From The Times, April 20, 2009
Ballard's bestselling novel The Empire of the Sun was inspired by childhood years spent in a Japanese war camp
- The young J. G. Ballard, revealed in his most popular novel Empire of the Sun, was far more in awe of Japanese kamikaze pilots than he was interested in being liberated from his internment camp. Similarly the adult Ballard found the enslavement of man to his own devices — concrete, technology, cameras and crashing cars — monstrous and terrifying, yet fascinating and ceaselessly inspiring. There was very little that Ballard would dismiss out of hand as horrible or uninteresting. Drawn to the dark and the lurid, he once set up a a 75-hour “installation” project at the ICA, London called The Assassination Weapon (1969) which narrated in film the journey of a deranged H-bomb pilot accompanied by the sound of a car crash. His dispassionate visions of modernity and apocalyptic imagery earned him the rare honour of seeing his name adjectivised: Collins English Dictionary describes “Ballardian” as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak manmade landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.
- James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, within the Shanghai International Settlement. His father was a wealthy textile chemist, and the family house on Amherst Avenue, modelled on a Surrey manor, was full of servants. Ballard recalled that the staff brought him up “without ever looking at me”. Ballard rarely saw his parents, who were busy with the social whirl of expat life. With the Japanese invasion Ballard saw brutality visited on the locals, but his parents’ first response to the Sino-Japanese War was to move house to avoid the shelling. After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the Japanese forces interned the foreigners in China, and the war was at last brought home.
- Ballard spent three years at Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre. He maintained thereafter that he had “not happy, but not unpleasant memories of the camp”. Although forced to live at arm’s length from his parents in a tiny room, he was at the same time free of them, running lawless through the sprawling slums with the other children. He every day witnessed the pain and stress of adults without it ever thwarting his need to play. He reported that once, on a normal day of beatings, privations and petty thievery, “I ran off, and nagged the off-duty Japanese guards in their bungalows until they let me wear their kendo armour, laughing as they thumped me around the head with their wooden swords.”
Ballard returned to London with his family in 1946. The dour austerity, he said, even after Lunghua, made him treasure his memories of Shanghai before the war. Intending to become a psychiatrist he went to King’s College, Cambridge, to study medicine while writing short stories. He disliked Cambridge, regarding it as an “academic theme park”, and when one of his stories was published in Varsity he switched to London University to study English Literature.
Ballard worked on the trade magazine Chemistry and Industry for a while, but after moving with his wife and children to Shepperton, he could no longer deal with the commute. He determined to support himself as a writer after the publication of his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere. Three more disaster novels followed, The Drowned World, The Burning World and The Crystal World — the four works corresponding to wind, water, fire and earth. The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) was the first of 19 collections of short stories, for which Ballard’s clipped, dispassionate prose was ideally suited. These books were important to building his readership: Martin Amis contended that Ballard “seems to address a different — a disused — part of the reader’s brain”. Thus enjoying his work required an acclimatisation, for which short tales were ideal.
- Vermilion Sands, written to celebrate “the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre”, was Ballard’s favourite; perhaps the best loved by fans and the most imitated by others. It concerns a resort town of has-been actors, minor celebrities, their misfit servants and their use of technnological gadgetry to add tawdry, carnal interest to their lives — with amusingly damaging results.
- These short stories became the most fractured in The Atrocity Exhibition, a book with no narrative sense in which disjointed vignettes lie on the page like pieces of shrapnel. He later admitted that its deliberate, Ginsbergian shock value was a reaction, some years after the event, to the death of his wife. Because of its incendiary titles, chapters such as Love and Napalm were published, or photocopied, by students, agitators and pranksters and handed out at rallies. A bookshop owner who had sold the chapter Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan as a pamphlet was taken to court on obscenity charges, while in the US the publisher Doubleday destroyed the entire print run. Ballard explained to unhappy Americans that The Assassination of Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race was his attempt, once again some years after the event, to cope with the trauma.
