Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  He’s not the only one who has seen my paintings and visualized a very different person. There was this disastrous trip I took across America. I was paid by this man to go all around the country and he was going to meet me at the end. He’d fallen in love with this painting I did of a beautiful eighteen-year-old. And there I was at the bus stop … I was never an absolute Venus. And on top of that I was forty-five. So the blow was terrible for him. It was like High Noon. He pushed me aside and kept looking for someone else. Everyone left and we were the only two people in the terminal, facing each other. Pistols at dawn.

  Ballard too! He was prepared to come and overpower this fragile creature. And the fragile creature gave as good as she got.

  He was saying that although he had fame he was totally uninfluenced by it. I said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re totally free from any kind of vanity, aren’t you?’ Ha! ‘And any kind of egotism?’ For god’s sake! It was really funny.

  Brigid reads the writer’s face. She likes it. She wants him to sit there, quietly, while she gets to work. She fixes Ballard as a Marlin portrait, to present in her catalogue, alongside the Dalai Lama, the travel-writer Cecil Lewis, and a beribboned Queen Mother. Ballard solicits a Delvaux, brought back from extinction, colour flooding a monochrome print. A physical representation of the most heartfelt psychodramas of his fiction.

  I didn’t like Delvaux. And I don’t like copying. So he said, ‘If Moby-Dick had been destroyed, I’d be perfectly prepared to rewrite it.’ I question that myself. I wondered if Moby-Dick would have emerged unscathed from Ballard’s pen.

  I thought: ‘He’s got an interesting face.’ I hadn’t read his work. I wasn’t at all interested in that kind of book. I put the proposition: ‘Either you sit for me or the copying is no go.’ He didn’t like that. He said he hated sitting. And in fact he’d ring up and say, ‘Do I have to come?’ And I’d say, ‘Do you want your Delvaux?’ I said, ‘You sound like you have to go to the dentist.’ He said, ‘It’s much worse than that.’

  He arrived. I told him to sit down and keep still. He didn’t do either of those things. He would get up from the chair and he would talk a blue streak. The funny thing was he was so uncontrollable. Most sitters, when you get them to sit down, and you draw them out, you get to see their inner spirit. But I’d never seen defences like those put up by Ballard. There was no way I was going to get into his inner spirit. And, instead, he starts talking to me and I realize, suddenly, that he is writing me, while I’m trying to paint him. And we’re each trying to drag the other into our worlds.

  He gave me the two specific Delvaux paintings he wanted. Because they’d been destroyed. That was his idea. They meant a lot to him, especially the naked girl looking at herself as a clothed figure – which I thought was badly painted, to be honest. The anatomy was bad, the folds are so childish. The concept of the wallpaper, I really disliked it.

  I sneakily improved those paintings, because Delvaux is not a colourist. He mixed every colour with black. Or else he never washed his brushes and black got in. They’re miserable old paintings with lots of skeletons. Delvaux is not one of my favourites, but Ballard admired him. I improved the colouring, now those paintings are quite nice.

  Jim didn’t detect that. He did not realize that I had made improvements. I have seen original Delvaux paintings and they are faded with a greyish tinge. Disagreeable pictures.

  Ballard would never lend out those copies. They meant everything to him. Gradually I began to understand Delvaux’s symbols. There’s a clothed woman looking at herself naked in the mirror. That’s what it is: Ballard, with all the festoons he brought into his life, gazing at the internal mirror where his real self is hiding. Without clothes. Naked to the world.

  Delvaux women have such cow-like faces. They are devoid of any real humanity. They are rubber blow-up dolls. Their faces have absolutely no expression. It’s as if they are mindless bimbos. And I think that’s another reason why Ballard liked them.

  I had a convent education. And I was also very anxious to – how can I put it? – follow a path. We had a few arguments about this. Ballard had to accept that when he came to my studio, it was just for being painted. If I worked too much on the portrait, and not enough on the Delvaux, he got very angry. But if I had finished the Delvaux too early, he wouldn’t have come back to let me complete the portrait.

  I met Ballard at my spring exhibition in 1986. I started the first Delvaux in the early autumn. After Christmas, I started the other one. It went on for quite a while, maybe two years, the whole thing.

