Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  The Harry Ransom Center threw out a lifeline by purchasing what they term ‘archive’, otherwise known as skip-fillers. Manuscripts. Typescripts. Notebooks. Thin blue bundles tied with yellow twine. Correspondence. Forty years of scribble and grunt in eighty sacks and boxes: a still life writhing with invisible termites, micro-bugs, blisters on onion-skin paper. This material, stacked solid in a tin box in Whitechapel, was an insect ghetto, an unvisited Eden: until I became my own grand project and sold the memory-vault for the dollars to keep me afloat for another season. Away went a mess of uncatalogued scraps, the vanished Dublin novel, the Chobham Farm journals. Spiked scripts and yards of indecipherable poems. Letters, postcards. Telegrams (they loved those): RIP NEAL CASSADY FEBRUARY EXPOSURE ALCOHOL DRUGS MEXICO. A pension prematurely cashed in.

  Ballard, when they asked him about his archive, about the drafts of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, the photo-collages, the lively exchanges with his peers, said that he kept nothing. Burnt: all of it. Trashed. And good riddance. He abhorred the fetishization of first editions in the original dustwrappers, the sacred relics of a writer’s hidden life. Nothing. Nothing intimate survived. A catalogue of wound illustrations. Some black-box flight recordings. Helmut Newton nudes. Histories of surrealist art. A paperback Moby-Dick (because Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for the John Huston movie). That was the legend and we believed it. Michael Moorcock, who now lived in Bastrop, a short drive from Austin, told me that he remembered Ballard making a bonfire of review copies in a pit in the Shepperton garden.

  Coming into Fay Ballard’s Hampstead house, nine months after her father’s death, I was astonished to find a neat stack of material we understood to have been destroyed. The collectors, the vulture dealers, the archivists: they bought the story and kept clear, giving Ballard the breathing space his strategy deserved. The man who commissioned the reconstitution of Delvaux paintings left behind an immaculately organized record of the typescripts and artworks he was supposed to have barbecued. I couldn’t convince myself that I was holding a version of Crash with numerous revisions, strikings out, improvements. The Ballard interviews, so courteously delivered, on the phone, and in person, were fictions crafted like the rest of his work. He told us what he wanted to tell us. Not a syllable more.

  ‘Shepperton lives on,’ Fay said. ‘I go and water the yucca and collect the post on a regular basis. Nothing is touched. Everything is sacred. Fifty years of life. It is very peaceful and beautiful in a timeless way – as if it never belonged to our world. I make sure the front lawn is trimmed every fortnight but there is little I can do about the car, which is beginning to look tired. I have no plans. I’m still trying to metabolize it all.’

  The word hoard for future scholars remained in England at the British Library. MYSTERIOUS TO THE END: JG BALLARD’S SECRET ARCHIVE IS REVEALED. Headline writers loved the story. Sex, lies and Hawaii Five-O videotapes, in lieu of £350,000 in death duties. The house in Old Charlton Road was exposed as a biography of its occupier in a thousand objects: term reports from the Leys School in Cambridge, documentation from the Lunghua internment camp, the holograph manuscript of Empire of the Sun. James Andrews, head of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, described the individual pages of Ballard texts as ‘worksof art’. Blue pen, red pen. Tippex, fading ribbon. Living alone, insulated by the residue of his past life, confirmed the author’s magus-like status, another upstream Dr Dee. (I was surprised to learn that Ballard, who turned down decorations that came with the word ‘Empire’ attached, drove up to Leicester to receive in person an honorary doctorate in literature. Thus acquiring the title he forswore when he gave up his medical studies.) Ephemera in the Shepperton archive helped to dictate successive raids on the past, as he assembled his elegant fictions. He did not need to consult old papers. I’m sure that Ballard never took a second look at a manuscript, after the book was published. He rarely discussed a work in progress, but enjoyed a celebratory drink when the job was done. Arm around the shoulder of the Thai waitress, ordering for all the company. Another bottle, dear.

