Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (128 page)

In 1987, Achebe published
Anthills of the Savannah
, a novel which reflected on the Biafran tragedy. Three years later, he was injured in a car accident, driving to Lagos, and would thereafter be wheelchair-bound for life. He moved, in what was now his retirement, to a series of honorific professorships in the US. In interviews, essays, poems and stories he continued to articulate the extraordinary pressures on African creativity in a post-colonial world. Achebe’s huge reputation rests on a relatively small corpus of full-length novels and the distinction of his having led the way. Where that way led, not even he was sure.

America, I knew, was a future that had already arrived.

As he came to the end of his life, Ballard returned repeatedly to its beginnings, notably in
Empire of the Sun
(1984) and in his autobiography
Miracles of Life
(2008), on the last page of which he disclosed – in painful physiological detail – that he was dying of terminal prostate cancer. It is not an easy death, but neither was his life easy. Ballard was born in Shanghai, in the ‘concession’ enclave, where foreign businessmen like his father (a dealer in textiles) had permits to operate from the Chinese authorities. The Ballards’ expatriate lifestyle was luxurious if ‘very strange’. ‘The honour guard of fifty Chinese hunchbacks outside the film première of
The Hunch-back of Notre Dame
’ stuck in the mind, Ballard recalls. ‘Atrocity Exhibitions’ would be a theme of his later work. The family were wholly insulated from the country around them: ‘I had my first Chinese meal in England, after the war,’ Ballard drily records.

Luxury ended in December 1941. In 1943 the Ballards, along with 2,000 other Europeans, were herded by the Japanese into Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre – a genteel concentration camp. Perversely, the twelve-year-old Ballard found his years there ‘happy and relaxed’. He made friends with Japanese guards, whose military code he admired as a young boy of his age might have admired Biggles in England. ‘It was’, he recalls, ‘a prison where I found freedom.’ The story of ‘James’ in
Empire of the Sun
explores the paradox. Lunghua, despite the forced intimacies of G-Block, estranged him from his parents. His father, on receiving a presentation copy of
The Drowned World
(1962), his son’s early novel, merely pointed to ‘one or two minor errors that I was careful not to correct. My mother never showed the slightest interest in my career until
Empire of the Sun
, which she thought was about her.’

On release from Lunghua, Ballard returned to England with his mother and his sister, finding the country ‘derelict, dark and half ruined’ – and, above all, ‘cold’ and class-ridden. It was a place, he discovered, ‘where even hope was rationed’. The only brightness came from Hollywood films, paradoxically from film
noir
. Ballard hated 1950s England and was unsettled at his Cambridge boarding school: it was like Lunghua ‘but the food was worse’. The more he found out about English life, ‘the stranger it seemed’. If he had found freedom in prison, he found alienation in his home country.

Ballard studied anatomy at King’s College, Cambridge, for two years – something that ‘framed a large part of my imagination’. He had, of course, already seen more corpses than most doctors – dissection would be his principal artistic
technique. A complex and oppositional world view was emerging out of the confusions of Ballard’s personal history at this time: ‘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.’ He found starting points in Nietzschean philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, Buñuelian surrealism and – most powerfully – in James Joyce. Everywhere but in England. ‘A jigsaw inside my head was trying to assemble itself,’ he said, and in search of the missing piece, he transferred to London University in 1952 to read literature (‘the worst possible preparation for a writer’s career’), leaving after a year without any qualification.

After various false starts, he joined the RAF on a short-service commission. Posted to Canada for flight-training, he came across American science fiction. It was the missing piece of the jigsaw: ‘Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka … Without thinking up a plan of action, I decided this was a field I should enter.’ Enter and transform, a less modest writer than Ballard would have said. After resigning his RAF commission, he returned to London (renting, as it pleased him to note, lodgings adjoining John Christie’s murder factory, 10 Rillington Place) and married, eventually settling with his family near ‘slightly raffish’ Shepperton, Middlesex, in south London, a setting which figures in much of his fiction. ‘I enjoyed being married,’ he testified.

He was currently developing what was to be a highly fruitful relationship with the SF magazine,
New Worlds
, devising sharp, dark scenarios in which traditional genre was mixed with modernist and Beat styles (William S. Burroughs was now an influence on his writing).

Ballard was as interested in what he called ‘inner space’ as the outer variety and he disdained the traditional genre props: space ships, little green men, time-travel and galactic warriors. He moved SF, it is said, from space opera to John Cage. Apocalypse would be his main theme – something keyed to the anxieties of a Cold War England, living under four minutes’ warning of annihilation by nuclear bombardment. His distinctive style emerged in three early catastrophist masterpieces:
The Drowned World
(1962),
The Drought
(1965),
The Crystal World
(1966). There were personal catastrophes adding more darkness to the mix: in 1964 his wife Mary died of pneumonia, leaving him with three children to support by his pen.

He wrote what he called ‘condensed novels’ over this period, but in the 1970s he returned to uncondensed styles, breaking out of the SF ‘ghetto’ with postmodernist narratives such as
The Atrocity Exhibition
(1969), a work which flagrantly transgressed boundaries of permissibility for the period. Even more controversial was
Crash
(1973), an allegory of modern society’s doomed, death-fuck love affair with the automobile: epitomised in the deaths of Kennedy and Dean. Ballard’s cold gaze
swept, apocalyptically, across the modern world with works such as
Concrete Island
(1974) and
High Rise
(1975) – expressions of his view that ‘the future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.’ The infernal vision is not Dante but Sartre. His career took another – surprising – turn with his transparently autobiographical novel,
Empire of the Sun
(1984), a work which had risen from his Lunghua years like a slow bruise. Steven Spielberg filmed the book in 1987, propelling Ballard to new levels of fame in America. A second autobiographical work,
The Kindness of Women
(1991) followed in the early 1990s. J. G. Ballard was, momentarily in his career, James Ballard.

