Miracles of Life

In June, I mentioned that I had just finished John Rechy’s autobiography About My Life and the Kept Woman. Now, I’ve finished J. G. Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life. They are polar opposites in the style of writing, but I loved them both. Rechy’s writing often verges on being prose poetry, while Ballard’s seems almost dry and matter-of-fact in comparison. And yet, Ballard has this knack of writing apparently very simple direct prose that nonetheless gets to the heart of the matter.

It’s clear that his youth in Shanghai shaped both the man and the writer. The themes of many of his stories – the drained swimming pools, deserted streets, atrocity as entertainment – have their roots in what he observed as a boy. In later life, the work that he did, first as a medical student, and then as a writer, enabled him to deal with the impact of both his childhood and adult experience of the world.

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.

As Sam Leith wrote in his review of Miracles of Life:

If Ballard sometimes reads like Mapp and Lucia on a day-trip to Belsen – reader, there is a good reason.

Despite the dystopian majority of his fiction, Ballard comes across in his autobiography as a genuinely nice man, who dotes on his children (they are the "miracles of life" of the book’s title). And I don’t think that this is a case of an author presenting himself in a favourable light, this seems to be the measure of the man. The book closes with a two-page chapter in which he explains that this will be his last work. He has advanced prostate cancer.