Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (53 page)

Returned to Hackney, I found that access to the canal was still blocked. Barriers had been put up in time to use this year’s cash reserves, but not one brick had been touched and no workmen were to be seen on the entire fenced-off strip. Parking in my street, for which the council charges a hefty fee, was suspended – without consultation – so that a film crew could lodge their catering vans. ‘Be advised,’ said the document shoved through the door, ‘using these suspended bays at any point during the day will accrue a parking ticket.’

My native borough never fails to surprise: a number of the anarchists who were giving a cutting edge to events in Greece were living right here, in a communal building near the canal known as the Greek House. They flew out, at regular intervals, to take part in the action in Athens, and then regrouped in what they described as ‘Occupied London’. I watched clips of protestors swarming through the narrow streets of Kolonaki, under the orange trees, marshalled by young men with megaphones. I read about the police opening fire on students at Palaio Faliro. And I saw, as if I needed to be told, how London becomes everywhere: the anarchists were making films transposing the conditions of the West Bank, restrictions endured by Palestinians, on Hackney.

That dog-culling, pre-Olympic moment had finally arrived. A local freesheet headlined a story about the growth in ownership of ‘status’ dogs, attack animals bred in tower blocks. The call is out: it’s them or us. Urban hunts were forming to slaughter a plague of foxes, Hackney babies had been attacked in their cots. Lord Low, blind from birth, told me that he found himself trapped in his bedroom, one afternoon, with a panicked beast: which turned out to be a fox. They couldn’t get rid of that hot reek. Animal rights campaigners responded by agitating about the traps set to counter the vulpine invasion. It was good to be back in a place where every edition of the
Hackney Gazette
read like a poem by Bill Griffiths.

We had some very strong tea – they said it had volcanic ash in it and it was the strongest they’d ever had.

– Jack Kerouac,
The Subterraneans

When product arrives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center it goes into quarantine. They are humane in this well-endowed enclave of Austin, Texas; respectful of the Masonic leyline that flows uninterrupted from the sniper’s University Tower to the extruded nipple on the dome of the State Capitol, which has to be the tallest of its kind in the USA, topping Washington, DC, by the height of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Stetson. LBJ’s presidential library is on campus, near a football stadium that holds more fans than Old Trafford.

Looking at volumes laid out in the cold room, I felt like a shamed witness trying not to turn away from the porthole of an execution chamber. I listened for the hiss of lethal gas. They brought the temperature right down, my guide explained, it was a kindly euthanasia, alien bugs died in their sleep, dreaming of sweaty human hosts, hirsute tropics, raised veins, moist deltas of delight. And I thought of my own status, a wasp in a bottle, flown in over the great meat-packing hangars of the Chicago railhead. That epic confluence of steel, horizontal ladders along which herds are transported for hundreds of miles. Unwitting bovine hitchhikers in refrigerated cars living down to the myth of John Wayne’s pathological cattle drive out of
Red River.

And then, coming south across the plains, small farms beside huge baked fields and long, empty roads. Humans struggle to make their mark on land which has been fenced, branded, but which remains a
tabula rasa
, bereft of ghosts. Kit-settlements, off-highway clusters, are temporary installations. The natural condition is to be precisely where we are, in flight, economy-plus with extra legroom: America still a movie, a pre-composed text. Writing in London is about archaeology: trawling, classifying, presenting. Here it is the blank page of an elephant folio; hot, red-gold dirt through which clips of my favourite westerns constantly appear and disappear. Howard Hawks to Monte Hellman. Geography as morality. A quorum of my particles might catch up in a month or two, letting me know just who I am; until then, with a week’s recovery time required for every hour in the air, Texas could dream me into existence, a floating presence lacking gravity shoes.

The Harry Ransom Center threw out a lifeline by purchasing what they term ‘archive’, otherwise known as skip-fillers. Manuscripts. Typescripts. Notebooks. Thin blue bundles tied with yellow twine. Correspondence. Forty years of scribble and grunt in eighty sacks and boxes: a still life writhing with invisible termites, micro-bugs, blisters on onion-skin paper. This material, stacked solid in a tin box in Whitechapel, was an insect ghetto, an unvisited Eden: until I became my own grand project and sold the memory-vault for the dollars to keep me afloat for another season. Away went a mess of uncatalogued scraps, the vanished Dublin novel, the Chobham Farm journals. Spiked scripts and yards of indecipherable poems. Letters, postcards. Telegrams (they loved those):
RIP NEAL CASSADY FEBRUARY EXPOSURE ALCOHOL DRUGS MEXICO.
A pension prematurely cashed in.

