James Graham Ballard was born on 15 November 1930 in Shanghai, China, the son of James Ballard (1901–1966), managing director of the China Printing and Finishing Company (a subsidiary of the Manchester-based Calico Printers Association), and his wife, Edna, née Johnstone (1905–1998). He had a younger sister, Margaret (b. 1937). Known as Jamie as a child, later as Jim, Ballard was brought up in a mock-Tudor house at 31 Amherst Avenue (now 508 Panyu Lu, with its former front entrance off Xinhua Road) and went to the Cathedral School in Shanghai.
Ballard
was eleven when the Japanese army occupied the Shanghai International
Settlement, and twelve when he and his family were interned at the
Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, Japanese prison camp. He drew on
the experience for the semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun
(1984), , which Steven Spielberg made into a film in 1987, Ballard’s
protagonist, Jim, who is separated from his parents at the outbreak
of World War II, spends three years in a Japanese prison camp. There
the boy’s contacts to his old world (already a bizarre amalgam of
Chinese environment overlaid with more typically European lifestyles)
occur through magazines and the warplanes the United States sends to
the Far East. In a touching scene, Jim clips out the photograph of a
couple from an advertisement in Life
magazine because of its likeness to his parents. It is not difficult
to see how Ballard’s fiction came to be obsessed with the icons of
America and why it centered on war, disaster, and imprisonment.
Ballard
said in interviews—of which he gave many: they were his favoured
form of self-mythologizing—that he didn't think of the two years he
spent in the camp, and the events surrounding his and his family's
internment, until years later when he began work on Empire of the
Sun. Ballard's attitude towards his time in the camp remained
profoundly ambivalent until his death. In a late conversation he
spoke of how:
The Japanese guards at the camp had a horrible habit of getting a rickshaw boy to pull them back to the camp from Shanghai—which was six or seven miles—and then, if he protested, they'd beat him up, smash up his rickshaw—which was his only means of making a living—and finally kill him. I remember wondering why my parents and the other adults didn't intervene—but they couldn't. There would've been terrible and immediate reprisals. No food for weeks—and worse. (‘Commander of the M25’, GQ Magazine, 2006)
The
camp was liberated after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Later the
same year Ballard and his mother and sister moved to England, near
Plymouth. His mother and sister subsequently returned to Shanghai,
leaving Ballard to attend boarding school, then university, while
spending holidays with his grandparents. Ballard's father remained in
China until a year after the revolution.
Ballard
was sent to the Leys School, Cambridge, from where he went to King's
College, Cambridge, to study medicine to become a Psychiatrist.
During this time he wrote extensively inspired by psychoanalysts and
painters. In 1951, which was his second year at King’s College he
wrote his first short story titled ‘The
Violent Noon’.
It got published in the newspaper magazine ‘Varsity’ and also won
a competition.
On
winning a short story competition, moved to study English at Queen
Mary, University of London. Having left without completing his
degree, he worked briefly as a copywriter for an advertising agency
and as an encyclopaedia salesman before joining the RAF, where he
underwent pilot training in Canada. Much of his time in the RAF was
spent in Moose Jaw, Canada, where he discovered science fiction
through reading American magazines.
Back
in England, he worked as a science editor and on 26 September 1955,
already describing himself on the marriage certificate as a ‘writer’,
Ballard married (Helen) Mary Nance Matthews (1930–1964), daughter
of John Arthur Jefferies Matthews. They had a son, Jim (b.
1956), and two daughters, Fay (b. 1957) and Bea (b.
1959). In 1959 the family moved to a semi-detached house in Charlton
Road, Shepperton, where Ballard would remain for the next fifty
years.
1964
was a year of grief for Ballard: while on a Spanish holiday in
September 1964 Ballard's young wife died suddenly of pneumonia. After
driving the children back to England, Ballard—although family and
friends initially tried to dissuade him from such an unusual course
of action for the time—committed himself to bringing them up alone.
He later said of this aspect of his life:
Some fathers make good mothers and I hope I was one of them, though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother … too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other—in short, the kind of mother … of whom the social services deeply disapprove. (Miracles of Life, 227)
But
his daughter Bea later described the home as ‘a very happy
nest—there was a sense of warm chaos that was hugely liberating’
(Sunday Times, 26 April 2009).
The truth about this may never be known. Ballard's mental state during these years—if the fiction he produced is anything to go by—was certainly very dark. Later he spoke of how his young wife's death had come as a shattering blow, convincing him that there was not even a residuum of providence in the universe. His drinking was also, self-confessedly, prodigious: starting with whisky, the first glass added to a cup of tea at 9 a.m., shortly after the children had been deposited at school, subsequent ones tippled slowly throughout the writing day. At one point Ballard lost his driving licence, but such was his inertial state that he did not leave the environs of Shepperton for an entire year, preferring to walk everywhere.
The truth about this may never be known. Ballard's mental state during these years—if the fiction he produced is anything to go by—was certainly very dark. Later he spoke of how his young wife's death had come as a shattering blow, convincing him that there was not even a residuum of providence in the universe. His drinking was also, self-confessedly, prodigious: starting with whisky, the first glass added to a cup of tea at 9 a.m., shortly after the children had been deposited at school, subsequent ones tippled slowly throughout the writing day. At one point Ballard lost his driving licence, but such was his inertial state that he did not leave the environs of Shepperton for an entire year, preferring to walk everywhere.
