PRINGLE: Your Far Eastern childhood interests me. Did you live anywhere else apart from Shanghai?
BALLARD: No, but we travelled a fair amount in the Far East. We made a trip to America in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, across the Pacific via Hawaii. By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I’d seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I’d come across which didn’t mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I’d been brought up at a much lower latitude – the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home, as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I’m sure this is something one perceives – I mean the angle of light, density of light. I’m always much happier in the south – Spain, Greece – than I am anywhere else. I think a lot of these landscapes meant a great deal. The English one, oddly enough, didn’t mean anything. I didn’t like it, it seemed odd.
England was a place that was totally exhausted. The war had drained everything. It seemed very small, and rather narrow mentally, and the physical landscape of England was so old. The centre of London now is a reasonably modern city – so much of it has been rebuilt. Then, of course, none of these high-rise office blocks existed, only the nineteenth-century city. The rural landscape of meadow didn’t mean anything to me. I just couldn’t latch on to that. That’s why the SF of John Wyndham, [John] Christopher and so forth I can’t take. Too many rolling English meadows. They don’t seem landscapes that are psychologically significant, if that means anything.
PRINGLE: The visual values are a strong element in your writing. Is this just from growing up in a place like Shanghai, or did you have any artistic background?
BALLARD: Not particularly. I’ve always wanted really to be a painter. My interest in painting has been far more catholic than my interest in fiction. I’m interested in almost every period of painting, from Lascaux through the Renaissance onwards. Abstract expressionism is about the only kind of painting I haven’t responded to. My daughter, about two years ago, bought me a paint set for my birthday. I’m still waiting to use it. When I start painting I shall stop writing!
I’ve said somewhere else that all my fiction consists of paintings. I think I always was a frustrated painter. They are all paintings, really, my novels and stories. The trouble is I haven’t any talent – that’s a bit of a handicap. I approach many of these stories of mine, like the Vermilion Sands stories – even the novels like Crash – as a sort of visual experience. I’m thinking particularly of painters like – I hate the phrase pop art because it has the wrong connotations – the British and American pop artists, or people close to them, like Hamilton and Paolozzi over here, and Wesselmann, Rosenquist. Warhol above all: a tremendous influence on me. I composed Crash to some extent as a visual experience, marrying elements in the book that make sense primarily as visual constructs.
PRINGLE: I recall in ‘The Assassination Weapon’ where you simply say: ‘Guam in 1947’, and this evoked for me the landscape of some American airbase littered with rusty wire, etc. Have you actually seen these things?
BALLARD: Yes, I have, absolutely. A lot of that post-technological landscape stuff that people talk about is a straight transcript. After World War II, the American war machine was so prolific – you got B-29s stacked six deep on the ends of airfields. The riches of this gigantic technological system were just left. Right from early on I was touched not just in an imaginative way – but as though some section of reality, of life, and movements of time, were influenced by the strange paradoxes that are implicit in, say, a field full of what seem to be reasonably workable cars, washing machines or whatever, which have just been junked there. The rules which govern the birth and life and decay of living systems don’t apply in the realm of technology. A washing machine does not grow old gracefully. It still retains its youth, as it were, its bright chrome trim, when it’s been junked. You see these technological artefacts lying round like old corpses – in fact, their chrome is still bright. All these inversions touch a response to the movements of time and our place in the universe. There’s no doubt about this. I think perhaps my childhood was spent in a place where there was an excess of these inversions of various kinds.
I remember when the Japanese entered China after Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. I was going to do the scripture exam at the end-of-term examinations at the school I went to. Pearl Harbor had just taken place, the previous night, I suppose, and I heard tanks coming down the street. I looked out the window and there were Japanese tanks trundling around. It doesn’t sound very much, but if tanks suddenly rolled down this street you’d have a surprise – Russian tanks, say. The Japanese took over the place, and they segmented Shanghai into various districts with barbed wire, so you couldn’t move from Zone A to Zone B except at certain times. They’d block off everything for security reasons, and on certain days the only way of going to school was to go to the house of some friends of my parents who lived on one of these border zones, between I think the French Concession and the International Settlement. There was an abandoned nightclub, a gambling casino called the Del Monte – this is just a trivial example – a huge building in big grounds. We’d climb over the fence and go through, and go up the main driveway on the other side of the border zone, and go to school. This abandoned casino, a huge multi-storeyed building, was decorated in full-blown Casino Versailles style, with figures holding up great prosceniums over bars and huge roulette tables. Everything was junked. I remember a roulette table on its side and the whole roulette wheel section had come out, exposing the machinery inside. There was all this junk lying around, chips and all sorts of stuff, as if in some sort of tableau, arranged, as I’ve said, by a demolition squad. It was very strange.
Now I was only about eleven when this was going on. Examples like this could be multiplied a hundred times. Our camp was a former university campus, occupying I suppose about one square mile. In fact, we occupied about two-thirds of the campus. There was a section of buildings which for some arbitrary reason – maybe the Japs were short of wire – they’d left out. Something like fifteen buildings were on the other side of the wire. You can imagine a little township of big, two- or three-storey buildings, the nearest of which was about twenty yards away. A complete silent world, which I looked out on every morning and all day from my block.
After about a year the Japs agreed to allow these buildings to be used as a school, so we used to enter this place every day, and walk through these abandoned rooms. Military equipment was lying around all over the place. I saw rifles being taken out of a well. All rifles were taken away, but spent ammunition, ammunition boxes and bayonets, all the debris of war, was lying around. We used to walk through this totally empty zone. It had been deserted for years. I’m sure that that again must have had a great impact on me. There were curious psychological overtones. One’s the product of all these things.
PRINGLE: Do you regret the world of the past, the pre-war world, in any way? I’m thinking of your story, ‘The Garden of Time’, where one man appears to be trying to halt history.
BALLARD: No, I don’t. I think some social changes that took place in this country in the mid-sixties are the best and greatest thing that ever happened here. It’s slid back now, but for about five years this country entered the twentieth century, and a whole new generation of people emerged – the youth explosion. The class divisions began to break down, which was so marvellous. It all slammed into reverse a couple of years ago, which is a shame. But I certainly don’t feel nostalgic, because I came from a background where there was no past. Everything was new – Shanghai was a new city. The department stores and the skyscrapers were about my age. I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much. The place didn’t exist before the year 1900. It was just a lot of mosquito-ridden mudflats. I was brought up in a world which was new, so the past has never really meant anything to me. The use in that story of an old aristocrat, or whatever he was, was just a convention.
PRINGLE: You studied medicine at Cambridge. Many of the protagonists of your stories have in fact been doctors. Is there a rationale for this?
BALLARD: