Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard

Chris Beckett

‘We had entered an inflamed landscape’1

When Raine Channing – ‘sometime international model and epitome of eternal youthfulness’2 – wanders into ‘Topless in Gaza’, a bio-fabric boutique in Vermilion Sands, and remarks that ‘Nothing in Vermilion Sands ever changes’, she is uttering a general truth about the fantastic dystopian world that J. G. Ballard draws and re-draws in his collection of stories set in and around the tired, flamboyant desert resort, a resort where traumas flower and sonic sculptures run to seed.3 ‘It’s a good place to come back to,’4 she casually continues. But, like many of the female protagonists in these stories – each a femme fatale – she is a captive of her past: ‘She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeated themselves.’5 Raine has murdered her ‘confidant and impresario, the brilliant couturier and designer of the first bio-fabric fashions, Gavin Kaiser’.6 Kaiser has been killed – with grim, pantomime karma – by a constricting gold lamé shirt of his own design: ‘Justice in a way, the tailor killed by his own cloth.’7 But Kaiser’s death has not resolved her trauma. Raine is a victim herself, a victim of serial plastic surgery, caught as a teenager in Kaiser’s doomed search for perpetual gamin youth: ‘he kept me at fifteen,’ she says, ‘but not because of the fashion-modelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.’8 She hopes to find in Vermilion Sands, in its localized curvature of time and space, the parts of herself she has lost on a succession of operating tables. She sleepwalks, dancing at night among the empty tables and discarded hypodermic vials of an out-of-season beach bar, looking for a

1 J. G. Ballard, ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, Vermilion Sands (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 19. Vermilion Sands was first published, as eight stories, by Berkley Books, New York, in 1971. In 1973 it was re-published, with minor textual revision, by Jonathan Cape, as nine stories, adding ‘The Singing Statues’ (first published 1962). All references below are to the Vintage reprint of 2001. 2 ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’, Vermilion Sands, p. 132. 3 Ibid., p. 128: ‘Running to seed in the sand-reefs on the fringes of Vermilion Sands, the singing flowers and sculptures formed the unique flora of the landscape, an island ringed by strange sounds.’ In ‘The Screen Game’ (ibid., pp. 69- 70), we are told that: ‘Several of the older sculptures whose sonic cores had corroded had been broken up and left on the beach, where they had taken root again. When the heat gradients roused them to life they would emit a brief strangled music, fractured parodies of their former song.’ 4 Ibid., p. 134. 5 Ibid., p. 143. 6 Ibid., p. 132. 7 Ibid., p. 142. 8 Ibid., p. 139.

1 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard beachcomber to pick up and murder with a bio-garment.9 Death and love, Thanatos and Eros, are the psychological drivers for these macabre and comedic entertainments of the desert. Ballard once remarked that authors do not necessarily write their books in order, identifying Empire of the Sun (1984) as truly his first book and Vermilion Sands (1971) as his last.10 The remark was made in 1995, shortly before he published in succession Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000), both of which are set in the leisure- soaked gated communities of the Mediterranean coastline that are often conveniently linked with the environment of Vermilion Sands. The linkage was encouraged by Ballard’s ‘Preface’ to the stories, in which he associated the fictional desert resort with ‘sections of the 3,000-mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun’.11 But the second pointer that Ballard offered in his ‘Preface’ is perhaps more helpful: ‘I once described this overlit desert resort as an exotic suburb of my mind’.12 Before addressing the Vermilion Sands story in draft that has recently come to light among Ballard’s literary papers at the British Library, I want to first prepare the way by sketching something of the strange, cerebral ‘suburb’ to which the abandoned story belongs. It is an arid suburb of nine stories, or perhaps nine case histories, since each is informed by what, in another context, Ballard referred to as ‘Freud’s view of the unconscious as a narrative stage’.13 One of them, ‘The Screen Game’ (1962), is a story that is of particular interest in relation to Ballard’s abandoned draft: both stories include a blue-haired Emerelda, each a ‘haunted Venus of Lagoon West’; both stories reach their narrative climax with the death of the father at the centre of a labyrinth; and both draw from the visual rhetoric of film to persuade us of their case history. The Vermilion Sands stories establish a world accumulatively. An incidental map of sorts of the desiccated narrative neighbourhood is gradually unrolled from tale to tale: the road from the inland sand-lake of Lagoon West – ‘like a segment of embalmed time’14 – that travels past the coral towers; the gravel track through the sand reefs with their convoluted cathedral- like hanging galleries of rock and massive towers of gloomy obsidian ‘like stone gallows’; the Van Stratten summer house with its collapsed ornamental gateway; the mineral island of Lizard Key; and the road that forks by the gas-station in Ciraquito to Red Beach and to Vermilion Sands. Here, Freudian family romance is dressed in new clothes, the psychological tone is delusional, and the script fatally predetermined. Weirdly vocal and proliferating wild sculptures echo from story to story, and fabulous sand-rays rise and glide in black clouds when their repose is disturbed. It is striking how the stories combine a mood of urgent narrative purpose with a contrary distracted interest in the incidental. Ballard repeatedly gestures at unreadable mysteries at the edges of the narrative frame. Glimpsed in passing, as the main narrative sweeps intently by, are the ‘amiable ciphers’15 of tethered gliders and

9 The reference to ‘hypodermic vials’, and the name of the boutique, ‘Topless in Gaza’, allude to Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and specifically to the morphine-addicted nymphomaniac, Mary Amberley. Huxley’s title (from John Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 41) also allows Ballard to allude to an archetypal femme fatale: Delilah. The narrator of ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’, and the owner of the boutique, is, of course, ‘Mr Samson’. 10 Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard (London, 2012), p. 299. The interviewer was Will Self, and the interview was first published in Self, Junk Mail (London, 1995). As an alternative ‘last’ work, Self suggested the collection The Terminal Beach (1964). 11 ‘Preface’, ibid., [p. 7]. 12 Ibid. 13 J. G. Ballard, ‘Grope Therapy’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essay and Reviews (London, 1996), p. 269. 14 ‘The Screen Game’, Vermilion Sands, p. 70: ‘The harsh song of the rogue sculpture still pierced the air. Two miles away, through the haze which partly obscured the distant shore, the beach-houses jutted among the dunes, and the fused surface of the lake, in which so many objects were embedded, seams of jade and obsidian, was like a segment of embalmed time, from which the music of the sculpture was a slowly expiring leak. The heat over the vermilion surface was like molten quartz, stirring sluggishly to reveal the distant mesas and reefs.’ 15 ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, ibid., p. 12.

