with fighter planes set him apart from the long-haired peaceniks of later generations. It was not Ballard’s date of birth per se that caused this disjunct: Burroughs and Timothy Leary were both much older, but it’s impossible to imagine them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jim and the RAF ‘honour guard’ at the funeral of a Spitfire pilot. As this scene from The Kindness of Women shows, Ballard could be cynical about many things, but not the tragic dignity of fallen soldiers.
Much of The Kindness of Women is set in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Ballard hatched the stories that made his reputation as a social anatomist. His relationship with the times was atypical. Indifferent to music, immune to the charms of psychedelia, and bemused by the idealism of hippies, he felt less enamoured of the 1960s than many of his fellow experimenters. He approved of the shake-up of the class system, and celebrated the rise of the literary counterculture that promoted his work, but in The Kindness of Women he chooses to present the sixties as an era driven to psychosis by a steady diet of drugs, assassinations, war trauma and TV. ‘The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade.’
If society is insane and the world has turned toxic, what hope is there? The kindness of women? Is it through female nurture that Jim (and his author) survives and thrives? So the book’s title invites us to think. Closer examination renders that notion dubious: Jim’s mother is absent; his sulky nanny is employed merely to mind him; Jim’s occasional lover Sally Mumford seems bent on addictive self-destruction; and even his wife Miriam, for all her support, is restless for change, regarding marriage as a ‘cul de sac … a detour from the main road’. In any case, just like Ballard’s own wife Mary, she dies suddenly, leaving him to bring up three children on his own. The novel might have been more appropriately titled The Allure of Closure. Certainly in the final chapters, the contrived sex scenes in which any remaining significant women from Jim’s past pop up to make love to him suggest a last-ditch authorial attempt to bind everything together with artificial dialogue and genital fluids. If any females can truly be said to have rescued Jim (and J. G.), it is, I think, his daughters, who provided their boozy, bereaved dad with all the stability, solace, love and happiness he needed.
Ballard was not an emotionless man and he did not write emotionless fiction. The coolness which many critics have characterised as archetypically ‘Ballardian’ is not as chilly as it seems. In The Kindness of Women, warm feelings – of pity, of passion, of parental love, of fond friendship – course richly beneath the surface of the skin but, like veins that retreat or collapse when a hypodermic needle seeks to penetrate them, they elude the forensic approach of Ballard’s pen. The Kindness of Women is a curious hybrid, combining – not always successfully – the merciless thematic rigour of his earlier, more fantastical work and a new humanity that dispelled the deviant cyborg of myth. Many years before, when Crash was rejected by a publisher whose editorial assistant had branded him ‘beyond psychiatric help’, Ballard took the comment as encouraging proof that he’d hit a nerve. By 1991, he no longer revelled in such opprobrium.
In truth, Ballard’s basic decency was always there, even in his most outrageous tales. He wanted people to grow up well-loved and safe in families like the one he maintained in suburban Shepperton, rather than descending into madness and cannibalism like the trapped hordes in High-Rise. It is a measure of how obtuse the guardians of public morality continue to be that Ballard was ever accused of being a nihilistic pervert or a champion of orgasmic car crashes. Like all satirists, he assumed that humans should behave compassionately and morally. Grieved by their failure to do so, he expressed his alarm – not with earnest hand-wringing, but by ushering us straight to a dystopian fait accompli. In short, he shanghaied us.
Us? I have to admit that for me, Ballard’s work was an oddly recent discovery. I say ‘oddly’ because he was so integral to the other cultural phenomena I investigated during my formative years that it’s hard to believe I could have passed him by. As a fan of underground comics, I was intimate with Gaetano Liberatore’s surreally cruel, visceral dys- topias – Crash on steroids. I evangelised on behalf of Phoebe Gloeckner, who, in one of the few works of hers I didn’t possess, crafted anatomical phantasmagoria for a revised edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. I swayed to Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hamburger Lady’ (pure Ballard in sonic form), chilled out to Paul Schütze’s ‘Vermillion Sands’, and sang along to Hawkwind’s ‘High Rise’. David Cronenberg was one of my favourite directors. I was hugely impressed by the Industrial Culture handbooks issued by Re/Search in the 1980s, rereading them many times but somehow never getting around to the ones devoted to Ballard.
Looking back on it now, my avoidance is inexplicable. Was I subconsciously worried that his fiction would unduly influence mine? In my own output, the occasional short story like ‘Explaining Coconuts’ strikes me as intoxicatingly Ballardian and I feel a peculiar pleasure to have explored such territory independently of his lead. But still I feel the poignancy of his absence from my life while he was alive. I would have liked to send him a letter praising him for his uncompromising vision and his often beautiful prose. Maybe this is it.
Fearn by Tain, 2014
Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun. As soon as lunch was over I would wait for my mother and father to leave for the Country Club. While they changed into tennis clothes, ambling in a relaxed way around their bedroom, it always amazed me that they were so unconcerned by the coming war, and unaware that it might break out just as my father served his first ball. I remember pacing up and down with all the Napoleonic impatience of a 7-year-old, my toy soldiers drawn up on the carpet like the Japanese and Chinese armies around Shanghai. At times it seemed to me that I was keeping the war alive singlehandedly.
Ignoring my mother’s laughter as she flirted with my father, I would watch the sky over Amherst Avenue. At any moment a squadron of Japanese bombers might appear above the department stores of downtown Shanghai and begin to bomb the Cathedral School. My child’s mind had no idea how long a war would last, whether a few minutes or even, conceivably, an entire afternoon. My one fear was that, like so many exciting events I always managed to miss, the war would be over before I noticed that it had begun.
Throughout the summer everyone in Shanghai spoke about the coming war between China and Japan. At my mother’s bridge parties, as I helped myself to the plates of small chow, I listened to her friends talking about the shots exchanged on July 7 at the Marco Polo bridge in Peking, which had signalled Japan’s invasion of northern China. A month had passed without Chiang Kai-shek ordering a counter-attack, and there were rumours that the German advisers to the Generalissimo were urging him to abandon the northern provinces and fight the Japanese nearer his stronghold at Nanking, the capital of China. Slyly, though, Chiang had decided to challenge the Japanese at Shanghai, two hundred miles away at the mouth of the Yangtse, where the American and European powers might intervene to save him.
As I saw for myself whenever I cycled down to the Bund, huge Chinese armies were massing around the International Settlement. On Friday, August 13, as soon as my mother and father settled themselves into the rear seats of the Packard, I wheeled my bicycle out of the garage, pumped up its tyres and set off on the long ride to the Bund. Olga, my White Russian governess, assumed that I was visiting David Hunter, a friend who lived at the western end of Amherst Avenue. A young woman of moods and strange stares, Olga was only interested in trying on my mother’s wardrobe and was glad to see me gone.
I reached the Bund an hour later, but the concourse was so crowded with frantic