  My guide to the Harry Ransom holdings, a charming young woman married to a golf pro (Austin is ringed by manicured, sprinkler-nurtured courses), produced three items to give me a taste ofthe treasures hidden away in grey archival boxes, in avenues that slide open at the touch of a sensor; narrow streets of high steel frames dedicated to Norman Mailer, Julian Barnes or Robert De Niro. Scripts, costumes, stills arrive on completion of every De Niro movie: more CIA research files for Meet the Fockers than the Kennedy assassination. But despite the madness, the W. R. Hearst-like, Xanadu-acquisitiveness of this storage facility, like a selective catalogue of human culture preserved against the coming nuclear winter, the atmosphere is calm, temperate, clean. It may be her smile, but the guide’s easy, sure-footed passage through intimidating chasms of matter, has a humorous, even ironic touch, reflecting the tone of the whole enterprise. The Harry Ransom Center, its entrance doors incised with the clustered signatures of Joseph Conrad, L.-F. Céline, Wyndham Lewis, John Cowper Powys, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Jarry, its grid of window panels fired by the unblinking eyes of Pablo Picasso, is the ultimate lock-up. Del Boy’s Peckham garage with billionaire budget. A perfect-taste condominium of high modernist culture: Vivien Leigh’s hold-your-breath Tara ball gown cased alongside a map of Joyce’s Dublin. A first edition of Conrad’s Youth (which includes Heart of Darkness), inscribed to Henry James, and marked as coming from the library at Lamb House, shares space with Harry Houdini’s chains and padlocks. The chaotic accumulations of writers’ lives are smoothed out, labelled, rationalized, entombed in grey boxes and prophylactic glassine sleeves. Tom Staley, the southern gentleman who was in charge of this place, occupied an office that was a fantasy for every collector, for dabblers and amateurs of rarity. Walls of gallery-quality black-and-white photographs, lithographs by the masters of the modern movement, author portraits of the giants of our time. And pristine books shelved and stacked – it hurt to look at them – without there being any sense of claustrophobic entrapment, the anal-compulsive derangement of the obsessive who vanishes into his library.

  And from all this, the tonnage of culture cargo held in a chilled Austin bunker, my guide put her three chosen items on a ledge for my inspection. The tiny doll-script of Emily Brontë’s warring empires in a childhood notebook, like those intricate burrow-worlds made by outsider artists. Then a wedding gift, an album of Templar knights, rams’ horns, topographical engravings of country estates, smeared with the drip of martyred hearts, presented to Evelyn Waugh. And, finally, the one that stopped my blood, as my guide had calculated, Jack Kerouac’s ring-bound On the Road work-book. His word counts, his comments, as he laboured at a first draft; no free-flowing, barbiturate-fuelled, hammer-typed spontaneous composition on teletype scroll. The daily reports of agonized progress in a school exercise pad: the 1949 JOURNALS. Of a man whose liver would burst in a Florida retirement colony before he reached the age of fifty.

  Silent avenues were like burial vaults. In a forensic lab, deep under the Texas heat, white coats stored bottles of parasites, the collateral damage of archival preservation. Murdered insects were carded for inspection. They were part of the unvisited museum. ‘Domesticated Beetle found on a manuscript, lived in the bug jar, without food, air, or water, for 4 months.’ They were already replete with the glue of Scott Fitzgerald’s nightmares, fear-saliva from Ford Madox Ford’s moustache, wax from Soutine’s inner ear, dust of Man Ray’s silver gelatin. Sharers in secret sorrows. Collaborative intelligences. One consciousness splintered into sentences.

  We progress through this silent, air-conditioned facility, nodding to researchers in their private kingdoms, to scholars making sense of otherwise forgotten aspects of the past. There were entire libraries, removed, post-mortem, from city apartment or rural shack, and shelved in alphabetical order in secular solitude. Chris Petit speaks about curating, across Europe, a museum of loneliness. This was that place, serviced by kindly and inte
lligent agents. The Harry Ransom Center was a repost to America’s paranoia, to the occult geometries of the information-acquisitive architecture of the secret state: target structures for the disaffected. I was touring an island of submarine wonders, the undestroyed evidence of vanished civilizations: available to all, a provocation for theses (which would themselves be acquired, catalogued, filed away, pre-forgotten). We came to rooms that were windowless theatrical sets, dimly lit reconstructions accurate in every detail and rarely visited. My guide took meetings, afternoon assignations, in the study of John Foster Dulles. Curators and academic bureaucrats sitting on authentic furniture, lolling on chairs where America played out her games of realpolitik. Dozing on couches polished with the leaked DNA of global decision makers.

