The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  His imagination was formed by his wartime experience in Shanghai, where he was interned by the Japanese. He was thirteen at the time and took to the life in the camp as he would “to a huge slum family.” But it wasn’t just the camp that formed him—it was the very low value attached to human life, something he saw throughout his childhood. He told me that he’d seen coolies beaten to death at a distance of five yards from where he was standing, and every morning as he was driven to school in an American limousine there were fresh bodies lying in the street. Then came the Japanese. He said, “People in the social democracies have no idea of the daily brutality of parts of the East. No they don’t, actually. And it’s as well that they don’t.”

  It is interesting that his two most famous novels were filmed by famous (and interesting) directors: Empire of the Sun by Steven Spielberg (an essentially optimistic artist who regularly steels himself for stringent historical themes), and Crash by David Cronenberg (a much darker artist, and one who specializes in filming unfilmable novels). Crash is the more typical Ballard piece. It is animated by an obsession with the sexuality of the road accident, reminding you that the word obsession derives from the Latin obsidere, which means “to lay siege to.” Ballard is beleaguered by his obsessions. Mood and setting, in him, are identical. He has very little feel for human beings in any conventional sense (and no ear for dialogue); he is remorselessly visual.

  Empire of the Sun—his greatest success—came as a strange kind of backhander to his more cultish admirers. This novel, which is utterly realistic for all its wild exoticism, seemed a betrayal of the Ballardian faith. The cultists felt that Empire (as he used to call it) showed—all too intelligibly—how Ballard’s imagination had been warped into such a curious shape. The novel was a naturalistic explanation of how his imagination got that way. For the cultists (not very logically), again, it was like the witch doctor revealing how he faked his cures.

  Ballard began as an exponent of hard-core SF. His very early short stories, on familiar themes such as overpopulation, societal decay, and so on, are as good as anything in the genre. But the genre couldn’t hold him. There followed four novels of glazed apocalypse—The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), The Crystal World (1966)—where the mother planet is destroyed by wind, by water, by heat, and by mineralization. Then came his brutalist period, beginning in 1970 with The Atrocity Exhibition. The titles of two stories from that book give the tone of the collection: “Princess Margaret’s Facelift” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Then the mortar-and-steel period extends itself with Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975). The next period can again be evoked by another title: Myths of the Near Future (1982). He was still in this period when he died (despite the moving and beautiful memoir Miracles of Life, published in 2008). The last novels—including Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes—were about the violent atavism of corporate and ultraprivileged enclaves in a different kind of near future.

  On my desk I have a printed postcard from Ballard which represents “the future” in mathematical terms: “the future equals sex times technology squared.” In his work he kept asking: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches—the motion sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography, and cyberspace? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme. When he broke away from rigid SF, Ballard said that he was rejecting outer space for “inner space.” This has always been his fief. Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century. He used to like saying that writers were “one-man teams” and needed the noisy encouragement of the crowd (i.e., their readers). But he will also be remembered as a one-man genre; no one else is remotely like him. Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) have been foolish enough to emulate him. What was influential, though, was his prose (characterized by Peter Straub as both “creamy and precise”), and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery.

  Ballard was a great exponent of the Flaubertian line—that writers should be staid and predictable in their lives, so that they can be savage and original in their work. He lived in a semidetached in Shepperton, which might as well have been called “Dunroamin,” and there was the tomato-red Ford Escort parked in its slot in the front garden. When I wrote a long profile of him in 1984, I arrived at eleven in the morning and his first words were “Whisky! Gin! Vodka!” He told me that “Crash freaks” from, say, the Sorbonne would visit him expecting to find a miasma of lysergic acid and child abuse. But, in fact, what they found was a robustly rounded and amazingly cheerful, positively sunny suburbanite. In 1964 his wife, Mary, died very abruptly, on a family holiday, so Ballard raised their three children himself. To begin with he could only manage to do this by drinking a scotch every hour, starting at nine in the morning. It took him quite a while to push this back to six o’clock in the evening. I asked him if that was difficult, and he said: “Difficult? It was like the Battle of Stalingrad.” Becoming a full-time parent and house mensch was, he said, “the best decision of my life”; and I think his three children would agree.

  The last time I saw Ballard, three or four years ago, was when my wife, Isabel Fonseca, and I, together with Will Self and Deborah Orr, had dinner with him and his partner of forty years, Claire Walsh. He revealed in the Shepherd’s Bush restaurant that he probably had “about two years to live.” This was said with innate courage, but with all the melancholy to be expected of a man who loved life with such force.

  The Guardian 2009

  Early Ballard: The Drowned World

  Is prescience a literary virtue? And should the work of J. G. Ballard be particularly prized (as some critics maintain) for the “uncanny” accuracy of its forecasts? The answer to both these questions, I suggest, is a cheerful no.

