Authors: J. G. Ballard
At all events, by the time I completed the anatomy course
I had really completed my time at Cambridge. It had supplied
me with a huge stock of memories, of mysterious
feelings for the dead doctors who in a sense had come to my
aid, and with a vast fund of anatomical metaphors that
would thread through all my fiction. The hours in the dissecting
room were backed up by the anatomy lectures and
the time I spent reading in the anatomy library, where I became friends with an émigré Pole who was an assistant
librarian, had served in the Polish Army and escaped to the
West through Iraq.
By comparison, college life seemed like a quaint and
overly folkloric pageant. Where the Cambridge science faculties
(Rutherford and the Cavendish, Crick/Watson and
DNA, Sanger and so on) were powerfully oriented towards
the future, the Cambridge colleges looked back to the past.
King’s was dominated by its chapel and the musical events
that surrounded it. The provost was a classicist, a pantomime
parody of the eccentric don. In the dining hall we
listened to a long Latin grace that I still know by heart, and
sat on benches to eat execrable meals, wearing gowns after
dusk and being overseen in the streets of Cambridge by a
proctor and his bulldogs (his bowler-hatted aides). We had
to be back in college by ten, or perhaps earlier. The colleges
may have begun as religious foundations, but they had
evolved into bizarre public schools with the boys played by
adults and the masters by overgrown boys. The French and
American students I knew were mystified by it all. I found it
rather sad and all too typical of England at the time.
A drawback of the collegiate system is that it is difficult to
make close friends in other colleges. There were no more
than nine or ten medical students at King’s across all three
years, and I was forced to find friends who were reading
other subjects. One Kingsman I knew was Simon Raven,
whom I would meet in the Copper Kettle after dinner. He told me many years later that he thoroughly enjoyed his time
at King’s. But he was actively homosexual, and King’s was an
openly homosexual college, famously home to Maynard
Keynes and E. M. Forster, with close connections to the
painter Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group. A few
years earlier a number of its dons had come very near to
being prosecuted for offences against the little troupe of
choirboys (in miniature top hats and bum-freezer jackets)
who arrived in a crocodile every day from the King’s choir
school. The complaining parents who threatened to go to the
police were said to have been paid for their silence from the
deep King’s coffers.
The ethos of the college was homosexual, and a heterosexual
like myself who brought in his girlfriends (mostly
Addenbrooke’s Hospital nurses and free-livers all) was
viewed as letting the side down, as well as having made a
curious choice in the first place. This was an era when most
public schoolboys met no women for the first twenty years
of their lives other than the school matron and their
mothers, with the result that women in general remained
forever in a dead perceptual zone (like vertical stripes to
kittens only allowed to see horizontal stripes). I have known
women married to unresponsive men they suspected of
being repressed homosexuals, but most were probably
victims of a special kind of English deprivation.
Otherwise, I enjoyed myself like other students, punting
on the river, playing tennis, writing short stories, getting drunk with the Addenbrooke’s nurses, who generously
provided me with an education not even the dissecting room
could match. They were interesting young women, some
with remarkably rackety lives (the syringes in the bedside
table drawer?) and I liked them all.
I also, with everyone else, went to a great many films. I
relished hard-edged American thrillers with their expressive
black and white photography and brooding atmosphere,
their tales of alienation and emotional betrayal. Already I
sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that
played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact
needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work.
The modern movement had demonstrated this from its
start, in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the
willing engagement of the audience’s own psychopathy is
almost a definition of modernism as a whole. But this was
strongly denied by F. R. Leavis and his notion of the novel as
a moral criticism of life. I went to one of Leavis’s lectures and
thought how limited his world was, and remember saying to
the English literature student who had taken me: ‘It’s more
important to go to
T-Men
(a classic noir film) than to
Leavis’s lectures.’ It sounded preposterous at the time, but
less so now.
I briefly met E.M. Forster at a King’s sherry party, already
an old man or convincingly posing as one, and often drove
in a friend’s car around the US airbases. No one seemed
aware that the nostalgic pageant called ‘Cambridge’ was made possible by the fleets of American bombers waiting in
the quiet fields around the city.
At the end of my second year I knew that I had absorbed all
I needed from the medical course. My interest in psychiatry
had been a clear case of ‘physician, heal thyself’. I never
wanted to walk the wards as a trainee doctor, and friends
ahead of me at their London teaching hospitals warned that
years of exhausting work would postpone for at least a
decade any plans to become a writer.
Varsity
, the student
weekly newspaper, staged an annual short story competition,
and my entry, a Hemingwayesque effort called ‘The Violent
Noon’, won joint first prize in 1951. The judge was a senior
partner at a leading London agents, A.P. Watt, who commended
my story and invited me to call on him.
This was another green light, and I told my father that I
wanted to give up medicine and become a writer. He was
dismayed, especially as I had no idea of how to bring this
about. He decided that I should study English literature, the
worst possible preparation for a writer’s career, which he
may well have suspected. I managed to get a place at London
University, at Queen Mary College, and started the degree
course in October 1951.
I had written a number of short stories at Cambridge,
heavily under the influence of James Joyce, and had sent a
few unsuccessfully to
Horizon
and other literary magazines. The surrealist painters were deeply inspiring, but there was
no easy way to translate the visually surreal into prose, or
prose that was readable. At heart I was an old-fashioned
storyteller with a lively imagination, but English fantasy was
too close to whimsy. This created problems that would take
me a good many years to solve.
