Ballard on Orwell

‘Do you realise that for the first time in 500 years we have no living genius?’ one of J. G. Ballard’s characters asks another (in ‘The Overloaded Man’), oblivious to the fact that their author disproved the claim. As George Orwell died in January 1950 and J. G. Ballard began to publish professionally in 1956 we can describe the first as the greatest author of the twentieth century, and Ballard as the greatest author of the second part of the twentieth century with complete veracity (Ballard died in 2009). He is best known for his novels, novellas and short stories but, like Orwell, many of Ballard’s real life interests permeate his fiction, while one can look for evidence from his fiction in his journalism.

Reading the latest selection of his non-fiction – a three-hundred-page-plus volume, which its editor admits is not complete—one can see the areas where Orwell and Ballard’s interests overlapped, as well as Ballard’s own appreciation of Orwell’s work. Ballard was also well-known as an interview subject, speaking about his areas of interest, but also open to questions about areas he might not have touched on. Consequently, readers should be aware of the 2012 volume Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967 – 2008, which is over five hundred pages, again with references to Orwell. Fortunately, both volumes are indexed. (Orwell himself seems to have practised something similar in his conversations – his surviving letters show him frequently making lunch appointments with interesting figures, but accounts of those meetings are few and far between, and transcripts are missing completely. The tape recorder and short-hand have changed the way we record the present).

One can find similarities in the life of each man – their experience of the Far East notably, and the loss of their wives leaving them with very young children. In both cases they wrote about the Far East, and wrote very little about their lost wives. Both were, after public school education (Eton in Orwell’s case, The Leys in Cambridge in Ballard’s), very much self-educated, though both had periods in the services (Orwell for five years in the Imperial police in Burma, Ballard for a much shorter time in the RAF in Canada), but the recollections of both men was far more of what they had chosen to read in their own time. They epitomise auto-didacticism.

George Orwell is not the most heavily indexed individual in the Selected Non-Fiction – he might not have been keen to see that Salvador Dali provoked more interest in Ballard, as did Sigmund Freud and William S Burroughs – but Orwell gets a good coverage. Ballard seems to have been little aware of Orwell’s non-fiction or journalism, and his comments relate mostly to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Ballard repeatedly discussed Aldous Huxley and George Orwell together, making comparisons even while he called them “classics”. In 2002 he wrote:

Huxley’s greatest novel, Brave New World, is a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s dystopia, with its test-tube babies and recreational drugs, its “feelies” that anticipate virtual reality, differs in one vital way from Orwell’s vision of a boot stamping for ever on a human face. Huxley’s victims welcome their own enslavement, revealing the same strains of passivity that lie beneath today’s entertainment culture. Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere.

Ballard had been more optimistic three years earlier, when he was asked ‘What is your definition of a classic?’

… which novels written in my lifetime (I was born in 1930) will survive to the year 2099? Here are my guesses:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This vision of the future seems uncannily accurate- test-tube babies, legalised drugs, virtual reality films, a life of compulsory pleasure. The best guide-book I know to the day after tomorrow.

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Some people have started to dismiss Nineteen Eighty-Four, as if the threat of Stalinist totalitarianism has passed forever. If only that were true.

He was evidently asked for a list of ten, as he goes on to name another seven fiction titles (including a Raymond Chandler, an author also found in Orwell’s library). Despite his reservation about Orwell before Huxley, in 1994 while repeating that reservation he had said as well, recognising that Huxley was limited in his fictional worlds:

Yet The Doors of Perception may prove to be even more prophetic than Brave New World.

In his own classic short story, ‘The Voices of Time’, we find the line, ‘Think of yourself in a wider context’ and that is what Ballard emphasised when he mentioned Orwell and Huxley only to expand on their significance. He was reviewing Brian Aldiss’s history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree (1974):

One of the great values of this book [Spree] is that we can see classical, modern and contemporary science fiction within the larger context of imaginative fiction. Arguments about whether Gulliver’s Travels and 1984 are science fiction or whether, say, Brave New World should be admitted to the club (it virtually designed the premises), fade away when we see the huge sweeps of cautionary and speculative fiction laid out in front of us.

More fascinating in Ballard’s work is to read his observations on writers about whom Orwell had written earlier, while Ballard seems to have been unaware of Orwell’s opinions. In 1946 Orwell had managed to get hold of a French translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (Nous Autres) and described it in his Tribune column. That reappeared in 1968, in the fourth volume of the Collected Essays Journalism and Letters, which received a much wider circulation starting in 1970 when the paperback edition first emerged. An English translation had appeared in the USA in 1924, but it was not until 1970 that Ballard could review the first British edition (whether the Orwell appearance was coincidence we do not know).

Ballard mentions Orwell and Huxley again, but then asks:

None the less, how does We stand up against those two classics, not to mention the host of anti-utopian satires produced by the writers of modern science fiction? To a large extent Brave New World and 1984 described developments that had already taken place, giving them an authenticity they have never lost. By comparison, the very quality which makes Zamyatin’s We so original – its brilliant extrapolations into the future before any such trends could have become visible in Soviet society – prevents it from becoming more than a remarkable fantasy.

Even more interesting for comparison purposes are Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf, and that by Ballard published in December 1969 as ‘Alphabets of Unreason’. Orwell concentrated first on the significance of current events – the attack on Britain rather than on the Soviet Union – but went to on to examine the psychology of the dictator:

Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of “Mein Kampf,” and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches… The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there.

Ballard towards the end of his review picked up on the ‘clumsy’ness:

…the style of a self-educated modern South German with a talent for oratory. In this respect Hitler was one of the rightful inheritors of the twentieth century – the epitome of the half-educated man… Hitler was the half-educated psychopath inheriting the lavish communications systems of the 20^th century.

Both men were to experience attempted suppression of their work at different stages of their careers: these editions of Mein Kampf were also examples of how intellectual property laws could be used to censor knowledge. Orwell pointed out that the James Murphy translation of 1939 was the first full translation in English, that was because the earlier Dugdale translation, which had been available in a ‘cheap edition’, had been abridged and edited by the Nazis themselves. The Murphy edition was then reprinted six times during the War, including being reprinted as a part-work. It was then suppressed. In 1969 Hutchinson, who had had acquired the rights, published the 1943 Ralph Mannheim translation for the first time in Britain. It is Mannheim that Ballard quoted talking about Hitler as ‘a self-educated modern South German’: ‘modern’ here meaning the 1940s at the latest.

In some ways it is a pity that Ballard had not read more of Orwell’s non-fiction. Thirty-five years after he reviewed Mein Kampf he wrote a joint review of A Woman in Berlin (a diary of the ravages of Soviet troops in the spring of 1945), and a reprint of Sebastian Haffner’s Germany: Jekyll and Hyde first published in 1940. Haffner had followed that in 1941 with Offensive Against Germany, one of the Searchlight Books edited by Orwell and Tosco Fyvel, knowing which would help to put it in context. Similarly, Orwell reviewed Edward Glover’s Fear and Courage along with The Neuroses in War, edited by Emanuel Miller, in 1940; Ballard was to quote from Glover’s War, Sadism and Pacifism (all terms known to Orwell) repeatedly.

One of the areas where Ballard’s knowledge was wider than Orwell’s – at least, as far his writings show – was the visual arts. From 1956 he had followed new movements, and sometimes worked with contemporary artists. Orwell’s widow, Sonia, may have been aware of some of these developments as she had written about earlier movements with which she was associated such as the Euston Road Group. To compare Orwell and Ballard, though, one should read their long essays on Salvador Dali: ‘Benefit of Clergy’ in Orwell’s case, and ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ and ‘Salvador Dali: The Innocent as Paranoid’ in Ballard’s.

One cannot look for comparisons of their treatment of classic literature – Ballard seems to have written nothing about it. Similarly he seems to have written and published no poetry, and written nothing about poetry. He was quite happy to describe his favourite films and what made them special but wrote nothing about the theatre.

Had he lived, would Orwell have appreciated the work of J. G. Ballard? The evidence is probably already there amongst Orwell’s journalism. One can read ‘What driver is going to crawl along at twelve miles an hour when he knows that his engine would do fifty?…we value speed more highly than we value human life’ as Orwell wrote in 1946 and see the first signs of Ballard’s 1973 novel, Crash. Or note Orwell’s observation in 1945 about modern sports, ‘It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest’, and have an idea of Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come. Meanwhile, ‘Is it possible that our climate has changed radically in the last three hundred years?’: surely Orwell’s question in 1944 contained the seed of Ballard’s first four novels?

It is unfortunate that Gregory Claeys, in his Dystopia: A Natural History (2017), mentions one of Orwell’s most significant post-war essays only in a footnote on page 441. ‘Pleasure Spots’ (1946) and ‘The Reilly Plan’ (also 1946) contain much that other authors would go on to explore, including Ballard: ‘one is never alone’. Given that the first evidences of Nineteen Eighty-Four can be found in Orwell’s journalism written years earlier (such as the fourth part of ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1943), or even ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937)) one could project Orwell exploring what he saw as potential social disasters in leisure and home building if he had gone on writing into the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. He might not have written, say, Ballard’s ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ about such disasters but he would have been aware of their potential. Ballard’s later novels, when he had been introduced to the south of France and wrote Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, seem to exemplify everything that Orwell saw wrong with pleasure spots. Orwell, of course, would have been able to put such works into a historical context, comparing them with, for instance, Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool (1936) set in the same regime.

In his introduction to the section of Ballard’s book and film reviews, editor Mark Blacklock says that Ballard mellowed as he aged. That may be true of his book reviews but two late diary pieces written for the New Statesman (an outlet shared by the two authors) show less forbearance as he writes of the Blair government. In 1944 Orwell told his American readers about his visit to the House of Commons:

It is just a collection of mediocre-looking men in dingy, dark suits, nearly all speaking in the same accent and all laughing at the same jokes. I may say, however, that they don’t look such a set of crooks as the French Deputies used to look.

In 2005 Ballard described what he saw in a restaurant when a Cabinet Minister came in. As the ministerial party left Ballard’s companion, Claire Churchill, quoted one word from Ecclesiastes also quoted by Orwell. Ballard’s article went on to wonder about the quality of all the government ministers. Making no suggestion of criminality he ended:

Perhaps UK plc would thrive if assigned to the two companies that will decide our planet’s future – Microsoft and the Disney Corporation. Tony Blair would at last feel completely at home.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four O’Brien says to Winston Smith:

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

One cannot help feeling that if Orwell and Ballard had ever met one or the other might have thought, if not said:

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind because you happen to be sane.

Selected Non-Fiction 1962-2007, by J.G. Ballard,

edited by Mark Blacklock, foreword by Tom McCarthy

(The MIT Press, ISBN13: 9780262048323)

The first sentence of this article re-phrases Ballard’s original.