I've just finished writing the biography of J.G. Ballard. Called
THE INNER MAN. The Life of J.G. Ballard, it's published by Orion. The following are a few photographs, some of which are used in the book. They are accompanied with short extracts.
From a postscript . " I knew of Jim Ballard before I ever came to Britain. Ted Carnell
published stories by both of us in the mid-sixties, even, occasionally, in the same issues: the high point of my career with Nova Publications may be sharing the cover of
New Worlds with
The Terminal Beach. That Jim was the superior writer was never in doubt, and when I experimented in his style, Ted published the story but chided my homage. One Ballard, apparently, was enough.
Having collected his books as they were published, I sought Jim
out when I arrived in London in 1970. We drifted into an amiable
professional relationship, sustained by my bibliophilia. I bought the
occasional manuscript or letter of his that came on the market,
shelving them next to his scribbled notes to me. These developed
into an archive of first editions, proof copies, letters and typescripts which included his outlines for novels such as
Concrete Island and a typescript of the original unedited version of
Crash. Jim viewed my collecting with amusement, explaining, to my dismay, that he periodically made a bonfire of such items in a pit in the back garden."
*
Jim was born in Shanghai and, during the war, interned with his parents and sister in Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre - the most formative experience of his life.
Cooking on "chatties" in Lunghua camp, 1943.
"Food, cooked in a central kitchen, mostly consisted of stew,
which contained whatever meat could be found. Breakfast was
cracked wheat or congee: rice boiled to a paste with water, and invariably full of weevils. Occasionally, the Japanese distributed Red Cross food parcels or supplied vegetables or meat, which the
internees cooked on ‘chatties’ – coal stoves improvised from petrol cans. As the war dragged on, the quality of ingredients declined. Everyone learned to hoard the weevils from rice and sweet potatoes as valuable protein. For a while, they subsisted on greyhounds from the dog track. Like other animals, these had been slaughtered when their owners could no longer feed them, but the more provident veterinarians froze the carcasses."
*
Repatriated to Britain in 1945, Jim entered The Leys school in Cambridge.
Jim at The Leys School, 1946. (Leys School)
"The boys slept in high-ceilinged dormitories, each bed screened
only partly from its neighbours by wooden partitions called ‘horse
boxes’. There was no running water and only two night lavatories for
forty boys. Each cubicle contained a washbowl and jug, a soap dish
and toothbrush holder, and a chamber pot which, because of the
shiny waxed floors, was often used in impromptu games of curling.
Accustomed to a lack of privacy, Jim accepted the arrangements with
equanimity. He didn’t resent the regimentation and petty rules. The
Leys even reminded him, consolingly, of Lunghua – ‘except,’ he joked, ‘that the food was worse’.
Most students strove to conform, whereas Jim, in the words of
another contemporary, "was
at The Leys but not
of it. He was coming among people who had already known one another for several years.
In addition, the war created a chasm between those who had been through serious wartime experiences and those who hadn’t. He kept aloof from our petty enthusiasms – sport, house competitions, prefectorial rank, ballroom dancing. He must have found The Leys community nauseating."
*
After attempting various careers - medicine, advertising copywriter, door-to-door salesman, Covent Garden porter, RAF aviator - Jim found his
metier as a writer of science fiction.
Jim at the 1957 London World Science Fiction Convention (Photo: Norman Shorrock/Peter Weston)
"The hotel, chosen for cheapness, was run-down, and in the midst
of renovation. The staff, unprepared for the unruly fans, were overrun. In later years, Jim, who only went for a single evening, described his visit in apocalyptic terms, claiming the experience so dispirited him that he couldn’t write for a year. This appears
extreme – all the more so since he never specified what offended him, except to remark, tersely, that ‘the Americans were hard to
take, and most of the British fans were worse’. Malcolm Edwards, then a fan but later Jim’s editor, sees a possible reason. ‘There may have been a snobbish element in what happened to him in 1957 – because at that time there were almost no fans who had been to university. They were as far from being an intellectual crowd as you can imagine. Jim was always quite an intellectual person, and he probably went in there, and realised “These people are not on my wave length at all”."
* Mike Moorcock in 1991. Ten years Ballard's junior, he became his closest friend and colleague.
"Through Moorcock, Jim met other writers such as [Barry] Bayley, Langdon Jones and John Brunner. From early 1962 for a year or more, Moorcock, Bayley and Ballard met regularly at the Swan pub in Knightsbridge, near Ballard’s office. The improvement of British science fiction and the widening of its focus were frequent topics of conversation. In the summer of 1962, they decided to convene a meeting of SF writers at a London hotel – ‘to just talk about where science fiction was going,’ says Moorcock, ‘and what we wanted to do with it. Plenty of people felt things must change, and that we needed to “up the game”’.
