Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: an Autobiography, by JG Ballard
(4th Estate, £14.99)
Writing of a cycle ride he took with his father in Shanghai in 1941, JG Ballard describes stepping into the grounds of a derelict casino and nightclub called the De Monte: "On the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appear, it could be swept aside into the past."
Central to all of Ballard's writings is the disassembling of the theatre in which our lives are ordinarily enacted—a theatre that includes our habitual selves. When these props are taken away by history, or by some inner imperative of our own, we find ourselves in a world more real than the one constructed by society. With the makeshifts of conventional existence demolished, we face human life on its most basic terms—an extremely sobering, sometimes devastating, experience that can also be oddly liberating.
In creating these imaginary vistas, Ballard was reliving his memories of Shanghai. A place where fantasies that elsewhere remained inside people's heads were routinely enacted in everyday life, this hyper-modern metropolis is the muse he met in childhood, and which has never deserted him. It cannot always have been a welcome presence, and this sparely written autobiography recounts some horrific episodes. The leisurely strangulation of a young Chinese man by a platoon of Japanese soldiers left marooned at a railway station by the approach of peace is described with laconic economy, but witnessing the event as a child must have left a lasting scar. At the same time, many of Ballard's memories of Shanghai are of pleasure and adventure. Despite everything he saw, it is clear that Ballard loved the city, vastly preferring its flamboyant modernity to the grimy resignation he encountered when he arrived in England after the war.
Ballard has said he spent 20 years forgetting his early life and another 20 remembering it—a process to which we owe Empire of the Sun. In Miracles of Life, he describes the actual experiences that were the sources of his astonishing creativity. The book reveals an aspect of Ballard that may seem at odds with the distant protagonists of his novels—his life as a devoted family man. Internment by the Japanese in Shanghai freed the young Ballard from an English family that was in many ways emotionally stultified, and when he married Helen Mary Matthews in 1955 he found a release from solitude and an uninhibited happiness that endured even after she tragically died of pneumonia in 1964. Determined to bring up his three young children himself at a time when lone parents were almost unheard of, Ballard thrived on the happy mayhem of family life. At the same time the loss of his wife altered him profoundly, and some of his most radical work was done in the years that followed. The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash have been read as prophetic glimpses of the fusion of sex and technology that shapes the media environment. But they are also more personal and more universally human books, in which Ballard struggles to find significance in the casual cruelty of life. "I felt that nature had committed a dreadful crime against Mary and her children. Why?" A question without an answer, this painful inquiry drives the seeming perversity of Ballard's characters, who seek in extremes of sensation a catharsis they cannot find any other way. Enriched by the companionship of Claire Walsh, his partner of 40 years, Ballard seems to have been able to leave the question behind. Yet it inspires a major portion of his work.
Miracles of Life fills a number of gaps in Ballard's development as a writer. Never an aficionado, he turned to science fiction as an escape from the literary conventions of postwar England. Later he took up other genres—the experimental novel, a variation on the crime thriller—while also turning himself into the greatest short story writer since HG Wells. Through all this he has remained as far as possible from anything that smacks of respectability. Ballard's conversation has none of the claustrophobic self-regard of the book world, and he has no time for the trappings of a man of letters. His work is a direct response to his life: an attempt to clarify what extreme situations tell us about the true nature of being human. Above all, it is a struggle with memory, which is alternately banished and then summoned in a lifelong effort at rescuing the past—at delivering it from time and regret, and turning even the horror it contains into something of life-affirming beauty.
As he reports with characteristic dry candour in the short last chapter, Ballard is now seriously ill. Supported by his doctor Jonathan Waxman, he has produced this autobiography while suffering from an advanced state of prostate cancer. Miracles of Life is another of Ballard's assaults on time, and as powerfully moving as anything he has written.