I enjoyed my year at Queen Mary College, glad to become a
student rather than an undergraduate. I travelled on the
London tube system with people who were going to work,
and I could almost imagine that I was doing a job. I was one
of those millions of European students who had helped to
launch revolutions and had battled with police on the streets
of eastern Europe, a political power bloc in their own right,
something one could never imagine in the case of Oxford or
Cambridge undergraduates. A student, Gavrilo Princip, had
assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and launched a
world war. At Cambridge, an academic theme park where I
was a reluctant extra, the only splash I could have made was
by falling off a punt.
I liked London, and particularly the Chelsea area, with its
lesbian pubs and rich friends of friends who took me to
expensive nightclubs like the Milroy and Embassy in
Mayfair. People lived in the present, and no one cared about property values or redecorating their flats. Everything was
still very shabby and much of South Kensington, where I had
a room in Onslow Gardens, was semi-derelict. People lived
in dilapidated flats but bought their clothes in Bond Street.
One of the English lecturers, a woman in her forties who
lived nearby, owned an open-topped Allard, an impressively
stylish car, which she drove all the way to the Mile End Road,
a journey unthinkable today. Sometimes she gave me a lift.
As we roared through the City of London she would take
both hands off the wheel to hold forth about
Gammer
Gurton’s
Needle
. I had the sense that my life could veer away
in any direction, figuratively as well as literally.
I also liked the social mix of students. At Cambridge
everyone was middle-class, trying to be middle-class or trying
not to be. At London University the students came from
all possible backgrounds, with very different approaches to
everything. In my group was a surprisingly free-thinking
nun, who wore a wimple and a full nun’s rig. There were
several ex-servicemen who had become interested in taking
a degree while in the wartime forces. They had travelled all
over the world. One or two were married. Another had spent
his entire childhood in foster homes, was pleasantly good-
humoured but quietly anti-semitic. They were all intelligent,
which wasn’t true of Cambridge undergraduates, and
already had original ideas about the world. When I mentioned
that I had been born in China and interned during
the war they noted this in the way they would have reacted had I told them I was born in a North Sea trawler or a
lighthouse.
The English course was interesting, but modern fiction
played no part in it, and at the end of my first year I decided
to leave Queen Mary College. My attempts to write a new
experimental novel were a complete flop. I needed to get
away from academic institutions, and I needed to be free of
all financial dependence on my parents, a sentiment I am
sure they shared. They were strongly opposed to my hopes of
becoming a professional writer, and I found their hostility
wearing. Through a Cambridge friend who was working for
Benson’s advertising agency in Kingsway, where Dorothy
Sayers had worked and which housed the spiral staircase that
appeared in one of her novels, I found a job as a novice copywriter
with a small London agency.
Like most people living in London for the first time, I
spent many of my free hours visiting art galleries and
museums, especially the National Gallery and the Tate, as
well as the commercial galleries off Bond Street. Now and
then there would be a small exhibition of new surrealist
paintings – I remember Dalí at, I think, the Lefevre Gallery,
and a show of new Magrittes. These sold for remarkably low
prices, even the Dalís, but the surrealists had lost most of
their prestige and appeal after the war. Their wayward imaginations
seemed tame by comparison with the horrors of the
Nazi death camps, and no one gave them credit for anticipating
the pathological strains in the European mind that had propelled Hitler into power. There were very few
surrealists in the Tate collection, and while I was interested
in modern art as a whole, my imagination wasn’t touched by
cubism or abstract art, which seemed to be formal exercises
confined to the artist’s studio.
Today it seems to me that the works by modernist
pioneers displayed in the Tate have begun to lose their lustre.
Those landmark paintings by Picasso and Braque, Utrillo
and Léger, Mondrian and Kandinsky appear smaller than
they did fifty years ago. Their colour has faded, and they lack
the imaginative bite that I felt when I first looked at them. At
the same time I have to accept that my entire visual response
to the world was kindled in those Millbank galleries I visited
in my early twenties. Then, whenever I visited the Tate, I
would always turn right into the modern rooms, and never
left to the British art of the past four centuries. I admired
Turner because he seemed to anticipate the Impressionists,
but the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Burne-Jones in particular,
presented an airless and over-imagined realm as suffocating
as the children’s books I read uneasily as a boy. Today,
my sense of direction has changed: whenever I enter the Tate
I first turn left, and never right.
Surprisingly, given my passion for the new, I spent a huge
amount of time in the National Gallery, and would often
go every day. By a touching coincidence, my future partner
Claire Walsh, then a hyper-bright 12-year-old Claire
Churchill, would also visit the National Gallery, as part of her intellectual roaming around London. I wish I had seen
her. Gallery tours are now part of every school curriculum,
but in the early 1950s even the National Gallery would often
seem deserted, and a visitor could be alone in a room filled
with Rembrandts, a powerful charge to the imagination.
I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the
Renaissance masterpieces in the National Gallery was due to
the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away
much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I
would stare at Crivelli’s
Annunciation
, charmed by the peacocks,
loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the
passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her
jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination
to stitch these elements into a master narrative that
made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall
caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol
of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird
be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be
more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a
loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming
birth of the Saviour?
Years later, standing in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in
front of another
Annunciation
, by Leonardo, I found my
view blocked by a huge party of Japanese tourists. I wondered
what they made of the religious paintings in the
gallery, with their winged men kneeling in front of rather
self-conscious young women. A few Japanese take the Latin mass, but most know nothing about the Christian myths,
and the paintings must have seemed completely surrealist.