Miracles of Life

by James Graham Ballard

  Despite my efforts to fit in, I think I was a bit of a misfit at school, an over-aggressive tennis player who would throw a game so that I could slip away to see the latest French film at the Arts Cinema. I was introverted but physically strong, and knew from my wartime experience that most people will back away if faced with a determined threat. One of my classmates called me an ‘intellectual thug’, not entirely a compliment, and my years in Lunghua had probably given me a tendency to watch other boys’ plates in the dining hall. I was also prone to backing up an argument about existentialism with a raised fist.

  I had a few close friends, an Anglo-Indian boy who went up to Trinity a year ahead of me to study medicine, and an American exchange student. There was also a boy called Frank who was an Auschwitz survivor and had his number prominently tattooed on his arm. He was adopted after the war by an émigré Cambridge physicist and his wife, and attended The Leys as a day boy. To begin with he spoke no English, but he was well-liked. I was drawn to all of them because they were foreigners, but when my parents returned from Shanghai on a visit, my mother stepping from their new Buick, dressed in the latest New York fashions, I thought rather critically of how un-English they seemed. I knew, as I thought this, that it marked how English I was becoming, despite all my efforts. The camouflage always imitates the target.

  In the Upper VIth I passed the King’s College entrance examination and met the admissions tutor. I had applied to read psychology, but at the time psychology was not an independent faculty at Cambridge, and he told me that I would have to read philosophy, which contained a small element of psychology within it. ‘What do you want to do when you graduate?’ he asked me. When I said that I was really interested in psychiatry, he told me that I would need a medical degree. I was interested in medicine, which seemed to abut abnormal psychology and surrealism, so I agreed there and then, perhaps not the wisest decision in the long term. My parents, naturally, were delighted. In October 1949 I moved half a mile down Trumpington Street to King’s, and began my study of anatomy, physiology and pathology.

  As I left The Leys for the last time, entering the world as an adult, I felt more confident about the future than I had at any time since arriving in England. In the last two years at school I had read a great deal, endlessly experimented with my short stories, which were becoming steadily more unreadable, and through my study of biology had even found a strain of scientific mysticism in my imagination. I was happy with the prospect of becoming a psychiatrist, and knew that I already had my first patient – myself. I was well aware that my reasons for studying medicine were strongly influenced by my memories of wartime Shanghai, and by the horrors of the European war exposed at the Nuremberg trials. The dead Chinese I had seen as a boy still lay in their ditches within my mind, an ugly mystery that needed to be solved.

  The faith in reason and rationality that dominated postwar thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry was as much with the sane as the insane.

  My last act at The Leys, in the week before I left, took place in the basement kitchen in North B house, when I skinned and then boiled a rabbit. I was determined to expose the skeleton, wire it together and use it as a combined mascot and table ornament. I filled the entire building with steam and a disagreeably potent stench. The housemaster came down to stop me, but backed off when he saw that I was on an intense mission of my own. Why the rabbit skeleton was so important I can’t remember.

  * * *

  Shanghai was still very close to me, and the American airbases that surrounded Cambridge were a constant reminder, as were the American airmen who visited the pubs and cinemas with their English girlfriends. I was strongly drawn to flight, and could still see the B-29s sailing slowly over Lunghua, releasing their coloured parachutes like toys thrown to desperate children. I once climbed through the fence around a British airfield and crept into one of the parking bays protected by an earth embankment. Security was lax, and none of the service crews was around. There was a four-engined bomber with a tricycle landing gear – probably a Liberator – and I swung myself through the open ventral hatchway, and sat surrounded by the clutter of equipment inside the cockpit.

  Today I would have been arrested, held in a child remand centre, examined by psychologists, sent to a juvenile court, and generally made to feel like a dysfunctional and even dangerous member of society. In fact, I had touched nothing and damaged nothing, and merely gazed through a small window into a dream. I might think that England was deeply repressed and ready to be laid on the analyst’s couch, but I was well aware of my own flaws. I liked to think I was rootless, but I was probably as English as anyone could be, and being rootless was anyway a huge handicap. I was drawing a curtain over my past life, accepting that I would never go back to Shanghai and would have to make a new life in England, with all that this entailed.

  12

  Cambridge Blues (1949)

  Unlike most undergraduates – never ‘students’, one of countless minor anachronisms – I knew Cambridge well when I first went up to King’s. I knew the coffee shops and bookshops, I had punted on the Cam, I knew several of the colleges well, especially Trinity, I had been to the tea dances at the Dorothy, the Arts Cinema and the film society, where I had seen all the pre-war classics such as The Seashell and the Clergyman, and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou and L’ge d’Or.

