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Disch on Ballard
Author: Simon Sellars • Jul 9th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, Thomas M. Disch, science fiction
ABOVE: Disch, photo by Jamie Spracher.
SF writer Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 4, and was described by John Clute as ‘perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers’. The obits have been noting Disch’s involvement with the New Wave of British SF, and Joanne, of Tomorrow Museum, writes to tell me of Disch’s admiration for Ballard.
Joanne says:
You’ve likely heard the sad news of Thomas M. Disch’s suicide. Although they are very different writers stylistically, Ballard and Disch seem to appeal to the same readers. And Disch was very much a fan of Ballard’s. I pulled a few quotes from Disch’s book about science fiction ‘The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of’. He devotes several pages of it to Ballard. Remarking on the New Wave, Disch writes of:
‘Ballard in the role of T.S. Elliot, the genius in residence, and Moorcock as Ezra Pound, a Svengali for all seasons, ready to welcome anyone in the club who might in some way advance the cause. They were essential to each other (and to the cause), for without Moorcock and New Worlds to beat the drum, Ballard’s work would have appeared in only those few avant-garde venues receptive to the transgressive fictions of non-Establishment writers … and without Ballard’s conspicuous and then prolific talent to showcase, the New Wave and New Worlds would never have reached escape velocity.’
…
‘Ballard, in erasing the rocketship from his fiction, and along with it the notion of outer space as the new frontier, found a new subject matter for SF: the present in, as it were, its futuristic aspect. He could look at the world around him — suburban Shepperton — with the radical innocence of someone whose home town had been a Japanese internment camp. And everything was strange. The sports car that he owned and drove around like a kamikaze pilot was a good deal stranger and more vivid than any rocket ship, which existed, if at all, only as a TV image among a host of other images….Why not build a future from those images rather than the do-it-yourself kits of traditional SF?’Later, Disch writes about meeting with Ballard when he was 26. Interestingly, David Pringle doesn’t believe it happened the way Disch says. (Pringle also calls Disch the “second-greatest iconoclast” of science fiction after Ballard):
‘His several meetings with J. G. Ballard in 1966 and after, we are told, “took the invariable form of a trip to the Shepperton train station south of London and then a terrifying ride with Ballard at the wheel of his sports car. At his home, a dilapidated, infinitely cluttered bungalow that he shared with his two children, Ballard, fuelled with whisky, would deliver an oral version of his private gospel. Sad to say, I remember not a single oracle from those occasions, only a sense that the man was, as advertised, a genius hard-wired to the Zeitgeist.” Memory may play even the greatest truth-tellers false, and as one who has visited the same house on half a dozen occasions from the 1970s to the 1990s I can testify that Ballard lives in a classic British semi-detached, not a “bungalow,” and that he raised three children there throughout the 1960s, not two; also I can vouch for the fact that JGB’s front door is less than five minutes’ walk from Shepperton station (which lies west of London, not south), so why a car-ride was necessary I can’t imagine. As for the drinking and hairy driving of the period following his wife’s death in the mid-1960s, Ballard has described those things himself in several interviews — and has even fictionalized them, in a chapter called “The Exhibition,” in his novel The Kindness of Women (1991); so, no surprises there — except, perhaps, for the revelation (if true) that JGB once drove a sports car.’
Joanne has included her own tribute to Disch over at Tomorrow Museum:
He will get the audience he deserves. I see other gay writers as well as women and non-whites, and just about anyone who has felt like a genre misfit, really responding to his work and taking influence. Heck, “slipsteam” is already deeply indebted to him.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day his name is as popular among teenagers as Vonnegut’s. It is just too bad it didn’t happen while he was alive.
Author:
Simon Sellars
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Tom did in fact visit Ballard first in 1966 and Ballard remembers him at this and other times with great affection. A bungalow is a style in the US and doesn’t mean the same thing. Tom used to meet Ballard at Kingston as, in fact, I did. He misrembered such things as anyone might.
Thanks Michael. Always good to hear your perspective. Could you recommend where to start with Tom’s books — say for someone interested in Ballard who’s never read TMD?
Simon:
I’m afraid I’ve just discovered this belatedly…
“Michael Moorcock on July 19th, 2008 at 6:06 am:
“Tom did in fact visit Ballard first in 1966 and Ballard remembers him at this and other times with great affection. A bungalow is a style in the US and doesn’t mean the same thing. Tom used to meet Ballard at Kingston as, in fact, I did. He misremembered such things as anyone might.”
Well, no one disputes that Tom (i.e. Thomas M. Disch) did visit Ballard at his home in Shepperton, probably on a number of occasions, in the 1960s. I just pointed out, in my review in _Interzone_ of Disch’s book _The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of_, that Tom had got a number of small details wrong — including the sort of house JGB lived in, the number of children he had, the geographical location of Shepperton, etc.
I take Mike’s point about the “bungalow.” Since writing my review in 1998, I’ve discovered that what Americans mean by a bungalow is not the same as what we British mean (and presumably Indians — the word comes from there). For Americans, it seems that bungalow just means a small, pokey house; whereas for us it strictly means a one-storey house, so that there’s no way a three-up, two-down semi-detached can be described as a bungalow.
It’s the same, I think, with Disch’s use of the word “sports-car.” For us, it means a low-slung two-door car with a powerful engine; whereas for Americans it seems to mean any car with a powerful engine — thus, for Tom, a four-door saloon can be a “sports-car” if the engine is big enough.
Small misunderstandings caused by Tom’s Americanness.
However, Mike Moorcock gives us one tiny, interesting new datum: “Tom used to meet Ballard at Kingston as, in fact, I did.”
What MM is saying there is that Tom, and others, would sometimes take the train to Kingston, in Surrey, rather than to Shepperton, and that JGB would drive over and meet them there and presumably then drive them back to Shepperton. This small explanation suddenly makes several things about Tom’s account click into place. _That’s_ why it was necessary for JGB to give Tom a lift in his “sports-car” (when Shepperton station is just a couple of minutes’ walk away). _That’s_ why Tom remembered Shepperton being “south” of London (when in fact it’s more west) — because Kingston lies south of the river!
I would guess Tom and others took the train from central London to Kingston because it was a quicker, shorter, cheaper ride than to go all the way to Shepperton by train. JGB evidently didn’t mind driving over to Kingston — it must have been an easy drive for him in those days, avoiding central London.
– David Pringle.