Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  The waitress was a student at a local facility known as The Centre for Suburban Studies. Nobody was required to go anywhere; to walk, roam, or drive to fungal villages growing out into the flatlands around Cambridge. ‘We do it all online,’ she said. ‘Satellite mappings. Google Earth.’

  She sat down, opposite me, there were no supervisors in sight; she reached for my book. Des Femmes Disparaissent. An emotive still: a thin dark man with a gun standing behind a blonde woman (not unlike Janet Leigh). She has hands (which do not look like her own) clenched over her mouth. ‘All French gangster films,’ Durgnat glosses, ‘are unconscious parables for the political scene.’ The man is North African. The woman’s shoulder straps are white.

  ‘You’ve taken his chair. This character I knew.’

  She drained my coffee, rim of froth over a downy moustache.

  ‘He came here, between lectures, for a coffee and a croissant. To work on his book. He said there was no appreciable difference between libraries and cafés. Students only turned up at his classes to eat. They sat in ranks munching burgers as he read from Marc Augé’s meditation on non-places. While they licked their fingers and texted.’

  The creased academic, with his ponytail and black leather jacket, told her that he spent most of his life at the wheel. Two days in Kingston, one in Loughborough. He lived in Brighton. The kids were with the second wife in Liverpool. It was difficult to know if he was in a service station or a new university. Campuses were the garden cities of the motorway, more bars, banks, health centres than any failing county town. Lectures were like extra features on a DVD of travel.

  He no longer wrote, he stared at the river. He asked for his coffee black and thought about taking up smoking again. One day he left the folder behind: nothing but unattributed quotations. ‘Death ceases to be a definite boundary.’ ‘Place becomes a refuge to the habitué of non-places.’ ‘The film made him feel like someone watching a film.’ She kept the John Lewis carrier bag. The man in the leather jacket never came back.

  The Lemon on the Mantelpiece

  Molesey congratulates its Olympic oarsmen: Andy Triggs-Hodge, Tom Jones, Acer Nethercott, Steve Rowbotham. There is a tablet in memory of the ‘world’s first ever manned balloon flight’ by James Sadler in 1785. Green parakeets squawk in innocent apple trees.

  Light rain was misting my spectacles by the time I reached the outskirts of Shepperton. The river path was blocked by a large two-tone Jaguar saloon, white and racing green: XJ MOTOR SERVICES. The upstream settlement has evident twenty-first-century loot, as well as Edwardian weekend villas and chalets. I record a blue plaque to the literary giant they choose to commemorate: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK LIVED HERE, 1823–1866. Modernist white cubes with picture windows animated by reflections of light on water. Natural metaphors for liquidity in a time of recession.

  Before I search out somewhere to sleep, I head for the station. That’s where Ballard met me when I visited him. I never saw the inside of his house. We drove to a riverside pub and sat under whirring fans. I wondered why, after his great success with Empire of the Sun, he didn’t relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-edged properties that were so attractive to the convalescing architects and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last; the where of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast. Times crossword. Desk overlooking a natural garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with World at One on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation: The Rockford Files rather than Kenneth Clark.

  The interior landscape of the suburban semi was a mirage. The more you studied it, the cannier the decision to settle the family in Shepperton, all those years ago, appeared. It was far enough out of London to limit the pests, the time-devourers. When journalists gained access they were mesmerized by the reproduction Delvaux canvases propped on the floor, the aluminium palm tree, the lounger in the front room; dutifully they repeated the standard questions about surrealism and how The Drowned World was saturated in Max Ernst. The house in Old Charlton Road was a premature installation; a stage-set designed to confirm the expectations of awed pilgrims. But it was also a home in which the widowed author brought up three children who are always laughing in family snapshots. A refuge and the generator of some of the most potent myths of our time: one of those myths being Ballard himself, the safe house, the good father.