  This had advantages and drawbacks. There was never any chance that I would be ‘smitten’ by the visual impact of the colleges, the Gothic presence of King’s chapel, the beauty of the Backs. I went on having my hair cut at the same barbers, I bought my shoes at the same shoe shops. Had I seen Cambridge for the first time in 1949, I might have taken more from it. In a sense I was ready to leave as soon as I arrived, not the best arrangement.

  On the other hand, I could concentrate on the important aspects of Cambridge – the medical and science faculties – and ignore anything connected with ‘heritage’ Cambridge, which has mesmerised generations of parents, who have sacrificed so much energy and ambition into getting their children between those sacred Gothic walls. This has long been one of the most wasteful forms of English snobbery. I firmly believe that Oxford and Cambridge should be graduate universities only, at one stroke killing off this absurd status race, and at the same time benefiting all other universities.

  In reality there are two Cambridges, the faculties on the one hand – history, physics, archaeology and so on – where research, lectures and laboratory work take place, and the colleges, which are residential clubs that provide poor food, a small amount of often poor teaching and the bulk of the myths about the Cambridge lifestyle. I was very happy with the first, and bored stiff by the latter.

  I spent my two years studying anatomy, physiology and pathology. The tuition I received was superb, the lectures lucid and intelligent, and the anatomy demonstrators who regularly tested us were all qualified physicians specialising in surgery. Anatomy involved the extended dissection of the five parts into which the human body was divided. Physiology and pathology largely consisted of examining slides through the microscope, but anatomy was a process entirely initiated by the student, and demanded hours of patient application. The dissecting room was the gravitational centre of all medical study. If nothing else was going on we would go to the DR, put on our white coats, take our particular body part – the leg, arm or head-and-neck we were dissecting, and start work alongside our Cunningham dissection manuals (never Gray’s), whose pages would soon be stained with human fat.

  Before our first visit to the DR we were welcomed by Professor Harris, the head of the anatomy school. He was an inspirational lecturer, the child o
f a modest Welsh family too poor to send their children to university. Harris and his brother were both determined to become doctors, so the younger brother worked for six years to support the older and pay his medical school fees until he qualified. He in turn supported his younger brother for a further six years until both had gained their degrees. In his wide-ranging lectures Harris made clear his belief in the noble calling of medicine, with anatomy at its heart, and I never for a moment doubted him.

  At the end of his opening lecture Harris warned that a small number of us would be unable to cope with the sight of the cadavers waiting for dissection on the glass-topped tables. Walking into that strange, low-ceilinged chamber, halfway between a nightclub and an abattoir, was an unnerving experience. The cadavers, greenish-yellow with formaldehyde, lay naked on their backs, their skins covered with scars and contusions, and seemed barely human, as if they had just been taken down from a Grünewald Crucifixion. Several students in my group dropped out, unable to cope with the sight of their first dead bodies, but in many ways the experience of dissection was just as overwhelming for me.

  Nearly sixty years later, I still think that my two years of anatomy were among the most important of my life, and helped to frame a large part of my imagination. Both before and during the war in Shanghai I had seen a great many corpses, some at very close quarters, and like everyone else I had neutralised my emotional response by telling myself: ‘This is grim, but sadly part of life.’ I assume that police, firemen, paramedics, doctors and nurses react in the same way. But they, at least, are absolved from any sense of guilt or responsibility. Even as a child in Shanghai I knew that something was wrong. Most of the corpses I saw, even (indirectly) the famine and disease victims, had been killed by someone else, and childishly I felt that I was partly responsible.

  Now, in 1949, only a few years later, I was dissecting dead human beings, paring back the layers of skin and fat to reach the muscles below, then separating these to reveal the nerves and blood vessels. In a way I was conducting my own autopsy on all those dead Chinese I had seen lying by the roadside as I set off for school. I was carrying out a kind of emotional and even moral investigation into my own past while discovering the vast and mysterious world of the human body.

  Each term we would begin work on a new cadaver, five teams of two students dissecting a body part. A team would separate its part from the cadaver, and continue the term’s dissection on its own. When the DR was closed we would leave our parts in one of the large wooden cabinets – one cabinet filled with heads, another with legs, and so on. Looking at the heaped faces with their exposed teeth, it was difficult not to think of the newsreels of Belsen and Dachau that were still being shown in cinemas when fresh accounts of Nazi atrocities came to light.

  In 1949 most of the cadavers in the DR were those of doctors who had willed their bodies for dissection to the next generation of medical students. This selfless act was a remarkable tribute to the spirit of these dead doctors, who knew that they would be reduced at the end of the term to a clutch of bones and gristle tagged for the incinerator. Once, searching for the senior laboratory assistant, I strayed into the preparation room beyond the DR on the last day of term, and found a large table set with a dozen metal platters, each bearing its tagged remains of the doctors who had bequeathed their bodies, a mysterious banquet in which I had taken part. I felt, and still feel, that in a sense they had transcended death, if only briefly, living on as the last breath of their identities emerged between the fingers of the students dissecting them.

