Arguably: Selected Essays (57 page)

Farrukh Dhondy was himself a peripheral member of this circle, and his biography is in some part also a memoir. It is difficult to think of a better point of comparison and contrast than the one he offers between Naipaul and James. Both men left Trinidad in their youth, both men were magnetized by Britain and became masters of English prose. Naipaul showed little if any nostalgia for his roots, while James felt committed to the struggle for independence and was an early advocate of West Indian Federation. Naipaul evinced scant interest in the history of the region, while James’s magnificent book
The Black Jacobins
(1938), a study of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave republic, is still considered a founding document in the world of postcolonial studies. The chief resemblance between the two men lies (or lay—James died in 1989) in their shared suspicion of a self-pitying or “black power” or “Afro-centric” worldview. There is also a sense in which both managed to be
plus anglais que les Anglais
.

James had been formed in the striving Trinidadian world of the scholarship school and the cricket field. Before he ever saw England, he had developed an admiration for what might be called the public school or Arnoldian ethos. Dhondy has some fun with a moment in Manchester in 1956, when Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot replied to the Labour leadership’s charge of “not playing with the team.” They did so by making sneering references to “straight bats” and “stiff upper lips.” This seemed slightly profane to James, and his shocked reaction, in turn, seems somewhat quaint to Dhondy. However, it put me in mind of what Lionel Trilling once said about George Orwell—that “he must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.” (Orwell, incidentally, was a fan of James’s and praised his 1937 book
World Revolution.)

The two men also had in common an affiliation with the old Independent Labour Party. In James’s case, this arose partly from his cricketing connection. Adopted as a ghostwriter by Sir Learie Constantine, he went to live with him in Lancashire, where the ILP was relatively strong, and soon became part of its Trotskyist wing. Adopted also by Neville Cardus, and composing cricket reports for the
Manchester Guardian
by day, he evolved into a semiprofessional revolutionary by night. He campaigned for colonial freedom, for intervention against Mussolini in Ethiopia, and for workers’ education. But the imperishable part of his writing in the 1930s and beyond concerns the struggle against Stalinism.

James had never had any illusions in the Communist Party to lose, and saw Stalin’s Russia from the beginning as a grotesque new form of oppression and exploitation. He translated Boris Souvarine’s seminal book
Stalin
from the French for Secker and Warburg, and in
World Revolution
showed how the Communist International had become a depraved apparatus in the service of a pitiless despot. The book reads rather creakily these days, because of its emphasis on Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it contains the most wonderfully scornful review of the Webbs and their shameful
Soviet Communism: A new civilization?
(from the second edition of which the question mark was famously removed), and is both lucid and prescient about the famine and the treason trials. Again to suggest an Orwellian comparison, one notices time and again that James is moved to anger and contempt by the sheer ugliness and euphemism of the enemy’s prose style. His training in English literature was as useful to him as his apprenticeship in dialectics.

He recrossed the Atlantic just before the outbreak of war, to visit Trotsky in Mexico and to make contact with his American epigones. This led to a long stay in the United States, a deep involvement with what was still called “the Negro question,” and to more than one passionate attachment. (The tall and handsome James went through white women like an avenging flame, but there was none of the macho vulgarity that one finds described in Naipaul’s narratives of black-white sex, and his former lovers are still loyal to him.) By the end of this deep engagement in sectarian politics, he had decided that the entire concept of a “vanguard party” was at fault, no matter who proclaimed it. The pamphlets and polemics of this period are still collector’s items, though the most closely wrought of his political texts,
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways
, is actually an allegorical study of Herman Melville, written while awaiting deportation from the United States in 1953.

Indeed, Trotskyism’s gain was in many respects literature’s loss. James’s only novel,
Minty Alley
, is a rather naive account of shanty-town or “barrack-yard” life in Trinidad, but can bear comparison with some early Naipaul (both V. S. and Shiva). His literary capacity was immense; he knew Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
almost by heart and later in life prepared a masterly series of lectures on Shakespeare. At all times he upheld the great tradition and was famous for his denunciations of those callow scholars who referred to English literature as “Eurocentric.” (Dhondy has some very telling anecdotes here, of James tossing and goring those young apostles of negritude who came to pay homage to the old revolutionary without troubling to register his attachment to high culture, or his conviction that the “Third World” had much to learn from the “First.”)

None of this inhibited him from taking an active part in the battle for decolonization—one of his first essays was a dignified refutation of J. A. Froude’s quasi-eugenic defense of white rule—or from seeing the American civil rights revolution as a vindication of his own prophecies. Naipaul’s Lebrun is eventually disappointed by the pettiness and infighting of the anti-colonial forces, and James, too, was to become disillusioned by the place-seeking and frequent viciousness of his former comrades in Ghana, Trinidad, and Grenada. (He was especially offended when the thugs who seized power in Grenada in 1983 claimed to be Jamesians.) Visiting at about that time, I was deeply impressed by the way that every little village appeared to be fielding a game of cricket, played in immaculate white kit. James is a part of the folklore of this pastime, and has an audience quite distinct from the following he attracted as a Marxist. (He appears, as the character K. C. Lewis, in Ian Buruma’s splendid cricketing novel
Playing the Game
.) For him, cricket was not a sport so much as an art form, and also a reflection of social organization. It can be compared at once to a ballet, and to the Olympic ethic of Classical Greece. It is also, both as a game and as an entertainment, inherently democratic. And it teaches the values of equality and fairness.
Beyond a Boundary
(1963), his partly autobiographical study of the subject, is a lyrical account of both the aesthetics of batsmanship and the bonding and exemplary role played by cricket in the development of the West Indies. Astonishingly, it was rejected for publication by John Arlott, but soon found a home at Hutchinson’s, and was warmly reviewed by V. S. Naipaul in
Encounter
in 1961. Dhondy barely exaggerates when he says that this book is for cricket what
Death in the Afternoon
is for the bullfight.

In 1948, in his
Notes on Dialectics
, James claimed to have evolved a “Hegelian algebra” with which to understand the historical process. This rash boast was the final break between himself and the little world of postorthodox Trotskyists. One might, though, borrow a Hegelian phrase—“the cunning of history”—to describe the way in which the “dialectic” played out. In the early 1980s, James was one of those who unequivocally welcomed the flowering of the Polish Solidarity movement, both as a workers’ movement in its own right and as the fulfilment of his prophecy about the end of Communism. As with Martin Luther King’s movement in the United States, a real revolution was to be the creation of conscious and self-determined people, not professionalized cadres. CLR, as many called him, did not live to see the full promise of the year 1989, and the complete vindication of his dream. He died at the end of May, surrounded by his piles of beloved classics, in his modest Brixton flat, on the corner of Railton Road and Shakespeare Road.

(
Times Literary Supplement
, January 18, 2002)

J. G. Ballard: The Catastrophist
³¹

I
N THE SPRING OF 2006, at the Hay-on-Wye book festival, I was introduced at dinner to Sir Martin Rees, who is the professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University and also holds the pleasingly archaic title of Astronomer Royal. He was to give a lecture that was later reprinted with the title “Dark Materials,” in honor of the late professor Joseph Rotblat. In the course of this astonishing talk, he voiced the following thought:

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Among the several questions that jostled for the uppermost in my mind was this: Where is the fiction that can rise to the level of this stupefying reality? (Only one novelist, Julian Barnes, was sufficiently struck to include Rees’s passage in a book, but that was in his extended nonfiction memoir about death,
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
.) I quite soon came to realize that there was indeed a writer who could have heard or read those words with equanimity, even satisfaction, and that this was J. G. Ballard. For him, the possibility of any mutation or metamorphosis was to be taken for granted, if not indeed welcomed, as was the contingency that, dead sun or no dead sun, the terrestrial globe could very readily be imagined after we’re gone.

As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H. G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons: The interplanetary genre made even C. S. Lewis write more falsely than he normally did. Hearing me drone on in this vein about thirty years ago, Amis fils (who contributes a highly lucid introduction to this collection) wordlessly handed me
The Drowned World, The Day of Forever
, and, for a shift in pace and rhythm,
Crash
. Any one of these would have done the trick.

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively “straight” novel,
Empire of the Sun
, and the resulting movie by Steven Spielberg. Some of his devotees were depressed by the literalness of the subject matter, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of being thirteen years old and an inmate in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. It’s not possible to read that book, however, and fail to see the germinal effect that experience had on Ballard the man. To see a once-thriving city reduced to beggary and emptiness, to live one day at a time in point of food and medicine, to see an old European order brutally and efficiently overturned, to notice the utterly casual way in which human life can be snuffed out, and to see war machines wheeling and diving in the overcast sky: such an education! Don’t forget, either, that young Ballard was ecstatic at the news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an emotion that makes him practically unique among postwar literati. Included in this collection is a very strong 1977 story, “The Dead Time,” a sort of curtain-raiser to
Empire
—Ballard’s own preferred name for his book—in which a young man released from Japanese captivity drives a truckload of cadavers across a stricken landscape and ends up feeding a scrap of his own torn flesh to a ravenous child.

Readers of Ballard’s memoir,
Miracles of Life
(a book with a slightly but not entirely misleading title), will soon enough discern that he built on his wartime Shanghai traumas in three related ways. As a teenager in postwar England he came across first Freud, and second the surrealists. He describes the two encounters as devastating in that they taught him what he already knew: Religion is abject nonsense, human beings positively enjoy inflicting cruelty, and our species is prone to, and can coexist with, the most grotesque absurdities. What could have been more natural, then, than that Ballard the student should devote himself to classes in anatomy, spending quality time with corpses, some of whom, in life, had been dedicated professors in the department. An astonishing number of his shorter works follow the inspiration of
Crash
, also filmed, this time by David Cronenberg, in morbid and almost loving accounts of “wound profiles,” gashes, fractures, and other inflictions on the flesh and bones. Fascinated by the possibility of death in traffic, and rather riveted by the murder of John Kennedy, Ballard produced a themed series titled
The Atrocity Exhibition
, here partially collected, where collisions and ejaculations and celebrities are brought together in a vigorously stirred mix of Eros and Thanatos. His antic use of this never-failing formula got him briefly disowned by his American publisher and was claimed by Ballard as “pornographic science fiction,” but if you can read “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race” or “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” in search of sexual gratification, you must be jaded by disorders undreamed-of by this reviewer. Both stories, however, succeed in being deadpan funny.