  Ballard may be the first serious novelist whose oeuvre is most widely represented in books of interviews. And whose future belongs as much in white-walled warehouse galleries as the diminishing shelves of public libraries. He was so generous to those who found his phone number, so direct: he rehearsed polished routines – and always agreed, with unfailing courtesy, that the world was indeed a pale Xerox made in homage to the manifold of his fiction. A late moralist, he practised undeceived reportage, not prophecy: closer to Orwell than H. G. Wells. Closer to Orson Welles than to either. Closer to Hitchcock. Take out the moving figures on staircases that go nowhere and stick with hollow architecture that co-authors subversive drama.

  Spurning critical theory, Ballard joined his near-namesake Baudrillard as the hot topic for air-miles academics. Students who have lost the habit of literature recognize, in the Shepperton master’s forensic prose, intimations of a hybrid form capable of processing autopsy reports and invasion politics into accidental poetry. The incantatory manifesto, ‘What I Believe’, deploys Ballard’s favourite device, the list: as he curates a museum of affinities.

  I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Dürer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

  It was almost dark when I got there, after a street occupied by Indian restaurants, Chinese takeaways, charity and novelty shops. Scenographic maps known as ‘Road Rugs’ were on special offer at £22.95. Petrol pumps and service stations on which to wipe your muddy feet. A close-cropped man, hedge-hopping Old Charlton Road, spotted me as I lined up the shot.

  ‘A writer bloke lives in that house. We’ve been out here twenty-five years. I’ve never set eyes on him, tell the truth. But he’s been on the box.’

  The silver Ford Granada is tilted at a drunken angle, like a sinking cabin cruiser, in the vestigial driveway. The privet hedge has been trimmed, the napkin of lawn made tidy. The Crittall window of the front room is overwhelmed by the sinister fecundity of a yucca. There is a cheerful yellow door with an inset panel of dark glass. The rear elevation is gritty with pebbledash. Perched on the wooden fence is a cut-out Sylvester, the Loony Tunes cat, waiting to pounce.

  It is easy to understand how Ballard, after he lost his driving licence in the 1970s, found everything he required within an hour’s walk, in any direction, out from this house. The ford where Martian invaders from The War of the Worlds crossed the river. Film studios. Reservoirs. Airport perimeter roads. And the footpaths, playgrounds, woods and streams he never felt the need to describe. Territory in which his three children grew up and thrived. That is the particular magic of his final book, Miracles of Life: how, through minimal changes of emphasis, he revises his mythology to give readers the illusion of being guided, at last, close to the heart of the mystery. A mystery which is somehow incarnate in the hidden spaces of the bereaved Shepperton property.

  Even now, when Ballard was removed to the care and comfort of his friend and partner, Claire Walsh, in Shepherd’s Bush, the house seemed possessed by a form of illumination not on stream to the rest of Old Charlton Road: the afterglow of decades of scrupulous composition. The physical effects we impose, in default of sentiment, to compensate for the writer’s troubling absence. Fay, Ballard’s elder daughter, told me that in her childhood the house did indeed stand out from its shrouded neighbours.

  ‘When I wa
s young the lights used to be on the whole time, even on bright summer days. Daddy loved the idea of brightness, intensity, as if we were living in the Med.’

  In too much pain to take the wheel, Ballard returned to the old house with Fay. It was strange now, this installation her father had created from the objects of his private obsessions: Ed Ruscha postcards, Paolozzi silk-screen prints, a lurid corduroy sofa. A domesticated Kurt Schwitters assemblage, in which the writer could actually live and work. Producing the books his daughters did not read.

  ‘I hadn’t visited Shepperton for many years, until the summer of 2008, when Daddy was quite ill,’ Fay said. ‘I remembered a dried-up orange sitting on the mantelpiece in the nursery. I walked through the door and it was still there. I said, “Oh my goodness, you still have the orange.” He looked at me and he said, very quietly, but seriously, “It’s a lemon.” It must have been there for at least forty years. I don’t see the lemon as something eccentric. It’s not a relic. It’s covered in dust. It hasn’t been moved. It’s obviously important to him. And it’s very beautiful.’