2 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard the ever-present ‘hieroglyphic shadows’.16 As if family romance were but the most obvious of mysteries to be explored, we are given lyrical pause to wonder whether Raine Channing’s lonely somnambulant dance – ‘her white gown drawing empty signatures in the sand’17 – or a leading actress’s decline, untold and off-stage, might be as remarkable as the main narrative highway, which more often than not is a well-lit road to revenge. And if there is not a neurotic leading lady in town, there is always time to kill, interminably, at Café Fresco, as the red sand – the ‘luminous ash’ of a glamorous season past – drifts desolately against the kiosk shutters.18 The composite names of nearly all the central female figures of these stories are loud- hailing portmanteau signifiers that boldly blazon their origins and their fatal directions of travel. To call them ‘characters’ would be to misunderstand their purely figurative purpose, and would attribute to them a fictional realism that the author did not intend. Like crudely- sutured shards of public fabulation, they are hybrid caricatures, dark blends of notoriety and neurosis, part new-world Hollywood and part old-world European decadence: Leonora Chanel, Emerelda Garland, Lunora Goalen, Hope Cunard, Lorraine Drexel, Raine Channing, and Gloria Tremayne.19 The remaining two of the nine female figures that Ballard presents do not fit this pattern: Aurora Day and Jane Ciracylides. They are more like commanding and abruptly arriving avatars of the unconscious than fading film stars or avant- garde artists or their patrons, and they pursue a rather different agenda, provoking change and transformation to enliven the monotony and the ‘beach fatigue’20 that is Vermilion Sands, before suddenly departing as unexpectedly as they came. Aurora tries to resuscitate the lost art of poetry in a world in which verse is churned out to order by a machine, and is measured by its length. Jane is an itinerant ‘speciality singer’,21 a beautiful mutant with insects for eyes

16 ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’, ibid., p. 91. 17 ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’, ibid., p. 134. 18 The Screen Game’, ibid., p. 47 19 Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool, 1997), p. 170, proposes: Leonora Carrington, Coco Chanel, Judy Garland, Nancy Cunard, ‘perhaps an echo of Dorothea Tanning’, and Gloria Swanson. A name that Luckhurst skips over, ‘Lunora Goalen’, is surely Barbara Goalen, the leading British fashion model of the late 1940s, noted for her elegant beauty, tiny waist, and her ‘mink and diamonds look’, who worked for the best fashion houses in Paris. Her first two husbands were pilots, one killed in action and the other a commercial pilot killed in a plane crash. In 1954, she married her third husband, a Lloyd’s underwriter, and stopped modelling but continued to make public appearances. Goalen died in 2002. For an obituary, see The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/1397667/Barbara- Goalen.html (accessed 4 July 2013). Another match for ‘Raine Channing’ is Carol Channing, of Hello Dolly fame (Broadway, 1963), who was no stranger to plastic surgery and who, rather like Ballard’s Raine Channing, married her manager and publicist (in 1956). Yet another match is Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950). In ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (London, 1996), pp. 84-8, a book review of two surveys of surrealism, Ballard refers colourfully to (pp. 85-6) ‘the remarkable beauty of its women – Georgette Magritte, demure sphinx with the eyes of a tamed Mona Lisa; the peerless Meret Oppenheim, designer of the fur-lined cup and saucer; the mystic Leonora Carrington, painter of infinitely frail fantasies; and presiding above them all the madonna of Port Lligat, Gala Dali, ex-wife of the poet Paul Eluard, who described her before his death as the one “with the look that pierces walls”. One could write a book, let alone a review, about these extraordinary creatures – nymphs of another planet, in your orisons be all my dreams remembered.’ The plain text of A User’s Guide omits the photographs of these ‘nymphs’, and also omits images of the six surrealist paintings that Ballard glosses. A further omission is another ‘nymph’, Dorothea Tanning ‘with her hieratic eyes’. The review in full, which first appeared in New Worlds (July 1966), is available on-line at: http://www.jgballard.ca/non_fiction/jgb_reviews_surrealism.html (accessed 16 July 2013). 20 ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, ibid., p. 19. 21 ‘Prima Belladonna’, ibid., p. 38. Her performances are so powerful that no one can quite agree on what they have heard: ‘After her performance three hundred people swore they’d seen everything from a choir of angels taking the vocal in the music of the spheres to Alexander’s Ragtime Band […] Tony Miles had heard Sophie Tucker singing the ‘St Louis Blues’, and Harry, the elder Bach conducting the B Minor Mass’ (p. 38).

3 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard who teaches plants to sing in chorus and to climax (the sexual analogy is explicit in the story); when she leaves, she leaves behind the lingering sound of her music, like a post-coital glow. In the story ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ Hope Cunard, a Diana-like figure, sails the desert – a ‘sea of dreams’22 – in her white-wheeled sand-schooner. She is hunting for the lover she has shot, or believes she has shot, the Flying Dutchman, hoping nonetheless that he will sail into view in the warm desert air. In effect, he does sail into view when the literary-named narrator of this story, Robert Melville, who is relieving his summer boredom by hunting a school of white sand-rays from a sand-yacht, suffers a flat tyre and is rescued by Hope. More captured than rescued, Hope takes him to her island villa, a future-gothic vision, on Lizard Key: ‘Surrounded on three sides by the tall minarets of the sand-reefs, both villa and island had sprung from some mineral fantasy of the desert.’23 Chasing the sand-rays had taken Melville to a region of the desert ‘beyond sight of any landmarks.’24 His indolent purpose was less to kill his airborne quarry – or to harpoon a white whale – than to lose himself like a disembodied cipher, a fleeting, anonymous signature, in ‘an abstract landscape composed of the flying rays, the undulating dunes and the triangles of the sails.’ It is from these elements – from ‘the barest geometry of time and space’ – that Hope Cunard appears, as if she were an illusion ‘born of that sea of dreams’.25 ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ is a story that turns upon the revelatory power of art. The story introduces the novelty of photosensitive paint, evidently a sister technology to the innovation of excitable bio-fabrics that react to human emotions. Hope retires to her villa every summer – whatever that might mean in a timeless resort – to sail, to hunt the Flying Dutchman, and to paint, although this advanced form of painting is not realized by brush and manual dexterity: the canvas is simply exposed to its subject through a process that resembles the long exposure of a photographic plate.26 Hope regularly records the desert at night, in case the white sails of the Flying Dutchman’s schooner should appear on the horizon and leave their trace on the canvas. But the innovative pigment records more than light. Like Melville, the Flying Dutchman enjoyed a ‘love-idyll’ at Lizard Key ‘that came to a violent end’.27 They produced portraits of each other using the new technique. Melville speculates that the Flying Dutchman may have seen in Hope’s portrait ‘some of the unstated elements he had begun to suspect in Hope’s character.’ His pointed observation recalls the provocative, morbid portraits of Leonora Chanel. Leonora Chanel’s name seems to suggest both the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and the glamorously flawed, international milieu of Coco Chanel. She is an heiress whose husband has died in mysterious circumstances on the Riviera. Since then, she has travelled the world to escape the suspicious ‘spotlight of publicity and gossip’.28 Vermilion Sands is her last refuge. Her villa is crammed with her portraits, formal portraits by artists such as Pietro

22 ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’, ibid., p. 92. 23 Ibid., p. 94. 24 Ibid., p. 92. 25 Ibid., pp. 91-2. 26 Ibid., pp. 96-7: ‘Once the pigments had been selected, the photosensitive paint would produce an image of whatever still life or landscape it was exposed to.’ The exposure was ‘a lengthy process […] of at least four or five days’ although ‘there was no need for the subject’s continuous presence.’ In the case of portraits, ‘the movements of the sitter produced a series of multiple projections, perhaps with the analytic forms of cubism, or, less severely, a pleasant impressionistic blurring. However, these unpredictable variations on the face and form of the sitter were often disconcerting in their perception of character.’ 27 Ibid., p. 102. 28 ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, ibid., p. 18.

