A conversation with Fay Ballard
Fay Ballard is a London-based artist, working mainly in drawing, and is the elder daughter of J.G. Ballard. When she was seven her mother, Mary, died suddenly of pneumonia. Fay and her siblings were raised by her father at the same time as he was carving out his remarkable career as a visionary, satirical and controversial short story writer and novelist.
We are great admirers of J.G.Ballard's work and, as you'll see from the attached catalogue, we are proud to carry his books in our stock. We have even taken several to the Boston book fair with us. We were, therefore, honoured when Fay agreed to talk exclusively to our book specialist Oriana Peckham. We have gained a rare insight into the domestic life of Ballard the parent, which was so at odds with the violence and outrage of so many of his books. Yet we also see how his encouragement of creativity, whatever its form, was a gift to his children.
"It’s difficult to choose [one of my father’s books] because he invents so many great stories, parables and ‘near futures’; all prescient, captivating and beautifully written. If I had to pick one it would be Vermilion Sands, a collection of nine short stories set in a desert-resort of the future. Written between 1956 and 1970, this volume of jewels includes his first short story, ‘Prima Belladonna’, about a plant programmed to sing operatic arias. The stories are set in an almost exotic paradise, albeit one of uneasy decay, populated by faded movie queens and solitary artistic types who have yet to fulfil their dreams. Shot through with wit and poignancy, they make a darkly funny and unsettling collection of what the future could be, and in typical Ballardian spirit, much in the stories is becoming our reality. We will recognise the dial-a-poem computers in our own use of AI, and the possibility of psycho-sensitive homes built with complex artificial intelligence that are capable of murder. Above all, I find these strange, haunting parables strikingly beautiful. My father admired the Surrealists, especially Salvador Dali, and the stories almost read as paintings inspired by Dali’s desert landscapes.
"As a child growing up, it was completely natural to be fathered by a man who loved his children and always put them first; we didn’t have a nanny or au pair. He brought us up single-handedly after my mother died suddenly in Spain in 1964: cooking, washing, driving us to school, helping with homework, joining us to watch Top of the Pops and Jackanory.
"In my teens, I began spending more time with friends and realised that our family life was different. Creativity and ideas came first in the Ballard household. The dining table was often covered in paints, pencils, crayons, paper, Plasticine, Meccano, Lego, scraps of coloured felt, cardboard and thread, small experiments with molten wine bottle caps, model aircraft kits and so on. A space would be created for a plate of food by pushing a pile of stuff to the side. The family dog joined us at the table sitting in his own chair. The sound of typewriter keys filled the air.
"It was a fertile upbringing for my own creativity and I drew and painted all the time. Later in life as an adult, my father would say: ‘Always follow your obsessions, drink at the well of your imagination’. After his death from prostate cancer in 2009, I began making drawings that explored my childhood and family home. I was trying to re-engage with my mother who had died when I was seven, and reassess my early experiences. I drew my mother from discovered photographs and belongings I found in the family home, and then other personal objects from memory that evoked feelings and thoughts. I also drew the family home where my father continued living until his death, linking particular memories to interior fixtures and fittings. It was reparative work.
"I will always remember him as a remarkable father who loved his children unconditionally, and as an intellectual giant. Although he is regarded as a writer of dystopian modernity, he was optimistic and positive. The life and soul of a good supper, both approachable and witty, he loved eating Chinese food with his family, a reminder of his upbringing in Shanghai where he was born in 1930. The conversation was lively and stimulating as he observed contemporary life with a detached but forensic eye.
"He was a true original and a gifted writer who wrote compelling prescient stories that foresaw the near future. You are rewarded in many ways when you read Ballard: absorbing stories beautifully told, haunting poetic imagery, big ideas and themes. Some are romantic, others hard-wired, and all unsettling and visionary.
"My father talked about his ideas and thoughts freely but didn’t discuss each work in detail as it developed through several drafts. He needed the creative space, privacy and solitude to follow his own obsessions and fertile imagination. "