  A newly appointed young woman, who came out to lunch with us at a Tex-Mex diner, was moving effortlessly around her open-plan workstation trying to make sense of a box of Mailer’s reel-to-reel recordings, a bunch of disembowelled Mad Max computers. One of the antique hard drives was mine: the submerged but unerased history of everything I’d written between the point when my children badgered me into wiring up, around 1997, and the day when the whole contraption was dumped in a skip in 2007. Coming back from a morning walk, it struck me that the hard-drive element might be worth rescuing, since it represented more information than hundreds of sacks of defaced paper. Now here it was, waiting for surgery. Everything else, my false starts, abandoned projects, drafts, proofs, corrected typescripts, had been sorted, listed, entombed.

  Tex-Mex is generally the best option. The food was good, but in quantities that challenged the slender figures of my companions. They told me, proudly, that this was the place where Laura Bush had been socializing before she was done for drink-driving. Under a ceiling of silver hubcaps, portraits of lifestyle cars, an Elvis shrine, I learnt that I would be required, that afternoon, to identify a few of the more mysterious items in my rescued-landfill deposit.

  Returned to the Harry Ransom Center, I picked up a notebook and flicked the pages. Dirt – processed, made safe – fell on the antiseptic surface of the desk. Clinker. Coal dust. A residue of the Lower Lea Valley. Of the Stratford railway sheds. English dirt preserved between pages of English paper: the work-diary jottings that became my vanished Chobhamjournals. I had resurrected material for Ghost Milk from a few photographs, reels of 8mm film, and an interview with Tom Baker. I had no use for the original, now that it had been processed through immigration. But the grit, the flakes of a place soon to be buried under the monolithic Westfield mall, that was another matter. I longed to rub the grains into my skin, to snort the essence of Chobham. The incident was such a neat conclusion, it framed a narrative. Writers are ruthless with their own lives, as well as the lives of those who surround them. Anna found these holdings disturbing, as if the story was now over. Many of the grey boxes had closing dates as well as dates of birth. When you are neatly sorted into chapters, you are sorted. Period. It seems rude to add another paragraph to the structure. Illegible notes, first draft, final version: an obituary in three slim files.

  The next afternoon the Moorcocks took us to Bastrop. Linda was keen to point out the profusion of Texas blue bonnets, motorway-fringe plantings in spring abundance. The fields looked green and well kept, but you couldn’t walk in them. There were no paths across this terrain. Bastrop had expanded. The sole off-highway motel from my previous visit was downgraded by a rash of optimistic real-estate projections, with the old western-style main street maintained as a tolerated quotation, Bath or Cheltenham with hitching posts and livery stables. We ate, outdoors, in a shaded courtyard. Around the corner from the Gin-U-Wine Oyster Bar, with its time-shift balcony and chicken-fried steak, I found a shop offering Philip Roth first editions. I wouldn’t have bought one at home, but travel had prepared me for an account of ‘the enduring of old age’. Exit Ghost: ‘Walking the streets like a revenant, he makes connections that explode his carefully protected solitude.’

  Michael Moorcock, more than anything in the Harry Ransom, was a live cultural resource, the London writer who, more than any other, kept the conduit open to the submerged literatures of Edwardian and Victorian England. He was a voracious reader and enthusiast, ploughing back his resources from the good days into supporting magazines for the best of his peers, British or American. Confessing his flaws, as he saw them, the misplaced wives (running amok on rogue credit cards), the bankruptcies, flights, breakdowns, vanities and illusions, he never stopped the books coming, never sold out the integrity of his vision. Libraries, built up and lost, flowed through this man. He lodged, steady and resolute, in the detritus of it. When I stayed in Bastrop, creeping up early to make a cup of coffee, before trying for a breath of air, Mike was waiting at the kitchen table, mid-sentence. To finish, or reignite, that never-ending tale: the gossip of ghosts, the testament of the last witness on the raft.

  Texas, on the edge of the hill country, was where the word stuck to the fence, where names that meant nothing in the realms of cyberspace lay at peace in their graves. Among racks of sheathed ball gowns. Mounds of boots. Watches, toys. Discontinued gods. Like the aftermath of a benevolent holocaust. An epicentre for the next hurricane.

