J g ballard, p.1
J G Ballard, page 1
J G BALLARD: Now: Zero
If any author is symbolic of the changing patterns in science fiction in the early 1960s, that author is J. G. Ballard. And, like any true revolutionary, Ballard had his origins firmly in the status quo.
James Graham Ballard was born on November 18th 1930, in Shanghai, the son of a Scottish doctor living in the American sector. Still in his mid-teens, Ballard was interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and was eventually repatriated to England in 1946. He went to Cambridge University to read medicine, and there won the annual short story competition in 1951. Thus fortified, he launched himself into his first mainstream novel. Science fiction was still a few years away. He did some copywriting, and even flew with the RAF.
In the Summer of 1956 Ballard submitted a short story, Escapement, to John Carnell, who accepted it. The story is a new look at time travel, in that the protagonist finds himself out of synch with his surroundings. Ballard then visited Carnell and brought with him a beautiful fantasy, Prima Belladonna, which Carnell also bought. The two stories appeared concurrently in the December 1956 issues of New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Ballard was launched.
He had no trouble producing follow-ups. Every story had its own individual flavour: whether the emphasis of future society and its overpowering effects on man, as in Build-Up (New Worlds, January 1957), or his deft fantasies centred on Vermilion Sands, of which Prima Belladonna was the first.
Before the end of the 1950s it was obvious to everyone, that here was someone who had brought something new and original to sf. Writing in the November 1959 New Worlds, Carnell said:
‘A sure sign of the present health of science fiction is the continued emergence of writers well outside the mainstream tradition, more interested in experimenting with the imaginative and stylistic possibilities offered by the medium than in the conventional story set against an interplanetary or futuristic background. Among these writers is J. G. Ballard ...”
In the early 1960s Ballard utilised his talents in reshaping the catastrophe novel, starting with The Wind From Nowhere (1961), and then The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964). All showed his emphasis on people rather than events, and all proved highly successful.
His next novel, The Crystal World, grew from a serial, Equinox, published in New Worlds. The important factor though is that the first episode appeared in the first issue to be edited by Michael Moorcock, dated May-June 1964. Nova Publications had finally felt the pinch of the magazines’ declining circulations, and the company folded. Carnell went on to edit his New Writings series, whilst New Worlds was handed to Moorcock, and Science Fantasy to Oxford art-dealer Kyril Bonfiglioli.
That first Moorcock New Worlds also carried an article by Ballard on the controversial William Burroughs. It was evident from the start that under new management New Worlds was already heading into other territory. The so-called ‘new wave’ was born. Ballard’s fiction became more and more fantasy-orientated, bizarre, avant-garde. His stories would range from the highly readable and fascinating Storm Bird, Storm Dreamer (New Worlds, November 1966) to the apparently pointlessly symbolical The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, reprinted in the first March 1967 New Worlds. I say ‘first’ because there were two issues bearing that date. They were the last paperback format New Worlds. The publishers encountered financial difficulty, but thanks to the efforts of stalwarts like Brian Aldiss, Marghanita Lhaski, J. B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis and the late Kenneth Allsop, New Worlds was reborn in a larger format with the aid of an Arts Council grant. Moorcock now threw all caution to the winds and the Ballardian material came even more bizarre, reaching a peak of irrelevancy with The Generations of America and Princess Margaret’s Facelift. These pieces will be remembered only as experiments in the flexibility of fiction, not for their entertainment value.
The stirrings of experimental Ballard are evident from the early days, and one of the best examples in his short story from the December 1959 Science Fantasy - Now: Zero.
* * * *
NOW: ZERO
J G Ballard
You ask: how did I discover this insane and fantastic power? Like Dr Faust, was it bestowed upon me by the Devil himself, in exchange for the deeds to my soul? Did I, perhaps, acquire it with some strange talismaniac object - idol’s eye-piece or monkey’s paw - unearthed in an ancient chest or bequeathed by a dying mariner? Or, again, did I stumble upon it myself while researching into the obscenities of the Eleusian Mysteries and the Black Mass, suddenly perceiving its full horror and magnitude through clouds of sulphurous smoke and incense?
None of these. In fact, the power revealed itself to me quite accidentally, during the commonplaces of the everyday round, appearing unobtrusively at my finger-tips like a talent for embroidery. Indeed, its appearance was so unheralded, so gradual, that at first I failed to recognise it at all.
But again you ask: why should I tell you this, describe the incredible and hitherto unsuspected sources of my power, freely catalogue the names of my victims, the date and exact manner of their quietus? Am I so mad as to be positively eager for justice - arraignment, the black cap, and the hangman leaping onto my shoulders like Quasimodo, ringing the death-bell from my throat?
No, (consummate irony!) it is the strange nature of my power that I have nothing to fear from broadcasting its secret to all who will listen. I am the power’s servant, and in describing it now I still serve it, carrying it faithfully, as you shall see, to its final conclusion.
* * * *
However, to begin.
Rankin, my immediate superior at the Everlasting Insurance company, became the hapless instrument of the fate which was first to reveal power to me.
I loathed Rankin. He was bumptious and assertive, innately vulgar, and owed his position solely to an unpleasant cunning and his persistent refusal to recommend me to the directorate for promotion. He had consolidated his position as department manager by marrying a daughter of one of the directors (a dismal harridan, I may add) and was consequently unassailable. Our relationship was based on mutual contempt, but whereas I was prepared to accept my role, confident that my own qualities would ultimately recommend themselves to the directors, Rankin deliberately took advantage of his seniority, seizing every opportunity to offend and denigrate me.
He would systematically undermine my authority over the secretarial staff, who were tacitly under my control, by appointing others at random to the position. He would give me long-term projects of little significance to work on, so segregating me from the rest of the office. Above all, he sought to antagonise me by his personal mannerisms. He would sing, hum, sit uninvited on my desk as he made small talk with the typists, then call me into his office and keep me waiting pointlessly, at his shoulder as he read silently through an entire file.
Although I controlled myself, my abomination of Rankin grew remorselessly. I would leave the office seething with anger at his viciousness, sit in the train home with my newspaper opened but my eyes blinded by rage. My evenings and weekends would be ruined, wastelands of anger and futile bitterness.
Inevitably, thoughts of revenge grew, particularly as I suspected that Rankin was passing unfavourable reports of my work to the directors. Satisfactory revenge, however, was hard to achieve. Finally I decided upon a course I despised, driven to it by desperation: the anonymous letter - not to the directors, for the source would have been too easily discovered, but to Rankin and his wife.
* * * *
My first letters, the familiar indictments of infidelity, I never posted. They seemed naive, inadequate, too obviously the handiwork of a paranoic with a grudge. I locked them away in a small steel box, later re-drafted them, striking out the staler crudities and trying to substitute something more subtle, a hint of perversion and obscenity, that would plunge deeper barbs of suspicion into the reader’s mind.
It was while composing the letter to Mrs. Rankin, itemising in an old note-book the more despicable of her husband’s qualities, that I discovered the curious relief afforded by the exercise of composition, by the formal statement, in the minatory language of the anonymous letter (which is, certainly, a specialised branch of literature, with its own classical rules and permitted devices) of the viciousness and depravity of the letter’s subject and the terrifying nemesis awaiting him. Of course, this catharsis is familiar to those regularly able to recount unpleasant experiences to priest, friend or wife, but to me, who lived a solitary, friendless life, its discovery was especially poignant.
Over the next few days I made a point each evening on my return home of writing out a short indictment of Rankin’s iniquities, analysing his motives, and even anticipating the slights and abuses of the next day. These I would cast in the form of narrative, allowing myself a fair degree of license, introducing imaginary situations and dialogues that served to highlight Rankin’s atrocious behaviour and my own stoical forbearance.
The compensation was welcome, for simultaneously Rankin’s campaign against me increased. He became openly abusive, criticised my work before junior members of the staff, even threatened to report me to the directors. One afternoon he drove me to such a frenzy that I barely restrained myself from assaulting him. I hurried home, unlocked my writing box and sought relief in my diaries. I wrote page after page, re-enacting in my narrative the day’s events, then reaching forward to our final collision the following morning, culminating in an accident that intervened to save me from dismissal.
My last lines were:
... Shortly after two o’clock th
As I wrote this fictitious scene it seemed scant justice, but little did I realise that a weapon of enormous power had been placed gently between my fingers.
* * * *
Coming back to the office after lunch the next day I was surprised to find a small crowd gathered outside the entrance, a police car and ambulance pulled up by the curb. As I pushed forward up the steps several policemen emerged from the building, clearing the way for two orderlies carrying a stretcher across which a sheet had been drawn, revealing the outlines of a human form. The face was concealed, and I gathered from conversation around me that someone had died. Two of the directors appeared, their faces shocked and drawn.
‘Who is it?’ I asked one of the office boys who were hanging around breathlessly.
‘Mr. Rankin,’ he whispered. He pointed up the stairwell. ‘He slipped over the railing on the seventh floor, fell straight down, completely smashed one of those big tiles outside the lift…’
He gabbled on, but I turned away, numbed and shaken by the sheer physical violence that hung in the air. The ambulance drove off, the crowd dispersed, the directors returned, exchanging expressions of grief and astonishment with other members of the staff, the janitors took away their mops and buckets, leaving behind them a damp red patch and the shattered tile.