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Annigoni,29 Salvador Dali, and Francis Bacon, ‘gilt miniatures on mantel shelves’, and even ‘an ascending mural’ that follows the sweep of the staircase.30 However, one unflattering portrait by a local artist called Nolan, which ‘visualised Leonora as a dead Medea’, lies rejected and unframed: ‘The stretched skin below her right cheek, the sharp forehead and slipped mouth gave her the numbed and luminous appearance of a corpse.’31 This is not the only portrait of Leonora not to have met with her narcissistic approval. At the time of her husband’s death, officially declared as suicide, he had also been painting his wife, but the ‘mutilated easel portrait’ was ‘accidentally destroyed’ before the inquest. ‘Perhaps,’ says the narrator, with a melodramatic nudge and wink, ‘the painting revealed more of Leonora’s character than she chose to see.’32 In Vermilion Sands, a small team of glider pilots, one of whom is the local artist Nolan, entertain the residents by sculpting clouds into transitory, fluffy representations of ‘seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds.’33 Leonora invites the team to put on a special vanity display for her and her guests near her villa: ‘Your men do understand that there’s to be only one subject.’34 But the all-too recognizable cloud-face the pilots create is far from flattering. Carved dangerously from unstable storm- nimbus rather than ‘fair-weather cumulus’ (one pilot dies in the carving), it has an accusatory power that hangs in the sky: ‘satanic eyes lit by the open vents in the cloud, a sliding mouth like a dark smear.’35 Leonora dies from a tornado guided by Nolan’s glider towards her villa: her ‘body lay among the broken tables near the bandstand, half-wrapped in a bleeding canvas.’ In mock respect, the narrator covers her ‘with the shreds of canvas, the torn faces of herself.’36 Just as Francis Bacon seems a strange choice of artist for a patron seeking a flattering society portrait, so the invitation to Nolan to portray her face across the sky – having previously rejected his work as too brutally truthful, too morbidly foretelling – is a wilful collision course to elect. Leonora Chanel is helplessly committed to an inevitable fate: it’s the way the story, or the dream, goes in Vermilion Sands, and all the part players know their parts, from the compliant agency of the narrator to the dwarf pilot who dies for his art in the storm cloud. The psychological tenor of Vermilion Sands takes a psychoanalytic turn in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, a story that features another new technology – auto-responsive architecture – to set alongside the novelties of bio-fabrics and photosensitive paint. Number 99 Stellavista is a ‘psychotropic’ property. Its many ‘senso-cells’ cause the house to respond physically to anyone it encompasses, occupants and visitors alike, and it retains ‘coded memories’37 of the emotional lives of previous occupants on a (now quaint) memory drum in

29 Annigoni completed portraits of Queen Elizabeth II in 1956 and 1969, and a portrait of Princess Margaret in 1957. ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, one of Ballard’s so-called ‘surgical fictions’ was published in New Worlds, 199 (March 1970), and was subsequently included in the expanded editions of The Atrocity Exhibition published by RE/Search (1990) and HarperCollins (1993). For a British Pathé News report (January 1958) on the first display of the portrait of Princess Margaret in a gallery in New Bond Street, see: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/the-art-of- annigoni-aka-annigoni-shows-his-portrai (accessed 23 July 2013). ‘Princess Margaret’s son, Viscount Linley, included the portrait in an auction of his mother’s possessions at Christie’s in 2006, arguing that he needed to meet a £3 million inheritance tax bill following her death in 2002. It was sold for £680,000, three times its original estimate. However, it later emerged that Viscount Linley was the anonymous bidder, buying back the portrait when it became apparent that the sale had far exceeded expectations by raising a total of £14 million.’ Reported in The Telegraph (18 September 2008): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/2982471/Princess- Margaret-portrait-on-display.html (accessed 23 July 2013). 30 ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, Vermilion Sands, p. 22. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 19. 33 Ibid., p. 11. 34 Ibid., p. 20. 35 Ibid., p. 27. 36 Ibid., p. 29. 37 ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, Vermilion Sands, p. 202.

5 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard a console. Living in a psychotropic house is said to be ‘like inhabiting someone else’s brain’.38 The property that Howard and Fay Talbot buy is disturbingly oppressive, as if it ‘contained the possibility of some explosive burst of passion or temperament’.39 We learn that the previous occupant had been a film actress, the late Gloria Tremayne (born, Emma Slack), whose career declined, or slackened, following a ‘narcotics charge after a car smash, and then disappeared into a limbo of alcoholics hospitals and psychiatric wards’.40 The house retains the memory of her unhappy marriage and the violent memory of Gloria shooting her husband. As if it were a troubled human psyche, the house recapitulates the trauma, revisiting itself upon the Talbots, whose marriage it breaks. Fay is driven away, as if by a rival lover, leaving Howard to (happily) ‘savour the quintessence of Gloria Tremayne […] exploring every alcove and niche in search of her.’41 But the house becomes dangerously unstable. Physically contorted and ruptured by the emotional history it has experienced and remembered, its ‘plastex’ walls buckle and its floors furl at their edges, nearly killing Howard in a ‘tremendous spasm’ that repeats the property’s ‘convulsive reaction’ to the violent death of Gloria’s husband. Talbot just manages to switch off the house, only to dream of one day switching the house (and Gloria) back on again. ‘If you ask me it needs a psychiatrist to straighten it out,’ remarks a policeman called to the scene. Howard replies off-handedly that his ‘role’ had been ‘to reconstruct the original traumatic situation’ and release ‘the repressed material.’42 With a single-minded urgency familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, Howard Talbot embraces an ‘insane’ destiny, kisses an ‘ambiguous smile’, and embarks upon a kind of necessary folly. ‘To live with it might well be madness for me, as there’s a subtle charm about the house even in its distorted form, like the ambiguous smile of a beautiful but insane woman.’43 This formulaic blend of vulnerable beauty and insanity matches the art-work of many an American pulp-fiction magazine cover of the day. ‘The Screen Game’, first published in the same year as ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, was the featured cover-story of the October 1962 issue of Fantastic Stories of Imagination. The cover was illustrated by just such a female type, the emotionally tortured and seductive Emerelda Garland, ‘the haunted Venus of Lagoon West.’44 The illustration (fig. 1) is quite faithful to Ballard’s vision: we see the large screens painted with signs of the zodiac for the obscure, therapeutic ‘game’ – ‘a sort of total psychodrama’45 – that is ‘played’; Emerelda’s ‘sepulchral’ body is shown ‘almost naked in a silk gown like a veil of moonlight’;46 and visible in the foreground are the front-runners of her chaperone-army of jewelled insects, ‘a carpet of Fig. 1. Front cover, Fantastic Stories of Imagination (October 1962), featuring ‘The Screen Game’ by J. G. Ballard.

38 Ibid., p. 190. 39 Ibid., p. 192. 40 Ibid., p. 195. Gloria Tremayne’s name, and her public decline, suggest by association the role made famous by another ‘Gloria’, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950), who portrayed ‘Norma Desmond’. 41 Ibid., p. 196. 42 Ibid., p. 207. 43 Ibid., p. 208. 44 ‘The Screen Game’, ibid., p. 59. 45 Ibid., p. 64. 46 Ibid., p. 67: ‘I found Emerelda Garland among the screens, her white face an oval halo in the shadows, almost naked in a silk gown like a veil of moonlight. She was leaning against a huge Taurus with her pale arms outstretched at her sides, like Europa supplicant before the bull, the luminous spectres of the zodiac guard surrounding her.’