  Mike spoke about how the fittest of men, the ones who skipped around town doing good works, putting up barns, were soon reduced by Bastrop’s microclimate, the wind from the prison, the Apache whistle of through-trains, to the state of cripples. He’d blistered a foot breaking in new boots at a dance, years ago, and had barely walked a step since: necrotized tissue cut back, toes amputated, long hours of treatment in an oxygen box, watching old westerns of his own choosing, singing cowboys or revenge sagas by Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Having completed an all-embracing European epic, the Pyat quartet, navigating our darkest histories with an astonishing deftness of touch, Moorcock was labouring, as in his earliest days, on a Dr Who novel, conceived in the spirit of P. G. Wodehouse.

  The Moorcock mansion was in southern colonial style, a veranda facing a wide lawn that ambled down to a quiet road. Customized properties in white and pink, self-consciously charming, were set apart in shady avenues. This section of town was exploited by numerous film crews looking for untainted iced-tea Americana. Austin, with its music, its design studios and geek entrepreneurs, attracted its share of movie stars. But no other Bastrop dwelling, I’m sure, opened directly on to the varnished melancholy of an Arts and Crafts interior: William Morris wallpaper, good pieces of furniture bought in Portobello Road at the right time, rows of George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson first editions. Every chamber, moving back through the Moorcock house, could have been transported to the Harry Ransom Center. Mike kept unsold stock, prodigious quantities of the back titles, in a structure he called ‘The Shed of Shame’. Cats scarfed his neck, purring and self-cleansing, as he wallowed in a deep chair, his fingers racing across the keyboard of a laptop, taking, as it appeared, the oracular dictation of his Egyptian pets. Bad news or old movies played, as low interference, on a giant plasma screen. Step outside, he said, and something will bite you.

  If the approach to the mansion was straight from the directory of historic Bastrop residences, Mike’s study at the rear was 1960s Notting Hill, Colville Terrace, a commune of one. When I was last here, ten years ago, you could still get in. Mike worked at his computer, keeping in touch with a diverse set of friends and disciples. Now the lumber was dense enough to bar him from the memory-prompts and sacred relics that informed and mapped his multiverse. The toys had a practical purpose. Mike demonstrated how he worked out potential narratives by manipulating plastic figurines. Betty Boop voodoo dolls, commedia dell’arte Pierrots and Pierettes, carnival masks and Elric swords were heaped over every surface. The walls were paper histories, Tarzan comics, family photographs, friable magazines, newspapers: the salvage of centuries. A group shot with Moorcock and Ballard as middle-aged men, companions-at-arms, took my eye. Mike in his Russian phase, bearded, capped, piratical. And Ballard, eyes shut against the sudden
flash, in dark, open-necked shirt and white jacket. They were refereed by a diminutive bookshop manager, who stood between them, ready to open twin piles of books for signatures.

  Ballard was a raw topic for Mike. Much that was now credited entirely to the Shepperton man emanated from Moorcock’s promiscuous curiosity, his civic conscience and his ability to put himself around: conduit to Paolozzi, Burroughs, Borges. I’m not sure, at this stage, if the details of who and when, and what exactly happened that night, actually matter. But Moorcock, the mythologist’s mythologist, was drawn, despite himself, into the debate over the way Ballard was perceived by the media, the new generations of fans and readers of website interviews. When, in 1999, I wrote about Cronenberg’s film of Crash, I plotted my path by the stories Mike told me, psychotic episodes from the motorway years, Hampstead orgies, reluctant trips to a wreckers’ yard. As I came to know Ballard, a little, and to value his company, I saw how much the two men meant to each other at the period of New Worlds, when they met, on a regular basis, to plot their assault on a stagnant culture. Ballard would always say: ‘Mike must come back. London is his city. He belongs here.’ He gave no evidence of having read any of the books after Letters from Hollywood.

  Moorcock never failed to acknowledge Ballard’s peculiar genius, even as he wrote effortless parodies of his style. He was a midwife to the fragmented tales of the high period, the mad period, that led to The Atrocity Exhibition. He steered a wide berth around Crash, while recognizing the achievement, the apotheosis, of Empire of the Sun. But differences festered. The core story was not being told. One man was self-exiled, walled in by books, cats, guitars, still sweeping between half-welcome commissions and major work that editors and critics were slow to accept. The other, Jimmy Ballard, at his death, was a global phenomenon, subject of glowing tributes, a news story. He left his daughters, his grandchildren, substantial fortunes. Spielberg and Martin Amis – on screen – paid their tributes at Ballard’s Tate Modern memorial. The archive, which he swore did not exist, was now lodged in the British Library. And being picked over by those who wanted to keep old arguments alive.