The crime of being alive

J. G. Ballard liked to begin his reviews with a good one-liner. In the 1960s and 1970s these took the form of a general thesis such as “Speleology, like outer space and the hydrogen bomb, plays straight into the hands of the unconscious”, or, in a late notice of Mein Kampf, in 1969, “The psychopath never dies”. By the new millennium, his credo had become the question mark: “Was there a Gulf war?”; “Have exaggerated fears about the weather replaced our dread of nuclear war?”; “Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme?” In the 1980s his opening lines were more reflective: “Kingsley Amis’s stormy affair with science fiction becomes more and more perplexing”; “Sooner or later, everything turns into television”. This last observation comes in a round-up of books about cars, and I wish Ballard had been given a television column. “I think it’s terribly important to watch TV”, he told Jon Savage in 1978. “Unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you’re just closing your eyes to some of the most important stream of consciousness that’s going on.” I remember Ballard’s Guardian review of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2005), a programme he discovered while “hunting the outer darkness of Channel 5”. After kicking off with “Television today is an ageing theme park”, he concluded by comparing the cadavers in the autopsy room to the viewers themselves: “The real crime the CSI team is investigating … is the crime of being alive”. Ballard himself died four years later, and we now have no idea what to do with him.

I followed Ballard’s byline before I became familiar with the central metaphors of his fiction, provided by his childhood in Shanghai and internment in a civilian war camp between 1942 and 1945. As a novelist he had little interest in character. His affectless fictional narrators describe dining on dogs or masturbating over car crashes as though filing an office report, but his journalistic voice has a rounded personality. Ballard appeared in his reviews as his own man following his own method, which was to extract the nectar of the book in hand, abandon it by the wayside and take off into his own inner landscape. “Psychopathology is fun”, he says in one review. “The beach is where the sun goes to doze and dream”, he muses in another. There was never any question that Ballard’s subject was himself.

It was in small journals that he grew his combative persona. After dropping out of university twice (first from Cambridge, where he was studying medicine with a view to becoming a psychiatrist, then from Queen Mary University of London, where he briefly read English literature), he worked as assistant editor for a trade magazine, Chemistry & Industry, subbing, editing and pasting up. He published his first story in Science Fantasy in 1956 and his first manifesto, “Which Way to Inner Space”, in New Worlds in 1962. “It is inner space, not outer, which needs to be explored”, he claimed, referring to the mind expanded by sex, drugs and psychoanalysis. Together with “earth is the only truly alien planet”, also coined in New Worlds, “inner space” became Ballard’s slogan.

The boldness of his sentences suggests someone fixed in their certainties, but the most striking aspect of Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007 – 119 examples of his literary ephemera filed into sections such as “Statements”, “Commentaries”, “Features”, “Reviews”, “Forum Discussions” and “Memoir” – is that he was in two minds about most things. His imaginative strength was built on ambivalence: “I believe in my own obsessions”, he wrote in a list for Interzone in 1984 called “What I believe” – a list that includes the declaration “I believe in nothing”. The things that obsessed Ballard, such as gated communities, the Heathrow Hilton, car crashes, runways, multistorey carparks, hypermarkets and flyovers, also appalled him. He wanted science fiction recognized as the most significant writing of the twentieth century, but also wanted it to remain what he called “invisible literature”; the task of SF was to look forwards, he said, but he also said that tomorrow has become today, in which case SF was dead. He believed in the unconscious as a “narrative stage”, but not in the rehearsals of psychoanalytic therapy that, by looking back to the roots of character and behaviour, ignored the psychological impact of the current mass-mediated life. (This was also his argument against the realist novel.)

Ballard liked the new “spoiled” French Riviera, he enthused in the Mail on Sunday in 1995, and would have lived there “if I could afford it”, which he probably could have done by then (the film of Empire of the Sun, written in 1984, came out in 1987); but his wealth made no difference to his modest lifestyle. He lived for fifty years in a semi-detached house in Shepperton (“a suburb of Heathrow airport”), where he set up his cottage industry and slept on a camp bed, as though still in a camp. While he claimed to have enjoyed the war and to have been unaffected by the sight of men killed in front of him, his interest in the future was clearly rooted in the traumas of the past.

His ambivalence extended to himself. Ballard disliked what he called the “career novelist” but this, nevertheless, is what he was; he also disliked the “Great Name” school of literature, but “Ballardian”, an adjective for his style of dystopian modernity, is now in the dictionary. A “sure sign of the second-rate”, Ballard said of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis in his contribution to the essay collection The Test of Time: What makes a classic a classic? (1999), is when “writers are more famous than their books”; and he must have hoped, as his own fame increased and his books became cult, that this wouldn’t prove true of him. He regretted, in a piece for the Guardian in 2007, that the surrealists died – as he too was then dying – “loaded with honours, prizes and, worst of all, respectability”. The Americans may have crowned Don DeLillo, his closest US counterpart, as their greatest living writer, but for the British, as Ballard put it in a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fates Worse Than Death (1991), “success usually comes with a live round still in its chamber”.

