So, the writer
J.G. Ballard died the other day. He was 78 and had been fighting cancer for a few years.
I’d call myself a big fan of his, though he was in fact gigantically prolific and I really only know a small fraction of his work. But what I do know I know well and love: the novels The Crystal World, Concrete Island, Running Wild, High Rise, and a number of short stories I’ve read in various anthologies, but especially the two great novels The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash. I’ve had a copy of Cocaine Nights for years (someone left a set of uncorrected bound galleys at Nada for some reason) but have only now started to read it, and am quite liking it as well. But actually I’ve been most often jumping around between all of the favorite works mentioned for the last few days, reading favorite bits and pieces of each from one, then jumping to another, back and forth, over and over. They all kind of become one work, in any case . . .
Crash was also, of course, made into a fine film by David Cronenberg that does a pretty damned good job of getting the story across onscreen, though it still can’t capture the real essence of the book, which is contained as much in Ballard’s narrative voice as in the plot (a film that got that voice completely would actually be – as Cronenberg once said an accurate film of Naked Lunch would be – banned in every country on Earth). Cronenberg may be a hair, just a hair, too sane (would you believe?) to really get the feel of Ballard. As a fan of the book, I also had distinct pictures in my head of what most of the characters looked and felt like, and while most of the casting was acceptable to my dreams of them, I just couldn’t see Elias Koteas, good as he is, as the hoodlum scientist Vaughan, who I had always pictured more as a scarred-up and badly plastic-surgeried Harlan Ellison, circa 1974, in leathers and denim.
I’m told that Jonathan Weiss made an excellent film of The Atrocity Exhibition. I have a copy of the screenplay, and it is a surprisingly good adaptation of a seemingly unadaptable novel. Oddly, I got the screenplay long before the film was made, or at least released, hanging out at Bar Bob on Eldridge Street sometime in 1994 or so, when it was still an “art bar,” and winding up in conversation with a stranger at the bar, which wound up turning to the subject of Ballard. He mentioned he was working in some capacity on this film that was being made of Atrocity ( a dubious proposition, it seemed to me), and left the bar to run to his nearby apartment and return with a copy of the script, which he gave to me. There seemed to be some implication that maybe I would want to work on the film in some capacity, but it was never stated and I had no opening to suggest it myself (it was all very Ballardian; it felt like a seduction of one kind or another, of me – not especially a sexual one – and I was blowing it). So I just wound up with a fine screenplay on my shelf for a few years, which I was actually surprised to find got made, though I still haven’t seen the final film.
Of course, the biggest film made of a Ballard book was Spielberg’s adaptation of his memoir-in-the-form-of-a-novel, Empire of the Sun, about JGB’s experiences in Shanghai as a child during the Japanese occupation. An almost-excellent film, horribly scarred by a maudlin and destructive John Williams score that screams at you what you are “supposed to be feeling” during the high emotional points and thus destroys any real feeling that might be occurring (a continued problem with Spielberg’s “serious” films – the horrible Williams scores that massively damage not only Empire but also Amistad and Saving Private Ryan -- I’d say that Williams should stick only to action, which he’s great at, but for some reason he does just fine by Spielberg on Schindler’s List and Munich, so I dunno . . .). Despite that score, the film succeeds, mainly because of the amazing performance of Christian Bale, still a child, but definitely not giving a “child actor” performance.
Ballard was quite happy with all three adaptations of his work, so he was a rather lucky author in that regard (not a lot of great or even really-good books work well onscreen; JGB’s prose was rather “cinematic” – he was a movie-lover, though I don’t seem to share his tastes too much – so that may have helped). Maybe someday someone will finally get to making a film of his intensely cinematic novel High Rise.
If anyone wanted a good intro to Ballard, I’d suggest above all issue #8/9 of RE/SEARCH, the magazine in book form that Andrea Juno and V. Vale used to put out, which was an entire JGB overview issue, containing interviews with and about Ballard, short fiction, novel excerpts, non-fiction, and – perhaps most valuably – his collages-as-short-stories (or perhaps short-stories-as-collages), some of which were published (as advertisements) in the magazine AMBIT, others intended to be “published” as billboards on English highways (unfortunately, this never happened). A rich collection of Ballard that can serve equally well as intro to the newcomer, and treasury for the fan.
There is plenty of other info about the man and his work, and tributes to him, at the Ballardian website.
The RE/SEARCH issue also includes, as a postscript, JGB’s response to a 1984 request from a French magazine to state “what he believed.” I don’t necessarily agree with all of JGB’s expressed beliefs (and I’d be surprised if he did much of the time, though I’m sure he did as he typed them), but I find them, like the best of his work, moving, provoking, and inspirational, so I reprint JGB’s “What I Believe” here, below behind the cut, in tribute. Enjoy, if that’s the word . . .
( WHAT I BELIEVE by J.G. Ballard, 1984 )
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