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

All photography by Rick McGrath.

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

Dear Simon,

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

Left: Toby Litt.

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

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

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

Claire Walsh.

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

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

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

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

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

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

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

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

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

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

Michael Moorcock.

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

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

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

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

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

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

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

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

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

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

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

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

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

Left: Iain Sinclair.

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

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

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

Cheers,
Rick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Self: Because he was on a driving ban.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intriguing, and I look forward to reading more.

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

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

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

What was that Sinclair said about creating a monster?

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

In true Ballardian fashion, there is more than a touch of megalomania to him and it becomes clear that HRH has his own plans for world domination. Believing himself to be telepathic and claiming the existence of extraterrestrials, he forms a religion called the Perfect Light Movement and is compared to Jesus Christ by André Malraux, eventually using his growing power and influence to sieze the UN where he attempts to spark off world war against the US and the USSR. Eventually he is incarcerated on the Isle of Wight where it’s presumed he wrote his life story.

The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself. It’s a format that allows for some humourous moments, as in this entry, in which we discover that Hitler impressed and then disappointed HRH within the space of two pages, an arc of disillusionment that reflects the greatest schism of the 20th century yet comically reduces it to just one line:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

Eventually we come to learn that the story, despite the form of the piece, actually unfolds in a linear fashion from “A” (including Avignon, HRH’s birthplace) to “Z”. In the entries for “U”, “V” and “W”, for example, HRH’s downfall is revealed:

United Nations Assembly, seized by Perfect Light Movement, 695 – 9; HRH addresses, 696; HRH calls for world war against United States and USSR, 698
Versailles, Perfect Light Movement attempts to purchase, 621
Vogue (magazine), 356
Westminster Abbey, arrest of HRH by Special Branch, 704
Wight, Isle of, incarceration of HRH, 712 – 69
Windsor, House of, HRH challenges legitimacy of, 588

While the very last entry is revealed to be that of the indexer himself:

Zielinski, Bronislaw, suggests autobiography to HRH, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761

Thus in one fell metaphysical stroke the indexer actually indexes himself out of existence, causing the editor to speculate, “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer”.

But what’s really going on in this story? Did HRH really play a part in changing the course of human affairs, with all facets of his existence covered up to the general public? Is this index then a giant conspiracy of which now have only vague, shadowy knowledge? As the editor again speculates, “A substantial mystery still remains. Is it conceivable that all traces of his activities could be erased from our records of the period? Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman a clef in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” Or has HRH somehow collaged himself into world affairs, rewriting postwar history with himself in a starring role? The latter would then beg the question: is Woody Allen a JGB fan? For by now you must have detected the obvious similarities to Allen’s film Zelig, made six years after this story was published.

Funnily enough, “The Index”, for all its brilliance, seems to be an extension of ideas first aired in two earlier, markedly less successful Ballard shorts: “Minus One” (1963), in which the existence of an asylum patient is inferred (and then covered up) from a few scraps of medical papers, and “Now: Zero” (1959), in which the reader, like the “deranged lexicographer” in “The Index”, obliterates himself via the act of participation. I guess this only goes to show that Ballard never wastes an idea, or that he really is writing the same story over and over (the latter is not a criticism in my view, I must add).

“The Index” is also in a direct continuum with The Atrocity Exhibition, whose central character, T-, represents all sides of the equation. On the one hand, T-, like the reader of “The Index”, feels as though he is amidst a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy of existence itself. But T-, driven mad by the new communications landscape fracturing the late 1960s, forms a strategy, as HRH possibly did, cutting and pasting the cultural and political events of the late 1960s into a bricolaged version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind — with himself in the lead role. Eventually, T-, like HRH, is indexed into his own storyline, even appearing in one chapter as a fragmented, diffuse entity, aligned to Christ, again like HRH:

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Thus it’s not completely accurate to say that Ballard abandoned the methodology of Atrocity in the 1970s, as many commentators do. As “The Index” shows, his experimental bent was still evident, and as always aligned to a strong storyline. I have read a few pastiches of Atrocity and the importance of plot is something that their writers do not fully grasp for the most part: it’s not enough to pay homage to JGB by simply cutting up text and fiddling with form and structure. Underpinning Ballard, always, is the bones of a strong plot that can be summarised in a linear synopsis and “The Index” (and Atrocity) is no exception. But this sparse framework also makes the work a “readerly” text, in which inference allows the reader to substantially flesh out the bones. In this respect, I see “The Index” as the logical, extreme outcome of the experiment began by Atrocity, in which the text is pared back as far as possible without sacrificing narrative legibility.

This is especially apparent in light of comments Ballard made in a 1983 interview:

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality — the reality we inhabit — almost as if it were a cadaver… the contents of a special kind of inquisition. We have these objects here — what are they?

If you move into a house that hasn’t been properly cleaned up, you find these strange unrelated items: a pen, a hair clip, a copy of Auden’s poems, and without even thinking you begin to assemble from these materials some sort of hypothesis about the nature of life that was lived in this house, or the nature of people who’ve left this debris on the beach after they’ve vanished in a plane crash or what have you.

I assemble materials and I draw from them. I treat the reality we inhabit as if it were a fiction — I treat the whole of existence as if it were a huge invention.… this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions — perhaps — that surround us in reality.

“Interview by Graeme Revell”. RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard

Now, having reflected on one of my favourite Ballard stories, I am therefore naturally delighted to report that Lucy Vickery in The Spectator recently ran a competition to “submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good”.

