JG Ballard

[Michael Moorcock]

JGBallard died Sunday 19 April at 7am. A giant in literature, he'll be greatly missed. One of my best and oldest friends.

[Rothgo]

Deep sympathies to his family and friends, particulalry those here that knew him (Mike and perhaps some others).

[Pietro_Mercurios]

I'm really sorry to read your news, Mike.

[Sir John Barbican Begg]

JG Ballard
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom

JG Ballard, the author who has died aged 78, was best known for his two fictionalised autobiographies, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women; the former, which told of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp outside Shanghai, became an international best-seller and was later made into a film by Steven Spielberg.

Before the success of Empire of the Sun Ballard was known principally for darkly surreal novels such as The Crystal World (1966), which described a West African country undergoing an inexplicable process of petrifaction, and Crash (1973), in which he put forward the idea that modern society finds traffic accidents erotic. Despising the term science fiction, Ballard never used it, preferring to describe his work as "apocalyptic".

Despite Ballard's avuncular appearance and booming voice, his air of bonhomie belied a much darker side. Acquaintances recalled that as young man he was "obsessed" with topics such as assassination, car crash injuries and psychosis. One of Ballard's more outré projects had been an "installation" at the ICA called The Assassination Weapon featuring a story about a deranged bomber pilot simultaneously screened on three walls to the sound of cars crashing.

Friends, while remembering Ballard as "generous and jovial" also described him as "jolly peculiar" and on occasion "straightforwardly mad".

Ballard admitted to spending much of his adult life drinking too much. "It was a great sense of achievement," he recalled, "when my first drink of the day was not at nine in the morning but at noon and then at eight. Life got much duller as a result." No doubt as an antidote to boredom he began taking the mind altering drug LSD and recalled "an indulgent over use" of silver spray-paint in decorating his footwear.

James Graham Ballard was born on November 15 1930 in Shanghai, the elder child of a cotton mill owner and his wife. Ballard's sister was not born until he was seven and he recalled that much of his childhood was spent alone or in the company of his nanny. "My father worked," he remembered, "and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house I was chauffeur-driven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped."

Ballard's memories of pre-war Shanghai were of "a cruel city". "If you fainted on the road from lack of food you lay there until you died," he said. "There used to be carts going around the city picking up dead bodies."

A year after the Japanese took possession of Shanghai, Ballard and his family were interned in Lunghua Camp just outside the city. "It was absolutely the reverse of anything I had ever known," he recalled, "previously we had lived an incredibly formal existence, then suddenly I was a member of a 2,000 strong tenement family. I had a good time, I thoroughly enjoyed myself."

Ballard was, he admitted, aware to some extent of the "years of stress and illness" undergone by his parents. "Towards the end when the food supplies had collapsed we were living on warehouse scrapings," he recalled. "One day my father said: 'We must eat the weevils, they contain protein' and so we did."

Ballard and his fellow internees were isolated from all news of the war.

They did not know hostilities had ended until the United States began dropping food parcels instead of bombs on the airbase next to their camp.

Ballard and his family went back to their house in Amherst Avenue in Shanghai and remained there until 1946 when they returned to England.

After China Ballard recalled that he found life in Britain "cold, grey and dull". He attended The Leys public school which, he insisted, he only survived having been previously exposed to the rigours of an internment camp. "I'd seen so much by then," he remembered, "I could put up even with public school."

On leaving in 1948 he went up to Kings College, Cambridge, where he studied Medicine for two years. Ballard had originally hoped to go on to study psychiatry but realised that the demands of the course were leaving him no time for writing. "I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great," he recalled, "that they were going to burst."

When Ballard left Cambridge without having taken a degree, he joined the RAF to train as a pilot. After two years of training in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he returned to Britain. He then worked variously as an encyclopedia salesman, a Covent Garden porter and a writer on a technical journal before publishing his first short story in Michael Moorcock's magazine New Worlds in 1956.

JG Ballard was married later that year and moved to Shepperton with his wife. He became a professional writer and his first novel The Drowned World was published in 1961. In it he put forward one of the first theories about global warming causing the flooding of the world's major cities. His second book, The Terminal Beach, followed a year later.

Ballard and his wife had three children before her sudden death from pneumonia in 1964. After his wife's death Ballard brought his children up alone, an experience he described as "the most important" of his life.

While Ballard insisted that he had enjoyed bringing up his children, and regretted that he had not had "more children and more dogs", the strain of being a single parent increasingly took its toll. "I used to have my first whisky at nine am, after I'd taken the children to school," he remembered, "then I'd have a glass on the hour, every hour. I was never drunk but I would have a glow all through the day."