  He was so fascinated by art. He wouldn’t let me get on with the painting. He kept saying, ‘Show me some other work you’ve done. I want to see what you did when you were younger.’

  I had my folder from art school, so I brought it down. He said, ‘But you could already draw then. Show me something from when you were much younger.’ So I had done, when I was about eight, little fairy books. There were minuscule fairies in them. Ballard looked at them. They were quite good for my age. He was very impressed. He put the books down, leant back in the chair, and he said: ‘You were born with it.’ He was trying to trace it back and find a moment when I didn’t have the ability to paint and then see the point when I learnt the skill. But there was no moment.

  He said, ‘Could you teach me to paint?’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ I sat him down, put up a still life – I’m a good teacher – and I said, ‘Now draw the apple.’ It was really funny to watch: this bold man, this bully, got a pencil in his hand, and he made a dab at the board. He did a C for the side of the apple. And then he couldn’t finish it. He was frightened. He was frightened of his failure. And I said, ‘It’s OK, you can do a bad apple.’ I said, ‘There’s a glass, now draw that.’ ‘You do it.’ So I drew it. He said, ‘Doesn’t look like a glass.’ Then, as I painted, he saw the glass coming through. He could hardly believe it. He said, ‘You must teach me art.’ I said, ‘You’ll have to come more often.’ And he said, ‘Couldn’t you teach me by phone?’

  He wanted to draw like an old master. He wanted to paint like Dali. When he was sitting, he would say, ‘You’re not to put this in. You’re not to paint me like that. I suppose you’re going to paint me like Hitler?’

  I said, ‘Excuse me, Jim. Do I tell you not to write like Enid Blyton?’

  I would say something thoughtless like, ‘You know in the book War and Peace by Tolstoy?’ And he said, ‘Oh, is there another one?’

  Such a put-down.

  I told him I’d read Crash. It was the first time I saw him really embarrassed. He didn’t want me to have read it. He was ashamed of it. I was very surprised. Then he said, ‘Don’t read that, read The Unlimited Dream Company. As if that was going to be holy writ. So I got it and I read it. And I thought it was even worse than Crash. He eats this little girl for lunch, stuff like that. Jim couldn’t see that his fear of spirituality, like eating little children, was in any way peculiar.

  He used my name in The Kindness of Women. I really resented that. The bastard, he didn’t ask me. I think it was revenge.

  I really miss his interest. He was so interested in one. And he was so intelligent. It was wonderful. People sitting for a portrait, they like the fact that you look at them with totally absorbed interest. You draw them out. That’s magic. I’ve never experienced that before. I grew up posing for my mother. But suddenly to have a guy really interested in you and asking questions with such attention. Like you are the most interesting person in the world.

  Ballard told me that women could be so cruel. That surprised me. He wasn’t keen to have people visit Shepperton. They might barge in on something. He didn’t want to curtail his fun.

  The guy had an amazing mind, a restless, prowling, animal of a mind. Reminding me of Blake’s tiger, burning bright. He actually told me that he had written Crash because he wasn’t making enough money to support his children.

  Empire of the Sun was the best book he ever wrote. I met him after that. I met him after the book and before the fi
lm. I think people are very stupid to be angry at him for not mentioning his parents. He wrote a work of art. You wouldn’t have felt the same about the boy if he had got parents with him. He was absolutely right with that decision, artistically.

  Ballard was about control. The one pearl that he took out of the oyster of his life was this book, Empire of the Sun. He was born to write that book. He had to have those experiences. That book is a poem.

  I knew Stanley Kubrick through his wife, we met at the art group. Stanley reminded me of Ballard, very much so. They shared a huge amount. The difference is that Stanley was very gentle with his women. He was a generous man. He deliberately limited his knowledge. But when he did need to know something, he was obsessive. But the two men were not unalike. They were built alike. Stanley was extremely eccentric, but he wasn’t damaged. A lot went into the twisting of Ballard. He was a very jealous man.

  After transcribing Marlin’s tape, I went straight back to The Kindness of Women. And found no trace of the woman I had interviewed. There were plenty of other details I’d forgotten and a strong sense of how much the landscape of the Thames Valley meant to Ballard, the woods and fields where he walked with his children. And the boat trip he makes with the woman who is clearly drawn from his partner, Claire Walsh.

