and Dino Buzzati also fascinated me. Of the SF authors in those days I had the most respect for Ray Bradbury, but I’ve never written like him. He was too romantic, too naive for me at times.

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

I did like Sturgeon. Dick, less so – he was too American for me. Many British authors imitated the Americans in those days, so as to get published in the US magazines. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I’d prefer the neutral tone of a Robert Sheckley or a Cyril Kornbluth. But if you ask me who really influenced me – it was less writers than painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, René Magritte. The surrealists. I wanted to create in words what they created on canvas. These dreamlike landscapes, this fascinating way of artistically realizing psychological states. You know, as a teenager I lived through the greatest surrealistic situation on the planet: the war. You go into the street, and half the houses are in ruins. A car sitting on top of one of the houses. And so on… War is full of surreal surprises, full of surrealist images. Back then it became clear to me that something in human culture was taking a dreadfully warped turn – and as an artist, a writer, I wanted to understand it.

LEFT: The Drowned World, German edition (Phantasia, 2008).

When your first stories were published in British SF magazines, what was the reaction in the USA? Were many of the stories accepted?

No, the Americans were very hesitant to publish my stories. They just didn’t understand what I was driving at. The American SF magazines of the late 50s and early 60s wanted conventional SF stories, stories set in the future or in space. An SF story set in the present irritated them terribly, and many of my stories were set in the present then. In time it got better, naturally, and many of my stories could then appear over there, but the experimental pieces were really published almost exclusively in Britain. So up to 1963 – when the success of my first really serious novel The Drowned World brought me a certain independence – I wrote almost entirely experimental short stories.

Can it be that your 1964 short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ marked a turning point in your work? With respect to what one generally designates ‘inner space’?

Absolutely. ‘The Terminal Beach’ is certainly one of my most important stories. Even though it was published in New Worlds, it wasn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather conveyed merely a certain science fiction atmosphere. It described a landscape that was the expression of a particular psychological state – our fear of nuclear war. Yes, I think ‘The Terminal Beach’ is the first real ‘inner space’ story and it leads directly to The Atrocity Exhibition, but also to novels like Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island. There, there are particular mental landscapes described throughout, like those made by the surrealists in their paintings.

‘Inner space’ was also the thematic centre of the start of the New Wave back then. When you look back today, how do you see your rôle in that literary movement?

I was the New Wave! (Laughs.) Well, in some ways there was something inevitable about the New Wave. Back then in the early 60s American science fiction had exhausted itself in repeating its themes, and people were looking for something new and exciting. You know, as soon as I began to write, I constantly saw in SF authors and especially in the American ones a collection of truly naive and, if you like, innocent men – people who truly didn’t know what they were doing. Ray Bradbury is a prominent example. A few years ago someone sent me a book about him, with many photographs. One of these showed Bradbury in his work room, which is about as large as a tennis court – and every millimetre of this huge workroom is stuffed full of toys: rockets, spaceships, dinosaur models, every kind of monster. A child’s room. A wonderful image for the American science fiction of these times, even for the whole of American culture.

You said that you wouldn’t describe ‘The Terminal Beach’ as a science fiction story at all. Would that go for everything you’ve written since?

Absolutely. I don’t see novels like Crash, High Rise or Concrete Island as science fiction. And I think that many people only describe it as science fiction because in that way they can neutralize the uncomfortable feeling it radiates.

Then what are these novels and tales?

Good question. They’re certainly not part of Realism, which dominates modern fiction – I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear. I’ve always seen myself as a kind of moralist, one who stands on the roadside holding up a sign with the legend: Look out, dangerous bends, drive slowly!

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

So, stories that read like science fiction, but aren’t?

Something like that. It’s simply that the themes of science fiction were eagerly ingested by the mainstream, and readers got on with them better and better. Just take William Burroughs, who I admire greatly: he demonstrated very early on, with his paranoid fantasies which naturally go back to Kafka, that one doesn’t have to be a science fiction author to write science fiction. No, I think that with The Atrocity Exhibition at the latest, I abandoned the genre for good. And I’ve not gone back to it since. But that’s not at all uncommon: even H. G. Wells began as a science fiction author, and at some point left off with it and wrote mainstream novels.

In the 80s with cyberpunk there arose a literary movement about which, in retrospect, one asks oneself if it was still science fiction.

Yes, I greatly admired the cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, many others. Whether they wrote science fiction or something else is hard to say. The fact is that new forms of communications have a great influence on literature, particularly the internet – and cyberpunk was the first expression of it. But it came too late for me. I’ve never owned a computer, and I still don’t have one even today.

But you surf on the internet now and then, don’t you?

Naturally. One cannot avoid it anymore. The internet’s a fascinating thing – it really has made the world into a global village.

Let’s come back to your short stories. Or rather to the fact that in the 90s you hardly wrote them any more…

I think that short stories are basically a playing field for young authors, a bit like the lyric. Moreover there are, as I said, scarcely any more opportunities to publish short stories. Of course now and then a magazine rings me and asks for a story, which is quite wonderful. But when I then ask how long it should be, they answer: 2000 words. 2000 words! That’s not a story, it’s a vignette. Yes, I stopped writing short stories in the 90s. But in some ways all my most recently published novels are extended short stories. But please don’t tell anyone.

And all these novels seem to have a common theme: the failure of every form of middle-class utopia.

Yes, in some ways. I’m very interested in social pathology, in what really drives us on in our everyday lives. My newest novel Kingdom Come raises the question of whether the consumer thinking of the present day might not at some point suddenly turn into fascism.

A very trenchant thesis.

Yes, but just take a look at what’s going on in these huge shopping malls. Evidently not much more than shopping is left for us. That and sport. That’s where we get our kicks, those are the new religions. I already believe that one of these days we could end up in a kind of leisure-time dictatorship.

But don’t events like the attacks of the 11th of September or the catastrophe in New Orleans remind people of the hard facts of reality?

I’m not so sure about that. I think it was difficult for many people to distinguish the picture of the collapsed World Trade Center from all the other images they know from Hollywood. It’s such a binary matter: real, unreal, real, unreal… And as for whether the current American administration finds itself brought down to reality or not, I very much doubt it. No, I think we live in dangerous times.

Do at least modern SF authors react appropriately to what’s going on around us?

I can’t say, I read practically no science fiction any more. You know, it’s like an old affair: if it ends, it’s gone forever. It doesn’t come back. What fascinated me about science fiction fifty years ago has long become a part of our everyday life, it’s permeated the whole of society. Just go to a modern hospital sometime – it’s pure science fiction. I only very seldom read novels at all. I read far more non-fiction, political analyses, biographies. The older one gets, the more one clings to facts.

And to come back to the aforementioned tome of fiction, your collected short stories: could you tell us what your favourite short story is?

Hm… My favourite story is probably ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’. That story changed everything for me.

And will there one day be a sequel? ‘Why I Want To Fuck George W. Bush’?

No, I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush! Hillary Clinton, maybe. If you know what I mean.

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007).

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)
Film