  The front room, guarded by the spiky fronds of the yucca, was known, in an echo of colonial times, as the nursery. Fay presented Ballard with the plant, his Triffid-like co-tenant, in 1976; a Christmas present from Marks & Spencer. It was repotted several times and addicted to regular hits of Baby Bio. Fay reckoned that, influenced by the Ballard story ‘Prima Belladonna’, the yucca learnt to sway and sing. The nursery was the family television room, where supper was taken. An unused exercise bike, now a junk sculpture, faced the substantial set.

  Chris Petit, who did make it out here, with a film crew, told me that he felt Ballard was comfortable in this constricted space because it reminded him of the internment camp, in the way that his parents’ Shanghai villa was a translation of Weybridge. Unseen horrors beyond the immaculate lawns and protective screen of trees.

  When international royalties and film rights rolled in, Ballard, modest and circumspect with consumer durables, commissioned copies of two Delvaux paintings destroyed in the Second World War. Brigid Marlin, who undertook this project, wanted to paint a Ballard portrait. He agreed, visiting the artist in her studio in Hemel Hempstead, and inviting her, in return, to recreate the lost works. One of which, The Violation, was placed in his study. Fay remembered how her father loved feeling ‘as if he could walk into the painting and be part of the landscape with these beautiful women’. The propped-up Delvaux stood like a permanently occupied mirror to the left of the author’s desk; with a long window, looking over the undisturbed garden, to the right.

  Ballard was fascinated by technique, craftsmanship. When Fay, herself a painter, became a student of art history, he would discuss the anonymous interior spaces of Francis Bacon compositions and enthuse over the synthetic colours of carpets in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. As a young girl, Fay perched on the corduroy sofa in the study, mesmerized by a Max Ernst poster, The Robing of the Bride, in which the feathered cloak of a naked birdwoman reprised the blood-orange tones of the ridged material on which she was sitting. She trawled through the shelves of reference books: Dali, Warhol, Bacon, Helmut Newton. And other less obvious interests. Reviewing a Stanley Spencer biography in 1991, Ballard proclaimed the Cookham painter as the last representative of an ‘innocent world before the coming of the mass media’. In a gesture of recognition, he said: ‘Small Thames-side towns have a special magic, each an island waiting for its Prospero.’

  Playing along with telephone interrogators, Ballard claimed that, like William Burroughs, he would have preferred to be a painter. Meaning that he lived by the discipline of the studio, infinite variations on a menu of established themes and motifs; that his books were sometimes collaged and cut up like The Atrocity Exhibition, so that degraded scene-of-the-crime photographs were palpable beneath the charged surface. He could move a narrative through time and space by a cataloguing of objects, buildings, machines. Burroughs, in his final period in the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, did indeed become a painter and an elective surrealist, a recorder of dreams. He would tend the cats, pick up his prescription, and blast away at cans of paint. The house, through vanity portraits by visiting celebrities, remembers him.

  ‘Daddy produced two sculptures in the garden,’ Fay said. ‘I was very young, four or five. Sculptures made with milk bottles, chicken wire and concrete, slightly in the style of Henry Moore, but moving towards Paolozzi.’

  The sculptures have vanished. The only record of their existence is a family photograph, taken in the garden, and reproduced in cropped form on the jacket of Miracles of Life. The three children, school-blazered, hair-ribboned, are delighted by something out of shot. Ballard, in dark sweater, white shirt, neat tie, smiles indulgently. Behind the fat cigar dangling from his hand, a minor sculptural intervention can be located: three diminishing Dali mouths stacked one above the other. The cement used in this work was also employed to make a monument for his son’s pet rabbit.

  There were Ballard oil paintings too, much later, with strong primary colours. And painstaking Dali copies undertaken to find how it was done: the bread, the rocks, the clouds. These things have disappeared. But typographical collages, like ransom notes to an alien culture, have survived: the provocative advertisements Ballard made for Dr Martin Bax’s Ambit magazine. The ads display oblique fragments of text against found images. Claire Walsh, Ballard’s conduit to the information superhighway, is presented in these pieces as an early muse. One of the photographs was taken in his Ford Zephyr – he was loyal to Ford – after Claire came close to drowning, when she plunged into the sea in Margate, wearing a coat and wellington boots.