“I
remember my mother dying, quite vividly, and afterwards sitting in
the car – a big old Armstrong Siddeley I think – and I was in the
passenger seat and Daddy just cried and cried. After that, we moved
forward – that was it." Fay Ballard, daughter of JG Ballard,
is describing what happened when her mother, Mary, died of pneumonia,
aged 34, on a family holiday in Alicante, Spain. After the burial,
her father drove Fay, her sister, Bea, and brother, Jim, home to
England. Fay was seven years old.
She
recalls a doctor visiting their holiday apartment and her mother's
fight to breathe with the aid of an oxygen cylinder; and, finally,
her father emerging from the bedroom, holding his children tightly
and saying, "She's dead."
"My
father was the most wonderful, loving, brilliant father," she
says, "but we never talked about our mother. Not once. We
couldn't discuss her with the wider family either. I never discussed
her with Bea or Jim. I felt very awkward if her name ever came up. I
buried the trauma deep inside of me."
His
other daughter Bea once said:
“My
father had two extreme experiences in his life – his internment as
a young child in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where he saw
horrible cruelty , and the terrible tragedy of my mother’s sudden
death. He knew how difficult life could be, but he showed courage and
gave us a loving, happy and secure environment. He didn’t fall
apart, as is suggested, and he was a brilliant example to me when my
husband died and later when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. He
was a great survivor, and so am I.”
But
before all that had happened, they had a few happy years together as
a family. In 1956 Ballard's first short story, “Escapement”, was
published in the magazine New Worlds; second “Prima Belladonna”
to Science
Fantasy.
His first novel ‘The Wind from Nowhere’ came out in 1962 (which
he later omitted from lists of his works ) and thus this became the
means for his financial support from then onwards. The same year ‘The
Drowned World’ got published, launching Ballard as a key figure in
the ‘New Wave’ movement.
For
a long time he was dismissed as a lowly science fiction writer, and
of a pessimistic dystopian kind that was far distant from the shiny
futurism and expansive space operas of Flash Gordon or Star Wars. In
the 1960s Ballard was associated with the British avant garde ‘New
Wave’ grouping that rejected outer space for the investigation of
‘inner space’. He evoked landscapes in the aftermath of global
disasters as the subjective dream-worlds of the haunted central
characters.
In
the 60s he word rate remained as prodigious as the alcohol
consumption, and if anything Ballard was still more prolific after
Mary's death. In 1965 Ballard met Martin Bax and became the prose
editor of Ambit magazine. They collaborated on a number of projects,
including a competition for poetry composed under the influence of
drugs, a series of abstract/spoof advertisements that he tried
(unsuccessfully) to persuade the Arts Council to fund and a show in
which scientific papers were read aloud, accompanied by a striptease
act.
The
Atrocity Exhibition (1970) became, like Burroughs's Naked Lunch, the
object of censure: in this case by its American publisher, Nelson
Doubleday, who, on reading through some of its contents, ordered the
destruction of the original print run.
In
1970 Ballard staged an exhibition at the New Arts Laboratory in
London entitled ‘Crashed Cars’, which was just that. The
exhibition garnered outraged criticism, but this paled in comparison
with the content of its novel-form sequel, Crash (1973), in which
Ballard's mounting preoccupation with the dysfunctional relationship
between humans and technology reached a sort of orgasmic crescendo in
a paean to the delirious psychosexuality of celebrity car crashes.
With fitting punctuation, Ballard himself survived a serious car
crash shortly after completing the novel. While excoriated by some,
others—such as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard—praised Crash as
the first great novel of the universe of simulation. It was filmed in
1996 by David Cronenberg, and even twenty-three years after the
novel's publication this adaptation was banned by Westminster
council, while the Daily Mail campaigned to have it banned
nationwide.
It
wasn't until the publication of Empire of the Sun (1984) that Ballard
was hailed wholeheartedly by the avatars of the literary mainstream.
Loosely based on his experiences at Lunghua internment camp, the
novel was awarded both the Guardian fiction prize and the James Tait
Black memorial prize, and was filmed in 1987 by Steven Spielberg.
Ballard estimated that he made £500,000 in royalties from the book.
After
this mainstream success, his work became valued as a significant
record of successive post-war transformations and their traumatic
effect on the Western psyche. His fiction has had a huge impact on
other writers (as Martin Amis, Will Self, William Gibson and Hari
Kunzru have testified), and his commentary on modern life was given
ample space in newspapers.
Ballard's
partner for the last forty years of his life was the journalist
Claire Walsh (1941–2014). He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in
June 2006. He lived to write and see published his memoir, Miracles
of Life (the title referring to his three children). He spent the
last year of his life at Claire Walsh's home at 166 Goldhawk Road,
Shepherd's Bush, London, and died there on 19 April 2009. His remains
were cremated. He was survived by Claire and his children.
In
his first biography, Baxter, the author accused him of having a
violent and abusive relationship with Ballard's long-term partner,
Claire Walsh, and affairs with many women, including Emma Tennant.
Hilariously, he describes Ms Tennant as "a novelist manqué and
journalist for magazines such as Vogue",
when in fact she was a recognized British novelist. That
sensationalism was widely criticized not only by Ballards family and
friends, but also by many people from the publishing industry who
never met them.
Sources:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2929/j-g-ballard-the-art-of-fiction-no-85-j-g-ballard
Sources:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2929/j-g-ballard-the-art-of-fiction-no-85-j-g-ballard
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