Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography

by J. G. Ballard

  Mary listened for hours as I described the kind of fiction I wanted to write, urging me to keep up a steady flow of short stories and to ignore the strong hostility they provoked from the s-f fans within the field. I submitted my stories to the American s-f magazines that I had read in Moose Jaw, but all came back to me, usually with very dismissive rejection notes, which revealed the narrowness of mind that lurks behind American exuberance. A fierce orthodoxy ruled, and any attempt to enlarge the scope of traditional science fiction was regarded as conspiratorial and underhand.

  In due course Mary became pregnant, and we were married in September 1955. Mary’s family, my parents and sister, and a few friends attended the church service, which moved me deeply. Three of us, in a sense, were being married – Mary, I and our unborn child. I took the ceremony very seriously, though not for religious reasons. My life had been witness to wars and destruction, to erosion and entropy, capped by two years in the dissecting room at Cambridge, paring down the cadavers as if death itself was not final enough, and the remains of these human beings needed to be further diminished. Now, for the first time, I had helped to create something, almost out of nothing, an intact and growing creature that would emerge as a living being. Mary was three months pregnant when we married, and I would lie beside her, touching the swelling of her womb, willing on this little visitor from beyond time and space. Creation on the grandest scale was taking place under the warmth of my hand.

  I remember the wedding ceremony as a slightly disjointed affair. The respective in-laws had not met each other, and the old tribal defensiveness showed itself. Waiting for the clergyman to arrive, I turned to my father in the pew behind me and asked if I should leave a donation ‘for the poor of the parish’. He replied, jovially: ‘You are the poor of the parish.’ He and my mother enjoyed the joke.

  Strictly speaking, this was true. I made a small income writing freelance advertising copy and direct-mail letters for an agency I knew, but I needed a full-time job to support us now that Mary had given up her post at the Express. Luckily I had begun to sell my short stories to the two English science fiction magazines, Science Fantasy and New Worlds, and the first was published in 1956, a signal moment in any writer’s career, especially that of a late starter like myself.

  The editor, E.J. Carnell, was a thoughtful and likeable man who worked in a pleasant basement office near the Strand. The walls were hung with posters of s-f films and magazine covers that together conveyed a rather conventional view of the nature of science fiction. In private, though, once he was away from the old-guard fans, Carnell told me that science fiction needed to change if it was to remain at the cutting edge of the future. He urged me not to imitate the American writers, and to concentrate on what I termed ‘inner space’, psychological tales close in spirit to the surrealists. All this was anathema to the American editors, who continued to reject my fiction.

  But we listened in 1957 to the radio call sign of Sputnik 1, an urgent wake-up call from the next world and the dawn of the Space Age. For the s-f traditionalists, Sputnik 1 confirmed all their most precious dreams, but I was sceptical. To hold its readers’ imaginations, I believed, science fiction needed to be the harbinger of the new, not a reminder of the old. Soon after, sure enough, science fiction went into a steep decline in the United States, from which it didn’t recover until the advent of Star Wars decades later.

  Aware that I needed a job, with a wife and baby son to support, Carnell arranged for me to get an editorial post on one of the trade journals published by his parent company. There were always vacancies because the firm paid so little to its employees, from the editors down. Colleagues would go out for a packet of cigarettes and never return. After six months I too moved on to a better-paid post as deputy editor of the weekly journal Chemistry & Industry, published by the Society of Chemical Industry in Belgrave Square.

  After our wedding, Mary and I lived, first, in a flat in Barrowgate Road, Chiswick, and then for several years in a larger flat in Heathcote Road, St Margarets, near Twickenham. Our son, James, was born in the Chiswick Maternity Hospital, part of the NHS, but a strangely penal institution that enshrined then-fashionable views about the post-natal care of mothers and their babies. There was no question of fathers being present at the delivery; we were told to stay at home until called. When I arrived soon after the birth I found Mary in a ward with five other mothers, all weeping as they listened to their babies desperately crying in a separate ward across the corridor. Mother and child were only united during feeding times, set out in an inflexible rota. When I protested I was told that it would be better if I left the hospital.

  Our daughters, Fay and Beatrice, were born in 1957 and 1959. Both were home deliveries, from the heart of a warm domestic nest, and in which I actively participated, almost shouldering the midwives aside. In the untidy but blissful bed where our two daughters were conceived they were in due course born, surrounded by Mary’s sisters and close friends. I was profoundly moved as Fay’s head emerged into the midwife’s waiting hands, just as I was two years later when Bea arrived in the same bed. Far from being young, as young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had travelled an immense distance to find their parents. Then, in a second, they became young and were carried off by the midwife and Mary’s sister. Only a few minutes earlier I had been kneeling beside the bed, pressing back Mary’s large and bursting piles, and now I lay beside her as she smiled, embraced me and fell asleep. I wept steadily through both these deliveries, the greatest mystery that life can offer, and I regret that so few babies, if any, are born today in their own homes.

