Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (11 page)

Late the next morning we began the drive from Castries to Soufrière. It is the worst main road in St Lucia. We were advised to allow at least two hours for the 29 km journey; it might be quicker, they said, to circumnavigate the entire island. The road meanders and so does the car, as you weave between puddle and pothole. Half an hour and a couple of miles later, we were stopped by a young man who stood carelessly in the middle of the road, flagging us down with some show of condescension, as if this was a duty he must reluctantly discharge. Suddenly his head was in the car. After briefly praising his own skills and credentials, he began to give us a guided tour of our destination. He spoke uninterruptably, like a machine-gun. 'The-trop-i-cal-for-est-it-like-a-bot-an-i-cal-garden-it-have-all-kind-of-spec-i men-there-they-got. . .' I can't tell you how long this seemed to go on for. Gravely hungover from the Street Party, my wife and I stared at each other, thinking of the patio, the plunge pool. 'The-St-Lu-cian-par-rot-does-be-fly-ing-a-bout-all-o-ver-the . . .' Every time I urged the car forward he appeared to wriggle in deeper; by now he was practically sitting on my lap. With bulging eyes he told us of the dangers we faced if we went on to Soufrière without him. Youths would harass us, would chase the car, would try to pass themselves off as guides. In other words, we should hire someone like him: otherwise we would have to hire someone like him - and who could possibly want that?

We didn't, but two hours later I was beginning to wonder. I had another head through the window now (bobbing, panting), telling me the same things. And it made no difference that we were travelling at thirty miles an hour.

The sights got seen in the end, under the auspices of Jeremy, one of the boys from Anse Chastenet. After the Diamond Falls he took us to visit his grandparents. A yard zigzagged by chickens, puppies sleeping on the porch, the timber house steaming from the recent rain. We settled in the good-sized room whose balcony gave on to the valley. Out here, in the heat and the wet, you don't fade into the genderlessness'of white old age; you stay manly or womanly, to the end. 'I am the oldest driver on the island!' announced the grandfather. I speculated. 'You mean you drove the first car?' 'No! There older drivers than me. But they all dead!' The grandmother swayed and nodded. Now she smiled in judicious assent to the proposition that Bob Marley got cancer because he rolled his
ganja
in newspapers. On the wall were greetings cards, a row of cobwebbed paperbacks, an idealised portrait of JFK at the White House. We went back to the car with gifts of oranges and avocado. We left a packet of cigarettes. And of course Jeremy would be getting an extra big tip.

In the eighteenth century France and England played patball with St Lucia. 'Helen of the West Indies' (beautiful, much fought-over) changed hands a record fourteen times until the English won the Battle of the Saints in 1782. The indigenous Caribs were wiped out; African slaves were imported, then contracted labourers from East India, Universal suffrage in 1951, independence in 1979: the dates are shamingly recent. St Lucia is so young that it makes the visitor feel old (and worn, and sinful). Holidaying is easy here, but travel is harder, more accidental. 'A few more jobs, and it be paradise,' said Jeremy. Like Antigua, St Lucia is on the way up. Capitalism looks on and cracks its knuckles. How far do we want it to go?

The sunsets get a mention, but the brochures undersell the Caribbean sky — its thrilling rapidity of change, the way its brushstrokes seem only a corner of some dreadfully vast canvas, the weird vapours of the grey as the rain moves in off the sea. Often it resembles a thermonuclear explosion, caught in a phase of abstract harmlessness. The skies stimulate travel — mental travel. And unlike the island they will always be there.

Departures, 1986

J. G. BALLARD

England's least conventional writer lives his life against type: in a little Shepperton semi, among the sculpted hedges, the parked Escorts, and the neighbouring houses with their fond appellations — Fairview, Gladecourt. Here in the deep innocuousness of garden suburbia, James Graham Ballard, the glazed SF stylist, the counter-cultural adventurer, the poet-technologian of our modern setting, calmly counts out the days. He has always been a vivid exponent of Flaubert's Law: orderly and regular in his life, savage and original in his art.