6 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard diamonds.’47 The scene is set in a dreamscape as removed from naturalism as a painting by De Chirico or Dali. ‘A night with Hecate’ is added front-cover copy, but the magazine blurb is not out of place for a story that revels in over-determination: in addition to the allusion to Emerelda’s namesake, Judy Garland, and to the emphasis upon her corpse-like appearance – the ‘soft down’ on her face has a morbid delicacy ‘like grave’s dust’48 – she is variously Venus, Eurydice, Europa, and Ariadne, mistress of the mobile labyrinth that the painted screens construct. The history of Emerelda’s residence in the vast Van Stratten summer house on Lagoon West, and her acutely disturbed state of mind, is a dark family-cloud of hearsay, suspicion, death, and madness. Charles Van Stratten is a rich man, ‘a scion of one of the world’s wealthiest banking families’.49 Despite his financial advantages, however, he suffers from a complaint as common as ‘beach fatigue’ in Vermilion Sands: he lacks ‘complete conviction in his own identity’.50 Both of Charles’s former wives have been driven away – one to suicide, the other into the arms of his analyst – by a possessive mother, whose husband died (we are not told why, but we may wonder at the Oedipal convenience) shortly after Charles was born. Emerelda, a third-wife candidate who ‘was once a minor film actress’,51 is suspected of pushing Charles’s ‘domineering harridan’52 of a mother over a balcony to her death. Emerelda is traumatized by the memory of what she has done, or what she might have done, or perhaps by what she might have witnessed: the truth of the matter is not disclosed until the end of the story. She becomes disturbed and withdrawn. ‘She’s clung to this place and its nightmare memories,’53 says Charles, who has engaged Dr Gruber – a black-shoed, dark-suited captor – to look after her. Gruber holds out little hope for Emerelda’s recovery, but Charles seems more optimistic and devises the symbolic psychodrama of the screen game through which he hopes to coax her back into the world again, like Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from the Underworld, and from Dr Gruber, who is, like the Hades he represents, an unseen figure, bar his dark shoes and suit and the symbolically ‘downward inclination of his head’.54 Charles’s psychodrama is to be framed within a film that his production company, Orpheus Productions, Inc., is making. Called Aphrodite 80, it is to be directed by Orson Kanin, ‘sometime enfant terrible of the futurist cinema but now a portly barrel-stomached fifty’.55 The film is to include a silent ‘shadow ballet’ filmed on the terrace. Emerelda is to play Eurydice, although she has not been told as much. This ‘ballet,’ Charles explains, is ‘not

47 Ibid., p. 68. 48 Ibid., pp. 60-1: ‘There was a curious glacé immobility about her face, investing the white skin with an almost sepulchral quality, the soft down which covered it like grave’s dust.’ 49 Ibid., p. 50. 50 Ibid., p. 51. 51 Ibid., p. 64. 52 Ibid., p. 50. 53 Ibid., p. 64. 54 Ibid., p. 68. The common Austro-German name of ‘Gruber’ that Ballard has chosen for this guardian of the Underworld is traditionally associated with the subterranean occupation of mining. In English, to grub, or to dig, is etymologically related to the noun grave, a place of burial. 55 Ibid., p. 54. Charles explains (p. 55): ‘The title is misleading, a box-office concession. The film is really Kanin’s final examination of the Orpheus legend. The whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other. How much reality can we stand?’ Orson Kanin (a name obviously derived from Orson Welles and Citizen Kane) has a filmography that alludes to Jean Cocteau, who directed three films about Orpheus: Le Sang d’un poète (1930), Orphée (1950) and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). Cocteau’s three films are, as it were, subtended from Ballard’s story. Kanin’s contribution to Orphic film is (ibid., p. 54) ‘Blind Orpheus, a neo-Freudian, horror-film version of the Greek legend. According to Kanin’s interpretation, Orpheus deliberately breaks the taboo and looks Eurydice in the face because he wants to be rid of her; in a famous nightmare sequence which projects his unconscious loathing, he becomes increasingly aware of something cold and strange about his resurrected wife, and finds that she is a disintegrating corpse.’ Charles Van Stratten’s imaginative grasp of his Orphic mission seems to be much influenced by Kanin’s film.

7 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard as abstract as Kanin thinks. In fact, its sole purpose is therapeutic’.56 Emerelda is encouraged to gradually venture out on the terrace by the screens – which offer a protective pathway, serving as ‘both barriers and corridors’57 – and by Paul Golding, the artist who has created them. Paul was ‘passing through one of [his] longer creative pauses’58 when he drifted into Van Stratten’s offer of a commission to paint some scenery. His (chronic) condition of creative pause strikes an ambiguous note: is this a particularly creative period of inactivity, or is Golding pausing from a period of creativity? Paul vainly surmises that Charles must know him from an art magazine profile. When Charles describes to Paul the sort of ‘scenery’ he has in mind, he refers him to one of the most influential films of early cinema: ‘Like the protagonist of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, trapped in a labyrinth of tilting walls, the Orphic hero of Aphrodite 80 would appear searching for his lost Eurydice among the shifting time stations.’59 First shown in 1920, the German Expressionist horror film is notable for its highly stylized, uncanny studio sets, lit by the faux light and shade of a painted chiaroscuro. A labyrinthine town is represented by a painted and psychologically evocative architecture: jagged roofs, curved walls and strangely angled doors and windows form an integral part of the visual narrative. The exaggerated ballet-like movements of the film’s actors, dressed in correspondingly stylized costumes, add to the unworldly theatricality and the unsettling mise-en-scène the film develops.60 Charles’s very specific choice of film suggests another interpretive key – harmonious with the master key of surrealism that turns all of Ballard’s locks – to the stylized and dream-like mise-en-scène, or liminal space, of the Vermilion Sands stories as a whole, in which inner and outer worlds are but two sides, or two realized expressions, of the same narrative coin. The unstable and emotive geology of Lagoon West is as prone to sudden landslide as a fragile ego is to psychological collapse.61 Psychotropic houses, bio-fabrics, photosensitive paint, and the wild sonic sculptures that function as a responsive but indecipherable chorus to the unfolding action, can all be accommodated within the frame of an expressionistic mise-en-scène. In the film-still shown opposite (fig. 2), the woman on the ground – who is in fact being rescued, although she appears to have been murdered or abducted – is fluidly joined to her surroundings. The narrowing lines of the pathway Fig. 2. Still from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920).

56 Ibid., p. 64. 57 Ibid., p. 56. 58 Ibid., p. 51. 59 Ibid, pp. 59-60. 60 For a recent introduction to the genre, and the critical reception of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, see Ian Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow (London, 2008). See also, Mike Budd (ed.), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (New Brunswick and London, 1990), and Dietrich Scheunemann (ed.), Expressionist Film: New Perspectives (New York, 2003). 61 Ibid., p. 53: ‘The whole of Lagoon West was a continuous slide area. Periodically a soft boom would disturb the morning silence as one of the galleries of compacted sand, its intricate grottoes and colonnades like an inverted baroque palace, would suddenly dissolve and avalanche gently into the internal precipice below […]. It was to this landscape, with its imperceptible transition between the real and the superreal, that Charles Van Stratten had brought the camera crews and location vans of Orpheus Productions, Inc.’