  Once the children arrived our domestic world became chaotic. Mary was never much of a housekeeper, but became a kind of earth mother, sitting up in bed and breastfeeding a baby while sipping a glass of wine and arguing in a strong voice about some topic of the day with two of my men-friends. One of the Twickenham GPs who looked after her became quite besotted, and was happy to be called at any hour of the day or night to sit on the bed beside her, a romantic infatuation that she thought hilarious, even as she was leading the poor man towards disciplinary proceedings at the General Medical Council.

  Despite the pressures of her new job as homemaker, wife and mother of three, Mary tried to read everything I wrote. For the first time I had someone who believed in me, and was prepared to back that belief by putting up with a rather modest life. She was always confident that one day I would be a success, which seemed unlikely in the late 1950s, when science fiction was generally regarded as not much better than the comic strips.

  In 1960, as our toddlers found their legs, we decided we needed a home with a garden, and bought a small house in Shepperton, where I live to this day. I think I chose Shepperton because of its film studios, which gave it a slightly raffish air. Mary assumed that we would stay there for no more than six months, but three years later, after the success of The Drowned World, there still seemed little hope of moving, which I think depressed her, as did the literary world as a whole.

  We began to meet other writers, both in and out of the s-f world, and she realised that even successful writers in England had rather humdrum lives. Publishers’ parties and writers’ boozy blow-outs in Clapham flats did not compare with the life of hunt balls and fast cars she had left behind in Stone. I am sure that we would have eventually moved to a detached house with a big garden in Barnes or Wimbledon, but even that would have been very tame compared with the world of well-to-do farmers and landowners, Lagondas and lavish dances.

  All the same, I hope that her years here were happy. I tried to share the load, and enjoyed every minute I spent with the children, watching them create their own universes out of a few toys, treats and games. I knew that I was enjoying a family life I had never really known, even in pre-war Shanghai. I had rarely seen my parents in a relaxed, domestic mood. Their lives were too busy, and ever
ything took place in the silent presence of Chinese servants and the bored White Russian nannies. Our home in Shepperton, by contrast, was a chaotic, friendly brawl, as a naked parent dripping from the bath broke up a squabble between the girls over a favourite crayon, while their brother triumphantly strutted in his mother’s damp footprints. Mayhem ruled.

  To give Mary a break, I often heaped the three toddlers into their huge pram, a stretch limousine of the perambulator world, and would push them down to the splash meadow a few hundred yards from our house. The river Ash, little more than a stream, emerged from a culvert and crossed the road, flanked by a pedestrian bridge where an appreciative crowd would lean on the rail and watch unsuspecting motorists strand their stalled cars in the stream. The scene in Genevieve, where the antique car is stranded in the village pond, was filmed here. My children loved to watch the whole hilarious spectacle, chortling and stamping as a nonplussed driver finally lowered his feet into the water, under the gaze of a sinister yokel and his offspring.

  We spent hours with little fish nets, hunting for shrimps, which were always taken home in jam jars and watched as they refused to cooperate and gave up the ghost. Fay and Bea were fascinated by the daisies that seemed to grow underwater when the stream rose to flood the meadow. Shepperton Studios were easy to enter in those wonderful summers nearly fifty years ago, and I would take the children past the sound stages to the field where unwanted props were left to the elements: figureheads of sailing ships, giant chess-pieces, half an American car, stairways that led up to the sky and amazed my three infants. And their father: days of wonder that I wish had lasted for ever.

  I thought of my children then, and still think of them, as miracles of life, and I dedicate this autobiography to them.

  16

  This is Tomorrow (1956)

  In 1956, the year that I published my first short story, I visited a remarkable exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, This is Tomorrow. Recently I told Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and a former director of the Whitechapel, that I thought This is Tomorrow was the most important event in the visual arts in Britain until the opening of Tate Modern, and he did not disagree.

  Among its many achievements, This is Tomorrow is generally thought of as the birthplace of pop art. A dozen teams, involving an architect, a painter and sculptor, each designed and built an installation that would embody their vision of the future. The participants included the artist Richard Hamilton, who displayed his collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, in my judgement the greatest ever work of pop art. Another of the teams brought together the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who constructed a basic unit of human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.

  The overall effect of This is Tomorrow was a revelation to me, and a vote of confidence, in effect, in my choice of science fiction. The Whitechapel exhibition, and especially the Hamilton and Paolozzi exhibits, created a huge stir in the British art world. At the time the artists most in favour with the Arts Council, the British Council and the academic critics of the day were Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, who together formed a closed fine art world largely preoccupied with formalist experiment. The light of everyday reality never shone into the aseptic whiteness of their studio-bound imaginations.

