Cats, whisky and modernity: the J.G. Ballard I knew

That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 78, was one of the darkest, most unsettling of post-war British novelists. In a career that spanned half a century from his debut as a science-fiction writer in the mid-1950s, his surreal imagination confronted such subjects as nuclear catastrophe and planetary drought. His discomfiting novel Crash (1973) attributed a deviant sexuality to the road accident. Ballard had a taste for ‘automobile pornography’, according to his biographer John Baxter, and fantasised about having sex with Margaret Thatcher in the back of the prime-ministerial Daimler V8.

In 1991, I called on Ballard at his home in Shepperton off the M3, where he had lived for 30 years. Shepperton had been attacked by Martians in The War of the Worlds, and in his fiction Ballard often tried to complete the task that H.G. Wells had begun. (His last published novel, Kingdom Come, unfolded amid the tarmac flyovers and underpasses that ring Heathrow and Thames Valley suburbia.) Immensely courteous, Ballard poured extravagant measures of whisky and spoke, among other things, of his love of surrealist art. His imaginary landscapes, influenced by the surrealist painters Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst, remain among the most haunting in English literature; the term ‘Ballardian’ has now entered the language. We became friends. Ballard sent me photographs of his cat and postcards of paintings by the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux. In the Telegraph, to my delight, he reviewed a book I wrote on Haiti (‘Perhaps you should seriously think about writing a novel?’), and helped research my biography of Primo Levi. He was extremely kind and generous.