Authors: J. G. Ballard
During the month they were on show the cars were
ceaselessly attacked, daubed with white paint by a Hare
Krishna group, overturned and stripped of wing mirrors and
licence plates. By the time the show closed and the cars were
towed away, unmourned the moment they were dragged
through the gallery doors, I had long since made up my
mind. All my suspicions had been confirmed about the
unconscious links that my novel would explore. My
exhibition had in fact been a psychological test disguised as
an art show, which is probably true of Hirst’s shark and
Emin’s bed. I suspect that it’s no longer possible to stir or
outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone, as did the
Impressionists and cubists. A psychological challenge is
needed that threatens one of our dearer delusions, whether a stained sheet or a bisected cow forced to endure a second
death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling
about the first.
In 1970, encouraged by my crashed cars exhibition, I began
to write
Crash
. This was more than a literary challenge, not
least because I had three young children crossing the streets
of Shepperton every day, and nature might have played
another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a
kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort
of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an
attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the
narrator my own name, accepting all that this entailed.
Two weeks after finishing the novel I was involved in a car
crash of my own, when my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a
front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car
swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and
rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt.
Hanging upside down, I found that the doors had been
jammed by the partly collapsed roof. People were shouting:
‘Petrol! Petrol!’ The car lay in the centre of the oncoming
carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by the
approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window
and clambered out. An ambulance took me to a nearby
hospital at Roehampton, where my head was X-rayed. I had mild concussion for a fortnight, a constant headache that
suddenly cleared, and was otherwise unhurt.
Looking back, I suspect that if I had died the accident
might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the
unconscious level, a surrender to the dark powers that
propelled the novel. I have never had an accident since, and
in half a century of driving have never made an insurance
claim. But I believe that
Crash
is less a hymn to death than
an attempt to appease death, to buy off the executioner who
waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby, like Bacon’s headless
figure in his herringbone jacket who sits patiently at a table
with a machine gun beside him.
Crash
is set at a point where
sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read
and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true, I
suppose, of Tracey Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this
young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled
grave.
Crash
has been published in many countries, and was
widely reissued after the 1996 David Cronenberg film. It was
a moderate success in Britain, but Jonathan Cape showed
none of the flair of their French counterparts, Calman-Levy
in Paris. The French edition was a huge success, and remains
my best-known book in France. The French critics accepted
without qualms the novel’s yoking together of sex, death and
the motor car. Anyone who drives in France is steering into
the pages of
Crash
.
An important factor in the French success of
Crash
was the long tradition of subversive works in France, going back
at least as far as the pornographic novels of de Sade and
extending more recently from the symbolist poets to the
anti-clerical fantasies of the surrealists and the novels of
Céline and Genet. No such tradition has ever existed in
England, and it is impossible to imagine
Story of O
being
published here in the 1950s. The United States, now fast
becoming a theocratic state run by right-wing political
fanatics and religious moralisers, has posed similar problems
to its more challenging writers. Nabokov’s
Lolita
, Henry
Miller’s
Tropic
novels, and William Burroughs’
Naked Lunch
were all first published in Paris by the Olympia Press, a small
publishing house that specialised in literary porn.
Crash
created little stir when it first appeared in Britain,
but twenty-five years later, after a period when the country
was supposed to have liberalised itself, a preposterous storm
in the largest teacup that Fleet Street could find showed just
how repressed and silly as a nation we could be.
David Cronenberg’s film of
Crash
was premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival in 1996. It was the most controversial
film of the festival, and the controversy continued for years
afterwards, especially in England. Desperate Conservative
politicians, facing defeat at the imminent general election,
attacked the film in an attempt to gain moral credit as the
guardians of public decency. One cabinet minister, Virginia
Bottomley, called for the film (which she had not seen) to be
banned.
The Cannes festival is an extraordinary media event, in
many ways deeply intimidating to a mere novelist. Books
may still be read in vast numbers, but films are dreamed.
Claire and I were stunned by the screaming crowds, the lavish
parties and stretch limos. I took part in all the publicity
interviews, and was deeply impressed to see how committed
the stars of the film were to Cronenberg’s elegant adaptation
of my novel.
I was sitting next to Holly Hunter when we were joined by
a leading American film critic. His first question was: ‘Holly,
what are you doing in this shit?’ Holly sprang into life, and
delivered a passionate defence of the film, castigating him for
his small-mindedness and provincialism. It was the greatest
performance of the festival, which I cheered vigorously.
The film opened in France within a few weeks, and was
very successful, and then went on to open across Europe and
the rest of the world. In America there were problems when
Ted Turner, who controlled the distribution company,
decided that
Crash
might offend public decency. At the time,
interestingly, he was married to Jane Fonda, who had
enlivened her career by playing prostitutes (as in
Klute
) or
cavorting naked in a fur-lined spaceship (in
Barbarella
).
In England the film was delayed for a year when
Westminster Council banned it from the West End of
London, and a number of other councils up and down the
country followed suit. When the film finally opened there
were no copycat car crashes, and the controversy at last died down. Cronenberg, a highly intelligent and thoughtful man,
was completely baffled by the English reaction. ‘Why?’ he
kept asking me. ‘What’s going on here?’
After fifty years, I was nowhere nearer an answer.