Lucy writes:

To give you an idea of what I was after, here are a couple of snippets from J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Index’, a story implied through an index, which is the only surviving part of the unpublished autobiography of Henry Rhodes Hamilton: ‘Churchill, Winston, conversations with HRH, 221; at Chequers with HRH, 235; spinal tap performed by HRH, 247; at Yalta with HRH, 298; ‘iron curtain’ speech, Fulton, Missouri, suggested by HRH, 312; attacks HRH in Commons debate, 367’.

But as she admits this was a pretty tough ask and subsequently “entries were thin on the ground”. However, Lucy did manage to unearth four winners who received £30 each, with a “bonus fiver” going to G.M. Davis. I’ve run two Ballard-inspired competitions here at ballardian.com, and I’m insanely jealous I didn’t think of this for the third — it’s a brilliant idea.

Reproduced below is G.M. Davis’s entry (which includes an entry for Will Self’s “snoring”), but special mention must also go to Basil Ransome-Davies, whose submission featured this hilarious detail: “Eagleton, Terence. Asks me to smooth his way with the Vatican, 246″.

G.M. DAVIS:

Mandela, Nelson, surprisingly short when you meet him, 526; political errors of, 828
Miners’ strike, author’s resolution of, 917–8
Mosley, Max, ‘kindred spirit’, 42; ‘Nazi pervert’, 1620
Nabokov, Vladimir, aesthetic fallacies of, 301
New Statesman, author’s rejection of editorship, 559; sales slump, 560
Portillo, Michael, deaf to good counsel, 338
Price, Katie, seeks author’s advice on mammary enlargement/reduction, 844
Prince Charles, personal hygiene problem, 208; bares soul, 443
Principia Mathematica, discussion of with Allen Ginsberg, 71; author’s refutation of, 113
Quantum theory, author’s contribution to, 12, 19, 47, 77, 101–114, 298–306
Rice, Condoleezza, ‘not so black as she’s painted’, 866; good in bed, 992–4
Rooney, Wayne, spotted by author as four-year-old, 1083; ingratitude, 1119
Sarkozy, Nicholas, requests author’s help in drafting European constitution, 1443
Scorsese, dissuaded from abandoning cinema, 636; as drug-crazed egomaniac, 665
Scotland, faulty central heating at Balmoral, 460; as failed state, 700
Self, Will, snoring of, 1757

The rest of the entries can be found at The Spectator.

Towards the end of his new memoir, Miracles of Life, JG Ballard singles out two literary soulmates: Iain Sinclair, “the Odysseus of the M25″; and Will Self, “a remarkable writer, almost seven feet in height with a tall man’s constant surprise at the mundane world far below him”. So it was right and proper that Ballard was himself name-checked more than once when Sinclair and Self met at the V&A to discuss psychogeography.

I suppose there is a superficial point of convergence with the writing of these three — Self with his interest in bizarre sex and distended suburbia, Sinclair with his haunted urban archaeology, both circumnavigating the M25 of literature back to Ballard — while the influence of Ballard’s outsider status and perspective on both is undeniable.

But to bring Sinclair and Self together to talk about psychogeography seems bizarre. I wonder what mystical forces aligned for this to happen? Consider what Sinclair had to say in Tim Chapman’s interview with him:

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

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

TC: Is there any mileage left in it?

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

And this from Sinclair, in an interview over at Classic Cafes:

Psychogeography is a talismanic term that Sinclair understands to have been cannibalised from French situationism. [Sinclair says:] “For me, it’s a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I’m just exploiting it because I think it’s a canny way to write about London. Now it’s become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to walk the South Downs with a pipe, which has got absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography. There’s this awful sense that you’ve created a monster.”

Being stranded in Oz, I wasn’t there, so I wonder if the V&A talk thrashed this out? Doubt it; I’m sure the Guardian review would have noted it. So, a missed opportunity on Iain’s part?

Perhaps the publication of Miracles brought them together…as the review says, the talk saw both Sinclair and Self pay tribute to Ballard in the end:

Sinclair, the godfather of modern psychogeographers, talked of the method’s early practitioners — De Quincey, Baudelaire, the situationists — as well as his own reverence for outsider figures, from Blake to Ballard…

Before long the conversation got back to ley lines, shopping centres and Ballard, hailed by Self as “the purest psychogeographer of us all”.

Well, that’s all very well and good, but I’m going to leave the last word to JGB, lifted from my own interview with him:

SS: There’s a recent book that has co-opted you into the psychogeographical literary movement.

JGB: I’ve seen that book. It doesn’t apply to me. No, that’s Iain Sinclair’s terrain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his latest book, Black Mass, the philosopher John Gray traces the history of Western millenarianism … For Gray, it is utopianism itself that is the problem. He suggests that ‘it is dystopian thinking we most need.’ We must, if we seek to understand our present condition, he says, ‘turn to Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau or Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Zamiatin’s We or Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Ballard’s Super-Cannes — prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealisable dreams.’

Actually, there’s not even a need to trawl back five or so years to the publication of Super-Cannes, stunning a read though it is. Dystopian futures have of late become a staple of mainstream contemporary literature. While Ballard is for me quite possibly the pre-eminent living English novelist, he has long been considered as foremost a sci-fi writer rather than a proper literary type, with only his naturalistic memoirs Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women awarded the unequivocal reverence all his work deserves. Suddenly, though, sci-fi has acquired literary credibility. We are now so comfortable with the idea of a post-apocalyptic future that such subject matter has seamlessly become part of the until-now unyieldingly naturalistic mainstream English literary scene.”

[thanks, Mike]