8 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard that extend from her body with an exaggerated perspective, the leaning lampposts and painted vegetation, and the formal posture of her body – an inverted crucifix, signifying the Devil – all contribute to a heightened and unified visual presentation that is far removed from naturalism. It is Charles’s view that ‘only the artist can create an absolute reality’ (p. 66), so Paul and two fellow local artists have been hired to paint huge screens ‘to shut out the distant reefs and mesas […] superimposing a new landscape upon the desert’.62 Despite their best efforts to ‘repaint the entire desert’,63 Kanin eventually decides to shoot his film ‘from models in a rented studio at Red Beach’, turning away from the painted reality of Lagoon West to yet another artificial representation of it, because its colours ‘could not be reproduced by any existing colour process’.64 Meanwhile, Emerelda’s confidence and her progress onto the terrace have been greatly increased by the zodiacal screens. At her request, Paul paints more. Every afternoon he plays the screen game with Emerelda and an assortment of bored film extras and production assistants. The ‘game’ is never fully explained, but we can deduce that it involves the movement of the screens by the players to create pathways and barriers within a symbolic framework that is – marked by the painted zodiacal emblems on the screens – representative of time, or perhaps the cessation of time. The core screens form a spiral, the unicursal pattern associated with the Cretan labyrinth at Knossos, whereas the outer screens, as Paul has multiplied them, are multicursal or maze-like. The centre of the screen game is therefore symbolically the oldest, and to reach it is to travel back in time. The climax of the game is always Paul’s discovery of Emerelda ‘in the dark centre with the screens jostling and tilting around her’.65 But Paul eventually tires of ‘courtship […] within a painted maze’66 and returns one evening alone to find Emerelda. He seems to be symbolically both Daedalus, labyrinth builder, and another would-be Orpheus. Like Charles, Paul wants to rescue Emerelda from psychological limbo and return her to life and to time. He finds her among the screens resting against Taurus, ‘like Europa supplicant before the bull’,67 and begins to guide her – ‘as if she were moving through some inner dreamscape of the psyche’68 – up the stairs towards her bedroom, like Orpheus leading Eurydice up to the light of day. But he hesitates and pulls back from a confrontation with Dr Gruber who is guarding Emerelda’s suite. At this moment, Emerelda does not see Dr Gruber at all; she sees only, to her horror, Charles’s mother. More Daedalus than he is Orpheus, Paul realizes that he is ‘less her lover than the architect of her fantasies’. Emerelda runs back into the refuge of the screens, followed by her myriad jewelled insects ‘like a vanishing night river’,69 and Paul returns home to Ciraquito. The liminal space of the terrace has become ‘the exercise area of a nightmare’70 and the setting for Charles’s final and fatal action. Charles’s stated hope that by including Emerelda in the film he might be able to take her back to a time before her trauma began – to when, ironically, she was an actress – comes to nothing when Kanin decides to film in a studio. Emerelda is taken back in time, but to another time, to a primal ‘dreamscape of the psyche’ codified by ancient legend. The following day, Charles loses patience with the screen game. Instead of approaching Emerelda from within the labyrinth, accepting the terms of its symbolic challenge, he violently pulls aside the screens to reach her and destroys the protective illusion he has fostered. As he scatters the last screens at the centre of the labyrinth, he is engulfed by ‘a cloud of jewelled spiders and scorpions’ that puncture his body and especially attack his head. He runs across the terrace

62 Ibid., pp. 64-5. 63 Ibid., p. 57. 64 Ibid., p. 66. 65 Ibid., p. 67. 66 Ibid., p. 66. 67 Ibid., p. 67. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 68. 70 Ibid., p. 69.

9 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard into the dunes and dies ‘clawing helplessly at the jewelled helmet stitched into his face and shoulders’.71 As the insects suffocate him, he just manages to reveal that it was Emerelda who murdered his mother, and we are left to conclude that Charles had been a witness. Might he have been an accomplice, urging Emerelda to an action he was incapable of himself? There had been rumours in Ciraquito at the time of his mother’s death that he had been responsible, but Paul quickly discounts them. He immediately sees that Charles is a weak man still dominated by his mother five years after her death.72 If Charles is Orpheus, he seems closer to the cowardly Orpheus presented in Plato’s Symposium than he is to the brave figure in the later Roman accounts of Virgil and Ovid.73 According to Phaedrus in the Symposium, Orpheus was

sent away from Hades disappointed of the wife he had come to fetch – what they showed him was a mere ghost and they did not surrender her real person – because he seemed to lack spirit, as is only natural in a musician; he had not the courage to die for love like Alcestis, but contrived to enter Hades alive. For this they punished him and caused him to meet his death at the hands of women.74

The jewelled insects, Emerelda’s private army – she has catatonically attached each gem during her many years in Dr Gruber’s care – represent the Maenads, a group of delirious Dionysian women who, according to legend, grow tired of Orpheus’s prolonged grief and kill him by tearing him apart. In Ballard’s legend from Lagoon West, the insect-Maenads specifically attack Charles’s head, perhaps to ensure that, unlike the head of Orpheus of legend, it cannot float downriver to Lesbos (an ironic prospect in a waterless resort) and ‘sing’ the truth of what it has seen. Emerelda disappears into the mineral Underworld of Lagoon West as Charles dies face- down in the dunes. His body is enigmatically over-written by ‘abstract ideograms’ formed by the ‘knotted legs and mandibles’ of the insects he has killed in his struggle.75 These ‘abstract ideograms’ call to mind the unreadable ‘hieroglyphic shadows’, the ‘amiable ciphers’, the ‘empty signatures in the sand’, and the ‘piercing cries of the sand-rays wheeling over the open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds’ that suggest both ritual and inscrutable script.76 A year later, Paul Golding and his artist friends return to an abandoned Van Stratten summer house, where the sand gathers around a ‘sepulchral emptiness’.77 The narrative returns to where it began: like Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, ‘The Screen Game’ is a memory that is framed by introduction and coda. They dig the screens from the sand, burn the broken ones in a pyre, and idle away their summer afternoons playing the familiar game with the screens they have rescued. Paul even paints some new screens, sensing that Emerelda is hiding nearby. One afternoon, he catches a glimpse of her blue dress and returns alone to the terrace at night. But he hears the dying words of Charles still echoing between the wild sculptures like a chorus that will not fade, and when Emerelda does appear he runs away at the sight of her deathly white face. After all, Paul is only a bored artist passing through a period of creative pause.

71 Ibid., p. 71. 72 Ibid., p. 51: ‘Five years after his mother’s death, Charles still behaved as if she were watching his every movement through tripod-mounted opera glasses on some distant balcony. His youthful figure was a little more portly, but his handsome aristocratic face, its strong jaw belied by an undefinable weakness around the mouth, seemed somehow daunted and indecisive, as if he lacked complete conviction in his own identity.’ 73 Virgil, Georgics, IV, 435-527. Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 1-85. 74 Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 44. 75 ‘The Screen Game’, Vermilion Sands, p. 71. 76 Ibid., p. 48. 77 Ibid., p. 73.