  In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Ballard famously tapped Ronald Reagan for president. His Hello America (1981), on the other hand, surmised that the United States in its entirety would be evacuated by 1990. The meteorological cataclysms envisaged by his first four novels still look plausible. But the social crisis envisaged by his last four novels—violent and widespread anomie brought about by a glut of leisure and wealth—now looks vanishingly remote.

  So here’s a prophecy: fictional divination will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world-historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and “the future” is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability. Besides, the art of fiction owes allegiance to a muse, a goddess as pure as her nine sisters, and not to some bustling Madame Sosostris (Eliot’s “famous clairvoyant,” with her “wicked pack of cards”). Nevertheless there are certain writers whose visionary power is indifferent to the corroboration of mere upshots—writers who seem to be able to feel, and use, the “world hum” of the “near-after.” That first quote is from Don DeLillo, who is one such; the second quote is from James Graham Ballard (1930–2009), who is another.

  Ballard foresaw manmade climate change, not in The Drowned World (1962) but in The Drought (1964). In The Drought (originally entitled The Burning World), industrial waste has thickened the mantle of the oceans and destroyed the precipitation cycle, transforming the planet into a wilderness of dust and fire. In The Drowned World, ecological catastrophe has a quite different set of causes. The median temperature at the equator is 180 degrees and rising, the polar ice caps and the permafrost have melted, Europe is “a system of giant lagoons,” the American Midwest, “an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay,” and the global population (down to 5 million) huddles within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles (where the thermometers, for now, record a “pleasant” eighty-five). And how did all this come about? Solar instability, pure and simple, with no help whatever from Homo sapiens. So, on the basis of this one novel, Ballard could unobtrusively add his voice to the current Republican debate on global warming—slightly to the left of Rick Perry and Michele Bachma
nn, true, but slightly to the right of Mitt Romney.

  This is an irony we need not fear: indeed, it speeds us on our way to more central questions. As a man (and as a good Green), Ballard was naturally on the side of the angels; but as an artist he is unconditionally of the Devil’s party. He loves the glutinous jungles of The Drowned World and the tindery deserts of The Drought—just as he loves the superhurricane, or express avalanche, of The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and the mineralized multiplicities of The Crystal World (1966). It is the measure of his creative radicalism that he welcomes these desperate dystopias with every atom of his being. He merges with his conjured futures, internalizing them in a kind of imaginative martyrdom. The fusion of mood and setting, the mapping of a landscape of the troubled mind—this is what really matters in Ballard. It gives the novels their tight clench of waywardness and fixity.

  “Soon it would be too hot” is the laconic first sentence of The Drowned World. Its hero, the marine biologist Robert Kerans, is staring out from the balcony of his suite at the Ritz; he is the only (mammalian) occupant of the hotel; the rising water is ten stories from his feet.

  Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders….The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield.

  The sun is alarmingly distended. It is also alarmingly noisy; it “thuds” and “booms”; we hear “the volcanic pounding” of its flares.

  There are mosquitoes the size of dragonflies, hammer-nosed bats, wolf spiders. There are iguanas and basilisks—at one point a large caiman sees Kerans “waist-deep among the horse-tails” and veers toward him, “its eyes steadying” (that steadying is awfully good). The water gives off an unendurable reek, “the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases.” Kerans watches the “countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing faceted eyes of gigantic insects.” Beneath the lagoon is a city: “Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.” The city is London.

  Kerans is nominally engaged with a team of scientists on a waterborne testing station, but the work has become pointlessly routine. Fauna and flora are faithfully following “the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier,” namely an accelerated counter-evolution, a retrogression into a world of lizards and rain forests under a Triassic sun. The human actors have embarked on a parallel process—within the diameter of their own skulls. Early on we learn that something has gone wrong with sleep: at night, the protagonists enter the “time jungles” of uterine dreams, descending into their amniotic past and also into the past of the species, experiencing the “archaic memories” (the “organic memories” of danger and terror) encrypted in their spinal cords. Some fear these dreams. Kerans, of course, embraces them, and yearningly submits to their domination of his waking mind:

  Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon….At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish.

