London Calling (51 page)

Doris Lessing remembered being taken to the White Horse and described it in volume two of her memoirs:

There was a room full of bespectacled lean men who turned as one to look warily at me – a
masculine
atmosphere… this was a clan, a group, a family, but without women… What they were was defensive: this was because they had
been so thoroughly rejected by the literary world. They had the facetiousness, the jokiness of their defensiveness… My disappointment
with what I thought of as a dull group of people, suburban, provincial, was my fault. In that prosaic room, in that very ordinary
pub, was going on the most advanced thinking in this country.
³

She points out that the Astronomer Royal had said it was ridiculous to think that we would ever send men to the moon whereas
these people were talking about rocket science, satellite communications systems and space exploration.

The tradition of regular surgeries with the readers continued under Moorcock’s editorship, only with a change of venue. On
the first Thursday of each month a group of grumpy disillusioned readers would gather at the Globe in Holborn and tell Moorcock
how terrible the new writing was (Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, John Sladek, Thomas Disch and Norman Spinrad; the ‘new wave’ in
science fiction), often causing him to get drunk and abuse them. Moorcock dropped ‘Science Fiction’ from the magazine’s title.

It was Moorcock who created the most enduring underground character in modern fiction: Jerry Cornelius, who was to star in
The Final Programme
(1969),
A Cure for Cancer
(1971),
The English Assassin
(1972) and
The Condition of Muzak
, and four subsequent titles as well as becoming the hero of stories by Aldiss, Spinrad, James Sallis, M. John Harrison and
others. Moorcock and his character became both an inspiration to other writers and a profound influence on the Notting Hill
underground rock ’n’ roll scene. Michael Moorcock:

Jerry Cornelius began as a version of Elric of Melniboné, when, in late 1964, I was casting around for a means of dealing
with what I regarded as the ‘hot’ subject matter of my own time – stuff associated with scientific advance, social change,
the mythology of the mid-twentieth century. Since Elric was a ‘myth’ character I decided to try and write his first stories
in twentieth century terms.
⁴

He wrote the first draft of
The Final Programme
in ten days in January 1965. For the narrative he rewrote his first two Elric stories, ‘The Dreaming City’ and ‘While the
Gods Laugh’, but stylistically it was very different: ‘I borrowed as much from the Hammett school of thriller fiction as I
borrowed from SF and I think I found my own “voice” as a writer.’

Jerry is a long-haired, underground James Bond, knowledgeable about weapons and fast cars, constantly travelling to exotic
places, a jack-the-lad who moves among spies and ‘dolly birds’, a cockney chancer with a bit of Ronnie Kray thrown in, whose
mother still lives in squalor in Ladbroke Grove. Neil Spencer reviewing the
Condition of Muzak
, described him as ‘beautiful, ageless, bisexual, multi-talented, murderous, drug-sodden, an eternal adolescent who is privy
to the secrets of time-travel and semi-immortality’.
⁵
The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius
, a cartoon strip drawn by Moorcock’s friend Mal Dean, appeared in
IT
(Cornelius looked remarkably like Mal Dean in the drawings). After Moorcock had first introduced the character in
IT
58
⁶
he let his character roam free for months with the words written by friends of Moorcock such as M. John Harrison and Richard
Glyn Jones. But before Moorcock hit his stride with Cornelius, his colleague Jim Ballard had been exploring a landscape largely
unknown to writers.

In the early sixties Ballard began investigating a new terrain: he marked out the desolate semi-industrial suburbs for his
own. He became a psycho-geographer of the deserted industrial estate, the slip roads leading to the motorway, the cracked
concrete and overgrown runways of wartime Battle of Britain aerodromes, the between-wars stucco villas, front gardens seized
in road-widening schemes, now just metres from the busy expressway, decaying warehouses, empty car parks, the bleak rainswept
vistas of the roads around Heathrow airport. He lived in Shepperton, in the middle of such a landscape, but the imagery had
been with him since his childhood in Shanghai. He told Charles Platt a childhood memory of visiting his best friend, a little
boy called Patrick Mulvaney who lived in an apartment block in the French concession:

I remember going there and suddenly finding that the building was totally empty, and wandering round all those empty flats
with the furniture still in place, total silence, just the odd window swinging in the wind… it’s difficult to identify exactly
the impact of that kind of thing. I mean, all those drained swimming pools that I write about in my fiction were there.
⁷

They had all left, presumably to escape from the Japanese. He was not so lucky and lived in an internment camp throughout
the war, arriving in
Britain in 1946 at the age of sixteen, to a landscape of bombed buildings overgrown by weeds, shabby houses and a beaten-down,
depressed population.

Recognizing that the traditional form of the nineteenth-century novel was no longer relevant, he began to experiment. At one
point he became so disillusioned with modern fiction that he told Vale at
RE/Search
magazine: ‘It’s just not necessary to read anybody except William Burroughs and Genet.’
⁸
His breakthrough came with
The Terminal Beach
in 1964, the memories and unsettling dreams of a bomber pilot, stranded alone on an abandoned Pacific island which had been
used to test fire an H-bomb. A series of long panoramic shots and flashbacks marked a new beginning for him. Then the June
1966 issue of
New Worlds
printed the first of what he called his ‘condensed novels’, ‘You:Coma:Marilyn Monroe’, where the story was reduced to a series
of images, a mood, a landscape made up a collage of advertising, Hollywood and media images, entirely lacking in narrative,
character development or any of the usual elements of fiction writing. Fifteen of these were collected as
The Atrocity Exhibition
(called
Love and Napalm: Export USA
in the States). As a collection they were like a cubist montage, relating subtly to each other, building up a powerful series
of disquieting images. Ballard told John Platt:

It was very much a product of all those dislocations and communication overlays that ran through everything from 1965 to 1970.
We’ve moved from a period of high excitement to low excitement and its very hard for people who are younger to realise just
how flat life is today, and how pedestrian are people’s concerns.
⁹

He published mostly in
New World
and the literary magazine
Ambit
, where he could do anything he liked. With the advent of the underground press, he took advantage of their radical stance
on freedom of the press and published ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ in
IT
(reprinted in
Atrocity Exhibition
). When the second-rate actor, Ronald Reagan, became Governor of California in 1967, Ballard had the prescience to realize
how significant this was and used his analysis of the influence of Hollywood and the mass media in politics in the USA to
accurately predict that Reagan would become a future president of the USA. Thirteen years later Ballard was proved right.
Amusingly his text was reprinted as a serious-looking leaflet bearing the official seal of the Republican Party headed ‘Official
Republican 1980 Presidential Survey’ and distributed at the Republican Nominating Convention in 1980, when Reagan was selected
as the presidential contender. Situationists were thought to be the guilty party. Even
Newsweek
was concerned by the direction politics was
taking: ‘increasingly our politics has become the politics of impersonation… the marketing of sheer illusions… the sitcom
politics everyone so enjoys. Cliché that it is by now, it is surely no accident that an accomplished actor sits in the White
House.’
¹⁰

Ballard caused further confusion with a series of advertisements he placed in
Ambit
,
New Worlds
,
Ark
– the magazine of the Royal College of Art – and some European alternative magazines. He did the artwork himself, arranged
for blocks to be made (the days before offset litho), then delivered the block to the magazine as any commercial advertiser
would. They looked just like regular ads, perfectly in place with their surroundings, until you tried to figure out what exactly
they were advertising. Ballard:

Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial
advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the
project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was, and still am, prose editor.
¹¹

He would have liked to have placed ads in
Vogue
and
Newsweek
, but the high cost prevented him. An application for a grant from the Arts Council for the purpose was rejected. Several
of the ads featured his girlfriend Claire Churchill. One showed a closeup of a photograph of her face by John Blomfield with
copy reading:

HOMAGE TO CLAIRE CHURCHILL, abraham Zapruder and ralph nader. At what point does the plane of intersection of these eyes generate
a valid image of the simulated auto-disaster, the alternate deaths of Dealey plaza and the Mekong Delta. The first of a series
advertising (1) Claire Churchill; (2) The angle between two walls; (3) A neuralinterval; (4) The left axillaray fossa of princess
Margaret; (5) The transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader. A J. G. Ballard production.
¹²

In this way he used the most immediate and sophisticated method of communication of the time to get his message across. He
began finding sources outside literature. He took a description of a facelift word for word from a textbook of cosmetic surgery,
except that he made it all happen to Princess Margaret instead of the textbook patient. It was published in
New Worlds
199
¹³
as ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’. For a piece called ‘The Side Effects of Orthonovin G’ he used promotional literature sent
by a company manufacturing birth control pills to Dr Martin Bax, who as well as being a GP was the editor and publisher of
Ambit
magazine. These consisted of
autobiographical pieces by women who used their product. One was by an American woman, settled in London, and described her
efforts to make friends by studying English football. The other was by a woman who lived in a sexually open relationship with
her husband: ‘We have a very independent and honest relationship with a sexual code that is flexible and permissive.’ Ballard
used these texts for a reading to the students at the Kingston Polytechnic organized by Martin Bax. Instead of Ballard reading
them himself, they were performed by a friend of theirs, a beautiful, tall Trinidadian stripper called Euphoria Bliss. She
looked at the first one and decided she would read it dressed in football boots and shorts. After reading the other text she
told them: ‘I’ll read that
naked
.’ Bax announced the reading: ‘And now Euphoria Bliss is going to read for us J. G. Ballard’s “The Side Effects of Orthonovin
G”.’ Euphoria was seated, wearing a big hat and a green coat. She approached the microphone. Martin Bax stood behind her and
helped her off with the coat. The students fell into an astonished silence as she read the peculiar found text. Afterwards
she sat down, still naked, and asked Ballard and Bax if she had looked good. They agreed that she had.
¹⁴

When Ballard was researching his book
Crash!
, there was one book that provided particular inspiration to him. Jacob Kulowski’s
Crash Injuries: The Integrated Medical Aspects of Automobile Injuries and Deaths
, a 1960 American medical textbook filled with gruesome photographs of car crash victims, categorized by car maker, which
compared the injuries sustained in a roll-over in a 1953 Pontiac with those sustained in a roll-over in a 1953 Chevrolet (in
the days before mandatory seat-belts). Ballard:

Upon viewing the photographs in Crash Injuries taken immediately after violent car crashes – all one’s pity goes out to these
tragically mutilated people… But at the same time, one cannot help one’s imagination being touched by these people who, if
at enormous price, have nonetheless broken through the skin of reality and convention around us… and who have in a sense achieved
– become – mythological beings in a way that is only attainable through these brutal and violent acts.

In this way Ballard parallels Andy Warhol’s fascination for the victims of everyday violence: the huge canvases in Warhol’s
Car Crash
series are a visual counterpoint to Ballard’s
Crash!

Ballard also shares this sensibility with Francis Bacon, who was very influenced by a medical textbook of coloured illustrations
of diseases of the mouth. In the case of all three artists, the violent face of everyday life is
revealed more or less without comment. Ballard: ‘My fiction really
is
investigative, exploratory, and comes to no moral conclusions whatever. Crash! is a clear case of that; so is Atrocity Exhibition.’
¹⁵

Ballard used the car not only as a sexual image but as a metaphor to stand for humanity’s role in present-day society. This
gave the book a political meaning in addition to its sexual content but he liked to think that it was the ‘first pornographic
novel based on technology’. Ballard believed that pornography was the most political form of fiction because its subject matter
was manipulation and gender role playing: ‘how we lie and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way’.
¹⁶
Crash!
took on a life of its own, being made into a controversial film by David Cronenberg that was seen as so threatening to the
stability of British life that the
Daily Mail
launched a campaign to prevent it from being released in Britain. Long before that, Ballard had himself proved how unexpectedly
volatile the subject was by exhibiting crashed cars at the New Arts Lab.