So we accelerated our road building programme in the white hot technology of Old Labour. We put a necklace around London, from the Exxon/Mobile (Esso) storage tanks at Purfleet to the jumbo-park of Heathrow. We burnt the city’s waste at Enfield, then fed the compacted dust back into new motorways.
Out in Shepperton, Ballard was as calm, as rational as Bateson. They were both Cambridge men who had lived abroad. Ballard was a copywriter for the Book of Revelations, the final dissolution. He skimmed technical journals, adapted their vocabulary. He was on friendly terms with scientists like Chris Evans. From such apparently innocent documents as the Siebel brochure, he factored the terminology for a sinister poetic. That’s where the virus was located, in the blandest of all forms, the puff, the free-sheet, the trade launch. The Motor Show at Earl’s Court, as Ballard recognised, would prove to be a more subversive gathering than the coming together of counter-cultural magi in Camden Town. William Burroughs, a major influence on Ballard, had been saying it for years: read the financial reports from IBM, cut them against a travel book by Graham Greene, a rhapsodic paragraph of Conrad, a snapshot from Tangier.
Burroughs took a dozen lifetimes to grow into his face, that prescient skull. A dozen lifetimes to arrive at the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas. Ballard made it to Shepperton in the 1960s. The Drowned World. This was never an exile. You can only achieve exilic status when you’d prefer to be somewhere else, when you acknowledge the power of the centre. For Ballard the transit out of West London was a spin to the colonies, the desert resorts of his fiction, not a banishment. The metropolis, so far as he is concerned, can sink into the swamp. The buildings are old and dirty and uninteresting and the furniture is dull. Ballard, at twenty-one, was an enthusiastic visitor to the Festival of Britain. The Skylon. The conjunction with the river. Those Swedish chairs!
Ballard’s fiction, reprising and reworking its own templates, is not prophetic in a way that would be recognised by H.G. Wells or George Griffith. The tone is matter of fact. Seemingly extraordinary or perverse episodes can be traced back to images in art books, cuttings from magazines, nightcap television: trade journalism and copywriting with their hypnotic present-tense blandishments, when you microwave them, turn feral. Let out the demons. Ballard doesn’t use a PC, he hammers away on a trusted portable. These are some of the books in his library (1984), as logged by interviewers from RE/SEARCH. The Warren Commission Report. Céline: A Biography by Patrick McCarthy. Stanley Spencer catalogue from the Royal Academy. White Women by Helmut Newton. The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. Mountbatten by Richard Hough. ‘I don’t have much to do with those literary people,’ Ballard told me.
I was delighted to learn that Ballard, who previewed the target towers of Canary Wharf in High-Rise (1975), had come to town to check out the Millennium Dome. His account of the excursion dealt, for the most part, with the journey. East London is a mystery to him. He’s read about it, but he has no desire to sample it first hand, other than through the window of a car. The Dome was nothing. He’d conjured up just this kind of hucksterist tent show (carny booths, empty car parks, toxic mutations, cyber-sell) in his early fiction. The Dome, as a concept, lagged years behind the Festival of Britain. The Dome was a marquee from a Regency pleasure park, Ranelagh or Vauxhall, visited by offcuts from a novel by William Thackeray.
Driving through the weekend-dead Isle of Dogs, underpasses, captured water, quotation architecture, was a nostalgic, back-to-the-future exercise. The septuagenarian writer, car window like a cinema screen, slides through a manifestation of short stories sold to pulp magazines at the period when his career was launched. Silvertown Airport is an epiphany, no flights, tropical vegetation splitting the quays of the deepwater docks, jet-skiers bumping over choppy water. Nothing pleases Ballard more than to walk in, unexpectedly, on one of his own sets. He is redundant, he can let go. Achieved fiction writes itself. He knows, after all these years, he has reached that point. Silvertown as a suburb of Vermilion Sands.
I arrived at Shepperton a couple of hours before I was due to meet Ballard at the station. Bad Day at Black Rock. The paper-shop was closing, Ballard told me, because Shepperton had run out of commuters. The dozy, sun-hammered town was an island settlement, between the wide blue of the motorway (M3 rushing into M25) and the meandering Thames. Ballard has reversed Edwardian polarities, he weekends in London — where the earlier inhabitants came out to their bungalows, huts, hutches, on Shepperton’s two islands, to get away from the pressures of the city. A ferry at Weybridge is still operative, summoned by a bell that may be rung at quarter-hourly intervals.
Main street, Shepperton, is a carousel of estate agents (£300,000 upwards for a riverfront box) and charity caves; a library (closed on Thursday mornings), a video shop, a specialist in TV memorabilia, toys and annuals. You can do the river-bank or stroll (across a bridge over the M3) to Shepperton Green and the film studios. ‘You walked?’ said Ballard, incredulously. ‘We do have buses in Shepperton.’
It was a scorcher, the midpoint in a freak heat wave. They didn’t need to drain the River Ash, which passes through the studio estate. The river was my target. Three significant ‘river’ films had been shot here: John Huston’s version of C.S. Forester’s The African Queen; the heritage Tudor barges of A Man for All Seasons, stately as a Hampton Court son et lumière; and the notorious colonial fantasy, Sanders of the River. In 1935 Zoltan Korda, adapting an Edgar Wallace novel, built an East African village on the banks of the Ash, and cast Paul Robeson, a leftist Othello in a loincloth, as Bosambo, the native chief. The rest of the tribe were bussed in from Tiger Bay in Cardiff. Jomo Kenyatta, President of Kenya (1964–78), had a bit part as a grass-skirted spear-waver.
Shepperton Studios spread themselves at the foot of the earth banks that contain the Queen Mary Reservoir (the site where E-culture, motorway raves began). Taking the twenty-minute walk from Shepperton station, close to where Ballard has his house, to the security gates of the studios, I travel through the landscape of Ballard’s fiction: lagoon (reservoir), motorway (Heathrow traffic defining the edge of the frame), wide-aisled supermarket (through which sleepwalking suburban adulteresses can practise their ‘amiable saunter’). To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that oeuvre.
‘Where else is there to go?’ Ballard said. ‘The past is a biological swamp, the future is a sandy desert — and the present is a concrete playpen.’
From the shade of a balding tree, I watched Ballard’s car pull up at the station. He didn’t look like any of the other early-afternoon motorists; he was in Mediterranean mode (straw hat, dark glasses, open-necked purple shirt). We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. ‘You know, I haven’t been in this place for fifteen years.’ Finding somewhere to park, Ballard reckons, is the biggest problem of contemporary life.