In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM colour. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of de Chirico. Set in an Anglo-Spanish colony, it featured a Surrealist painter, a racing car driver and a toreador. All love the mysterious Pandora, who is unable to love anyone until the Dutchman drops anchor. To prove his passion for Pandora one suitor takes poison while another pushes his beloved car over a cliff. Anyone familiar with Ballard’s work will note these themes in his fiction, from the exotic Vermilion Sands stories begun in the 1950s to his 1970s fixation with automobiles and sexuality in Crash.
Dropping out of Cambridge, first as a medical, then as an English, student, Ballard found visual media to be his chief influence: the Surrealists, Akira Kurasawa, Ingmar Bergman, new French cinema and British pop artists. He admired Ray Bradbury, until Life magazine revealed Bradbury’s fascination with science fiction juvenilia. A brief attendance at London’s 1957 World Science Fiction Convention persuaded Ballard that he was not after all among existentialist intellectuals but mostly grown-up adolescents.
When, with John Brunner, I called a one-day conference to address these issues, Ballard and I bonded over our mutual disappointments; and, with B.J. Bayley, we began meeting regularly to plan the creation of an imaginative new literature, including ‘condensed novels’, which we hoped would invigorate English fiction, making it better able to address contemporary issues. With some ups and downs we remained close friends over many decades until his death in 2009.
Through my work as an editor I was privileged to get to know some of our best imaginative writers, but none was as original as Mervyn Peake or Ballard, who brought a unique vision to English literature. Both born in warring China, they found Britain a grey, prosaic place, just as I had after the dramatic years of the London Blitz and screaming V-bombs. Both offered me an exciting wealth of literary and personal inspiration.
In the early 1960s, when Hilary Bailey and I began visiting the Ballards in sub-urban Shepperton, their dining room doubled as Ballard’s office. On every wall were typographical layouts, ideas for magazine pages, phrases which ultimately would become familiar to his readers and which I published as soon as I had the necessary format. The William Burroughs books I brought back from Paris demonstrated how science fiction could enliven English fiction. In 1963, often to our wives’ amused and caustic exasperation, we talked incessantly about finding fresh literary techniques to deal with the Cuban missile crisis, the Keeler affair, Kennedy’s assassination and how the Beatles energised the popular arts.
Ballard described me as a modern Defoe. I admired him as an influential visionary, like Ezra Pound. We were a good team. I had the means, patience and journalistic skills to build bridges between popular and literary fiction, the familiar and unfamiliar, and to acquaint a readership with my friend’s genius. We were both enthusiastic fathers, sharing literary ambitions. I was never the ‘romantic philanderer’ later described by Claire Walsh in a press interview and neither was Jimmy. In that respect, we were rather dull chaps, concerned with craft and the security of our families.
A happier man in those days, celebrating married life and his children’s qualities, Ballard continued to develop his writing. The Drowned World, a metaphysical disaster novel, was his breakthrough. On becoming editor of New Worlds in 1964, I immediately commissioned a two-part serial, ‘Equinox (The Crystal World)’, and a long article on William S. Burroughs. Thanks to the US paperback market, we began earning decent money.
After his wife Mary’s gall bladder operation, Jimmy determined she should enjoy a reviving holiday on the Spanish riviera. Shortly before they set off we had dinner together. Still recovering, Mary insisted the Mediterranean sun would do her good. Soon we received their jolly holiday postcard. A few days later came a rare telegram. I opened it and was horrified to learn that Mary had died – from pneumonia. Jimmy could not afford to bring her back. She was buried in Alicante’s Protestant cemetery.
Stopping every few hours when his eyes filled with tears, Jimmy drove the children home. We were there for support, as was his sister, but within a few months he had changed, sleeping with one sympathetic woman after another and given to turns of paranoia. We continued enjoying our kids and discussing the virtues of stapling machines over conventional stitching. Mary’s clothes remained in the wardrobe and her picture at his bedside while, increasingly rarely, he talked about her only with me. This would later cause rifts with James, his teenaged son. He became upset if he heard that Hilary and I had even mentioned Mary. In well-honed monologues he described the impossibility of predicting the future for more than a few seconds ahead. This idea was not difficult to understand. Claire Walsh, who would become his partner, bore the brunt of his troubled conscience. He blamed himself for Mary’s death, or suspected that others did.
Vermilion Sands and his metaphysical disaster novels were followed by The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which I believe to be his most important book. This gave way to Crash (1973) and the psychopathology of the automobile age, which was not exorcised until Empire of the Sun (1984), the autobiographical novel about his boyhood in Japanese-occupied China which every friend wanted him to write. I introduced him to the pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi and the National Physical Laboratory’s Chris Evans, who encouraged him further. Thereafter, with the exception of his somewhat equivocal The Kindness of Women, he spent his career refining techniques developed in early works such as The Terminal Beach and The Voices of Time with reference to contemporary events.
Christopher Priest has an enthusiastic following as a literary science fiction writer and was influenced by Ballard, with whom he was acquainted. If not particularly profound, this biography is a sympathetic discussion of its subject. I do, however, have issues with some inaccuracies. Apart from David Pringle, Ballard’s extraordinarily conscientious bibliographer, Priest could interview few of his contemporaries. Most were either dead or reluctant to participate.
Ballard blamed himself for his wife Mary’s death, or suspected that others did
Ballard’s own moving memoir, Miracles of Life (2008), was not generally informative. Some sources are unreliable. In an often-quoted letter to Jimmy’s daughter Fay, Hilary recalled events which could not possibly have occurred because Mary died before they happened. Ballard’s children share their father’s reticence, as does Claire’s daughter Jenny. Bea Ballard’s touching reminiscence is available online. John Baxter’s wildly inaccurate and spiteful The Inner Man (2011) seemed determined to damage Ballard’s reputation.
As a record of Ballard’s creative life and innovations, the inspirer of Alasdair Gray, Michel Houllebecq and Iain Sinclair, The Illuminated Man avoids describing Ballard as merely a first-rate science fiction writer good at talking up his own work; but it is also obvious that Priest lacks any profound affinity with his subject’s remarkable originality.
Soon after beginning the project, Priest, like Ballard, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His wife Nina Allan, also a talented writer, tried to find some way of completing the book. As he struggled with this study of probably the greatest literary innovator of his time, she decided to fold in a narrative of her husband’s dying.
Understandably, Allan’s focus is on Priest rather than on Ballard, whom she admires and had earlier proposed to write about but never knew. This perhaps gives the book an emotional depth, a perspective considerably deeper than Baxter’s miserable and hasty biography, but rather fails its intended subject. For me, Ballard was a dear friend and a great writer who overcame a troubled life to give us brilliant fiction which resonates through the century. The Illuminated Man will enlighten new readers and maintain Ballard’s reputation. Whether it adds to Ballard scholarship remains to be seen.
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