  ‘In the two years since Miriam’s death,’ he wrote, ‘the familiar gardens and water-meadows had come to my rescue, but at something of a price … the quiet streets with their bricky villas, presided over by the film studios, formed the reassuring centre of my mind.’

  Upstairs, in the Berkhamsted house, Marlin stood smiling for the camera, looking straight at me, while I framed the self-portrait on the wall behind her: another, younger, more troubled self; a woman with bare, powerful shoulders holding a pair of spectacles in her hand, while other discarded glasses on the edge of the shelf spurn the opportunity to reflect some surreal inner world.

  The telescoping of images is vertiginous: the cross-struts of the empty easel, the fields outside the window. Brigid showed me a reproduction of the reproduction, the reconstituted Delvaux – which invokes Magritte, while belonging firmly in the Marlin catalogue. The nude in the gilded mirror is arranged at the same angle as Ballard in the formal portrait, which has now ‘disappeared’ from public view, to the reserve collection of the National Portrait Gallery. The woman in the mirror is Ballard’s female self, his anima, the stoic writer in a golden wig: stripped, breasted, hands resting modestly over her sex. The grain of the bare boards in the Delvaux is reprised in the texture of the wall behind Ballard and in the table on which his manuscript is spread out. Using the text of an actual Ballard script, Marlin copied some sentences, showed the revisions, and invented a calligraphy of her own to duplicate the mysterious process of creation. Ballard is not rewriting Moby-Dick, the savage epic treated as a primer for coded messages. In preliminary drafts of the portrait, he is handless, his torso a Francis Bacon smudge of white lines over blue. The manuscript is blank. Blood arrives in his cheeks in time for the finished version. He is trapped, interrupted, on edge. Pencil gripped, he looks like a man asked to draw a perfect apple. He is St Jerome, tempted, seduced away from his cell, seeing green England as a future desert.

  I spoke to Brigid about swans, the walk I had just completed with Andrew Kötting. And the swan sculpture in the conservatory, behind the chair where she sat for her lunch. ‘The journey is symbolic,’ she said. ‘There is a pursuit and there is the running away. Maybe our whole journey is to become ready, leaving all our baggage behind.’

  When I was leaving, standing at the door, she told me that I wasn’t the journalist she had expected. She saw other qualities. Ballard, in The Kindness of Women, put it more succinctly. He understood, all too well, the unreality of waiting on a country station for the short ride back to town. ‘You’ve been in England for eighteen years and you still look as if you’ve stepped off the wrong train.’

  Farland

  Ghost Milk

  Milk is the subtlest of insults.

  – Don DeLillo

  I remember R. D. Laing, in July 1967, sitting at the back of the Roundhouse, talking about the artist and illustrator Tomi Ungerer. How he relished the state of siege, living close to 42nd Street in the heart of Manhattan. ‘He’s dressed in military uniform. He is conscious of the smog biting into his eyes, destroying his skin, eroding his lungs. He’s aware all the time of the enormous pollution, the noise. It’s impossible to smell anything any more because all the interior environments are air-conditioned and pumped with the most sickly scent. You can’t smell each other’s sweat. You don’t know who to trust.’

  Now, forty years on, I understood Ungerer’s attitude: homoeopathic doses of horror to prepare ourselves for the dark day. Circumambulations of the Olympic Park were becoming an addiction. Richard Mabey, author of The Unofficial Countryside, a book I twinned with Ballard’s Crash as the great edgeland testimonials of the 1970s, accompanied me on another forlorn excursion. He travelled with binoculars, not a camera. He pointed out the feathery clumps of fennel growing at the cropped margin of the canal, near the Mare Street bridge. He told me that coots and ducks would be unaffected by radioactive spillage into the water table. They breed quite happily, and often, in the teeth of eco-disaster. He was impressed by the duckweed lawns clotting the Lea, near Old Ford Lock. The telling moment on this walk came with our arrival at the stack of yellow containers that operate, in playfully ironic mode, as café, viewing platform and learning centre, on the Greenway overlooking the Olympic Stadium. We explored a thicket that ran along the side of the railway, where wild nature, profligate and without imposed narrative, thrived in blossom and berry. Hacking our way out of the tunnel, we emerged on a strip of bare, baked earth beside the yellow tin box. Mabey examined, in grim fascination, a cluster of dying saplings. At which point, a young woman emerged from the education centre to tick him off for having the temerity to intrude on the few yards of precious ground reserved for the education of the disadvantaged children of the Olympic boroughs. Richard pointed out that the pathetic plantings were choked of sustenance, uncared for, coughing their last. And if she really wanted to let the children see something grow, all she had to do was take down the rickety exclusion fence and a fruiting, thrusting wilderness would sweep across from the embankment.