10 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard

‘About Twenty miles from Vermilion Sands’

I turn now to the draft story in the Ballard archive at the British Library, to seventeen closely typed sheets, revised by hand, without title or date.78 The story is set on the rambling estate of an ‘eccentric millionaire’ which is located some twenty miles from Vermilion Sands, in an area of the imaginary map the published stories do not visit. The narrative arc of the story is completely drawn, but as a composition it was rejected before a final or more advanced draft was attempted. Indeed, from its careless physical disposition in the boxes that were received when Ballard’s archive arrived at the British Library – the seventeen sheets were divided between two boxes among various loose sheets – its survival seemed less than intended when compared to the neatly tied bundles in which Ballard’s other draft material was received.79 Compare, for example, the manuscript of Millennium People: a tied bundle including a spiral- bound notebook containing the synopsis of the novel deliberately tucked inside (fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Tied manuscript of Millennium People, prior to cataloguing, with inserted notebook. Photograph: Chris Beckett Doubly abandoned, it is not surprising that the text of the draft story has an unfinished quality: we can think of it as a free-standing intermediary document, an avant-texte, although there was to be no final or settled text that followed.80 When was it written? Why was it abandoned? And why, having been rejected, was it retained? Answers to these questions can be found, I believe, in the document itself (which, embedded in time, has both a history and a context), and by

78 British Library Add. MS. 88938/3/2. I am grateful to the Estate of J. G. Ballard for permission to quote from the story and to reproduce extracts from it (figs 5-16 below). 79 For an introduction to Ballard’s archive, see Chris Beckett, ‘The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library’, Electronic British Library Journal (2011), art. 12: http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/article12.html. The ‘discovery’ of the draft story is related on pp. 11-13. 80 The term ‘avant-texte’ derives from la critique génétique, whose scholarly origins lie in French structuralism. Its field of interest is not the final or established text of a given work but the material manifestations of the process of composition – the work’s textual genesis – insofar as this can be traced from such archival documentation as rough notes, correspondence, diary entries and preliminary drafts. See the essays collected in Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds.), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia, 2004), and William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones (eds.), Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater (Rochester, 2009).

11 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard considering the compositional relationship of the draft story to Vermilion Sands and to Ballard’s other published works. Before developing these considerations, it will be useful to summarize the story, since, as a newly admitted and unpublished adjunct to Ballard’s corpus, it is little known.

The draft story in outline

The story begins with an arresting sentence that sets the tone: ‘Last year, for three months during the summer, I was private secretary to a madman’. Max Caldwell, the young anti-hero and narrator, accepts a temporary job to relieve his boredom. He’s said to be in ‘a negative zone’, a condition that seems somewhat akin to ‘beach fatigue’, although Ballard had not yet christened it so.81 He is also attracted by the prospect of meeting Hardoon’s beautiful daughter, Emerelda, ‘the lonely haunted Venus of Lagoon West’. Max does a little homework before he starts and discovers that Hardoon has spent the twenty-five years since his wife’s death – she died giving birth to Emerelda – in compulsively extending his property. Little more than facades connected by a network of narrow streets, the supplementary buildings are a jumble of architectural follies, a ‘clutter of pavilions, temples and palaces, in a dozen different architectural styles, sprawling away across the sand’. ‘Welcome to Disneyland,’ Emerelda says sarcastically to Max when they first meet. Whilst they are talking, Hugo appears. Hugo is the architect of Hardoon’s latest construction project, an exact replica of the Cretan labyrinth at Knossos. A few days later, Max is summoned to Hardoon’s private rooms where he finds his employer poring over architectural blueprints. Max expects that his duties, which are yet to be conveyed to him, will be in some way connected to the proliferating follies, but he is told abruptly that the continuous construction on the estate is a private matter and is not his concern. Instead, Max is asked to assist with a different Hardoon project: he is to collate statistical data from certain experiments that are being conducted in laboratories elsewhere (in the world), experiments designed to verify that human beings possess an innate sense of time, an inner clock. ‘One of [Hardoon’s] best volunteers is […] sitting in an isolation cell, cut off from day and night, to see how accurately he can assess a period of one year.’ Max leaves the meeting convinced that Hardoon is mad. Hugo shows Max how the labyrinth is progressing. Gazing down upon it from the perimeter wall, Hugo emphasizes that it is as insoluble as the original labyrinth at Knossos: ‘the insoluble maze, an unbroken neuro-architectonic structure. They use the principal [sic] in laboratories to induce nervous exhaustion in rats.’ Max learns from Hardoon’s sister, Miss Lizabeth, who also lives at the house, that the origin of Hardoon’s obsession was a fortune-teller who told him shortly after he married that if he ever stopped building he would die. He scoffed at the idea, but then his wife died. Hardoon took this as a warning. One evening, as Max strolls through the maze of multiplying buildings (‘stepping in and out of the millennia as [he] walked from an Assyrian ziggurat to a miniature Versailles’), he sees Hardoon hurrying by from building to building like a man possessed. Max observes the same frantic behaviour every night. As the construction work on the labyrinth nears its conclusion, Hugo disappears and Max spends more time with Emerelda. She dismisses the warning of the fortune teller as a convenient excuse. She tells him she is trapped in the house and asks him to help her escape. Hardoon killed her

81 The local malaise of ‘beach fatigue’ first appears in ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961), Vermilion Sands, p. 147: ‘Most of us were suffering from various degrees of beach fatigue, that chronic malaise which exiles the victim to a limbo of endless sunbathing, dark glasses and afternoon terraces.’ The phrase appears twice again in the same story, on pp. 157 and 175. We have already come across the phrase in ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’ (ibid., p. 19), and in ‘The Screen Game’ (ibid., p. 51). As if in accord with Ballard’s remarks in the ‘Preface’ to Vermilion Sands about gated Mediterranean communities, ‘beach fatigue’ makes a late return in the Mediterranean novel Cocaine Nights (London, 1996), p. 205, by which time the words had become arch self-quotation. (I am indebted, here and elsewhere, to the invaluable Ballard Concordance maintained by Mike Bonsall: http://bonsall-books.co.uk/concordance/index.htm.)

12 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard mother, she says: ‘Poisoned her with hate. The day before I was born she slashed her wrists.’ When the labyrinth is finally completed, Hugo, Emerelda and Max drive out to see it. Hugo remarks that the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur seems to match their present situation. Max takes up the analogy and begins to see himself as Theseus rescuing Ariadne/Emerelda. The three-month term of his employment almost complete, Max asks Hardoon if he can stay on at the mansion for a week, until his apartment at Red Beach is available. Hardoon accedes and they agree to visit the completed labyrinth together the following morning. In the afternoon, Max relaxes by the pool, hoping to see Emerelda. She calls across to him from the shadows where she is standing with three suitcases and a hat box, ready to leave immediately. They drive away in her car to Hugo’s beach house. Hugo is apparently away for a couple of weeks. Emerelda says she needs a couple of days to decide what she is going to do. She fixes a drink, dances suggestively, and then proposes they go out on the town in Vermilion Sands. They don’t return until six in the morning. Max is very drunk and sleeps on the sofa. When he wakes, it is the afternoon and Emerelda has gone shopping. When she returns, she seems restless and anxious. Max suddenly realizes that he has been teased and tricked, and Emerelda has been deliberately keeping him away from his pre-arranged meeting with Hardoon at the completed labyrinth. ‘Tell me,’ Max asks her, ‘did your father know that the labyrinthe [sic] is insoluble?’ It is now dusk as Max drives to the labyrinth, where all is quiet. He swings the catwalk-boom out over the centre of the labyrinth, jumps down and finds Hardoon, dead, face-down in a pool of blood. Max asks himself: ‘Had Hugo killed Hardoon, or had the millionaire trapped himself in the maze, perhaps re-entering it after the architect had left him?’ Max looks up and sees Hugo standing on the outer wall. He gives chase, but Hugo manages to drive away (with the keys to Max’s car in his pocket). In the distance, Max sees Hugo stop to let Emerelda into his car and they drive away together.