- There was no excuse, though, for Crash, in which the protagonists seek gratification by having sex in crashed cars, amid the human and mechanical wreckage. Ballard was convinced that everyone found crashed cars sexy, and found nothing odd in delighting in “the mysterious eroticism of wounds; the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun visors lined with brain tissue”. The publisher’s reader who read the manuscript wrote upon it: “This author is beyond psychiatric help”, something Ballard took as “proof of complete artistic success”. In case anyone was unconvinced, he organised a crashed car exhibition, with topless women in London. The book gained a much greater readership after the success of the David Cronenberg film in 1996.
- Although Ballard was frequently called a writer of science fiction, he abhored the term, explaining instead that his books “pictured the psychology of the future”.
- It was 40 years before Ballard felt able to write about the most formative events in his life. Empire of the Sun is unusual for a Ballard novel in that its young protagonist is instantly likable, his story moving. It was his most saleable novel, made into a Hollywood epic by Steven Spielberg with the young Christian Bale as Ballard. It was not, he insists, an autobiography but a “negotiated truth” from which he excised, among other things, the parents who had shared his ordeal. Similarly the follow-up, The Kindness of Women, deals with his wife’s death from pneumonia as a sudden hammer-blow to the head. Her death, while on holiday in Spain in 1964, devastated Ballard, who regarded it as “a terrible crime of nature”. He was no green thinker; he rather liked it that nature, with all its random savagery, had been made subservient to man. Thus his disasters in later novels were always of man’s creation: High Rise is a disaster of urban living; Concrete Island a disaster of town planning, Millennium People a crisis of urban sociology. Even the virus that ruins the landscape in The Crystal World was man-made. Although his wife died in 1964, Ballard later admitted that The Atrocity Exhibition was his first real attempt to deal with the pain. Nonetheless the late 1960s and 1970s, spent bringing up three children alone, was, he said, his happiest time.
- The Ballardian world dispenses entirely with heroism. He never required his readers to empathise with his characters or understand their actions. In Concrete Island, the protagonist crashes on a rubbish-strewn traffic island. The traffic will not stop for him and he is marooned there. He rises, like Prospero, to wrest control of the island from a Caliban who is a lame acrobat and an Ariel who is a depressed prostitute. It does not stop to consider what the point is; the protagonist’s psychological adaptation to his surroundings and innate need to conquer his environment — whatever it may be — eclipses both rationalism and philosophy.
- Ballard was a man of complications and contradictions. Readers of his fiction are never at ease; The Crystal World deliberately confuses the landscape with the human body just as Crash later melded man to machine. Yet the brutality and pessimism of his novels was not reflected in the easygoing cheer of the man himself, and although his writings informed the idea of cyberspace even before the appearance of the internet — which both appalled and fascinated him — he did not even own a typewriter and wrote all his books in longhand. While he worried aloud about the “suburbanisation of the planet” he remained, since 1961, in a terraced house in Shepperton, often saying that he had quite enjoyed watching the area grow more ugly with time.
- In later years he could always be relied upon to vent an opinion on events in the publishing world. He lamented the demise of the short story and defended the right of publishers to print “winner of the Booker Prize” on novels that had not even been shortlisted. He condemned the American practice of “partnership writing”, whereby a blockbuster author puts his or her name to someone else’s labour.
- With age he became more radical, but also more given to humour. In Millennium People the middle classes rise up against the state’s determined efforts to suck all the cash and human rights out of them. Molotov cocktails are constructed with vintage burgundy bottles and stoppered with regimental ties. It is at once a call to arms for his class and an admission of futility: while his rebels discuss changing their street names to those of Japanese film directors, they are put off by the likely drop in property value. Ballard, while convinced of the psychological violence wrought be a poor environment, lived happily among piles of junk and layers of dust, and his lifestyle did not change one iota after Spielberg gave him half a million pounds.
- He continued writing in his closing years, producing Kingdom Come in 2006, a novel that explored the theme of whether consumerism might become the new fascism. Last year Ballard published an autobiography, The Miracle of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton. His wife predeceased him, but he is survived by his son and two daughters.
- J. G. Ballard, author, was born on November 15, 1930. He died of cancer on April 19, 2009, aged 78.
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