Ballard, when they asked him about his archive, about the drafts of
Crash
and
The Atrocity Exhibition
, the photo-collages, the lively exchanges with his peers, said that he kept nothing. Burnt: all of it. Trashed. And good riddance. He abhorred the fetishization of first editions in the original dustwrappers, the sacred relics of a writer’s hidden life. Nothing. Nothing
intimate
survived. A catalogue of wound illustrations. Some black-box flight recordings. Helmut Newton nudes. Histories of surrealist art. A paperback
Moby-Dick
(because Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for the John Huston movie). That was the legend and we believed it. Michael Moorcock, who now lived in Bastrop, a short drive from Austin, told me that he remembered Ballard making a bonfire of review copies in a pit in the Shepperton garden.

Coming into Fay Ballard’s Hampstead house, nine months after her father’s death, I was astonished to find a neat stack of material we understood to have been destroyed. The collectors, the vulture dealers, the archivists: they bought the story and kept clear, giving Ballard the breathing space his strategy deserved. The man who commissioned the reconstitution of Delvaux paintings left behind an immaculately organized record of the typescripts and artworks he was supposed to have barbecued. I couldn’t convince myself that I was holding a version of
Crash
with numerous revisions, strikings out, improvements. The Ballard interviews, so courteously delivered, on the phone, and in person, were fictions crafted like the rest of his work. He told us what he wanted to tell us. Not a syllable more.

‘Shepperton lives on,’ Fay said. ‘I go and water the yucca and collect the post on a regular basis. Nothing is touched. Everything is sacred. Fifty years of life. It is very peaceful and beautiful in a timeless way – as if it never belonged to our world. I make sure the front lawn is trimmed every fortnight but there is little I can do about the car, which is beginning to look tired. I have no plans. I’m still trying to metabolize it all.’

The word hoard for future scholars remained in England at the British Library. MYSTERIOUS TO THE END: JG BALLARD’S SECRET ARCHIVE IS REVEALED. Headline writers loved the story. Sex, lies and
Hawaii Five-O
videotapes, in lieu of £350,000 in death duties. The house in Old Charlton Road was exposed as a biography of its occupier in a thousand objects: term reports from the Leys School in Cambridge, documentation from the Lunghua internment camp, the holograph manuscript of
Empire of the Sun.
James Andrews, head of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, described the individual pages of Ballard texts as ‘worksof art’. Blue pen, red pen. Tippex, fading ribbon. Living alone, insulated by the residue of his past life, confirmed the author’s magus-like status, another upstream Dr Dee. (I was surprised to learn that Ballard, who turned down decorations that came with the word ‘Empire’ attached, drove up to Leicester to receive in person an honorary doctorate in literature. Thus acquiring the title he forswore when he gave up his medical studies.) Ephemera in the Shepperton archive helped to dictate successive raids on the past, as he assembled his elegant fictions. He did not need to consult old papers. I’m sure that Ballard never took a second look at a manuscript, after the book was published. He rarely discussed a work in progress, but enjoyed a celebratory drink when the job was done. Arm around the shoulder of the Thai waitress, ordering for all the company. Another bottle, dear.