By 1980 my three children were adults and away at their
universities. Within a year or two they would leave home and
begin their careers apart from me, and the richest and most
fulfilling period in my life would abruptly come to an end. I
had already had a foretaste of this. As every parent knows,
infancy and childhood seem to last for ever. Then adolescence
arrives and promptly leaves on the next bus, and one
is sharing the family home with likeable young adults who
are more intelligent, better company and in many ways wiser
than oneself. But childhood has gone, and in the silence one
stares at the empty whisky bottles in the pantry and wonders
if any number of drinks will fill the void.
We had enjoyed the 1970s together, the dull Heath years
and the twilight world of the last Old Labour government,
largely by going abroad whenever we could. Claire and I and
our four children would climb into my large family saloon
and head for Dover, watch the white cliffs recede without a
pang (I never saw a tear shed by a single fellow passenger on countless cross-channel ferries) and begin to breathe freely as
we emerged through the bow doors and rolled the wheels
across the Boulogne cobbles. Soon there was the intoxicating
reek of Gauloises, scent, merde and higher octane French
petrol – now sadly all gone, including the cobbles. For reasons
I have never understood, we took few photographs, and had
left it too late when the children decided to holiday on their
own. But memory is the greatest gallery in the world, and I
can play an endless archive of images of the happy time.
Waving goodbye to the children as Claire and I set off on
our first holiday alone, I found myself thinking of Shanghai
again. I had almost forgotten the war, and never referred to
Shanghai in conversation with friends, and rarely even to
Claire and the children. But I had always wanted to write
about the war years and internment, partly because so few
people in England were aware of the Pacific war against the
Japanese.
It was then nearly forty years since I entered Lunghua
Camp, and soon my memories would fade. Few novelists
have waited so long to write about the most formative experiences
of their lives, and I am still puzzled why I allowed
so many decades to slip by. Perhaps, as I have often reflected,
it took me twenty years to forget Shanghai and twenty years
to remember. During my early years in England after the war
Shanghai had become an unattainable city, an El Dorado
buried beneath a past to which I could never return. Another
reason was that I was waiting for my children to grow up. Until they were young adults I was too protective of them to
expose them in my mind to the dangers I had known at their
age.
One question that readers still ask is: why did you leave
your parents out of the novel? When I first began to think
about the overall story I assumed that the central characters
would be adults, and that children of any age would play no
part in the novel. But I realised that I had no adult memories
of Lunghua Camp, or of Shanghai. My only memories of life
in both the camp and the city were those of an early teenager.
I had, and still have, vivid memories of cycling around
Shanghai, exploring empty apartment buildings, and trying
unsuccessfully to fraternise with Japanese soldiers. But I had
no memories of going to nightclubs and dinner parties.
Although I spent my time roaming around Lunghua Camp,
I had little idea of large areas of adult life. To this day I know
nothing about the sexual lives of the internees. Did they have
affairs, in the warrens of curtained cubicles that must have
been ideal trysting cells? Almost certainly, I assume, especially
during the first year when the internees’ health was still
robust. Were there pregnancies? Yes, and the few families
involved were moved by the Japanese to camps in Shanghai
that were close to hospitals. Were there fierce rivalries and
gnawing tensions between the internees? Yes, and I observed
rows and arguments between both men and women that
sometimes came to blows. But I knew nothing about the
festering resentments that must have lasted for months if not years. My father was a gregarious man and got on well with
most people, but my mother made few friends in G Block
and seemed to spend most of her time reading in our
little room. Curiously, though we ate, slept, dressed and
undressed within a few feet of each other, I have very few
memories of her in the camp. And none of my sister.
So, I accepted what I had probably assumed from the
start, that
Empire of the Sun
would be seen through the eyes
of a child who became a teenager during war and internment.
And there seemed no point in inventing a fictitious
child when I had one ready-made to hand: my younger self.
Once I decided that the novel would be autobiographical,
everything fell naturally into place. In much of the novel I
was describing events I could still see in my mind’s eye.
There were a huge number of memories that I needed to knit
together, and some of the events described are imaginary,
but although
Empire of the Sun
is a novel it is firmly based on
true experiences, either my own or those told to me by other
internees.
Writing the novel was surprisingly painless. A rush of
memories rose from my typescript, the filth and cruelty of
Shanghai, the faded smell of deserted villages, even the
stench of Lunghua Camp, the reek of overcrowded barrack
huts and dormitories, the desperate seediness of what in
effect was a large slum. I was frisking myself of memories
that popped out of every pocket. By the time I finished, at the end of 1983, Shanghai had advanced out of its own
mirage and become a real city again
Empire of the Sun
was a huge success, the only one I have
known on that scale, and outsold all my previous books put
together. It revived my backlist, in Britain and abroad, and
drew many new readers to my earlier books. Some were
deeply disappointed, writing letters along the lines of ‘Mr
Ballard, could you explain what you really mean by your
novel
Crash
?’ A question with no possible answer.
Other, more sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and
short stories were quick to spot echoes of
Empire of the Sun
.
The trademark images that I had set out over the previous
thirty years – the drained swimming pools, abandoned
hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers –
could all be traced back to wartime Shanghai. For a long
time I resisted this, but I accept now that it is almost certainly
true. The memories of Shanghai that I had tried to
repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet,
and had slipped quietly into my fiction. At the same time,
though, I have always been fascinated by deserts, and even
wrote an entire book,
Vermilion Sands
, set at a desert resort
something like Palm Springs. And yet there are no deserts
within a thousand miles of Shanghai, and the only sand I
ever saw was in the snake house at Shanghai Zoo.