Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (44 page)

Marlin’s conservatory looks out, without interruption, on a spread of greenbelt countryside. Ballard described her as ‘a tall and attractive American woman with a strong personality and a lively sense of humour’. Meaning that she did not always, or ever, agree with him. And that she was able to laugh about it. In patterned blue, shades picked up in several of her own paintings, which decorate the walls, Brigid welcomes me and lays out the lunch. She is smiling, seeing the absurdity that comes with an interrogation of the past, with summoning up the presence of Jim Ballard, who so provoked and intrigued her.

I asked about
The Rod
, the painting that brought Ballard to her studio with his photographs of the lost Delvaux paintings.

It was inspired by a trip to Kuwait, where I saw all these cars buried in the sand. It was so bizarre. And the oil wells … The figure of the woman represents me. I used someone else to pose, but it represents a moment when I realized that my life was leading nowhere and going towards nothing. And so these boxes in the foreground, black and white, they’re like coffins. The emptiness of the boxes reflected the emptiness of my life. The woman is holding burning newspapers. It was war and anti-war: the contradictions we live in. There’s no middle road. And so the thought is, that the woman, if she turns round and walks through the desert of unknowing, then there is another land, which is exemplified by a sun, which has a seascape in it. And water is a symbol of truth and it’s on a higher level. So one must walk through the desert of unknowing. We can’t raise ourselves to a higher level. And, at the same time, I was searching for a path myself. So it was very deep from my point of view.

The uncanny aspect, for Ballard, was finding a direct transcription, as he saw it, a proof, of the stories he was composing, a few miles down the orbital motorway, in Shepperton. ‘I could well understand why Leonora Chanel had come to Vermilion Sands, to the bizarre, sand-bound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting perspectives … The fused silica on the surface of the lake formed an immense rainbow mirror that reflected the deranged colours of the sand-reefs, more vivid even than the cinnabar and cyclamen wing-panels of the cloud-gliders overhead.’

Ballard critiques a painting he has never seen. Marlin reproduces the inscape of an author she has never read. She is exposed, when he arrives at her studio, not as a tailored fashion plate, nor a desert-dwelling surrealist: neither Coco Chanel, nor Leonora Carrington. But a very real woman, with a history, her own agenda, and a set of spiritual beliefs for which Ballard has no obvious sympathy or understanding.

The woman in my painting was a very feminine woman, very gentle. She represented resignation and suffering. But, in a strange way, there was something in Jim Ballard that wanted, not only to dominate women, but to suppress his own female quality, his anima. He wasn’t prepared to face the anima. He was doing battle with his own inner spirit almost all of his life. And, when we met, my inner paintings didn’t resemble my outer persona, because I was quite aggressive and bouncy. I don’t think Jim was quite prepared for this. He expected some little fragile creature.

He’s not the only one who has seen my paintings and visualized a very different person. There was this disastrous trip I took across America. I was paid by this man to go all around the country and he was going to meet me at the end. He’d fallen in love with this painting I did of a beautiful eighteen-year-old. And there I was at the bus stop … I was never an absolute Venus. And on top of that I was forty-five. So the blow was terrible for him. It was like
High Noon.
He pushed me aside and kept looking for someone else. Everyone left and we were the only two people in the terminal, facing each other. Pistols at dawn.

Ballard too! He was prepared to come and overpower this fragile creature. And the fragile creature gave as good as she got.

He was saying that although he had fame he was totally uninfluenced by it. I said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re totally free from any kind of vanity, aren’t you?’ Ha! ‘And any kind of egotism?’ For god’s sake! It was really funny.

Brigid reads the writer’s face. She likes it. She wants him to sit there, quietly, while she gets to work. She fixes Ballard as a Marlin portrait, to present in her catalogue, alongside the Dalai Lama, the travel-writer Cecil Lewis, and a beribboned Queen Mother. Ballard solicits a Delvaux, brought back from extinction, colour flooding a monochrome print. A physical representation of the most heartfelt psychodramas of his fiction.

I didn’t like Delvaux. And I don’t like copying. So he said, ‘If
Moby-Dick
had been destroyed, I’d be perfectly prepared to rewrite it.’ I question that myself. I wondered if
Moby-Dick
would have emerged unscathed from Ballard’s pen.