We ourselves are clearly in two minds about Ballard. Do we want him on the inside pissing out, or on the outside pissing in? On the one hand it is was for many years illegal in the Borough of Westminster to screen Crash (1996), the David Cronenberg film of the book of 1973 that Ballard designed to be “the first pornographic novel based on technology”; on the other hand Ballard was offered, in 2003, a CBE, which he turned down: “There’s all that bowing and scraping and mummery at the palace”. The palace is also in the Borough of Westminster, an irony he doubtless enjoyed.

Despite the author’s antipathy to the theorizing of science fiction, which he called “bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalised academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance” (“A Response to the Invitation to Respond”, 1991), Ballard studies is now part of the curriculum, and this book, edited by an academic and published by a university press, is designed for the use of students. Tom McCarthy describes, in his foreword, his own experience of putting Ballard on MA courses, and Mark Blacklock, in his introduction, uses terms like “the Ballardian imaginary”.

Thirty or so of the essays and reviews here have appeared already in Ballard’s own selection, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996), while the other ninety pieces, whose sources range from New Worlds to Tatler, have never previously been compiled. There is a good deal more still out there: Ballard wrote about 300,000 words of nonfiction and gave scores of interviews, none of which Blacklock has included. (Extreme Metaphors, 2012, edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara, contains an excellent selection of his interviews.) Some pieces, such as Ballard’s exchange of letters with the tiresome author and broadcaster Anne Atkins about the screening of Lolita (Guardian, 1998), might happily have remained forgotten; others, such as his Time Out review of the first Star Wars film in 1977 (first line: “Can I offer a dissenting opinion?”), now have, at least in my own canon of film reviews, classic status. The highlights are the fourteen commentaries on his own work (including the Danish foreword to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970, written the year before the novel hit the shelves), in which Ballard speaks about his novels and stories as a mechanic might about the engine of a new car. In his “Introduction to the French Edition of Crash!” (1974–5), he sets out the “driving impetus behind this work”: “We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality”.

If everything for Ballard is fiction, what makes for inclusion in a selection of his nonfiction? Aware of his challenge, Blacklock hopes to “illuminate the full range of Ballard’s activities as a reviewer, essayist, journalist, commentator, memoirist, provocateur, compiler of lists, and talking head”. He achieves this handsomely, while also illuminating the narrowness of the author’s range and the fixity of his thinking. Ballard’s favourite artists were the surrealists; his favourite writer was William Burroughs; he liked the films of David Lynch. There is little intellectual evolution to observe over the fifty years, aside from the deepening of his ideas of depth. He tells the story about Salvador Dalí preparing to deliver a lecture in a diving suit. How far do you propose to go, asks the workman supervising the suit. “To the Unconscious!”, Dalí flourishes. “I’m afraid we don’t go down that deep”, the workman replies. In the Guardian series of “Writer’s Rooms” that ran earlier this century, Ballard said that his own room contained a postcard of Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory” and an Eduardo Paolozzi screenprint; my guess is that his study in 2007 looked much the same as it did in 1962.

It is no mean feat to be loyal, in your seventies, to the person you were aged thirty – to share the same likes and dislikes, the same few favourite writers and artists, the same positions on most things. Ballard did not need to move with the times because the times moved with him. In his novels of the 1960s, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966), he foresaw the effects of climate change; he tipped Ronald Reagan for president in a story of 1968 entitled “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”; an essay for Drive in 1971 predicted the electric car, the pedestrianizing of cities and the feeding frenzy surrounding the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales. An essay for Vogue in 1977 described Facebook and Instagram:

Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day.

An interview with i-D magazine in 1987 (reprinted in Extreme Metaphors) predicted what would become the internet itself (“invisible streams of data pulsing down lines to produce an invisible loom of world commerce and information”), as well as YouTube: “Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes”. Other Ballardian predictions and premonitions might include President Trump, the Covid lockdown (particularly the parties in Downing Street), Rwanda as a vexed deportation zone for migrants and the recent abandonment of the HS2 line to Manchester: discarded infrastructure always interested him.

In one of the final entries in the selection under review (published in the Guardian in 2006), Ballard reflects on the twenty years it took him to forget the formative events of his life, described in his self-mythology Empire of the Sun, and the twenty years it took to then remember them. His final work, the memoir Miracles of Life (2008), accordingly looked backwards rather than forwards.

So what will the future hold for the Seer of Shepperton? J. G. Ballard predicted this as well: “The worst fate for a prophet is for his predictions to come true”, he wrote in a review of a life of Aldous Huxley in 2002, “when everyone resents him for being so clear-eyed.”

Frances Wilson is writing a book about Muriel Spark

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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