JG Ballard’s lessons in life and death

When JG Ballard submitted his novel Crash to his publisher Jonathan Cape in 1972, one reader’s report on the manuscript got straight to the point: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” The book followed a group of car crash fetishists who become sexually aroused by staging or participating in shunts and rear-enders. The advice of the reader in question – Catherine Storr, wife of the noted psychiatrist Anthony Storr – was not taken by Ballard’s publisher, who went on to make a notorious bestseller of Ballard’s book, later a David Cronenberg film. The author himself was delighted by Storr’s comment when it was relayed to him; it convinced him he was on to something properly disturbing.

One of the achievements of this curious and affecting new life of Ballard is the way it gets close to the dissociative traumas in the writer’s life that enabled him to channel wider unsettling currents in the culture. Ballard, following his estranging childhood in the Japanese-run Lunghua detention centre in Shanghai during the war (experiences dramatised in his indelible novel Empire of the Sun, and dwelt upon in his later memoir Miracles of Life) grew up with a capacity to always see what he called the “ragged scaffolding” beneath the stage-set structures of society. That sense of impermanence being always near was compounded by the sudden loss of his young wife, Mary, from pneumonia while they were on holiday in Spain in 1964. Ballard was left in a suburban semi in Shepperton, Surrey, to bring up three young children; his still nascent writing life was confined, a bottle of scotch to hand, to the hours after he got them off to school.

That personal history was in tension with his formative interest in science fiction: the thrilling mythology and desire for technological advance always at odds in his work with the human script of destruction and despair. Reading this new account of his writing life, you have a sharp sense of him being perfectly placed to be the prophet of scientific utopias and their discontents. In the three decades after the end of the war, he had watched the fantasies of the new wave of science fiction writers – with whom he was initially associated – not only come true, but effectively have a beginning and a middle and an end. The space age, as he declared, lasted no more than 15 years, from the 1960s to the 1970s. Ballard claimed to be dismayed but not derailed by that trajectory: his own work “was concerned with inner space”, he insisted, “not outer space”. He intuited that our rocketman dreams were, at their root, collective expressions of sublimated sexual longing, and doomed to fall to earth.

The novelist Christopher Priest, the prime mover of this biography, was something of a disciple of Ballard in his own distinguished writing life. Priest was a four-time winner of the British Science Fiction award for book of the year and is well placed in particular to understand that strand of Ballard’s work. (He details at one point the kinds of things that we have come to understand as “Ballardian” – images of promised utopia that have a kind of existential dread built in: a drained swimming pool, an abandoned hotel being among the most frequent examples.)

Priest formed the ambition to write this biography after being given a 400,000-word chronology of the author’s life by Ballard’s indefatigable bibliographer, David Pringle. He felt in some way fated to the task; not only was he an admirer and acquaintance of Ballard, but they had been conceived in the same town – Stockport – a little over 10 years apart, and shared an early interest in aviation that led them to American science fiction. Priest had only sketched out an outline and chapter headings, however, when he was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. He ploughed on with the book during his grim treatment, determined to do it justice; and it was completed by his widow, the writer Nina Allan.

The tragic narrative of the book’s construction is written into it. Allan not only fills in the gaps in Priest’s incomplete biography of Ballard, she also details the brutal progression of her husband’s disease – including his heartbreaking notes to her and his accounts of fever dreams. The shifts in tone and direction are sometimes disorienting, and the parallels that Allan looks for between her husband’s career and Ballard’s sometimes forced.

Though the demarcations between Priest’s and Allan’s joint enterprise are not signposted, you sense in places their differing emphases. Priest’s chapters come alive in particular when he is detailing Ballard’s place among the SF writing fraternity that he spearheaded with Michael Moorcock in the early 1960s. From Allan, I’m guessing, we get insight into Ballard’s womanising and fatherly duties (he applied himself to both with irrepressible vigour). More than that, though, the shadow of authorial mortality and glimpses of desperate love that lace the later chapters create a telling backdrop for Ballard’s own creative life.

I was reminded reading the book of the couple of hours I spent talking to Claire Walsh – the most consistent female companion in Ballard’s life, for 40 years – only a couple of weeks after Ballard died in 2009. Her grief had a similar tone to Allan’s; full not only of aching loss, but also of the lightness and joy of what had been shared. Ballard would drive down to see Walsh most weekends, and though they never lived together they would holiday together each summer. In a passage from my interview that Allan quotes here, Walsh recalled to me how, for all his existential knowledge, Ballard always lived in hope: “Mostly I think I will think of us going away,” she told me. “I would always wait for him in the terminal at Heathrow. He liked me to be there first because he would worry. And seeing him arrive with his suitcase, always smiling, ready for anything, that was wonderful.”

At one point in this book, Priest and Allan mention a telling interview that Ballard gave to the American psychiatrist David R Kopacz, in 1997. In it, Ballard took issue with the “received wisdom” of our times that “all disturbing and violent experience is inherently damaging” and that “experiences like the death of a spouse or child … the hunger and privations of war, will all leave indelible fracture lines that run through the psyche like a crack through a glass pane”. Ballard suggested that, from his own experience, he very much doubted this to be the case, saying: “I’m not sure that I have ever suffered irreparable trauma.” He went on: “I think ‘inexplicable’ cruelty (in fact, sadly, mortality – often unexpected) is the ocean we swim in.”

Ballard’s novels often seem a product of that philosophy. There is, in this sense, something appropriate about the way that, in this account of his life, sudden wayward grief erupts out of nowhere, and then the thing partially rights itself. The biography reads like a grand scheme gone awry – and you imagine that Ballard, more than anyone, would have appreciated the truth of that.

The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard

by Christopher Priest & Nina Allan is published by Bloomsbury Continuum (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Bettman Archive