  Ballard gives The Drowned World the trappings of a conventional novel (hero, heroine, authority figure, villain), and equips it with a plot (jeopardy, climax, resolution, coda); but all this feels dutiful and perfunctory, as if conventionality simply bores him. Thus the novel’s backdrop is boldly futuristic while its mechanics seem antique (with something of the boys’-own innocence we find in John Buchan and C. S. Forester). In addition, Ballard’s strikingly “square” dialogue remains a serious lacuna. Here as elsewhere, his dramatis personae—supposedly so gaunt and ghostly—talk like a troupe of British schoolteachers hoisted out of the 1930s: “Damn’ shame about old Bodkin,” “Capital!,” “Touché, Alan.” (Cf. DeLillo, whose dialogue is always fluidly otherworldly.) We conclude that Ballard is quite unstimulated by human interaction—unless it takes the form of something inherently weird, like mob atavism or mass hysteria. What excites him is human isolation.

  The “otherness” of Ballard, his mesmeric glazedness, is always attributed to the two years he spent in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai (1943–1945). That experience, I think, should be seen in combination, or in synergy, with the two years he spent dissecting cadavers as a medical student in Cambridge (1949–1951). Again the dichotomy: as a man he was ebulliently social (and humorous), but as an artist he is fiercely solitary (and humorless). The outcome, in any event, is a genius for the perverse and the obsessional, realized in a prose style of hypnotically varied vowel sounds (its diction enriched by a wide range of technical vocabularies). In the end, the tensile strength of The Drowned World derives not from its action but from its poetry.

  “Soon it would be too hot.” Yes, and soon it will be time to abandon the lagoon and the drowned city; they will evacuate north, to one of the last human redoubts, Camp Byrd, in Arctic Greenland. There are, after all, pressing reasons to go: the mutating mosquitoes and mutating malarias, the new skin cancers caused by the evaporating cloud cover, the increasingly brazen encroachments of the reptiles, the coming of the equatorial rain belts and the equatorial heat. Kerans is, inevitably, the last to leave. He does so on foot (on foot singular, with an infected leg wound and a crutch). And which way is he heading, as the novel closes? Even a reader quite new to Ballard will by this stage consent to the logic of it. “There isn’t any other direction.” He is heading south.

  The Guardian 2012

  The Shock of the New: A Clockwork Orange Turns Fifty*

  The day-to-day business of compiling a novel often seems to consist of nothing but decisions—decisions, decisions, decisions. Should this paragraph go here? Or should it go there? Can that chunk of exposition be diversified by dialogue? At what point does this information need to be revealed? Ought I to use a different adjective and a different adverb in that sentence? Or no adverb and no adjective? Comma or semicolon? Colon or dash? And so on.

  These decisions are minor, clearly enough, and they are processed more or less rationally by the conscious mind. All the major decisions, by contrast, have been reached before you sit down at your desk; and they involve not a moment’s thought. The major decisions are inherent in the original frisson—in the enabling throb or whisper (a whisper that says, Here is a novel you may be able to write). Very mysteriously, it is the unconscious mind that lays the foundation. No one knows how it happens. This is why Norman Mailer called his (excellent) book on fiction The Spooky Art.

  When, in 1960, Anthony Burgess sat down to write A Clockwork Orange, we may be pretty sure that he had a handful of certainties about what lay ahead of him. He knew that the novel would be set in the near future (and that it would take the standard science-fictional route, developing, and fiercely exaggerating, current tendencies). He knew that his vicious antihero, Alex, would narrate, and that he would do so in an argot or idiolect that the world had never heard before (he eventually settled on a blend of Russian, Romany, and rhyming slang). He knew that it would have something to do with Good and Bad, and Free Will. And he knew, crucially, that Alex would harbor a highly implausible passion: an ecstatic love of classical music.

  We see the wayward brilliance of that last decision when we reacquaint ourselves, after half a century, with Burgess’s leering, sneering, sniggering, sniveling young sociopath (a type unimprovably caught by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s uneven but justly celebrated fil
m). “It wasn’t me, brother,” Alex whines at his social worker (who has hurried to the local jailhouse): “Speak up for me, sir, for I’m not so bad.” But Alex is so bad; and he knows it. The opening chapters of A Clockwork Orange still deliver the shock of the new: they form a red streak of gleeful evil.

  On their first night on the town Alex and his droogs (or partners in crime) waylay a schoolmaster, rip up the books he is carrying, strip off his clothes, and stomp on his dentures; they rob and belabor a shopkeeper and his wife (“a fair tap with a crowbar”); they give a drunken bum a kicking (“we cracked into him lovely”); and they have a ruck with a rival gang, using the knife, the chain, the straight razor: this “would be real, this would be proper, this would be the nozh, the oozy, the britva, not just fisties and boots…and there I was dancing about with my britva like I might be a barber on board a ship on a very rough sea.”

  Next, they steal a car (“zigzagging after cats and that”), cursorily savage a courting couple, break into a cottage owned by “another intelligent type bookman type like that we’d fillied [messed] with some hours back,” destroy the typescript of his work in progress, and gang-rape his wife: