“Jimmy” to early generations of friends and family, J. G. Ballard was typically stoical in dealing with his painful cancer, seeming to belong to the world of stiff upper-lip colonial hands into which he was apparently born. Actually he could not have been more different in outlook, turning down a CBE in protest at what he saw as a neocolonial war in Iraq and devoting much of his fiction to attacks on nostalgic atavism in the English character.
Although we were on nodding terms when we met occasionally at the offices of New Worlds, the science-fiction magazine, in the late 1950s, we did not become close friends until 1960, after we attended a conference of SF writers and discovered that the rest of our colleagues were interested merely in seeking new markets. From then on, together with the late Barrington Bayley, we met regularly, discussing our determination to make use of some of science fiction’s generic conventions to write a form of fiction which, in our view, would address the specific conditions of post-Second World War society. Though he was nine years older, we had both emerged from that war with intense childhood memories. Most fiction we read had little to do with our generation’s experience and was fundamentally backward-looking. While Jimmy admired Ray Bradbury and I liked Alfred Bester, our real heroes were a handful of absurdists and surrealists.
Perhaps as important to our friendship were the family visits to each others’ homes soon after he moved to Shepperton in 1960. His wife Mary and my then wife Hilary were young mothers. Mary would cheerfully contradict him in the middle of one of his rhetorical flights, just as Hilary would remind me of my own exaggerations.
We began as journalists and were soon supporting our families by our fiction, finding our first publisher in E. J. Carnell’s science-fantasy magazines. Gradually we produced more idiosyncratic stories. When Carnell was reluctant to publish Jimmy’s The Terminal Beach, Bayley and I persuaded him. We often discussed founding a magazine which was imaginative but ran fiction with, in Ballard’s succinct phrase, “the moral authority of a literature won from experience”. When, in 1964, I became editor of New Worlds, Jimmy contributed a guest editorial about William Burroughs, one of our inspirations (“A New Literature for the Space Age”), as well as a serial, Equinox, which became The Crystal World, where the Earth suffers a kind of crystalline contagion, a thematic sequel to The Drowned World, set in an inundated London, a work that some believe to be one of the first warnings of global warming.
That same year, he took his family on holiday to Spain after Mary’s operation for gallstones. Not long after they left, we received a telegram telling us that Mary had died. He would be returning with the children by road. Mary had been buried in the Protestant cemetery in Madrid. Jimmy had been unable to afford to bring her home.
On his arrival he told me how he had been forced to pull his old Armstrong Siddeley to the side of the road whenever tears made it impossible to continue. At the time he blamed himself for Mary’s death. He never mentioned this to me again. He devoted himself to raising “Little Jimmy”, Bea and Fay on his own, claiming convincingly that the baked bean, the staple gun and a pot of fabric glue were the cornerstones of successful childcare.
Like many great visionaries, Jimmy had an enormous store of common sense and ordinary wisdom, which enabled him to raise the children and, as they said, have the sheets washed on time. But the stress of earning a living and raising his family told on him. He drank far too much Johnnie Walker and, when friends tried to find him girlfriends, did not always treat them well. In fact, the first time we fell out was over his treatment of women. But I did manage to introduce him eventually to Claire Walsh, who became his longtime companion.
I don’t think he changed anything about the Shepperton house after Mary died. For a while his back garden served as a pit in which he burnt review copies (he phoned me to complain bitterly that Fahrenheit 451 was not the temperature at which book paper burned) or as a jungle of sunflowers, which he had seeded. For years Mary’s clothes remained in her closets, his typewriter sat on the same living room table, commissioned copies of lost Delvaux paintings hung on the opposite wall and a unicycle stood in his hallway.
Although unreliable sources claimed he regularly took LSD, the only tab he ever dropped he obtained from me. I gave him some important advice about how best to take it which, typically, he completely ignored. The subsequent trip was so horrific that he never took another. The title of his book Cocaine Nights was actually chosen by his publisher. By 1966 he was writing arguably his best short work, including The Assassination Weapon, offering all the factors resulting in Kennedy’s murder, and most of the stories which appeared in his 1969 collection The Atrocity Exhibition. Published without incident in the UK, when the book appeared in the US it was pulped before publication on instructions of Nelson Doubleday, chief of the publishing firm, who objected to his sardonic Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy. The Assassination Weapon helped to define the character of the fiction we were to run increasingly, making a clear break with generic science fiction. These “condensed novels” demonstrated a theory we had developed whereby iconographic figures, with their own dense stories, functioned as narratives, enabling us to tell many stories at once.