I thought: ‘He’s got an interesting face.’ I hadn’t read his work. I wasn’t at all interested in that kind of book. I put the proposition: ‘Either you sit for me or the copying is no go.’ He didn’t like that. He said he hated sitting. And in fact he’d ring up and say, ‘Do I have to come?’ And I’d say, ‘Do you want your Delvaux?’ I said, ‘You sound like you have to go to the dentist.’ He said, ‘It’s much worse than that.’

He arrived. I told him to sit down and keep still. He didn’t do either of those things. He would get up from the chair and he would talk a blue streak. The funny thing was he was so uncontrollable. Most sitters, when you get them to sit down, and you draw them out, you get to see their inner spirit. But I’d never seen defences like those put up by Ballard. There was no way I was going to get into his inner spirit. And, instead, he starts talking to me and I realize, suddenly, that he is writing me, while I’m trying to paint him. And we’re each trying to drag the other into our worlds.

He gave me the two specific Delvaux paintings he wanted. Because they’d been destroyed. That was his idea. They meant a lot to him, especially the naked girl looking at herself as a clothed figure – which I thought was badly painted, to be honest. The anatomy was bad, the folds are so childish. The concept of the wallpaper, I really disliked it.

I sneakily improved those paintings, because Delvaux is not a colourist. He mixed every colour with black. Or else he never washed his brushes and black got in. They’re miserable old paintings with lots of skeletons. Delvaux is not one of my favourites, but Ballard admired him. I improved the colouring, now those paintings are quite nice.

Jim didn’t detect that. He did not realize that I had made improvements. I have seen original Delvaux paintings and they are faded with a greyish tinge. Disagreeable pictures.

Ballard would never lend out those copies. They meant everything to him. Gradually I began to understand Delvaux’s symbols. There’s a clothed woman looking at herself naked in the mirror. That’s what it is: Ballard, with all the festoons he brought into his life, gazing at the internal mirror where his real self is hiding. Without clothes. Naked to the world.

Delvaux women have such cow-like faces. They are devoid of any real humanity. They are rubber blow-up dolls. Their faces have absolutely no expression. It’s as if they are mindless bimbos. And I think that’s another reason why Ballard liked them.

I had a convent education. And I was also very anxious to – how can I put it? – follow a path. We had a few arguments about this. Ballard had to accept that when he came to my studio, it was just for being painted. If I worked too much on the portrait, and not enough on the Delvaux, he got very angry. But if I had finished the Delvaux too early, he wouldn’t have come back to let me complete the portrait.

I met Ballard at my spring exhibition in 1986. I started the first Delvaux in the early autumn. After Christmas, I started the other one. It went on for quite a while, maybe two years, the whole thing.

He was so fascinated by art. He wouldn’t let me get on with the painting. He kept saying, ‘Show me some other work you’ve done. I want to see what you did when you were younger.’

I had my folder from art school, so I brought it down. He said, ‘But you could already draw then. Show me something from when you were much younger.’ So I had done, when I was about eight, little fairy books. There were minuscule fairies in them. Ballard looked at them. They were quite good for my age. He was very impressed. He put the books down, leant back in the chair, and he said: ‘You were born with it.’ He was trying to trace it back and find a moment when I didn’t have the ability to paint and then see the point when I learnt the skill. But there was no moment.

He said, ‘Could you teach me to paint?’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ I sat him down, put up a still life – I’m a good teacher – and I said, ‘Now draw the apple.’ It was really funny to watch: this bold man, this bully, got a pencil in his hand, and he made a dab at the board. He did a C for the side of the apple. And then he couldn’t finish it. He was frightened. He was frightened of his failure. And I said, ‘It’s OK, you can do a bad apple.’ I said, ‘There’s a glass, now draw that.’ ‘You do it.’ So I drew it. He said, ‘Doesn’t look like a glass.’ Then, as I painted, he saw the glass coming through. He could hardly believe it. He said, ‘You must teach me art.’ I said, ‘You’ll have to come more often.’ And he said, ‘Couldn’t you teach me by phone?’

He wanted to draw like an old master. He wanted to paint like Dali. When he was sitting, he would say, ‘You’re not to put this in. You’re not to paint me like that. I suppose you’re going to paint me like Hitler?’

I said, ‘Excuse me, Jim. Do I tell you not to write like Enid Blyton?’

I would say something thoughtless like, ‘You know in the book
War and Peace
by Tolstoy?’ And he said, ‘Oh, is there another one?’