Ballard’s latest phase was marked by a dystopian comedy, in which idealistic human communities collapse under the pressures of ineradicable human imperfection.
Cocaine Nights
(1996) and
Super-Cannes
(2000) chart the slide from architect’s projection to apocalypse in a gated Spanish expat community and a French hightech ‘total’ community. One of the very greatest writers of his time, Ballard has never quite shook off the SF albatross that critics have slung around his neck: ‘If it’s good, it can’t be SF. If it’s SF, it can’t be good.’ The prejudice haunted him even in this least science-fictional segment of his career. He declined a CBE in 2003 – disdaining to be associated with the ‘Ruritanian charade’ of the British honours system. The prostate cancer which he had calmly announced in 2008 finally caught up with him in April 2009. He was waiting. He had, his memoir records, seen worse.

I think of myself as a romantic formalist.

A pioneer ‘postmodernist’, Barth was born, a twin, and brought up in Cambridge on the eastern shore of Maryland, the grandson of nineteenth-century German immigrants to the US. On leaving school, he attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York. His ambition was to be a jazz drummer, but music, he eventually discovered, was not for him and he moved on to Johns Hopkins University, where he majored in journalism. Hopkins was at the time the hotbed of what came to be called ‘theory’ – the high modes of critical thought imported from France via sages such as Roland
Barthes, Michel Foucault and Paul de Man. Theory was transforming the practice of literary criticism and seeping through into the practice of experimental fiction. Barth was open to both avenues. Unusually for the time, Hopkins also offered its students a creative writing option. Barth had an early appetite for genre fiction, but his literary taste was crucially formed by admiration for John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. Barth’s own mature fiction would combine the strengths of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ – spiced by adventurous critico-philosophical speculations on the nature of fiction itself.

At university, while working on Boccaccio for his comp-lit class, he came across Ebenezer Cooke’s 1707 doggerel poem ‘The Sot-Weed Factor’ (i.e. ‘tobacco merchant’), a verse satire, set in seventeenth-century colonial Maryland. It was written by a luckless immigrant (the connection with Barth’s origins was a further point of interest to him) and opens:

Condemn’d by Fate to way-ward Curse,

Of Friends unkind, and empty Purse;

Plagues worse than fill’d
Pandora
’s Box,

I took my leave of
Albion’
s Rocks:

With heavy Heart, concerned that I

Was forc’d my Native Soil to fly.

And the
Old World
must bid good-buy.

This obscure, and comically inept, poem – with its clodhoppingly Hudibrastic sarcasms against New World barbarism – inspired the later novel which remained embryonic, but on Barth’s mind, for a decade.

On graduating from Hopkins in 1953, Barth took up a post teaching English at Penn State University. Thereafter his career would follow two tracks: academic and creative. Over three violently inspired months in 1955, he wrote
The Floating Opera
. It is the story of Todd Andrews, a lawyer, who resolves to commit suicide on a specific day in June 1937. The novel was turned down by a succession of publishers, before being accepted, subject to major changes. Barth later, defiantly, published his original version.

In 1960
The Sot-Weed Factor
, with Ebenezer Cooke as its hero, was published to immense success. A picaresque tale in high-pastiche mode, set in the seventeenth century, it mixes elements of Voltaire’s
Candide
, Hervey Allen’s
Anthony Adverse
, and what the 1960s revered as ‘absurdism’ – a literary style bolstered, theoretically, by French existentialism. More importantly,
The Sot-Weed Factor
laid the ground for the postmodernist ‘Literature of Exhaustion’. The phrase is Barth’s and the concept is his singular, and fruitful, bequest to modern fiction. Its basic tenet is that once all
the stories are told, or no longer tellable, all the writer has left is ‘narrative’ – the empty, but still functioning, fictional machine. Barth’s ‘exhaustion’ thesis helped the experimental novel onto its next stage of literary evolution, ‘postmodernism’. Unlike the ‘New Wave’ fiction of Robbe-Grillet, or the convention-defying experiments of W. S. Burroughs, Barth’s mock-epic connected with a large and appreciative readership from the start. It was ‘advanced’, but not offputtingly ‘difficult’, and daringly (for 1960) ‘bawdy’. Jolly rape figures centrally, graphically and, for some later readers, disturbingly.

The influence of Borges’s gamesomeness – and possibly that of Vonnegut – can be felt in Barth’s third major work, a collection of short pieces,
Lost in the Funhouse
(1968). Fun is the theme – crossed with higher criticism which glosses ‘fun’ as ‘aesthetic pleasure’. ‘Night-Sea Journey’, for example, is a travel story told from the point of view of a sperm. The idea was picked up by Woody Allen in
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But were Afraid to Ask)
(1972). In 1972, Barth won an NBA for
Chimera
(three connected novellas).
LETTERS
(1979), as the title indicates, is an exercise in epistolary fiction. His fascination with the looping, interminable curves of the picaresque mode is further evident in
The Tidewater Tales
(1987). Unusually, his theoretical discourses on the nature of fiction (particularly his essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, 1967) have been as influential as his fiction itself. It can be summed up in the cry ‘fiction is dead: long live fiction’. As with Salman Rushdie and the ‘1001 Nights’, the never-ending sequence whose only function is simply to narrate is Barth’s ‘navigational star’. The novelist is not a storyteller, but a story-maker. Not all novelists approved: according to Gore Vidal, Barth’s is a recipe for ‘plastic fiction’ – productive only of intolerable, self-satisfied dullness. Barth himself describes what he does as like knotting a tie while describing how to knot a tie, and offering a simultaneous digression on the history of tie-knotting.