'What would you like?' he asked me. 'Scotch? Gin? Vodka?' Actually it sounded more like 'Scotch! Gin! Vodka!' Ballard's voice is strongly musical and resonant, every other word vehemently stressed in the cadences of high sarcasm. It is how I remember him. I'd better explain that I have known Jim Ballard, vaguely, for nearly twenty years. A friend of my father's, he would show up fairly often — affable, excitable, and noisy. He still cuts a pleasantly rounded figure, with his loose shirt and flipflops, his panting laugh. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. There was a time when Ballard used to drink all day (a scotch every hour, starting at nine); postponing that first drink until six in the evening was, he says, an epic battle ('It was like the Battle of Stalingrad'). But he can't take it any more, and neither can I. So he brought coffee to the dusty back room.

'What you see here is a vacuum. Until quite recently it was a happy family house. All these French
Crash
-freaks used to come out here to see me, expecting a miasma of child-molestation and drug-abuse.'
(Crash
was a big hit in France, perhaps because of the Baudelairean waywardness of its theme: the sexuality of the road accident.) 'What they found was a suburban house full of kids and their friends, with a big dog, and me writing a short story in the middle of it all.' Ballard's wife died of pneumonia twenty years ago 'almost to the day', suddenly and bafflingly, during a family holiday in Spain. He raised the three children himself. They're grown up now, all of them thriving professionals. One imagines Ballard as a profoundly tolerant and pragmatic father. None of his children has read a word of his stuff, which delights him. 'No! None of them! Not a
word.
Why should they? They know me well enough as it is. It's a very intimate experience, reading a book. You're as close as you get to anyone - except in bed. No, closer.'

Ballard has already had an unprecedented success with his new novel,
Empire of the Sun,
and now his life is suddenly open to change. That success has been long delayed, and fully deserved; but Ballard doubts whether he can be bothered to gentrify himself at this stage. 'It's very difficult to remythologise one's life. You tell yourself these tales of gold, to sustain yourself, to inspire this one-man team. You need a new set of dreams, landscapes, forests. And what happens? I just sit with a whisky and soda, watching
The Rockford Files.'

It is a fairly routine irony that
Empire,
as he calls it, is in some ways the most conventional novel that J.G. Ballard has ever produced. Based on his childhood experience as a detainee in Shanghai, it is a survival story, harshly naturalistic, with little of the wicked spin that Ballard usually imparts to time and space. And yet it is also thoroughly Ballardian, a drama of extremity and isolation played out against an 'inverted landscape' which, for all its terror, attracts and compels the actors who move within it.
Empire of the Sun
uses the familiar abstract imagery, the unmistakable lilts ('The Abandoned Aerodrome', 'The Cemetery Garden', 'The Terrible City' are typical chapter headings), and the childlike amorality we find in all Ballard's work. Vanished, ruined, forgotten, disused, drowned, drained — these are the key-words of his lexicon; it is as if, in his landscapes, human life has gone, passed through, absented itself, leaving only icons and totems for the next wanderers to interpret. The new novel shines a light back through Ballard's entire corpus, and in the end the circle is satisfyingly complete. The trauma of Shanghai determined his course as a writer. And now, in
Empire of the Sun,
he gives shape to what shaped him.

'How closely does the book follow your own experience?' I asked him. 'This is what everyone will want to know.'

'Ah, God. Well look. I'm the same age as my hero, I was born in Shanghai as he was, lived in that big house as he did. I
was
interned in that camp but I wasn't separated from my parents - as Jim is in the book. The vast body of Jim's experiences are invented, though psychologically true. You fictionalise to reach the truth . . . I've always wanted to write a book about the war and I've always put it off. Oh, I'll do it
next.
Three years ago I reached fifty and felt that the memory might begin to fade. Originally I took it for granted that I would have an adult central character. A doctor, something of this sort. But I couldn't get into the book, nothing came alive, despite the big emotional charge that was waiting, ready to go off, inside my head. Then I thought, what about a thirteen-year-old, someone my age? And — boom! — the cannon went off. I knew it was the only way I could write it. Because of course I don't have the benefit of hindsight. I have no adult response to that experience and couldn't imagine one.'

Later, when I replayed the tape of this interview, Ballard's voice was eerily underscored by two distinct sound-effects: the premonitory surge of airliners as they banked for Heathrow; and the poppings and squawkings of Ballard's swivel chair. He writhed as he talked, partly through natural restiveness, and partly through the difficulty of recalling these times. The memories cannot be assimilated, or purged.