Immediately, they encountered the personality conflicts that
riddled SF. Brian Aldiss declined to attend. ‘It may have been because
he disliked John Brunner,’ says Moorcock, ‘or perhaps he thought it
would be political, or that we wanted to set up a Communist cell.’
Then Brunner withdrew, piqued that Kingsley Amis had also refused.
‘When I saw the letter he’d written to him, I wasn’t surprised,’ says
Moorcock. ‘It said, more or less, “Dear Kingsley Amis,We are having
a conference called ‘Whither Science-fiction?’ at the Bonnington
Hotel, Holborn, on such-and-such a date. It would be very useful if
you could come along. By the way, I’ve just read your most recent
book and I have to say it is not up to your usual standard” .’ "
*
In 1970 Jim staged his notorious
Crashed Cars exhibition at IRAT (Institute for Research in Art and Technology) in north London.
" ‘I suggested we hire a young woman to interview the guests about
their reactions,’ Jim said. It was implicit in his suggestion that the
woman be nude. The girl who accepted the job, Jo Stanley, wasn’t
part of the IRAT collective. ‘I believe Jo was a model,’ says [videographer John "Hoppy"] Hopkins. ‘She had big breasts, so that was quite an eye-catcher, and exciting for the blokes anyway. She was quite natural and spontaneous. She became a personal friend very quickly. She was a lovely person.’
On the telephone with Jim, Stanley agreed to appear naked, but
once she met him and saw the cars, she changed her mind. ‘It was so
delicious,’ Jim recalled to Iain Sinclair, still excited three decades on.
‘She walked into the gallery. She said, “I won’t appear naked. I’ll only
appear topless”. I thought, “That’s interesting”. She saw the sexual
connection.’ It inflamed him that she understood this wasn’t simply
an art show, but the realisation of his sexual fantasy."
(Below) Jo Stanley at the private view of
Crashed Cars, 1970. (Frame from the original video tape of John "Hoppy" Hopkins.)
*
Jim's 1972 novel
Crash created a furore with its erotic and sadistic vision of the automobile in both motion and collision.
Cover for French paperback edition of
CRASH. ( Atelier Pascal Vercken, 1973.)
" At 476 pages – more than 100,000 words – the typescript
of
Crash!, both in size and content, shook Jonathan Cape. As they debated their options, copies were sent to readers – outsiders with
the expertise to assess a book’s commercial potential. According to Jim, one was the wife of a ‘well-known TV psychiatrist’, who concluded: ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!’ Leaving aside the improbability of any psychiatrically competent person describing someone as ‘beyond help’, and of making such a judgement on the basis of a book alone, there were no psychiatrists
on British TV in 1972. Moreover, in practice, such a verdict wasn’t particularly damning. Cape saw hostility as an indication of potential controversy and, thus, sales. As for Ballard, who was the only source of the anecdote, the frequency with which he retold it suggests he took the judgement as a compliment. Nor did he particularly
disagree, acknowledging that his motives for writing
Crash were confused. Reading the proofs nine months later, his first reaction
had been ‘the guy who wrote this must be nuts’....
[The published edition of Crash
, as well as lacking the final exclamation point, is a third shorter than the original.] Jim never complained that Cape censored him, and length rather than content appears to have dictated most deletions. The most provocative episodes remained intact
and, if anything, more flagrant for the removal of the literary
undergrowth. Only occasionally was an image so outrageous that the
editors intervened. They retained
James’s fantasy about the body
of his own mother, which he
imagines, after a succession of
accidents, being fitted with new artificial orifices of ever greater
abstraction and ingenuity. Nor did they cut a Burroughs-like evocation of
elderly pederasts tonguing the simulated anuses of colostomised boys.
They insisted, however, on removing a passage where, after sex with
Catherine, James scrapes shit from her rectum with a finger and smears
the words ‘LOVE’ and ‘CRASH’ on her thigh."
*
Jim's Lunghua experiences inspired his greatest success, the 1984 novel
Empire of the Sun. "Once the book became a best seller, Jim was badgered about
what was real and what was invention. One Lunghua survivor
protested that, contrary to his version of the camp, ‘it was very well run – like a small town, with a school, hospital, churches, clubs for entertainment, study, sport and games, and we turned the rough ground into productive and beautiful gardens’. It troubled some readers that the book showed Jim surviving alone when he was
actually interned with his parents and sister, and shared a room with them for more than two years. Jim joked that, as he’d spent forty
years forgetting the war, some detail was bound to be lost. In truth, he’d suppressed so much that
Empire of the Sun became almost as much a work of pure invention as
The Drowned World. When his French teacher from the camp, Peggy Abkhazi, formerly Pemberton-Carter, wrote her memoirs,
Enemy Subject: Life in a Japanese Internment Camp 1943-45, and the British publisher asked Jim
for an introduction, he acquiesced, but remarked, with mild embarrassment, ‘I wish I could remember her in person’."