Dating the manuscript

For all that the stories of Vermilion Sands are inward-looking psychological dramas – the unconscious as a narrative stage on which symbolic contests are fought to the death – they also inevitably draw from, and look towards, the world at the time they were written, to its technological paradigms and projections, its commodities, its social norms, habits of speech, and cultural practices. One might argue that the more inventive a fictional world, the more likely it is to leave indelible traces of its imaginative origins. In fact, Vermilion Sands very much trades upon its semiological markers: IBM Verse Transcribers, cartwheel hats, Stan Kenton, kitchen styling, cars, crocodile-skin slacks, psychotropic houses controlled by consoles linked to grooved memory drums, separate bedrooms, the cha-cha, and John Cage. Markers all, and many more might be highlighted. They form a floating frame of reference that stretches and blurs chronological correspondence to the ‘real’ world, which is nevertheless a weirdly parallel presence. Fictionally, it is somewhere that Leonora Chanel and Hope Cunard have retreated from, where artists like Paul Golding have profiles in exclusive magazines, where plastic surgeons reconfigure faces and leave behind identities like invisible residue on operating tables, and where Hardoon’s volunteers endure isolation in laboratories and bunkers to estimate time. Ironically, the very activity that convinces Max Caldwell that Hardoon is mad is not his obsessive folly-building but his collection of data from the human isolation experiments. In fact, experiments to determine if human beings have an innate sense of time – an internal clock that continues to tick when we are deprived of daylight and any other temporal cues – have been conducted on several occasions that we can reasonably surmise Ballard would have known about. This fictional ‘madness’ of Hardoon turns out to be one of the pieces of non-fictional contextual evidence, or real-world correspondence, to be considered in attempting to date the draft document. But before we consider this and other varieties of evidence, the first question to ask about the document is whether the text includes any specific date indications, and we find that there are three. One indicator – a reference to cha-cha music playing on the radiogram as Emerelda entices

13 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard

Max – we may discount, since the date that it provides is too early to be helpful (the Cuban dance was first introduced by Enrique Jorrín in 1953). But the other two indicators are more helpful. These are: the make and model of Hugo’s car, a Ford Thunderbird; and Emerelda’s pointed remark to Max: ‘Welcome to Disneyland’. The Thunderbird, a two-seater ‘sportster’, was introduced as a new 1955 Ford model in October 1954 (fig. 4).82 And Walt Disney’s Disneyland

Fig. 4. 1955 Ford Thunderbird. opened in Anaheim, California, on 17 July 1955. These two date indicators, which are both found in the typewritten text, prompt an initial hypothesis that the story was typed in 1955. In the autobiography Miracles of Life, Ballard recounts that in the autumn of 1954 he sailed to Canada to take up a short service RAF commission. Flight training was conducted at an isolated NATO base at Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, a ‘wilderness of ice and snow’.83 With time to spare in the wilderness, when inclement weather often precluded flying, he began to read some of the popular American science fiction magazines that were to hand and quickly became engaged. He was less interested, he tells us, in stories about space travel and ‘tales of a hard-edged technological future’ than he was in stories ‘set in the present or very near future, extrapolating social and political trends already evident in the years after the war.’84 In the spring of 1955, Ballard resigned his commission. During the long journey

82 ‘The all-new Thunderbird was first unveiled at the Detroit auto show on February 20, 1954, nine months before public introduction of the regular 1955 Ford line. However, full production did not begin until September 1954, so very few were into consumers’ hands prior to the official introduction date of October 22, 1954.’ J. ‘Kelly’ Flory, Jr., American Cars, 1946-1959: Every Model, Year by Year (Jefferson, 2008), p. 648. Brian Long, The Book of the Ford Thunderbird from 1954 (Dorchester, 2007) reproduces original publicity material. 83 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (London, 2008), p. 163. 84 Ibid., p. 165 and p. 166: ‘Luckily, there were other magazines like Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the short stories were set in the present or very near future, extrapolating social and political trends already evident in the years after the war. The dangers to a docile public of television, advertising and the American media landscape were their terrain. They looked searchingly at the abuses of psychiatry and at politics conducted as a branch of advertising. Many of the stories were droll and pessimistic, with a surface of dry wit that hid a quite downbeat message. These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka.’

14 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard back to England by sea from Canada, and the weeks that followed at RAF High Wycombe as he waited for his discharge papers to arrive, Ballard continued to write his first science fiction stories. RAF High Wycombe was ‘a gloomy place’ but a place for which he had ‘fond memories’: ‘it was there that I wrote my first s-f story to be published.’85 It was also during 1955 that Ballard’s relationship with Mary Matthews, his future wife, began to flourish. Mary worked as a secretary, and in a tantalizing passage in Miracles of Life, Ballard recalls: ‘Mary lent me her typewriter, and over the next few weeks I typed out all the stories I had written on the way back to England.’86 If the draft story was written in 1955, might the document in the archive be one of the stories that Ballard ‘typed out’ on Mary’s typewriter? And yet, Emerelda’s sarcastic reference to Disneyland gives no indication that Walt Disney’s theme-park has only just opened; the readiness of her acerbic comparison suggests quite the opposite. Similarly, on the first occasion that Hugo’s car is mentioned in the story, as he drives Max to see the labyrinth, the car is described as ‘his old Thunderbird’ (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. ‘We bumped along the perimeter road in his old Thunderbird….’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 7).

Might the story, therefore, have been written at a later date? How old is an ‘old’ Thunderbird? Two years? Five years? On the other hand, perhaps the ease of the Disneyland reference and the ascribed age of the car function as narrative devices to nudge the story into the future, towards Ballard’s preferred fictional zone of the displaced present, ‘the very near future’. As another consideration, the human isolation experiments that obsess Hardoon call to mind the first isolation experiment of French geologist and speleologist Michel Siffre. Between July and September 1962, Siffre spent sixty-three days 375 feet below ground, isolated and without time cues, on a cold and dark glacier in the Scarasson Cavern in the French-Italian Alps. When Siffre’s account of his experience appeared in English translation, as Beyond Time (1965), Ballard reviewed the book and highlighted the experiment’s relevance to outer (and inner) space exploration. The review begins: ‘Speleology, like outer space and the hydrogen bomb, play straight into the hands of the unconscious’. Ballard drew out from Siffre a sentence that might have come directly from his own programme for fiction: ‘I felt I was on another planet: for the most part, I dwelt neither in the past nor in the future,

85 Ibid., p. 169. The story to which Ballard refers was ‘Prima Belladonna’. After first experiencing rejection from American sci-fi magazines, Ballard’s stories began to be accepted by ‘the two English science fiction magazines, Science Fantasy and New Worlds, and the first was published in 1956 […]’ (ibid., p. 180). ‘Prima Belladonna’ was first published in Science Fantasy, vol. vii, no. 20 (1956), pp. 63-75, preceded by a brief editorial introduction (p. 63): ‘Once again we have pleasure in presenting a new author to our pages with quite a fascinating approach to fantasy. In particular, we cannot remember having read such an intriguing idea about singing plants before, although there have been stories that have referred to such a possibility.’ 86 Miracles of Life, p. 178.