Ballard spent the late 1960s editing Ambit magazine and socialising with fellow writers and artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Having developed a fascination for car crashes he frequently surprised fellow dinner guests by producing photographs of his girlfriend's crash injuries.

If she was also present Ballard would persuade her to show her scars.

Another long-term obsession, assassination, culminated in Ballard producing a screenplay, Atrocity Exhibition, which became part of an "installation" at the ICA entitled The Assassination Weapon (1969).

The film told the surreal story of an H-Bomber pilot lost among a series of motorways and psychiatric wards and haunted by images of John F Kennedy, Malcolm X and Lee Harvey Oswald. It was projected onto a number of screens and was accompanied by flashing lights, incense and the sound of car crashes. The event lasted for 75 hours.

In 1973 Ballard's obsession with car accidents came to fruition with the publication of Crash. The book put forward the unusual theory that only through intimate contact with a car (in the form of accidents) can humans achieve true eroticism. Ballard's accounts of "the mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels and sun visors lined with brain tissue" did not suit all tastes. The publisher's reader who first saw the manuscript described Ballard as being "beyond psychiatric help." Ballard took her comment as a compliment.

Throughout the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s JG Ballard wrote approximately one book every 18 months. All of his novels and short stories were marked by the same dark, surreal landscapes and all dealt with a future in which his characters had abandoned themselves to personal obsessions.

Concrete Island (1974) dealt with a futuristic motorist marooned for days, not on a desert island but on a roundabout, by the ceaseless flow of traffic. Stories such as Low Flying Aircraft (1976), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), Hello America (1981) and Myths of the Near Future shared an almost hallucinatory quality and featured Ballard's most common theme, characters lost in unknown and abandoned landscapes.

In 1984 Ballard wrote his first realistic novel, the fictional autobiography Empire of the Sun. The book told the story of his childhood in Shanghai and his internment in Lunghua camp and proved an international best-seller. The 1987 film version, made by Steven Spielberg, prompted further sales and Ballard estimated that he made half a million pounds from book sales alone.

Ballard was offered an extra's part in the film and played John Bull in a scene featuring a fancy-dress party.

Instead of producing further realistic works, Ballard returned to his "apocalyptic" vision of the future with The Day of Creation (1988). The novel told the story of a doctor, working in Africa, who opens a small spring which rapidly grows into a river. As the flood transforms the country around it the doctor feels compelled to find the source of the river and to try to dam the flow. "Obsessions again," Ballard recalled. "I think people often feel like that, they create something and then become frightened of it, people become jealous of their own children."

Later that year Ballard returned to Shanghai for the BBC Two Bookmark programme. He visited his old house in Amherst Avenue, by then an electronics library, which had remained largely unchanged since the war. "My bedroom was still painted blue," he recalled, "and the shelves where I had stacked my Chums annuals were full of reports." Ballard also visited Lunghua camp, which had been transformed into a boarding school.

"The Ballard family's room was a broom cupboard" he recalled, "but I remembered every scratch, every chip of paint. It was Lunghua, not Amherst Avenue, which felt like home."

After producing two more books of short stories, Running Wild (1988) and War Fever (1990), Ballard wrote the second part of his fictionalised autobiography The Kindness of Women in 1991. Although the book sold well it did not enjoy the same kind of success as Empire of the Sun. Spurred on by advanced prostate cancer, Ballard completed his non-fiction memoirs, Miracles of Life, in 2007. In them he observed that the attack on the World Trade Centre of September 11 "was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th century". His own life, he declared, was the final story he would tell.

JG Ballard remained in his peeling semi-detached house in Shepperton throughout his life, surrounded by the same furniture and fittings which had been there when he bought it. Asked why he never moved after the enormous financial success of Empire of the Sun, Ballard insisted that living in Shepperton was a "political statement." "My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed," he insisted, "It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did I found them colossally vital."

Ballard also claimed that he liked living near the motorway and Heathrow airport because he enjoyed their "perverse beauty". "I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China," he recalled. "All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai."

JG Ballard married, in 1954, Helen Matthews, who died in 1964. He never remarried. He is survived by his three children and by his long-term companion Claire.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...G-Ballard.html

[Jherek Cornelius]

Terribly sad to hear of this. I'd just seen the news on the BBC website and came here directly.

Such a monumental writer - visionary, ground-braking, oh, I can't find words enough.
One of the 'big three' of the sixties New Wave, along with Aldiss and of course, Mike.
And one of my all time favourites.

The only compensation is knowing that he's escaped from the condition he was suffering from
- which sadly I know about as it was the same one my father died from six years ago.