Such a put-down.

I told him I’d read
Crash.
It was the first time I saw him really embarrassed. He didn’t want me to have read it. He was ashamed of it. I was very surprised. Then he said, ‘Don’t read that, read
The Unlimited Dream Company.
As if that was going to be holy writ. So I got it and I read it. And I thought it was even worse than
Crash.
He eats this little girl for lunch, stuff like that. Jim couldn’t see that his fear of spirituality, like eating little children, was in any way peculiar.

He used my name in
The Kindness of Women.
I really resented that. The bastard, he didn’t ask me. I think it was revenge.

I really miss his interest. He was so interested in one. And he was so intelligent. It was wonderful. People sitting for a portrait, they like the fact that you look at them with totally absorbed interest. You draw them out. That’s magic. I’ve never experienced that before. I grew up posing for my mother. But suddenly to have a guy really interested in you and asking questions with such attention. Like you are the most interesting person in the world.

Ballard told me that women could be so cruel. That surprised me. He wasn’t keen to have people visit Shepperton. They might barge in on something. He didn’t want to curtail his fun.

The guy had an amazing mind, a restless, prowling, animal of a mind. Reminding me of Blake’s tiger, burning bright. He actually told me that he had written
Crash
because he wasn’t making enough money to support his children.

Empire of the Sun
was the best book he ever wrote. I met him after that. I met him after the book and before the film. I think people are very stupid to be angry at him for not mentioning his parents. He wrote a work of art. You wouldn’t have felt the same about the boy if he had got parents with him. He was absolutely right with that decision, artistically
.

Ballard was about control. The one pearl that he took out of the oyster of his life was this book,
Empire of the Sun.
He was born to write that book. He had to have those experiences. That book is a poem.

I knew Stanley Kubrick through his wife, we met at the art group. Stanley reminded me of Ballard, very much so. They shared a huge amount. The difference is that Stanley was very gentle with his women. He was a generous man. He deliberately limited his knowledge. But when he did need to know something, he was obsessive. But the two men were not unalike. They were built alike. Stanley was extremely eccentric, but he wasn’t damaged. A lot went into the twisting of Ballard. He was a very jealous man.

After transcribing Marlin’s tape, I went straight back to
The Kindness of Women.
And found no trace of the woman I had interviewed. There were plenty of other details I’d forgotten and a strong sense of how much the landscape of the Thames Valley meant to Ballard, the woods and fields where he walked with his children. And the boat trip he makes with the woman who is clearly drawn from his partner, Claire Walsh.

‘In the two years since Miriam’s death,’ he wrote, ‘the familiar gardens and water-meadows had come to my rescue, but at something of a price … the quiet streets with their bricky villas, presided over by the film studios, formed the reassuring centre of my mind.’

Upstairs, in the Berkhamsted house, Marlin stood smiling for the camera, looking straight at me, while I framed the self-portrait on the wall behind her: another, younger, more troubled self; a woman with bare, powerful shoulders holding a pair of spectacles in her hand, while other discarded glasses on the edge of the shelf spurn the opportunity to reflect some surreal inner world.

The telescoping of images is vertiginous: the cross-struts of the empty easel, the fields outside the window. Brigid showed me a reproduction of the reproduction, the reconstituted Delvaux – which invokes Magritte, while belonging firmly in the Marlin catalogue. The nude in the gilded mirror is arranged at the same angle as Ballard in the formal portrait, which has now ‘disappeared’ from public view, to the reserve collection of the National Portrait Gallery. The woman in the mirror is Ballard’s female self, his anima, the stoic writer in a golden wig: stripped, breasted, hands resting modestly over her sex. The grain of the bare boards in the Delvaux is reprised in the texture of the wall behind Ballard and in the table on which his manuscript is spread out. Using the text of an actual Ballard script, Marlin copied some sentences, showed the revisions, and invented a calligraphy of her own to duplicate the mysterious process of creation. Ballard is not rewriting
Moby-Dick
, the savage epic treated as a primer for coded messages. In preliminary drafts of the portrait, he is handless, his torso a Francis Bacon smudge of white lines over blue. The manuscript is blank. Blood arrives in his cheeks in time for the finished version. He is trapped, interrupted, on edge. Pencil gripped, he looks like a man asked to draw a perfect apple. He is St Jerome, tempted, seduced away from his cell, seeing green England as a future desert.