J. G. Ballard was the ghostwriter for postwar English literature, standing at the shoulder of all writers who staked out the city or the suburbs1 whether they realised it or not. You’ll read about his literary achievements in the obituaries that spring up like mushrooms around his death yesterday, but I doubt that those achievements were his greatest pleasure. His last book, the autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, is dedicated to his real achievement: the three children he raised as a single father after the death of his wife Mary in 1964.
My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and the countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way. Then, perhaps, the ghosts inside my head , the old beggar under the quilt of snow, the strangled Chinese at the railway station, Kennedy and my young wife, could be laid to rest.
Ballard lived most of his life in the UK in Shepperton, which by meaningless coincidence is where my grandparents lived, and I like to imagine that I passed him many times on Shepperton High Street without realising it. I read everything I could find by Ballard when I was growing up – finding in his writing a survival kit that helped me to reconfigure suburbia as a place of strangeness rather than banality – so I suppose that I crossed paths with him in a literary sense; and that will have to be enough. R.I.P.
- Although not the countryside, which in literary terms I think would have been more alien to him than Mars. [↩]
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