  The younger Ballard had active contacts in the London subterranea of the 1960s. Michael Moorcock, collaborator in mischief, editor of New Worlds, joined him on a whirling carousel that led them towards Burroughs, Borges and Eduardo Paolozzi. But the two writers were never more than tourists on the skirts of the hive at Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room. ‘There were a couple of drunken days around Bacon,’ Moorcock told me, ‘but Jimmy and I tended to make our excuses and leave, because we were really family men and wanted to get home in time to fetch the kids.’

  The Ballard of Brigid Marlin’s portrait is a St Jerome of Shepperton: bare table, pencil and manuscript. He undertook numerous European pilgrimages with Claire Walsh, as they investigated the genius of Velázquez, Goya, Dürer, Manet. ‘He loved Netherlandish art,’ Claire reported, ‘especially Van Eyck.’ In London, on Sunday afternoons, they haunted the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. When I followed in their footsteps, before moving around the corner to the National Portrait Gallery, to search out the Marlin portrait, it was not on display. ‘We’ve left him in the dark,’ the man at the desk said. ‘Much better for preservation. We can only show writers the general public request. Like Jane Austen.’

  I looked for a lemon by Francisco de Zurbarán to represent the decaying object on the nursery mantelpiece. The closest I came was a still life of oranges and walnuts by Luis Meléndez. It wouldn’t do, Ballard was nothing if not precise. He said what he meant and he meant what he said. The lemon, according to Lucia Impelluso, is a potent antidote to poison and a symbol of ‘amorous fidelity’.

  Fools of Nature: To Oxford

  Castle walls: Walter Scott-land buzzed by Heathrow’s oversubscribed flight path. Faith keeps the jumbos up there, faith we no longer have. A silhouette of heritage real estate stamped on a tin tray. This riverside avenue, under ancient trees, from which random plebeians are ruthlessly excluded: Royal Windsor, nemesis of walkers.

  THIS IS A PROTECTED SITE UNDER SECTION 28 OF THE SERIOUS CRIME AND POLICE ACT 2005. TRESPASS ON THIS SITE IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE.

  Much of the official Thames Path, after Shepperton, is nervous of uninvited guests. Savage dogs are name-checked, never seen. NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH. NO ACCESS TO THE RIVER. The upstream property portfolio is a mirror of our times, shifting from customized baronial (turrets, lawns, gazebos) to Carmel (California) glass-and
-pine: the lifestyle deck, the private dock. A waterside balcony occupied, in one case, by a Blues Brother mannequin sprawled on a designer chair. The epitome of cool is when you can afford to hire somebody to chill for you. When you are too lazy to be lazy.

  The more pretentious mansions are being re-conceptualized by IT operations, corporate hospitality, money religions. They take the ‘bank’ part of riverbank very seriously. You invest inthe historic Thames. You buy into the pleasure principle as a matter of business. But it’s challenging to be always on show. You don’t want grockles fouling the vista, lime-green anoraks gawping over the garden gate. The royals take the privacy fetish to extremes. Not content with park, castle, mausoleum, homefarm, they insist on fences inside fences. They shunt ramblers across the water for an infuriating trudge down a busy road, through scrub woods and open fields: to the commuter-hamlet of Datchet.

  Wouldn’t I, if I had the equity, be out here too? A Mr Toad on the Thames: boat, swimming place, picture window? For sure. I have fantasized, most of my London life, about living in Narrow Street, Limehouse, on the bend of the river: with the comforting knowledge that it can never happen. My relish for this section of the path comes from voyeurism, a puritan kick at advancing through scenes from which I am barred, English arcadias that remain tantalizingly out of reach. I haven’t noticed a single swimmer anywhere from Gravesend to Maidenhead. Many rippling blue pools on manicured lawns, no plungers. No medicated Burt Lancaster, in scrotum-pinching briefs, Australian crawling, length after length, down chlorinated puddles that mock the flowing river.