In Depth
J G Ballard: The making of a writer
20.11.07 Benedicte Page
J G Ballard's novels, including Empire of the Sun, Crash, The Drowned World, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, have offered a unique, dystopian and often controversial perspective on the contemporary world since the early 1960s. Now 77, Ballard has written his autobiography, exploring some of the sources of his dark imagination. He describes in measured terms his childhood in Shanghai in the 1930s, where he saw the poor lying in the streets dead from starvation, and internment in a Japanese camp during the Second World War, where among other experiences he witnessed the killing of a young Chinese man at close hand. He also describes bringing up his three children alone after the sudden, tragic death of his wife in 1964. Miracles of Life is to be Waterstone's Book of the Month in February and will be read as BBC Radio 4's "Book of the Week", beginning on 11th February.
"I turned the material of my early life into fiction in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Strangers, but they were novels and I wanted to tell the story straight. I've now reached an age where I look back on almost all of my life, and I thought it was a good time to write an autobiography and draw all the threads together.
"The shocking events that I witnessed as a boy during the war, and before the war, remain shocking in my mind and I have thought about them ever since, and never really come to terms with them. Obviously, the death of my wife is something that still feels very disturbing. But there were happy things too: bringing up my children by myself, making my career as a writer, and friendships [with writer Michael Moorcock, sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and psychologist Chris Evans].
"The Lunghua internment camp held about 2,000 people and it was, in effect, a huge slum. In any slum, it's the teenage boys who run wild. They are out of control of their parents because their parents have no levers they can pull: my parents couldn't feed me, keep me warm, protect me, they had no treats they could offer me. I had enormous freedom: I would roam around the camp with my chessboard, challenging anyone to a game. I got involved with these American merchant marine sailors, who had a huge stock of magazines, and I read them all about 10 times. But when I say that in many ways I enjoyed the camp, people might think it was a sort of Butlins, and nobody who was there thought that.
"The shock of coming to England in 1946 is something that has never left me. Very few -people now remember quite how bleak life here was. Obviously, the country was exhausted by the war, and visibly shattered. Large areas of London and Birmingham and Manchester were bomb sites. I'd been brought up on a myth of England: Peter Pan, A A Milne, Just William, a middle-class world that was enormously secure and everyone was a doctor or a solicitor. Then to get here and find that all that was a complete myth, jolted me.
"Surrealism had a big effect on me then, and still does. It explained things. Partly it was that war is surreal in its effects: the bus on top of a block of apartments, thrown there by a bomb; the whole wall of a tall building collapsed, so you can see dozens of flats, like a doll's house, with the furniture still in place. I think I began to feel that surrealism explained what was going on in England; if you looked at things through the eyes of the surrealist painters, everything was upside down and you got bizarre things being looked on as though they were completely ordinary.
"A very important thing for me was being a medical student for a couple of years. The central course was dissection; each term you would dissect part of the human body in the most minute possible way. If you are dissecting an arm and there are scars on the hand and on the skin, you can't help but begin to imagine the life lying behind this detailed map of what was once a human being. Each of us had a little pine box which we kept under our beds containing a human skeleton. Mine was quite small and I was assured it was not that of a child, but of a peasant from Southeast Asia. These were the kind of dead I'd seen [in Shanghai] and now I slept in my bed with this coffin below me.
"I've always had a very inquiring approach to everything I write. Most English novelists accept the English landscape as it is, and analyse it and its social relationships. I've never adopted this approach. I've always been interested in understanding what's going on, in analysing the peculiar things about England. Partly this is because I didn't come here until I was nearly 16. I was on a one-man expedition to work out what was going on in this strange tribe; I was up my own Amazon, but it was actually the Thames.
"I was married in 1954, and most of my life from that point on was involved with my family and, later, bringing up my children on my own. I think I say in the book, I watched the Swinging Sixties on television, after 'Blue Peter'. The orthodox wisdom then was that no father, however well-meaning, could take a mother's place. I thought at the time it was baloney, it's only true if the father is absent or not loving and caring. My books have come out of my Shanghai background, but they've also come out of watching my children grow—that was enormously satisfying. I think through them I had a childhood that I'd missed because of the war."
J G Ballard Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, February, h/b, £16.99, 9780007270729)
RSS
Subscriber Content