J. G. Ballard
MIRACLES OF LIFE
Shanghai to Shepperton
278pp. Fourth Estate. £14.99.
978 0 00 727072 9
Over the early pages of J. G. Ballard’s new book falls the shadow of its most
publicly successful predecessor, which refers to many of the same events as
the new one does. The new one is a memoir, while Empire of the Sun, which
appeared in 1984, is a fictional version of the author’s adventures as a
young prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War, on and off the
exciting streets of corpse-congested Shanghai. What he could now and then
remember in his later years as a golden-age ordeal spools by at speed. He
calls that book a novel in Miracles of Life, and in the novel itself he
calls himself Jim, and can look at moments like the boy in children’s books
who outwits and stands up to people. As in certain children’s books, his
parents are written out of the script – during the time spent at the
detention camp of Lunghua – and his captivity was to place limitations on
his future relations with them. When his mother came to read the novel, he
tells us, she thought it was about her. The novel deserved its success:
subtly characterized, astonishingly circumstantial, vivid to the point of
hallucination, a hard act to follow. Are we in for some elderly reprise?
The memoir starts in wartime Shanghai and pays a visit to his fascinating city
in later years. But there’s more to Miracles of Life than the ghostly
presence of its predecessor. It turns out to be a different work, chiefly
interesting for its picture of Ballard’s domestic life and of his dealings
with the writers he warmed to and with those he despised. Ian Hamilton, for
instance, figures as a self-important idler – some effect of hallucination
here, surely. Ballard might have said more about the books which came of his
restless, copiously inventive fertility.
When he got to Britain, he found it an unappealing place – tired out,
mean-spirited, suffocating. He began to miss the camp, where at the time
he’d felt more at home than in his parents’ Shanghai mansion. Hollywood
films were the best Britain had to offer at first, though he was later to
complain about “the narrowness of mind that lurks behind American
exuberance”. There’s a touch there of the contradictions which turn up in
these pages. Having railed at museums for pressing on visitors information
about the paintings displayed (they should be left to the imagination), he
praises his partner for being informative on such subjects. On these
occasions the apostle of literary duality can perhaps be glimpsed.
In Britain he also found Surrealism and science fiction – a joint commitment
in which contradictions could be located by those of a different turn of
mind. He found his feet as an advanced artist involved with the psychedelic
revolution. Anthony Powell wouldn’t do, while Michael Moorcock became a
friend, and William Burroughs, to whom no debt is enlarged on, left a mark
on the writings of Ballard’s mid-career.
A major contrast soon registers: between the course of his domestic life and
the violence and eroticism of some part of what he wrote during his middle
years, when he grew to think that art must speak to a prevalent
psychopathology detected in its audience. His wife Mary died of pneumonia in
Spain, a severe loss, after which he became the devoted single parent of two
girls and a boy. Ballard is liked by many who know him, I believe, and his
words about the happiness of his family life, both during and after his
marriage, make it possible to understand why. He conveys that he has been a
lucky Jim. The pram in the hall, viewed in the 1950s as a threat to literary
talent, is hereby rehabilitated.
He is able to think of science fiction as “the true literature of the 20th
century”, while conceding that its light is dimmer now than it once was.
Lucky Jim became friends with the author of Lucky Jim as a result of their
shared passion for it; and there was the shared experience of seeing dead
bodies lying about during the war. Their friendship cooled on the discovery
that Kingsley Amis was now “dissatisfied with everything”, and was drinking
too much. Ballard himself, we read, drank much, but there was no self-harm.
The chapter ends with the report of a piece of brutality on his friend’s
part at the expense of Amis’s first wife.
Ballard, too, is dissatisfied with many things. They are not what they used to
be in the days of pre-war Shanghai, when duty “counted for something” in its
expatriate community, for all their heavy consumption of alcohol and the
unfortunates stepped over at their gates. He can also be said to be
dissatisfied with his peers, and to do his bit in the ancient and currently
proactive mutual antipathy of authors. The late B. S. Johnson was a
“thoroughly unpleasant figure who treated his sweet wife abominably”, one of
the tribe identified as relishing the friendly commendations they receive in
the Times Literary Supplement.
Avant-gardes live up to their name by portraying themselves as breaking
ground. What they do is new. What they ask for is change. Ballard came to
see his work as subversive, maverick, outsiderish, pledged to change and to
an evolving technology, though he can often seem distressed by the prospect
or spectacle of a new world fashioned from electronics, aviation,
automobiles, advertising, consumer needs and a manipulated consumer
politics. But it’s also reasonable to describe his work, with the “strange
fictions” it has favoured and its period element of “sex’n’violence”, as a
Romantic phenomenon tuned to achievements of the nineteenth century. He can
sometimes appear to hanker after an extrasensory experience, an occult, that
never transpires: that, too, can be considered traditional. The
heterogeneity of a science fiction is equally traditional.
These propositions are distinctly enforced by a reading of his extraordinary
novel of 1973, Crash, which could well prevent his readers from ever
thinking of traffic in the old way again, and in which the famous death in a
car accident of Princess Diana is in some degree foretold. In this novel a
narrator called Ballard takes up with a sinister zealot called Vaughan for
whom wounds are wonderful and violence and desire are one. A pantheon of
car-crash victims – celebrities and stars – fills his scarred head. An
Autogeddon is enacted by this pair in tandem. Character pales in the stress
of their mania, and a heartlessness, or a show of heartlessness, is at times
perceptible. “Still uncertain whether Vaughan would try to crash his car
into Catherine’s, I made no attempt to warn her.” Why not? This can hardly
be a good way to treat his wife, of whom he is fond. An answer to the
question may be framed in terms of the antecedents of Ballard’s novel, its
origins in the old idea of the divided self.
This Gothic delirium of a novel is all too briefly mentioned in Miracles of
Life. The “auto-destructive hero”, Vaughan, is spoken of as “that deranged
figure”. What does that make “Ballard”? The dualistic energy of the novel
can drive the two into one, with Vaughan comprehensible as a projection of
the narrator, whose “fantasies” are such that “as I made love to Catherine,
I saw myself in an act of sodomy with Vaughan, as if only this act could
solve the codes of a deviant technology”. The device of such an “as if” is
frequent in the novel. It is as if its Autogeddon were true.
I am making the novel sound like a sibling of James Hogg’s novel of 1824, the
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and I think it right to suggest that
Ballard has created his double in the knowledge, conscious or not, of this
early dualistic exemplar. When he approaches the narrator, “Ballard”, at the
climax of the novel, Vaughan is in a bad way. “As he walked towards me
through the chromium chairs and tables, his reflection multiplied in the
glass wall-panels, Vaughan had never appeared more derelict and uncertain.
His pock-marked face and haggard shamble through the passengers waiting for
their flight-calls together gave him the look of an unsuccessful fanatic,
doggedly holding together his spent obsessions.” Vaughan’s condition
strikingly resembles that of the previously majestic, now “haggard”
demon-double at the climax of Hogg’s novel, which once bore the alternative
title, “Confessions of a Fanatic”.
Ballard’s novel is a gruesome work which is also a singular and powerful act
of the imagination, in which the changing world of the present time, and a
suicidal fanaticism of the present time, are caught. So different from it is
this memoir that the salience there of a private happiness and kindness
might almost seem like a distance travelled from certain of the foregoing
fictions. Miracles of Life is a quiet, readable book which contradicts and
repeats itself on occasion. It does not repeat the Gothic delirium of Crash.
Karl Miller’s books include Electric Shepherd: A likeness of James
Hogg, 2003, and Dark Horses: An experience of literary journalism, 1998