My guide to the Harry Ransom holdings, a charming young woman married to a golf pro (Austin is ringed by manicured, sprinkler-nurtured courses), produced three items to give me a taste ofthe treasures hidden away in grey archival boxes, in avenues that slide open at the touch of a sensor; narrow streets of high steel frames dedicated to Norman Mailer, Julian Barnes or Robert De Niro. Scripts, costumes, stills arrive on completion of every De Niro movie: more CIA research files for
Meet the Fockers
than the Kennedy assassination. But despite the madness, the W. R. Hearst-like, Xanadu-acquisitiveness of this storage facility, like a selective catalogue of human culture preserved against the coming nuclear winter, the atmosphere is calm, temperate,
clean.
It may be her smile, but the guide’s easy, sure-footed passage through intimidating chasms of matter, has a humorous, even ironic touch, reflecting the tone of the whole enterprise. The Harry Ransom Center, its entrance doors incised with the clustered signatures of Joseph Conrad, L.-F. Céline, Wyndham Lewis, John Cowper Powys, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Jarry, its grid of window panels fired by the unblinking eyes of Pablo Picasso, is the ultimate lock-up. Del Boy’s Peckham garage with billionaire budget. A perfect-taste condominium of high modernist culture: Vivien Leigh’s hold-your-breath Tara ball gown cased alongside a map of Joyce’s Dublin. A first edition of Conrad’s
Youth
(which includes
Heart of Darkness
), inscribed to Henry James, and marked as coming from the library at Lamb House, shares space with Harry Houdini’s chains and padlocks. The chaotic accumulations of writers’ lives are smoothed out, labelled, rationalized, entombed in grey boxes and prophylactic glassine sleeves. Tom Staley, the southern gentleman who was in charge of this place, occupied an office that was a fantasy for every collector, for dabblers and amateurs of rarity. Walls of gallery-quality black-and-white photographs, lithographs by the masters of the modern movement, author portraits of the giants of our time. And pristine books shelved and stacked – it hurt to look at them – without there being any sense of claustrophobic entrapment, the anal-compulsive derangement of the obsessive who vanishes into his library.

And from all this, the tonnage of culture cargo held in a chilled Austin bunker, my guide put her three chosen items on a ledge for my inspection. The tiny doll-script of Emily Brontë’s warring empires in a childhood notebook, like those intricate burrow-worlds made by outsider artists. Then a wedding gift, an album of Templar knights, rams’ horns, topographical engravings of country estates, smeared with the drip of martyred hearts, presented to Evelyn Waugh. And, finally, the one that stopped my blood, as my guide had calculated, Jack Kerouac’s ring-bound
On the Road
work-book. His word counts, his comments, as he laboured at a first draft; no free-flowing, barbiturate-fuelled, hammer-typed spontaneous composition on teletype scroll. The daily reports of agonized progress in a school exercise pad: the 1949
JOURNALS.
Of a man whose liver would burst in a Florida retirement colony before he reached the age of fifty.

Silent avenues were like burial vaults. In a forensic lab, deep under the Texas heat, white coats stored bottles of parasites, the collateral damage of archival preservation. Murdered insects were carded for inspection. They were part of the unvisited museum. ‘Domesticated Beetle found on a manuscript, lived in the bug jar, without food, air, or water, for 4 months.’ They were already replete with the glue of Scott Fitzgerald’s nightmares, fear-saliva from Ford Madox Ford’s moustache, wax from Soutine’s inner ear, dust of Man Ray’s silver gelatin. Sharers in secret sorrows. Collaborative intelligences. One consciousness splintered into sentences.

We progress through this silent, air-conditioned facility, nodding to researchers in their private kingdoms, to scholars making sense of otherwise forgotten aspects of the past. There were entire libraries, removed, post-mortem, from city apartment or rural shack, and shelved in alphabetical order in secular solitude. Chris Petit speaks about curating, across Europe, a museum of loneliness. This was
that
place, serviced by kindly and intelligent agents. The Harry Ransom Center was a repost to America’s paranoia, to the occult geometries of the information-acquisitive architecture of the secret state: target structures for the disaffected. I was touring an island of submarine wonders, the undestroyed evidence of vanished civilizations: available to all, a provocation for theses (which would themselves be acquired, catalogued, filed away, pre-forgotten). We came to rooms that were windowless theatrical sets, dimly lit reconstructions accurate in every detail and rarely visited. My guide took meetings, afternoon assignations, in the study of John Foster Dulles. Curators and academic bureaucrats sitting on authentic furniture, lolling on chairs where America played out her games of realpolitik. Dozing on couches polished with the leaked DNA of global decision makers.

A newly appointed young woman, who came out to lunch with us at a Tex-Mex diner, was moving effortlessly around her open-plan workstation trying to make sense of a box of Mailer’s reel-to-reel recordings, a bunch of disembowelled
Mad Max
computers. One of the antique hard drives was mine: the submerged but unerased history of everything I’d written between the point when my children badgered me into wiring up, around 1997, and the day when the whole contraption was dumped in a skip in 2007. Coming back from a morning walk, it struck me that the hard-drive element might be worth rescuing, since it represented more information than hundreds of sacks of defaced paper. Now here it was, waiting for surgery. Everything else, my false starts, abandoned projects, drafts, proofs, corrected typescripts, had been sorted, listed, entombed.