An editor who read "Crash" called JG Ballard "beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish"
by Mark Frauenfelder · Boing BoingWhen JG Ballard submitted Crash to Jonathan Cape in the early 1970s, a senior reader reportedly wrote on the manuscript: "This man is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish." Cape published it anyway, and Ballard went on to write The Atrocity Exhibition, The Drowned World, and Empire of the Sun — a body of work so magnificent that "Ballardian" is now a real word in the language. When Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, people called it a Ballardian moment.
The Illuminated Man, a new biography by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, covers all of this and more. Priest — the novelist behind The Prestige and The Adjacent — had written roughly 65,000 words, about half the book, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. His partner Allan completed it. The result is, as The Guardian puts it, "a brave and moving book" — unconventional in form partly because it had to be.
Priest's thinks Ballard made a mistake writing Empire of the Sun, his autobiographical novel about being interned in a Japanese civilian camp as a child. Revealing the source material drained him dry, Priest believed. Whether you buy that or not, the biography covers the facts of Ballard's life that are almost as strange as his fiction. From the 1960s until his death in 2009, he lived and worked in Shepperton, a dull suburb west of London, writing every book in longhand on paper, never touching a computer, never getting email. Martin Amis called his talent "one of the most mysterious and distempered in modern English fiction."
When the film rights to Empire of the Sun sold and the first payment arrived, Ballard went to his local supermarket and bought a tin of salmon.
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