It was a sparklingly enjoyable afternoon’s conversation, and he displayed such a generously heavy hand when dispensing the single-malt that I still have only the sketchiest idea of how I got home. I still can’t improve on the description I wrote of him at the time:
‘It would be tempting to extrapolate Ballard from his books and deduce a gaunt, quiet man resembling a cross between William Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft as portrayed by Peter Cushing, a man whose eyes are forever fixed on distant beaches where deserted buildings crumble, or else scanning the skies for dead astronauts and satellites chattering obliviously to no one.
‘A poetic ghoul looking forward to his final peace: to be attained when the world is under 200 feet of water, burnt to a crisp by the sun, battered by massive winds. Probable hobbies: comparing photographs of differently produced fatal injuries, inventing new ways of torturing his characters.
‘The actual Ballard is, of course, nothing of the sort.
‘He is a smooth, ellipsoid being, simultaneously rumpled and suave, a porpoise masquerading as an English gentleman. Ballard would not seem remotely out of place deputising for Ian Carmichael in the Paul Masson California Carafe commercial, or delivering lines like, “Of course there’s absolutely no possibility of letting him live” over a glass of sherry in a British spy film.’
Some of what Ballard said that afternoon would seem startlingly prescient, even by the Sage Of Shepperton’s remarkable track record. ‘In the future every home will become like a TV studio in which one is simultaneously writer, director and star of our own show… what is life? What is our existence except our own show? That home movie that we all live inside… it’s already started to some extent. It won’t be like Crossroads’ — his smooth features produced a startlingly wolfish smile – ‘it’ll be more like Eraserhead’.
‘It isn’t necessarily a frightening or even a corrupt future which lies ahead, but it may be one that is truer to our own selves, and I think therefore it is to be welcomed.’
Remember: when he said that, the webcam-and-YouTube world we currently inhabit WAS science fiction, just as were the ecological catastrophes depicted in his early-’60s novels The Drowned World and The Drought. Musicians have by no means ignored him: The Comsat Angels were named after a Ballard story, as were Madonna’s Drowned World, The Klaxons’ album Myths Of The Near Future and Hawkwind’s High-Rise.
His prolific literary output – twenty novels, nineteen short-story collections (admittedly, some of these latter overlap), one anthology of essays and criticism – divides into ‘clumps’: the eco-catastrophes; the avant-gardism of the ’condensed novels’ which make up The Atrocity Exhibition; the ‘urban disaster trilogy’ of Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise (required reading during the punk years), the mordant depictions of the enclosed worlds of the wealthy in later works like Super-Cannes and Cocaine Nights. His last book, Miracles Of Life, published in 2008, was the autobiography for which many had mistaken Empire Of The Sun and its less celebrated sequel The Kindness Of Women. In it, he said goodbye to us and to the world.
Something else he told me back in ’83: ‘In a radical view of the world, and assuming that the role of the imagination is to reorder reality in a way that makes a little more sense and tells the truth about ourselves and shows us some kind of possibilities of what our lives could be… if that’s the job of the writer, and it always has been, then the whole modern school of American fiction has produced nothing that remotely compares with Burroughs. His work seems as fresh and exciting and as absolutely radical … as it ever was. It takes its place alongside Swift, Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud, Kafka… the radical reshapers of the imagination, of all the possibilities of our lives.
‘There seems no point in writing unless you’re going to do that.’
Which was exactly what he himself did. Jim Ballard was as authentic a radical of the imagination as Burroughs or Genet or Carroll or Rimbaud. We were all better and wiser for sharing this time and place with him, and we are all the poorer for his passing.
Word, 2009
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