Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton
I would much rather not review this autobiography; in fact, I wish that this book had not been written. Because if it hadn’t, that would mean that its author would not be suffering from the advanced prostate cancer that occasioned its few frenzied months of writing; he would not be dying and he would still be able to write more of his superlative, speculative psychological fiction.
Conversely though, I was more than a little intrigued and excited to read what the grand old man of English literary sedition would come up with as a closing edition on his controversial half-century-long career. Although James Graham Ballard has been my own favourite writer for twelve years, and I have read every interview with him that I could get my hands on, there were still a number of significant gaps in his life story that I was intensely curious about. This book provides many educational -answers and much, much more.
Miracles of Life starts off with the author’s birth, and right from the start it seems as if he was fated to be a troublemaker in some way, shape or form. He drolly notes, ‘I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim-hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world’.
The Shanghai life he was born into was one of middle-class colonialist privilege, being waited on by numerous servants known by numbers instead of names. The family resided in a large house where Ballard, his younger sister Margaret, and parents James and Edna, lived quite comfortably in an insular and xenophobic manner scarcely imaginable today. (Ballard never learned a word of Chinese, despite living in Shanghai for the first sixteen years of his life.)
The writer pours out memories of the sensory overload of his Chinese youth in the ‘-self-generating fantasy’ of Shanghai with a mixture of awe and acute sociology, noting clinically the staggering disparity between his affluent, pampered existence and that of the average Chinese person he would see starving or dead in the streets. Of course, this uneven existential playing field would savagely level when the author and his family were interred in Lunghua Camp from March 1943 to August 1945 by the invading Japanese army, a period of time that he would immortalise in print nearly four decades later with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize-winning Empire of the Sun.
Emigrating from Shanghai to post-war England in 1946, Ballard was totally unprepared for the ‘derelict, dark and half-ruined’ London that inhospitably greeted him, where the people acted as if they had lost the war, and ‘food rationing was in force, but everything seemed to be rationed, the air we breathed, hope of a better world, and the brief glimpses of the sun’. He’s writing here of the inflexible small-minded nature of his English -grandparents, whom he stayed with for a while, but might as well be writing of the drained, devastated post-war mood.
The grey lifeless country the nascent writer -encounters is in total contrast to the vibrant Shanghai he had once known; it’s a total culture shock (or, to be more precise, a culture-free shock). His later works are part reaction to the backward-looking entropic ennui of the drab England he is subjected to, and part examination and dissection of his own bruised psyche and spirit.
At sixteen, he discovered surrealism and Freud and his internal artistic compass hit true north in some subconscious inchoate fashion. Deciding that he wanted to be a psychiatrist (as he notes, a clear case of ‘physician, heal thyself’) he studies anatomy, physiology and pathology at Cambridge, whilst finding himself ‘bored stiff’ by the lifestyle of the institution.
Dropping out after a couple of years and still struggling to find an artistic voice, he became a student of English literature (‘the worst possible preparation for a writer’s career’). Then, frustrated by the fact modern literature played no part in the course, he dropped out after a year to take up a succession of jobs including novice copywriter with a small London ad agency, Covent Garden porter and, most bizarrely, as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. Can you imagine the author of Crash turning up at your door to sell you the Waverley Encyclopedia?
But these restless options didn’t suit him and he joined the RAF, ending up in Saskatchewan in Canada for a while where he first encountered American science fiction magazines, a new literary form which he immediately took to for its forward-looking and extrapolative qualities.
Upon going back to London after his short stint as a pilot, he met Mary Matthews, who was pregnant with their first child James when they married in September 1955. They lived a happy, idyllic life, and she bore him two more children, Fay and Beatrice. The passages describing the home births of Ballard’s daughters are incredibly moving. Also moving is the account of Mary taking ill on holiday in Alicante and dying suddenly and unexpectedly of severe pneumonia:
‘In the final seconds, when her eyes were fixed, the doctor massaged her chest, forcing the blood into her brain. Her eyes swivelled and started at me, as if seeing me for the first time.’
This is an image that, unsurprisingly, has haunted the writer since his wife’s death in 1963. Talk about a Greek tragedy – you couldn’t write a life like the unfortunate Ballard’s, and the fact he didn’t commit suicide or end up in a mental hospital or as a drunk (though he does flirt with excessive alcoholic consumption for a while after Mary’s death) is quite an incredible thing. Or maybe not. After all, the man had three young children to raise (or to raise him, as he puts it) and simply couldn’t afford to slide off into self-destruction.
The final seventy-one pages of Miracles after Mary’s death cover oft-reported material – London during the swinging sixties, Ballard’s friendship with sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, his writing of Empire of the Sun and The Atrocity Exhibition, his return to Shanghai in 1991, etc, culminating with his matter-of-fact revealing of his cancer. But it’s really the fact that this is first and foremost a book about the positive and negative effects of family on the writer that makes Miracles such a revelation. The unfamiliar familial sections about Ballard’s cold, unemotional, unavailable parents – his all-things-American-loving father with his ‘belief in the power of science to create a better world’, and his dilettante liquid-lunch-swigging mother – add depth of humanity to the picture of a writer often himself perceived as clinical and unemotional.
As, naturally, do the sections where Ballard writes about happily raising his children (the ‘miracles’ of the title and to whom the book is dedicated), reckoning that his fiction is all the better for being interrupted by viewings of Blue Peter or flying kites with his kids. This is a sentimental side to the writer we’ve never seen before (first hinted at in the excellent volume about Ballard by V Vale, published by RE/Search). It’s also gratifying to know that Ballard has had a steady partner, Claire Walsh, for the last four decades to share his life and ease his pain.
Ultimately, Miracles of Life is a soul-baring triumph, one man sifting through his cooling memory embers to understand his life’s psychological machinations and motivations, and it stands as a superb tome-stone on JG Ballard’s oeuvre. I would recommend it to anybody interested in the man, or contemporary subversive fiction, or post-war Britain or, indeed, in the ultimate redemptive power of family love in the face of extreme adversity. The author’s ultimate lack of bitterness, his acceptance of great pain and transcendence of it, will be an inspiration to everyone reading the book.
James Graham Ballard, you are irreplaceable and will be greatly missed when you go. And I don’t think I need to say any more than that.
Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton
JG Ballard
(Fourth Estate, 2008)
