Like many readers, Zadie Smith was scandalised by Crash, the first 'pornographic novel about technology'. She reflects on why she changed her mind about the novel and her disastrous meeting with the author
I met JG Ballard once it was a car crash. We were sailing down the Thames in the middle of the night, I don't remember why. A British Council thing, maybe? The boat was full of young British writers, many of them drunk, and a few had begun hurling a stack of cheap conference chairs over the hull into the water. I was 23, had only been a young British writer for a couple of months, and can recall being very anxious about those chairs: I was not the type to rock the boat. I was too amazed to be on the boat. (Though it was no pleasure barge, more like a Travelodge afloat, with an interior that put you in mind of a Shepperton semi-detached. A Ballardian boat. Everything brown and grey with accents of tube-seat orange.) I slunk away from the chair-hurlers and walked straight into Ballard. That moon of a face, the shiny tonsure, the lank side-curtains of hair ghost of a defrocked priest. An agonising 10-minute conversation followed in which we two seemed put on earth to vivify that colloquial English phrase "cross purposes". Every book I championed he hated. Every film he admired I'd never seen. (We didn't dare move on to the visual arts.) The only thing we seemed to have in common was King's College Cambridge, but as I cheerily bored him with an account of all the lovely books I'd read for my finals, I could see that moon face curdling with disgust. In the end, he stopped speaking to me altogether, leant against a hollow Doric column, and simply stared.
I was being dull but the trouble went deeper than that. James Graham Ballard was a man born on the inside, to the colonial class, that is, to the very marrow of British life; but he broke out of that restrictive mould and went on to establish uniquely among his literary generation an autonomous hinterland, not attached to the mainland in any obvious way. I meanwhile, born on the outside of it all, was hell bent on breaking in. And so my Ballard encounter like my encounters, up to that point, with his work was essentially a missed encounter: ships passing in the night. I liked the Ballard of Empire of the Sun well enough, and enjoyed the few science-fiction stories I'd read, but I did not understand the novels and Crash in particular had always disturbed me, first as a teenager living in the flight path of Heathrow airport, and then as a young college feminist, warring against "phallocentricism", not at all in the mood for penises entering the leg wounds of disabled lady drivers.
The entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter.
What I noticed about these affairs, which she described in an unembarrassed voice, was the presence in each one of the automobile. All had taken place within a motor-car, either in the multi-storey carpark at the airport, in the lubrication bay of her local garage at night, or in the laybys near the northern circular motorway, as if the presence of the car mediated an element which alone made sense of the sexual act.
Braced on his left elbow, he continued to work himself against the girl's hand, as if taking part in a dance of severely stylised postures that celebrated the design and electronics, speed and direction of an advanced kind of automobile.
Vaughan's interest in myself was clearly minimal; what concerned him was not the behaviour of a 40-year-old producer of television commercials but the interaction between an anonymous individual and his car, the transits of his body across the polished cellulose panels and vinyl seating, his face silhouetted against the instrument dials.
The same calm but curious gaze, as if she were still undecided how to make use of me, was fixed on my face shortly afterwards as I stopped the car on a deserted service road among the reservoirs to the west of the airport.
The silence continued. Here and there a driver shifted behind his steering wheel, trapped uncomfortably in the hot sunlight, and I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped. The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.
I met JG Ballard once it was a car crash. We were sailing down the Thames in the middle of the night, I don't remember why. A British Council thing, maybe? The boat was full of young British writers, many of them drunk, and a few had begun hurling a stack of cheap conference chairs over the hull into the water. I was 23, had only been a young British writer for a couple of months, and can recall being very anxious about those chairs: I was not the type to rock the boat. I was too amazed to be on the boat. (Though it was no pleasure barge, more like a Travelodge afloat, with an interior that put you in mind of a Shepperton semi-detached. A Ballardian boat. Everything brown and grey with accents of tube-seat orange.) I slunk away from the chair-hurlers and walked straight into Ballard. That moon of a face, the shiny tonsure, the lank side-curtains of hair ghost of a defrocked priest. An agonising 10-minute conversation followed in which we two seemed put on earth to vivify that colloquial English phrase "cross purposes". Every book I championed he hated. Every film he admired I'd never seen. (We didn't dare move on to the visual arts.) The only thing we seemed to have in common was King's College Cambridge, but as I cheerily bored him with an account of all the lovely books I'd read for my finals, I could see that moon face curdling with disgust. In the end, he stopped speaking to me altogether, leant against a hollow Doric column, and simply stared.
I was being dull but the trouble went deeper than that. James Graham Ballard was a man born on the inside, to the colonial class, that is, to the very marrow of British life; but he broke out of that restrictive mould and went on to establish uniquely among his literary generation an autonomous hinterland, not attached to the mainland in any obvious way. I meanwhile, born on the outside of it all, was hell bent on breaking in. And so my Ballard encounter like my encounters, up to that point, with his work was essentially a missed encounter: ships passing in the night. I liked the Ballard of Empire of the Sun well enough, and enjoyed the few science-fiction stories I'd read, but I did not understand the novels and Crash in particular had always disturbed me, first as a teenager living in the flight path of Heathrow airport, and then as a young college feminist, warring against "phallocentricism", not at all in the mood for penises entering the leg wounds of disabled lady drivers.
The entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter.
What I noticed about these affairs, which she described in an unembarrassed voice, was the presence in each one of the automobile. All had taken place within a motor-car, either in the multi-storey carpark at the airport, in the lubrication bay of her local garage at night, or in the laybys near the northern circular motorway, as if the presence of the car mediated an element which alone made sense of the sexual act.
Braced on his left elbow, he continued to work himself against the girl's hand, as if taking part in a dance of severely stylised postures that celebrated the design and electronics, speed and direction of an advanced kind of automobile.
Vaughan's interest in myself was clearly minimal; what concerned him was not the behaviour of a 40-year-old producer of television commercials but the interaction between an anonymous individual and his car, the transits of his body across the polished cellulose panels and vinyl seating, his face silhouetted against the instrument dials.
The same calm but curious gaze, as if she were still undecided how to make use of me, was fixed on my face shortly afterwards as I stopped the car on a deserted service road among the reservoirs to the west of the airport.
The silence continued. Here and there a driver shifted behind his steering wheel, trapped uncomfortably in the hot sunlight, and I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped. The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.