Last ballad for British novelist JG Ballard

By Tony MochamaWhenever an artist whose work(s) you enjoyed, or whose brilliance you once saw on show dies, a part of you dies, especially if the dead artist was younger. Fortunately, JG (James Graham) Ballard was 78 when he passed on last Sunday, after losing an epic three-year struggle with cancer. It saddened me. Not devastated, but the sadness you feel for someone you felt you knew a little through his books and wished you could have had a drink with.I am an exponent of the Ballard modus operandi — to be orderly and regular in life, but savage and original in one’s art. If anything, Ballard was a bit of an anti-Flaubert Law exponent: be orderly and regular in your art, but savage and original in the way you live your life.But it was because I identified with Ballard at three levels. First, I read his novel Crash that combines car crashes, death and sex as a teenager, and was fascinated by counter-cultural adventurism of it all, at an age when anti-thetical apotheses are all the rage.Secondly, I finally watched the Steven Spielberg movie of his book Empire of the Sun in 1999, and absolutely sympathised with the writer as an adolescent in a world at war.Thirdly, in London last year, I learnt that there was a time Ballard used to drink all day as he wrote, starting at 9am, taking scotch, then gin, then vodka, writing all the while up to six in the evening."The war between body and mind, discipline and desire, was like The Battle of Stalingrad. In the end, I stuck to Scotch, and only after 6pm, as my reward after a hard day’s writing work," he once wrote.His Life in LondonFrom his 50s until his death last week, Ballard led his life in the most conventional London way — a little mansion with a large garden, and a small escort car for the odd transportation, while writing the most unconventional novels in Europe.And who can blame the man?His life after an idyllic childhood in China, from 13 to 33, was a dramatic ballad.In the early 1940s, at his late teenage years, the Japanese invaded China, and in Shanghai where he was living with his expatriate parents, they were dragged from a comfortable life to a semi-concentration camp for Japan’s ‘white enemies’.Ballard described the two years of terror and deprivation thus:"Executions, public stranglings, people beaten to death on the street, very violent times. You’d have to have lived through the last days of Idi Amin’s Uganda, or in the Congo, or Cambodia in the 1970s, to get an idea of what life then was, especially for the ordinary Chinese. Shanghai was a huge city, so anything and everything happened. There were bodies lying all over the place — people who fainted from hunger or collapsed from illness (and never woke up). Disbanded puppet soldiers roamed Shanghai, randomly looting. As for me, I was happy there. Sort of. We ate raw wheat, weevils and even warehouse scrapings. But it was like having a huge slum family."This real-life experience was his inspiration to his international best-seller Empire of the Sun, 35 years after he left Shanghai for England at the age of 15. At 18, he began a degree in Medicine in Cambridge. Failing at Medicine, Ballard went on to Oxford for a two-year English course. He was later expelled for playing truant from final exams. He then joined the RCAF (airforce) at 21, but was soon thrown out for indiscipline. He then went into advertising, successfully, from age 22 to 25 — but then abandoned it for writing Science Fiction, finally finding modest success, and marriage, at 30 — with three books under his belt, and three children soon to come.Loses his wifeAt 34, his wife died suddenly of a strain of pneumonia she picked up in Spain, while they were on a champagne vacation with their children, celebrating the success of his fourth novel The Atrocity Exhibition.Devastated, Ballard withdrew into the quiet life of prolonged drinking and hard writing life in London, while successfully bringing up the three children all the way to college, and into strong professional lives. Only at 50, with the last born in university, did Ballard give up the scotch for scorching hot coffee. The novel writing, however, never stopped.When he was trying to place cult hit Crash, with a publisher, he received a note with a rejected manuscript: "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish." But Ballard regarded it as a sign of "complete artistic success."His rare inspirationsLast year, looking at London for the first time — the angle of light, the greyness, the closeted nature of London life, the little houses from the train, this writer certainly couldn’t see what could possibly inspire Ballard to look into the over-orderly streets and write a novel like Unlimited Dream Company where a sexual messiah arrives in Shepperton, among its "lunar and abstract" landscape, and makes everyone loony.But then Ballard was the type of writer who could look at anything, however ordinary, — and see absolutely whatever he wanted to see, —whether in Shanghai, China or Punta Arenas in Chile.Ballard did not need to travel to see the world to write it. He had seen enough of it by the time he was 15. Besides, the landscapes he wrote about were out-of-this-world. So that it was fitting that only through death, did he finally get his passport out of Britain.

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