'In the book, I played it all
down.
The beating to death of the rickshaw coolie, for instance — I wasn't a hundred yards away when that happened, I was ten feet away. No, they were very violent times. Executions, public stranglings, disbanded puppet soldiers wandering about, starving armies. You'd have to go to Uganda during the last days of Idi Amin, or the Congo during the civil war, or Cambodia, perhaps, to get some idea of what life was like for the ordinary Chinese. Shanghai was a huge city. Anything could happen. If you fainted in the street from hunger or illness . . . you just died where you lay. When I went to school every morning

— with chauffeur and governess, to prevent kidnap attempts

— I would see a body every two hundred yards. They were just lying all over the place. People brought up in the social democracies of Western Europe have no idea of this kind of savagery. No they don't, actually, and it's a good thing that they don't.'

In 1946, aged fifteen, Ballard sailed to the exotic land that he had only heard and read about: England. 'The culture shock is still with me,' he says. 'I was genuinely stunned. I wasn't prepared for the latitude. The angle of the light, almost as much as the ambient temperature, plays a vital part in one's responses, as if one has a sextant in one's head. I wasn't prepared for the greyness, the harshness of the light, the small, exhausted, shattered community, the white faces, the closed nature of English life. I wasn't prepared for the "furniture" of England. I remember looking down from the ship at Southampton, seeing the little houses and these black perambulators like mobile coal-scuttles. These were English
cars.
I was used to Packards and Cadillacs. It flummoxed me to think that people drove
around
in these things.'

He lived with his grandparents and attended the Lees School in Cambridge — 'just like the camp, only the food was worse'. His mother returned to Shanghai to rejoin her husband, who had stayed on. In 1949 Ballard Sr was put on trial for infringements of the revolutionary code. 'But he knew his Marx and Engels, and talked his way out of it.' Soon afterwards the Ballards returned to England for good. 'They were drained by their experience in the camp. Their view of it was much more sombre than mine. They didn't want to talk about it. Fortunately my sister remembers nothing. She was just too young.'

And so began Ballard's worldly 'career'. But of course he was one of life's surrealists — a natural misfit. He read medicine at King's College, Cambridge. He was interested in Freud, Sartre, Camus: 'My fellow undergraduates hadn't heard of them. Neither had the
dons.'
Thrown out of King's, he read English at London. Thrown out of London, he became a trainee pilot in the RCAF. Thrown out of the RCAF, he ... 'The only thing I wasn't thrown out of was advertising. After I'd been in advertising for a while, I suddenly realised that I hadn't been thrown out of it.' What did this tell him about advertising? 'It told me
run don't walk.
I threw myself out.'

In 1955 Ballard stopped reading SF and started writing it. His early, 'hard' SF stories were as brilliantly imagined and executed as anything in the genre - but it soon became clear that Ballard was
sui generis,
and that SF wouldn't hold him for long. His galaxy was the planet Earth, his terrain that of
'inner
space'. During a three-week summer holiday he wrote
The Wind from Nowhere.
In this novel, since disowned by its author, a global hurricane accelerates until the atmosphere consists of a lateral avalanche. Established as a full-time writer, Ballard proceeded, in his next three books, to subject the planet to death by water, dehydration and mineralisation, but these were
psychological
disaster stories, their landscapes internal as well as actual. At the end of
The Drowned World
the hero heads south, to embrace the terminal heat and insanity of the swamped jungles. 'The American publisher said, "We have a problem with the ending. It's too negative. Couldn't we have him heading
north?"
But it's a
happy
ending. South is where he
wants
to go. Further. Deeper. South!'

The vein of tranced perversity in Ballard's writing found its limits in the late Sixties and early Seventies, with his hard-edge, concrete-and-steel period, an exploration of high-tech atavism, of wound-profiles and sex-deaths, neatly summed up in the first title of the phase,
The Atrocity Exhibition. Highrise
begins as follows: 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events . . .' The first editor who read
Crash
said in her report: 'The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.' Ballard was thrilled. 'To me this meant total artistic success. Actually, even I was rather startled when I saw the proofs. But the pornography was used for serious purposes — cautionary purposes.'