J.G. Ballard was a man of the Right — not that the Right really wanted him

Wiilhelm

Rod sweetheart

Can you please get your mum to comb your hair and iron your clothes cos you look as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Im just being helpful, kid.

Jez

Being uneducated white underclass- (for a while - the last bit anyway) i've never heard of Ballard until now.

Your last question Rod;

"I wonder if we will ever see a British writer with such a breadth of imagination again?"

There's probably is several out there but these days imagine a knackered salmon battling up an endless stream;

Bright kid - taught in an institutionally left wing education system

Bright student - lives/taught in institutionally left wing sixth form / college / Uni system

Bright young writer; All work / breaks / offers through a mainstream centre-right (maybe if it exists) / liberal-left / left media industry..... that could swallow one whole if ever deviating from the santioned shallow dogma.

You've no chance pal.

BTW Just read Lou Reed's 'i wanna be black' lyrics;

He wanna stick to writing songs about chasing dragons in parks maybe!!

A bit a safer career move!

:))))

Daniel Heslop

Rod I want to ask you something. Why do you think it is that so many modern conservative writers (yourself included!)feel the need to pose as lefties?

rod "mussolini" liddle

Daniel - I don't know that they do. I consider myself old left because I believe in collectivism, in high taxation, in communitarianism and in support for the white working class who, I think, get a raw deal. I'm in favour of equality for women, presuming they want it, and no employment discrimination against homosexuals. I dislike Islam because it contradicts every liberal instinct I have.

But - like many of the old left - I believe in the nuclear family (despite having absented myself from one), hard work, deferred gratification, thrift etc. In other words, socialist on economics, right wing on most social policy. Just like Labour once was.

Jez

The high taxation due to communitarianism; who'd spend the money and on what?

Example; i'm on a K band because of a stupid car that (somehow) falls into the 'lets shaft someone' catagory every month (it says hello and starts with a button though)- this because it must emit pure o-zone shagger into the stratosphere i suppose.

If it does, don't worry everyone. I'm paying for it.

Where does the (honestly- i'm not joking) massive percentage of my money go- and on what?

The amount of UK tax money- if it's been fairly pulled in over the last decade (from everone who should pay it) should have been invested in something to at least buffer to a minute extent this financial debacle.

NuLab have done something with the money they've collected over the last decade.

What is it?

Vaemar

Sorry, Ron, you don't quite convince me. Ballard was a very gifted descriptive writer but a Nihilist, not a conservative, except to the small accidental aount that everyone is.

Alan Watson

Rod, darling, so glad you've figured out where to look for your soup spoon. And they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Jez

Tax and media bias.

'I wanna stay on topic' maybe.

:))))))))))))))))))))

David Pringle

Ha ha! It's that man Rod Liddle again. Well, he has emerged as something of a humorist these days -- so we shouldn't take it too seriously.

It's interesting, though that he has read Re/Search's book _J. G. Ballard: Conversations_ (as he quotes from it) -- a fairly obscure volume to most people in Britain; so maybe Liddle really is some kind of a Ballard fan after all.

He has missed a trick, though, by not mentioning that the late Harold Pinter also voted Conservative in 1979 -- he acknowledged as much in later years. It's all very well to come up with names like John Osborne -- everybody knows he turned right-wing (as did Amis, Braine, etc) -- but _Pinter_!

Pinter would have been a crushing example to strengthen Liddle's case.

Bob T

Given that the subject was Ballards' C(?)onservatism Liddle gives surprisingly little specific evidence either actual or implicit. There was also almost no discussion of the kind of Conservatism that Ballard inclined to/warmed to/lusted over. Was it American neo-con, American traditional; English economic, jingoistic, nostalgic or nanny-dominatrix conservatism? Was it deeply held and consistent or simply, periodic attacks of bile? Was his "little government" view political or artistic - the perils of all-encompassing government imposing its own group think on artist and citizen?

Ian Parkinson

Hope you saw what Charlie Brooker called you on Newswipe, Rod. It rhymed with 'punt'.

kim serca

Bollocks Liddle. Unconvincing crap. Ballard was unclassifiable with regard to a left/right split. The idea that he had a concrete vision of how society should be organised, as opposed to a fantastic vision which drew on existing tendencies is to try and reduce his imagination to the level of hackwork. Cant imagine why a hack like you would want to do that

David Vaughan

J G Ballard was a conservative? Oh really?

"I would like to see the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords, inherited titles and the public schools, a move that would bring us into line with the rest of the English-speaking world. I would like to see Oxford and Cambridge turned into graduate uni- versities entirely devoted to research, which at a stroke would cool the ardour of the "tiger mothers" of Holland Park and Hampstead determined to set their three-year-olds on the path to Oxbridge, whatever the human cost."
J G Ballard, New Statesman 9/5/2005.

Jez

Well, i always get there in the end.

You mean *Ballard* don't you.

So he's Jim, from Empire of the Sun.

Ok. Perspective met.

"You can see why the British Right did not reach out to Ballard and return his warm (and at times, er, moist) embrace."

Do you think maybe his incredibly astute instinct (the very one that helped him survive Japanese internment within the Soochow camp system) relayed a rather obnoxious / mischievous approach whilst engaging with/about- (and let's be fair)- a ruling political elite (right or left)- that when compared sufferings and trauma he experienced/observed in his early life, could only be described as sub-human rock slime.

So let’s get this straight; The Right didn’t want *him*?!

Other way around maybe?

Read in the Sunday Times today:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6168386.ece

Not politically correct enough for the luvvies maybe. Best push him to the sidelines then.

Slaughter House 5, Kurt Vonnegut’s maybe takes a similar obscure approach to life/writing whilst enduring extremely unique trauma/experience in earlier life?

We could maybe learn so much from these people.

J.G.Ballard = Legend.

Lit crit

Rod, the best writers have always been on the Right: often on the far right. A few names you didn't mention:
WB Yeats (wrote marching songs for the Irish fascist Blueshirts).
TS Eliot (churchy consservative).
Ezra Pound (Mussolini lover. broadcast from fascist Italy throughiut WW2).
Wyndham Lewis (Before recanting admired Hitler & Mosley).
Henry Williamson (Loved Mosley as well as Otters. member of BUF.)
DH Lawrence ( working class but convinced elitist).
Kingsley and Martin Amis.
And abroad...L-F Celine (Shared Ballard's apocayptic bleakness but murderously anti-semitic).
Knut Hamsun ( Hippie favourite but collaborated with Nazis).
Ernst Juenger (Admired by ecologists and Mitterrand but GOM of German quasi-fascism).
Mikhail Bulgakov (Stalin loved him, but a Christian conservative for all that).
Ivan Bunin.
William Burroughs.
etc
etc.
The reason is the same as why the Speccie used to be so much better a read than the New Stateman. The Left are dull, worthy, have an agenda. The right are Tory/anarchistic; don't give a fuck; are for the individual human and don't believe in the illusions of human equality that produce hells on earth..
Who have the left got to compare? Orwell was well on the way to right when he died; ditto Camus. Sartre? Salman Rushdie? Give us a break...

Fudgington Temple-Sweed

David Vaughn, he wasn't left or conservative:

"Ballard considers himself a libertarian. "I'm all for free sex, alcohol and would liberalise the drug laws if some way could be found to protect adolescents."

-- The Independent September 15, 2006.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/j-g-ballard-the-comforts-of-madness-415967.html

JOn

I'm not sure I would call Ballard a right-winger. He was probably more of libertarian or free-thinker than anything else. I remember him criticizing George Bush quite harshly, but then what sane person hasn't. He certainly was pessimistic about human nature.