Ballard dead, after a long illness. Ballard, dead ... he said he was dying, didn't he, in his last book? I didn't read it - I haven't read any new Ballard since The Kindness of Women, which seemed a betrayal to me. Of what? All those early stories and books, 'The Terminal Beach', The Atrocity Exhibition which I read and reread.
The only British novelist of ideas, I want to write that - but was he really British? His horror on returning to this grey isle, I remember reading of that. A dreadful, parochial country with dreadful, parochial novelists ... but then there was Ballard, outside all that, outside it but within it with Delvaux on his wall.
How many times did I read the original Re:search publication by him and about him? It seemed an antidote of sorts. To what? This country. Parochialism. Over and over again, that and The Drowned World, of which I had an illustrated edition. I was quite young reading those. The battle (a false battle) was for the legitimacy of Ballard - the incorporation of his name among the canon other well known writers.
Literary writers, parochially literary writers ... A false battle as I say. As a bull, you should never charge the bullfighter's cape. Everyone knows the influence of Ballard spread by other means. Music above all - popular music and its satellite publications. Later, I never liked Ballard's name to be listed among a band's influences. Like that Myths of the Near Future album. No need for that.
Ballard and Ballardism long since saturated music and other arts. Keep quiet about your influences. Ballard became a name that was too obvious. Let it fall back into obscurity. The dream of someone young as I was discovering a novel of his. The Drowned World, say. Or a story. 'The Terminal Beach', say. 'The Voices of Time'.
Forget the short story compendia and anything published after ... what date? Forget the profile of a career novelist, which Ballard never wanted to be in the obituaries. A sensibility, a mood instead. A vision, a way of looking. That 'we' - whoever we are - bear inside our own vision, looking with his eyes in us. Inside us, outside us.