My deepest sympathies to his family, his friends and all those as affected by his passing as I am.

[DeepFixer]

Only read a few of his books, but I've enjoyed them.

A great loss.

[GuyLawley]

Very very sad news, though we all knew it was coming. It was gratifying to see the warm reception Miracles Of Life got when it came out.

Met him only once at a book signing, for The Kindness of Women I think. Highly enjoyable.

One of my favourite Ballard stories is Mike’s recent mention that he refused to go to court to defend one of his stories from obscenity charges, on the grounds that it was supposed to be obscene. Uncompromising.

That Telegraph piece seems to dwell rather too much on some personal issues, while failing adequately to describe his literary strengths.

[opaloka]

Very sorry to hear that, Mike, very sad news.

[Dodge]

Very sad, despite being expected.

[The English Assassin]

Sad news indeed.

The BBC has this and this to say about him.

[stonehenge]

Sad to hear the news. A very important writer. Our thoughts are with his friends and family. RIP

[interzone]

Originally Posted by Michael Moorcock

JGBallard died Sunday 19 April at 7am. A giant in literature, he'll be greatly missed. One of my best and oldest friends.

Mike:

I feel so bereft at the news of JGB's death. It's almost as if he had invented the modern world. How can things go on without his imagination to sustain them? Why hasn't the world winked out of existence, without him to sardonically observe it?

-- David P.

[interzone]

I'm afraid that anonymous Telegraph obituary of Ballard which someone posted here in full is pretty terrible...


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/5183831/JG-Ballard.html

It's riddled with small factual errors -- e.g., as people here well know, Mike Moorcock was not the editor of New Worlds in 1956!

But it also contains some dubious anecdotes which I recognize from the three or four interviews with JGB that the journalist Lynn Barber published over the years. So, did she write this obit?

E.g: "Ballard spent the late 1960s editing Ambit magazine and socialising with fellow writers and artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Having developed a fascination for car crashes he frequently surprised fellow dinner guests by producing photographs of his girlfriend's crash injuries."

He _frequently_ surprised dinner companions in that way, did he? Is there any truth in the story at all? After Lynn Barber first made this claim in a profile she wrote (in 1991, I think it was), JGB was asked about it by another interviewer, and he denied that it was true.

There are several other assertions in that piece which are dubious. "No doubt as an antidote to boredom he began taking the mind altering drug LSD" -- suggests that he took it with some frequency. In fact, as JGB has constantly said, he took it _once_ (circa 1967), had a bad trip, and vowed never to take it again. Perhaps Mike can confirm?

-- David P.

[Kyrinn S. Eis]

So sorry to hear of this, Mike.

[Chris T]

Many condolences, Mike. Truly a great loss.

[Nathaniel]

Condolences Mike. And thanks, my understanding is that Ballard got his writing "break" in new worlds, so thankyou for helping Ballards stories reach the world.

[Michael Moorcock]

JGB began publishing in the Carnell magazines in 1956, long before I took over. I didn't begin appearing in the Carnell NW until 1959! What I did was encourage Ballard to publish his 'experimental' stories in NEW WORLDS from 1964 onwards. We had been friends since the late 1950s. We had many ideas in common and became friends as soon as we met!

[Michael Moorcock]

Just lost my long reply to this. I agree with you 100%, David, but the work continues to live and be there for us. Lynn B was notorious for her inventions. We both knew her slightly when she worked for Penthouse and she had only the shallowest acquaintance with J and our world. To be honest, she made us a bit impatient! As David says, the piece is absolutely riddled with errors. Another good reason why the DT should not have fired the excellent obits editor, in the general putsch of some outstanding journalistsw a few months ago! He happened to have an excellent knowledge of the sf field and 'new wave' in particular! My guess is that they are unlikely to publish corrections.
Hew took acid once (he got it from me with instructions to be cautious) when drunk. It freaked him so much, he never dropped LSD again. He didn't do drugs, in general, apart from alcohol. He didn't know Freud or Bacon. We both knew Paolzzi and other pop artists. We knew Burroughs and met Bacon casually once or twice through him, I think at the Colony. J didn't socialise much and tended to be even less likely to mix with what he called 'the literary crowd' than with the sf crowd! He knew Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest a little and was better friends with Martin Amis, Will Self and Iain Sinclair. By and large he preferred his own (and Claire's) company! Thewre is, indeed, something very iffy and lazy about that obituary.
.

[Vazkar Asquinol]

A 'Merge' I am sensing....

Prayers throughout with....

[Michael Moorcock]

To be honest the BBC pieces have their share of inaccuracies, too!!