No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is as thin a body of lived experience as the average Labour Cabinet minister possesses.
Reading J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, you sometimes need to pause to remind yourself just how young he was at the time of many of the atrocious events described. At the point where most English autobiographies are just beginning, as the subject leaves university, enough horror has been lived through by Ballard to supply a lifetime’s imaginative transformations.
Ballard must always have seemed something of a puzzle throughout his grotesque and glorious high period. He was said to live in Shepperton, of all places, in a small suburban house with three children — his wife was known to have died suddenly and young. Occasional lady journalists were dispatched to the respectable outer suburbs, to return with sardonic views of the bourgeois setting and Ballard’s vagueness about household matters.
But only the most foolish journalist would presume that imaginative writing is conducted exclusively in a double-doored salon in Hampstead. The way that literature continues to be written by people who live in perfectly ordinary houses, rather than by the sort Philip Larkin called the ‘s**t in a shuttered chateau’, ought to be no surprise.
Still, the publications that were regularly issuing from Shepperton were a surprise. Ballard’s often gruesome fantasies had the brilliantly simple conceit of taking a situation to its logical conclusion. They are horrid, but perfectly sensible.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in