* * * *
Within an hour I had recovered. Sitting in front of Rankin’s empty office, watching the typists hover helplessly around his desk, apparently unconvinced that their master would never return, my heart began to warm and sing. I became transformed, a load which had threatened to break me had been removed from my back, my mind relaxed, the tensions and bitterness dissipated. Rankin had gone, finally and irrevocably. The era of injustice had ended.
I contributed generously to the memorial fund which made the rounds of the office; I attended the funeral, gloating inwardly as the coffin was bundled into the sod, joining fulsomely in the expressions of regret. I readied myself to occupy Rankin’s desk, my rightful inheritance.
My surprise a few days later can easily be imagined when Carter, a younger man of far less experience and generally accepted as my junior, was promoted to fill Rankin’s place. At first I was merely baffled, quite unable to grasp the tortuous logic that could so offend all laws of precedence and merit. I assumed that Rankin had done his work of denigrating me only too well.
However, I accepted the rebuff, offered Carter my loyalty and assisted his reorganisation of the office.
Superficially these changes were minor. But later I realized that they were far more calculating than at first seemed, and transferred the bulk of power within the office to Carter’s hands, leaving me with the routine work, the files of which never left the department or passed to the directors. I saw too that over the previous year Carter had been carefully familiarising himself with all aspects of my job and was taking credit for work I had done during Rankin’s tenure of office.
Finally I challenged Carter openly, but far from being evasive he simply emphasised my subordinate role. From then on he ignored my attempts at a rapprochement and did all he could to antagonise me.
The final insult came when Jacobson joined the office to fill Carter’s former place and was officially designated Carter’s deputy.
* * * *
That evening I brought down the steel box in which I kept record of Rankin’s persecutions and began to describe all that I was beginning to suffer at the hands of Carter.
During a pause the last entry in the Rankin diary caught my eye:
. .. Rankin suddenly lost his balance, toppled over the rail and fell to his death in the entrance hall below.
The words seemed to be alive, they had strangely vibrant overtones. Not only were they a remarkably accurate forecast of Rankin’s fate, but they had a distinctly magnetic and compulsive power that separated them sharply from the rest of the entries. Somewhere within my mind a voice, vast and sombre, slowly intoned them.
On a sudden impulse I turned the page, found a clean sheet and wrote:
The next afternoon Carter died in a street accident outside the office.
What childish game was I playing? I was forced to smile at myself, as primitive and irrational as a Haitian witch doctor transfixing a clay image of his enemy.
* * * *
I was sitting in the office the following day when the squeal of tyres in the street below riveted me to my chair. Traffic stopped abruptly and there was a sudden hubbub followed by silence. Only Carter’s office overlooked the street; he had gone out half an hour earlier so we pressed past his desk and leaned out through the window.
A car had skidded sharply across the pavement and a group of ten or a dozen men were lifting it carefully back onto the roadway. It was undamaged but what appeared to be oil was leaking sluggishly into the gutter. Then we saw the body of a man outstretched beneath the car, his arms and head twisted awkwardly.
The colour of his suit was oddly familiar.
Two minutes later we knew it was Carter.
That night I destroyed my notebook and all records I had made about Rankin’s behaviour. Was it coincidence, or in some way had I willed his death, and in the same way Carter’s? Impossible - no conceivable connection could exist between the diaries and the two deaths, the pencil marks on the sheets of paper were arbitrary curved lines of graphite, representing ideas which existed only in my mind.
But the solution to my doubts and speculations was too obvious to be avoided.
I locked the door, turned a fresh page of the notebook and cast round for a suitable subject. I picked up my evening paper. A young man had just been reprieved from the death penalty for the murder of an old woman. His face stared from a photograph: coarse, glowering, conscienceless.
I wrote:
Frank Taylor died the next day in Pentonville Prison.
The scandal created by Taylor’s death almost brought about the resignations of both the Home Secretary and the Prison Commissioners. During the next few days violent charges were levelled in all directions by the newspapers, and it finally transpired that Taylor had been brutally beaten to death by his warders. I carefully read the evidence and findings of the tribunal of enquiry when they were published, hoping that they might throw some light on the extraordinary and malevolent agency which linked the statements in my diaries with the inevitable deaths on the subsequent day.
However, as I feared, they suggested nothing. Meanwhile I sat quietly in my office, automatically carrying out my work, obeying Jacobson’s instructions without comment, my mind elsewhere, trying to grasp the identity and import of the power bestowed on me.
Still unconvinced, I decided on a final test, in which I would give precisely detailed instructions, to rule out once and for all any possibility of coincidence.
Conveniently, Jacobson offered himself as my subject. So, the door locked securely behind me, I wrote with trembling fingers, fearful lest the pencil wrench itself from me and plunge into my heart:
Jacobson died at 2.43 p.m. the next day after slashing his wrists with a razor blade in the second cubicle from the left in the men’s washroom on the third floor.
