the strange life of j.g. ballard

Jim Ballard freely admitted that, under what his publisher Malcolm Edwards called a "shell of good manners", he was emotionally harmed, even psychotic, with little or no conception of good or evil. But the seductive baritone voice and upper-class drawl in which he made these admissions instantly cast doubt on them. Could this charming man really have blackened the eyes of a mistress or written his best work with "half a bottle of Johnny Walker" inside him?

Skilled in marketing, Jim often invited journalists to the dilapidated semi-detached in Shepperton where he lived, mostly alone, for much of his life. Distracted by the layers of dust, the expiring pot-plant, the desiccated lemon on the mantel, and the pale, bare-breasted women, expressionless and forbidding, in the surrealist paintings by Paul Delvaux that hung on the walls, they failed to probe the  reasons for creating this décor and letting it remain largely untouched for 30 years.

Instead, they succumbed to his charm, his confidence, his voice. "You could be seduced by that voice," said one woman. "It wrapped itself around you. It embraced you. It asked you questions. It lingered over your life. It sort of gobbled you up. Through the delightful interest this interesting man takes in you, through his wonderful melodious voice, you're sucked into his world. And before you know it, you're in bed with him."

Novelist Diane Johnson compared him to "an intelligent, idealistic child brought up in a bordello, who sees things from an early age that no one should have to see". That bordello was Shanghai, where he was born in 1930 and interned by the Japanese during World War II. Though these events inspired his most popular novel, Empire of the Sun, he soon forgot what was real and what invented. Taken back by BBC TV for the film Shanghai Jim, he wrote to his closest friend, science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, "Tracked down the camp and stood in our old room, waiting for an avalanche of memories, but none came."

Jim's mother believed his strangeness dated from his birth, when a difficult delivery compressed and distorted the soft bones of his skull. While that isn't rare, she suggested it explained his eccentric behaviour. He responded with a chilly distaste for family life. Of his parents, he wrote "I didn't really like them very much". His memoir Miracles of Life accords each a few terse paragraphs, and gets their birth and death dates wrong. He plainly loved his son and two daughters, whom he raised with minimum help after the death of his wife in 1964, but his work contains no happy marriages, and no children. "To be honest, the relationships between my characters don't interest me very much," he said. "All my fiction is in a sense about isolation and how to cope with isolation."

He claimed particularly to dislike his mother, whom he felt neglected him. Yet, as a young boy, he loitered in her bedroom as she dressed for her bridge afternoons, and the title story of his collection The Atrocity Exhibition refers ambiguously to "the contours of his mother's body, site of so many psychic capitulations". During his two years as a medical student, he chose to practice dissection on one of the rare female cadavers provided by the teaching hospital, endowing the corpse with the characteristics of Edna Ballard.

Pressed to explain his unconventional sexuality, he evaded queries with such observations as "Each of us dies in the unseen erotic corridors of the sexuality of others." No point in asking what this meant, since he would simply hear you out, then go on spinning ideas. "You never had conversations," said Iain Sinclair. "You listened to these monologues and hoped to hear something you hadn't heard before."  

Sexual dysfunction

This troubled man once thought of becoming a psychiatrist. But he was sufficiently self-aware to admit that, had he ever qualified, he would have treated only one patient – himself. He compromised by becoming a writer, first of science fiction, in which he quickly lost interest, then of novels that explored the wilder shores of urban violence and sexual dysfunction.  

From adolescence, he was aroused by visions of the automobile in violent juxtaposition with the human body. His first published story, written at medical school, includes a bullet-riddled car, a dead baby and a bleeding, helpless woman. He alarmed friends with his fantasies of automobile sex, imagining coupling with his girlfriend in the back seat of a speeding Cadillac Eldorado. Occasionally he put them into practice. Passing the Tower of London one night, he noticed excavations taking place in the grounds, pulled over, and popped into a handy trench for a quickie with his girlfriend.

More bizarrely, he staged a 1970 exhibition of crashed cars in a London art centre, and hired a model to conduct topless interviews with the first-night crowd. So vivid were his descriptions of drunks fouling the cars with wine, urine and paint, and nearly raping the model in the back seat of a mangled white Pontiac, that it's jolting to discover almost every detail was invented.

The show emerged from the same "willed madness" in which he wrote his 1973 novel Crash. The manuscript startled publishers Jonathan Cape, and alarmed at least one reader. Catherine Storr, former wife of psychologist Eric Storr and author of books for children. She called Ballard "beyond psychiatric help", and urged "Do not publish!"  Cape fortunately ignored her advice but did persuade Ballard to cut 30,000 words. What remained was sufficiently shocking to polarise readers and critics both. As indifferent to their opinions as he was to the law, Jim took a midnight drunken drive shortly after delivering the book, overturned his car near Chiswick Bridge, and lost his licence for a year.

Little hint of his hidden life appeared in the reverent obituaries that followed his death in April 2009. Writers accepted him at his own valuation, celebrating the spinner of seductive phrases, the poet of "inner space", the people's guru. Only once did Jim, in my hearing at least, let slip a different vision of himself.  I asked him what he thought of Christian Bale, who played his 11-year-old self in Steven Spielberg's film of Empire of the Sun. ‘‘Just like me," he smiled. "A not-very-nice little boy."

The Inner Man: The Life of J G Ballard by John Baxter is published by Phoenix.