  Although they were identified only by number, each of the cadavers seemed to have a distinct personality – the girth and general physique, the profile bones of the face coming through the skin and reasserting themselves, the scars and blemishes, odd anomalies such as extra nipples and toes, residues of operations, tattoos, inexplicable blemishes, the story of a lifetime written into the skin, especially of the hands and face. Dissecting the face, revealing the layers of muscles and nerves that generated expressions and emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these dead physicians and almost of bringing them back to life.

  There was one female cadaver, a strong-jawed woman of late middle age, whose bald head shone brightly under the lights. Most of the male medical students gave her a wide berth. None of us had seen a naked woman of our mothers’ age, alive or dead, and there was a certain authority in her face, perhaps that of a senior gynaecologist or GP. I was drawn to her, though not for the obvious sexual reasons; her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue on her chest, and many of the students assumed she was male. But I was intrigued by the small scars on her arms, the calluses on her hands she had probably carried from childhood, and tried to reconstruct the life she had led, the long years as a medical student, her first affairs, marriage and children. One day I found her dissected head in the locker among the other heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were like the pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be reshuffled into another life.

  And all the while, in a wooden box under my bed at King’s, slept the bones of a small Asian farmer who had once planted rice, smoked his pipe in the evenings and watched his grandchildren grow. After his death his body had been boiled down to the white sticks that were sold on to an English medical student who had once boiled a rabbit to its bones. His skeleton, in the same pine box, has probably guided generations of Cambridge students, who have sat at their desks and explored his ribs and pelvis, feeling the bony points of his skull as if assembling the armature of a soul. Patiently, he has lived on.

  My years in the dissection room were important because they taught me that though death was the end, the human imagination and the human spirit could triumph over our own dissolution. In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century. Or it may be that my two years in the dissecting room were an unconscious way of keeping Shanghai alive by other means.

  At all events, by the time I completed the anatomy course I had really completed my time at Cambridge. It had supplied me with a huge stock of memories, of mysterious feelings for the dead doctors who in a sense had come to my aid, and with a vast fund of anatomical metaphors that would thread through all my fiction. The hours in the dissecting room were backed up by the anatomy lectures and the time I spent reading in the anatomy library, where I became friends with an émigré Pole who was an assistant librarian, had served in the Polish Army and escaped to the West through Iraq.

  By comparison, college life seemed like a quaint and overly folkloric pageant. Where the Cambridge science faculties (Rutherford and the Cavendish, Crick/Watson and DNA, Sanger and so on) were powerfully oriented towards the future, the Cambridge colleges looked back to the past. King’s was dominated by its chapel and the musical events that surrounded it. The provost was a classicist, a pantomime parody of the eccentric don. In the dining hall we listened to a long Latin grace that I still know by heart, and sat on benches to eat execrable meals, wearing gowns after dusk and being overseen in the streets of Cambridge by a proctor and his bulldogs (his bowler-hatted aides). We had to be back in college by ten, or perhaps earlier. The colleges may have begun as religious foundations, but they had evolved into bizarre public schools with the boys played by adults and the masters by overgrown boys. The French and American students I knew were mystified by it all. I found it rather sad and all too typical of England at the time.

  A drawback of the collegiate system is that it is difficult to make close friends in other colleges. There were no more than nine or ten medical students at King’s across all three years, and I was forced to find friends who were reading other subjects. One Kingsman I knew was Simon Raven, whom I would meet in the Copper Kettle after dinner. He told me many years later that he thoroughly
enjoyed his time at King’s. But he was actively homosexual, and King’s was an openly homosexual college, famously home to Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster, with close connections to the painter Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group. A few years earlier a number of its dons had come very near to being prosecuted for offences against the little troupe of choirboys (in miniature top hats and bum-freezer jackets) who arrived in a crocodile every day from the King’s choir school. The complaining parents who threatened to go to the police were said to have been paid for their silence from the deep King’s coffers.

  The ethos of the college was homosexual, and a heterosexual like myself who brought in his girlfriends (mostly Addenbrooke’s Hospital nurses and free-livers all) was viewed as letting the side down, as well as having made a curious choice in the first place. This was an era when most public schoolboys met no women for the first twenty years of their lives other than the school matron and their mothers, with the result that women in general remained forever in a dead perceptual zone (like vertical stripes to kittens only allowed to see horizontal stripes). I have known women married to unresponsive men they suspected of being repressed homosexuals, but most were probably victims of a special kind of English deprivation.

  Otherwise, I enjoyed myself like other students, punting on the river, playing tennis, writing short stories, getting drunk with the Addenbrooke’s nurses, who generously provided me with an education not even the dissecting room could match. They were interesting young women, some with remarkably rackety lives (the syringes in the bedside table drawer?) and I liked them all.