There is often an interesting clash between our sense of who a writer is and the self they reveal in private letters or in memoirs. This clash always ultimately resolves itself as part of the process whereby careers end and reputations begin – sometimes, as here, before the writer’s death. JG Ballard reveals stoically at the end of this short autobiography that he is terminally ill with cancer. He has dominated a particular niche at the edges of genre fiction and the experimental to such a degree that it is hard to cope with the realisation that his work will soon be a closed text; that there will be no more that is new from a writer who so often made new and fascinating art.
The stoicism with which Ballard handles mortal sickness is of a piece with the toughness with which he has lived his life and dealt with its crises, and which permeates his emotionally ruthless, innovative, driven fiction. As a boy, he witnessed quite casual atrocities during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and learned that all ideals come to this, a bound man choking in the dirt; as a medical student, he learned the extent to which the human body is meat; as an advertising copywriter, he learned some useful lessons about the manipulation of ideas. Even in personal life, where most of us find some sanctuary, a random infection killed his wife early in the lives of their children.
Ballard’s work is all about getting on with things as they are. The novels of disaster are all about continuity, about finding ways of enduring in the face of hopelessness; his experimental fiction deals in the need to find ways of telling truth in a postmodern world of numbing emotional chaos. Perhaps his two best novels of the real – ‘Crash’ and ‘Empire of the Sun’ – are about both – about bearing the unbearable and giving a true account of it. This last memoir is more of the same, tough and fearless to a point that compels admiration.