  Among the cargoes regularly transported down the railway line, through the heart of London’s major development, the site where countless thousands will soon be arriving from across the globe for the great B&Q self-assembly Olympics, are flasks containing highly radioactive nuclear fuel-rods, shipped from Sizewell in Suffolk, and Dungeness in Kent, to Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast. When the Nuclear Trains Action Group (NTAG) contacted the Olympic Development Authority to ask if these convoys would continue to run through the period of the Games, they received no reply. Mayor Johnson knows nothing, remains silent. He has other, more pressing problems.

  A protest rally, marching from Victoria Park to Stratford Station, staged a ‘die-in’ in front of the CGI Westfield promotional panels, well aware of the official Olympic clock clicking down the seconds like the nuclear triggers in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Such oddities are part of a conflicted topography: protest into art, political rhetoric into psychotic babble. The Angel Lane bridge over the railway, the route we walked from Chobham Farm to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal and the High Street, has been demolished. Mounds of scoured earth appear overnight, mountain ranges of a rigid formality thrown up by some new collision of the earth’s tectonic plates.

  At the junction of the Hertford Union Canal and the Lea Navigation, I came across an Olympic art manifestation which stopped me in my tracks. Here at last was a conceptual piece that took the breath away. Between Whitepost Lane and Old Ford, water gushed, cascaded, out of the enclosed site, through the fence, into the turbid and duckweed-infested canal. New barriers had been erected to deny access to potential paddlers heading for the main stadium. It was shapely, the way the water folded, curved and sh
immered: a dwarf Niagara coming out of nowhere.

  A jogger paused alongside me, hands on knees, taking in this unexpected water feature. ‘Twenty-eight years,’ he said. ‘And now this.’ He had come from Hong Kong and settled on an estate in Hackney Wick. Every morning he ran the same circuit, now his path was blocked. He never knew when he set out which way he would be allowed to return home, or if his home would still be standing. ‘There has never been such division between rich people and poor.’ He gestured towards the cliff of green-glazed windows on the spit of ground opposite us: a man-made island, the triangle between the Hertford Union Canal, the Lea Navigation, and the A102 Blackwall Tunnel Approach.

  This was no artwork, in the sense of being funded, approved: punctured Victorian pipes on the Olympic site. No water in the taps for much of Hackney. The security guards brought in to protect the rapidly assembled plywood barriers were old-fashioned bouncer types, amiable and suspicious, nervous of saying the wrong thing in an unfamiliar language. The inner ring, close to the stadium complex and the construction convoys, was still guarded by regiments of Joanna Lumley’s diminutive and unreadable Gurkhas.

  It was only when I studied privately commissioned reports of investigations into the extensive radioactive contamination of the 2012 site that I appreciated the implication of the gushing pipes. The dispersal cell holding many tonnes of treated and untreated soil, in layers under a permeable skin, was positioned right here. As Ian Griffiths revealed in an article in the Guardian: ‘Documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) rules reveal that, contrary to government guidelines, waste from thorium and radium has been mixed with very low-level waste and buried in a so-called dispersal cell.’ A cell which was placed about 500 metres to the north of the Olympic stadium. The setting for the involuntary water feature.

  Bill Parry-Davies convened a meeting at which Mike Wells, who had been sifting thousands of documents and invigilating the progress of construction activity with numerous photographs, gave a lucid and alarming account of his findings. You could not nominate, in all of London, more challenging ground for a landscape blitz, a ticking-clock assault on the devastated residue of industrial history: insecticide and fertilizer works, paint factories, distillers of gin, gas-mantle manufacturers, bone grinders, importers of fish-mush, seething dunes of radiant maggots.