Our friend Bill Butler, publisher of Unicorn Books, ran “Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan”, famously prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Jimmy did not appear at the trial because he was asked to defend himself against obscenity charges. He claimed that the story was intentionally obscene and, if called, would have to say so. In my view The Atrocity Exhibition contains Ballard’s finest and most innovative work. Together with Empire of the Sun, his autobiographical novel set around a Second World War Japanese civilian prison camp, it remains perhaps his best book.
Jimmy had quickly shown himself to be a true original with a distinctive style and subject matter. His obsessions with suburbia, drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels, deserted motorways and mysterious beaches littered with mid-20th-century technology, his poetic, retrospective harmonies, rich with original metaphors, became trademarks of his exotic, erotic stories. His characters were solitary, sleepwalking through landscapes that might have been painted by Dalí or Ernst, and if his gift for dialogue was limited, he compensated by offering utterly fresh observations of the contemporary world, resonating on levels understood by Freud or Jung. Ironically, his late novels are closer to the conventions of SF satire than the earlier ones.
Although literary critics were quick to minimise his years as an SF writer, Jimmy made no effort to divorce himself from his SF roots, though preferring to call himself first a “speculative” and later an “apocalyptic” writer. His influence was seen in the work of his admirers including Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest. Tending, in the early years, to rely on me to introduce him to fellow spirits, like Burroughs, Chris Evans (New Worlds’ science editor), the artist Eduardo Paolozzi (our “aeronautics adviser”) and others, Jimmy remained a modest and rather shy man, a loyal friend who avoided what he called “the literary crowd” even more assiduously than SF conventions, living quietly at home and only rarely going out. He was a working writer, leading the rather dull life the job usually entails.
After The Atrocity Exhibition the equally controversial Crash followed, describing the characters’ obsession with sexually fetishised car crashes that some say anticipated the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. First of a loose trilogy including Concrete Island (in which a man finds himself stranded on a traffic island) and High Rise (occupants of a posh apartment block revert to primitivism), published between 1973 and 1975, the books were produced during what was arguably the time when his life and fiction were at their closest. I found it hard not to feel ambivalent about his famous exhibition of crashed cars. There were hair-raising rides and the occasional smash. I recall going with him to collect his almost completely totalled Ford Granada from the wrecker’s yard. He insisted on driving the thing home, creaking and stinking of mildew, at a top speed of 20mph.
By the time his children were grown he began work on the book I had hoped he would write. Empire of the Sun appeared in 1984. In my view this book revealed, with its images of a Shanghai deserted by its former residents, its empty buildings and swimming pools, its crashed plane and wrecked machines, its solitary, introspective protagonist, the realities of his supposedly invented images. It grounded many of his early traumas as well as his previously unexamined behaviour, including his understandable expectations of betrayal, his suspicion of kindness and, together with the security its success as a bestseller and movie brought him, allowed him to relax and become again the generous, affable human being he had been when we first met.
Soon after his sale to Spielberg we went out to eat together. “Have you noticed, Mike, how rude customers in restaurants have become?” he asked. “I’m not sure it’s that, Jimmy,” I said. “I think we can now afford to eat in the rude people’s restaurants.” The cash simply went into his current account. Until then he had never owned a credit card, taking a sum of money from the bank on a Monday and making it last the week. This had not prevented him offering me his last £200 when he heard I was broke. Nor did wealth change him. He remained one of the least materialistic people I knew.
His memoir Miracles of Life was written after the diagnosis of prostate cancer. By the time the disease was diagnosed it had spread to his spine and ribs. Even though they had never shared a home together, he and Claire succeeded in maintaining a relationship that deepened over 40 years into increasing harmony. In his final months, Claire nursed him through the final stages of his painful illness, converting a room for him at her flat in Shepherds Bush when his cancer became impossible to manage in Shepperton. He remained courageous and thoughtful of others, always quick to ask after our health while minimising his own sickness. I loved him and Claire believes my feeling was reciprocated. While we by no means shared all the same enthusiasms and often argued vigorously we remained close friends for 50 years, only very occasionally having our serious differences, and I shall miss him enormously. He was a great original, a true genius. His reputation and readership can only continue to grow.
