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JG Ballard had revealed his early life in two of his novels and had no plans for an autobiography. Then illness took a hand
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography by JG Ballard.
AFTER completing his two autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun (1984)and The Kindness of Women (1991), J G Ballard said he had no plans to write more about his own story. “I think those two books take care of my life. Who knows, one day I might write an autobiography, but I don't think so.”
What has changed his mind he discloses in the last chapter of Miracles of Life. In June 2006, he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had spread to his spine and ribs. He thanks his specialist, Dr Jonathan Waxman at the Hammersmith Hospital, for having helped him lead as normal a life as possible since. "It is thanks to Jonathan Waxman that I found the will to write this book." JG Ballard's literary career has taken an unusual form altogether. He began writing science fiction stories in the Fifties and went on in the early Sixties to publish wonderful novels dreaming up different kinds of universal cataclysm, The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World, among them.
At the end of the decade, his imagination took a more violent, perverse turn in The Atrocity Exhibition and, notoriously, Crash (1973), in which the psychopathic hero fantasised a "whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant".
At the time, most readers knew little about Ballard or what the ultimate source of his apocalyptic visions could be. That all changed when he brought out Empire of the Sun, describing his threeyear internment as a boy, 1943-45, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. It was immediately obvious that this had been his formative experience and that he had been recreating it in transposed forms in his fiction ever since.
Empire of the Sun is a marvellous novel - and was filmed by Steven Spielberg himself, becoming what Ballard himself rates as "Spielberg's best, and most imagined, film". The first half of Miracles of Life is devoted to Ballard's boyhood in Shanghai again - and doesn't greatly alter the picture we already have of those years.
It was an extraordinary city - "a magical place, a self-generating fantasy", "extravagant but cruel" - even before the invasion.
Ballard was 12 when, along with his family, he entered the Japanese camp. He loved it, almost to the end. "I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart." Having felt distant from his parents, he relished the intimacy they were forced into by living in one small room. He missed it later.
"Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same Shepperton house for nearly 50 years and to the despair of everyone have always preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua." In 1946, he came to England, going to boarding school, then university, in Cambridge, studying anatomy, physiology and pathology, all the while planning to write. "My years in the dissection room were important because they taught me that though death was the end, the human imagination and the human spirit could triumph over our own dissolution." An English course at Queen Mary College, a stint at an advertising agency, and two years in the RAF followed. Only relatively late did he discover science fiction as a way of presenting the whole world as a psychological construct, "prone to mysterious and often psychopathic impulses". At the time, he was switching off his memories of Shanghai and somehow it never occurred to him to write a novel based on his wartime experiences.
In 1955, Ballard married Mary Matthews; they had a son and two daughters. In 1964, she died suddenly of pneumonia, while on holiday in Alicante.The loss changed and darkened his writing.
In the extreme pieces that became The Atrocity Exhibition, he was "trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary's death..." Hereafter, the book largely becomes a generous tribute to his friends - such as the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and Ballard's companion of the past 40 years, Claire Walsh - and his family. It is his children who are the "miracles of life" of the title and he says the years he spent as their parent when they were young were the richest and happiest of his life.
And so why did he wait so long to write about Shanghai? He's still puzzled himself.
"Perhaps, as I have often reflected, it took me 20 years to forget Shanghai and 20 years to remember," he offers.
Another reason, he thinks, was that he was waiting for his children to grow up. "Until they were young adults I was too protective of them to expose them in my mind to the dangers I had known at their age." It's a slightly more intricate explanation than it at first appears.
But whatever the reason, perhaps it was for the best that Ballard so abstracted and transfigured his experiences? For that was how he gave us the best science fiction of his time. And now, in this touching memoir, the storyteller lays down his mantle.