  This is Tomorrow opened all the doors and windows onto the street. The show leaned a little on Hollywood and American science fiction; Hamilton had got hold of Robby the Robot from the film Forbidden Planet. But for the first time the visitor to the Whitechapel saw the response of imaginations tuned to the visual culture of the street, to advertising, road signs, films and popular magazines, to the design of packaging and consumer goods, an entire universe that we moved through in our everyday lives but which rarely appeared in the approved fine art of the day.

  Hamilton’s Just what is it…? depicted a world entirely constructed from popular advertising, and was a convincing vision of the future that lay ahead – the muscleman husband and his stripper wife in their suburban home, the consumer goods, such as the tin of ham, regarded as ornaments in their own right, the notion of the home as a prime selling point and sales aid for the consumer society. We are what we sell and buy.

  In Paolozzi’s display, the power tool laid on the post-nuclear sand was not just a portable device for drilling holes but a symbolic object with almost magical properties. If the future was to be built of anything, it would be from a set of building blocks provided by consumerism. An advertisement for a new cake mix contained the codes that defined a mother’s relationship to her children, imitated all over our planet.

  This is Tomorrow convinced me that science fiction was far closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the day, whether the angry young men with their grudges and grouses, or novelists such as Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow. Above all, science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled away from the modernist novel. It was a visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.

  If pop art and surrealism were a huge encouragement, my work at Chemistry & Industry kept me up to the mark about the latest scientific discoveries. An established science magazine receives a steady flow of press releases, conference reports, annual bulletins from leading research laboratories around the world and publications put out by UN scientific bodies and organisations such as Atoms for Peace. I feasted on all this material, the accounts of new psychoactive drugs, nuclear weapons research, the applications of the latest-generation computers.

  For several years I commuted to Belgrave Square, first from Twickenham and then from Shepperton, a long journey that left me too tired to write, except at weekends. After being cooped up all day with the children, Mary needed to breathe. I remember her saying when I reached home at 7.30 and was pouring a stiff gin and tonic: ‘Are we going out? I can call the babysitter.’ I thought: Out? I’ve been out. But we would go down to one of the pubs on the riverbank, and she would come alive when I bought a sandwich and threw bread to the swans.

  In 1960, sadly for himself and his family, the editor of Chemistry & Industry, Bill Dick, killed himself with a gas poker and a plastic bag. He had been the once celebrated editor of the science magazine Discovery, but had become an argumentative alcoholic. After his death I was left alone to produce the magazine, and adjusted my time so that I could write in the office. My one piece of out-and-out commercial fiction, The Wind from Nowhere, was written straight onto the typewriter during a fortnight’s holiday in 1961, and was published by an American paperback firm, Berkley Books. I received an advance of $1000, which seemed a fortune. I celebrated by moving from the 3/6 (three shillings and sixpence) lunch menu at the Swan pub in Knightsbridge to the 4/6 menu, an extravagance that alarmed the waitresses, to whom I had proudly shown a photograph of my three children. It is easy to forget how thin was the line between poverty and bare survival.

  In 1963 The Drowned World was successfully published, and with Mary’s encouragement I gave up my job at Chemistry & Industry and became a full-time writer. Despite the many editions of The Drowned World, this was a huge gamble, and I’m grateful and impressed that Mary urged me to take it. The novel was published all over the world, but the amounts of money forthcoming were modest.

  Victor Gollancz, the patriarch of English publishing, paid me an advance of £100, barely enough to keep a family afloat for a month. When Gollancz took me out to lunch at The Ivy and I saw the prices on the menu I was tempted to say: I’ll have nothing to eat, and just take the cash. But I knew that being lunched by Gollancz was a significant honour. He had dominated London publishing throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and h
ad a huge influence on literary editors and readers. As we sat down in The Ivy he boomed in his loud voice: ‘Interesting novel, The Drowned World. Of course, you stole it all from Conrad.’ The Ivy was a haunt of senior journalists, and I saw heads turning. I thought: My God, this grand old man is going to sink my career before it’s launched. As it happens, I had not read anything by Conrad at the time, though I soon made up for this.

  My first decade as a writer coincided with a period of sustained change in England, as well as in the USA and Europe. The mood of post-war depression had begun to lift, and the death of Stalin eased international tensions, despite the Soviet development of the H-bomb. Cheap jet travel arrived with the Boeing 707, and the consumer society, already well established in America, began to appear in Britain. Change was in the air, affecting the nation’s psychology for good or bad. Change was what I wrote about, especially the hidden agendas for change that people were already exposing. Invisible persuaders were manipulating politics and the consumer market, affecting habits and assumptions in ways that few people fully realised.

  It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space’, was where science fiction should be heading. But I met tremendous opposition. The editors of the American s-f magazines were nervous of their readers, and would refuse to accept a story if it was set in the present day, a sure sign that something subversive was going on. It was a curious paradox that science fiction, devoted to change and the new, was emotionally tied to the status quo and the old.