15 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard but in the hostile present.’87 When Siffre returned to the surface on 14 September 1962 – an event widely reported in the press88 – he thought that he had spent twenty-five days less than the sixty-three days he had actually endured below ground. He had entered a form of semi-hibernation in which, Ballard noted, ‘his physiological functions became his time references’. Siffre confirmed that human beings do indeed have endogenous clocks.89 But, however interesting, Siffre cannot be pressed into service as a date indicator, and need not be. For one thing, Siffre’s experiment was not the first to investigate circadian patterns of sleep and wakefulness: as early as 1938, Nathaniel Kleitman and Bruce Richardson spent a much-publicized thirty-two days in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 400 metres underground, to see if they could adapt to a 28-hour day.90 And as the space-race gathered momentum in the late 1950s, American and Russian scientists also began to investigate the effects on astronauts of leaving Earth’s gravity and experiencing prolonged isolation from natural time cues. But over and above these considerations, and over-riding them, there is a limitation of another kind that pushes the story’s date of composition back into the 1950s: the publication, in 1961, of Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere. The central character in that novel is another ‘Hardoon’, another obsessive and controlling figure who also builds. Instead of a Cretan labyrinth, he builds a pyramid against an apocalyptic wind that is razing civilization to the ground. We can reasonably infer that the draft story was written, revised, and then abandoned, sometime before the name ‘Hardoon’ was resurrected in The Wind from Nowhere (notwithstanding the author’s habit of recycling character names). Ballard did not have much luck with compositions including a character called ‘Hardoon’: after abandoning the draft story, he quickly disowned The Wind from Nowhere and thereafter always referred to The Drowned World (1962) as his first mature work of novel length. But early impressions endure: thinking back in Miracles of Life to his childhood, Ballard recalled Hardoon one last time and in doing so retold what is, in effect, the germ of the draft story:

He [Ballard’s father] was always telling the chauffeur to slow down when we passed significant local landmarks – the Radium Institute, where cancer would be cured; the vast Hardoon estate in the centre of the International Settlement, created by an Iraqi property tycoon who was told by a fortune-teller that if he ever stopped building he would die, and who then went on constructing elaborate pavilions all over Shanghai, many of them structures with no doors or interiors.91

87 Michel Siffre, Beyond Time (London, 1965), p. 77. The book was reviewed by Ballard for The Guardian (23 July 1965) under the heading ‘Into the drop zone’. The review is not included in Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London, 1996). The Ballard archive includes the second page only of the review, in typescript (Add. MS. 88938/3/25). The typescript page from the review was received at the British Library as a loose sheet, like the disunited parts of the draft story. Siffre’s self-declared purpose went beyond speleology; he framed his subterranean experiment in relation to outer space exploration: ‘This problem of time is surely important in the dawning space age, when the astronaut placed aboard an artificial satellite necessarily lives outside the familiar cycle of night and day. Will his previous conditioning, which regulated life on earth, continue to govern him, or will his rhythm be modified? And how will that man in space behave when deprived of his natural points of reference? How will he sleep without the usual cosmic or mechanical references? Will he sleep more than on earth, or less? What kind of sleep will he have, and how will his organism react to these new conditions of sleep?’ (Beyond Time, p. 26.) 88 For example, ‘Two Months Alone in an Icy Cave’, The Observer (30 September 1962), p. 23, which included extracts from the journal Siffre kept. 89 Although the duration of Siffre’s periods of sleep and wakefulness became very variable, he kept close to a 24-hour rhythm. Siffre observed (Beyond Time, p. 222): ‘What threw me off in my estimation of the time spent underground was that I underestimated by almost half the length of my working or waking hours; a “day” that I estimated at seven hours actually lasted on the average fourteen hours and forty minutes.’ 90 Nathaniel Kleitman, Sleep and Wakefulness (Chicago, 1939; 2nd edn, 1963). Kleitman, who identified and defined Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep in 1953, researched sleep rather than chronobiology, which was still developing its identity and defining its field of research in the early 1960s. For a current overview of the field of chronobiology, see Urs Albrecht (ed.), The Circadian Clock (New York, 2010), which includes a historical introduction. 91 Ballard, Miracles of Life, p. 9.

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The rhythm that obsesses Hardoon, and the rhythm that he will not allow to be interrupted, not even for a landslide in the road (see manuscript sheets 10-11), is not chronobiological but the rhythm of compulsive building. The momentum is Hardoon’s way of stopping time and staying death, trauma untold. ‘I have been collating the results of experiments,’ Hardoon told Max, ‘to measure this time sense we all possess, the extent to which it can be trained, modified, obliterated […]’ (fig. 6). Ballard’s memory

Fig. 6. ‘Well, for some years now I’ve been carrying out a series of experiments – or rather, I have been collating the results of experiments carried out by others – designed to measure this time sense we all possess….’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 5). of car journeys through Shanghai pairs science and superstition, the Radium Institute and the Hardoon Estate, carefully (and poignantly) framing the hope-filled expression ‘where cancer would be cured’ in the credulous perspective of himself as a child. I have referred to the draft story as an avant-texte that no further draft followed. This is strictly true in terms of the story itself, but if we consider the draft story as a germinal text, as a cluster of formative themes and motifs which other stories subsequently develop and, in their various ways, complete, the draft story is not as detached as its abandonment suggests. Such a perspective, which views the draft story as a resource rather than a cul-de-sac, may go some way towards answering why it was retained in the author’s papers, and why it was subsequently returned to with a revising and annotating hand. We can trace this textual afterlife of the draft story across a number of compositions. We might, for example, move beyond the Vermilion Sands stories and discover something of Hardoon in the story ‘The Voices of Time’ (written and published in 1960):

Until his liaison with Coma, Kaldren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors and ceilings.92

In the same story, we might explore the correspondence between Hardoon’s labyrinth and the mandala or cosmic clock being constructed by the scientist Powers (a man at the end of his time, approaching his moment of timeless singularity and interstellar dispersal). However, confining observations to Vermilion Sands, we should begin by observing several ‘firsts’. The draft story offers the first substantial indication of the fictional locale of Vermilion Sands,

92 ‘The Voices of Time’, The Complete Short Stories, vol. i (London, 2006), p. 252. The story was first published in New Worlds, vol. xcix, no. 33 (October 1960). The quoted passage continues: ‘Only Kaldren had solved the building, a geometric model of √-1, and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents’ hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the roof-top, where his lean angular figure stood out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day’s trapping.’ As all mathematicians (and Kaldren and Ballard) know, √-1 is not a real number but an imaginary unit (i).

17 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard incorporating for the first time topological references to the sand reefs, to Lagoon West, to Red Beach and to Red Beach Road; by contrast, the action of the first Vermillion Sands story, ‘Prima Belladonna’, takes place exclusively in Vermilion Sands itself with little sense of the surrounding area (Lagoon West is mentioned once, but then so is Lima, Peru). At the beginning of the draft story, we find Max ‘idling away the hot empty afternoons under the

Fig. 7. ‘I had stayed on in Red Beach after the season ended, idling away the hot empty afternoons under the awning at the Café Fresco….’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 1). awning at the Café Fresco’ (fig. 7); this is the first appearance of the beach-haunt that will appear again in ‘The Screen Game’. And the draft story also occasions the first appearance of the sand-rays, the fantastic creatures of the desert; combining docility with latent danger, they nest in cliffs and dunes, in the sand and out of the sand, gather in herds, and glide elegantly through Ballard’s barren landscape. They seem to have leapt into flight from a past sea with a single evolutionary jump peculiar to the locale.93 Max gets up quickly from his chair when he notices a sand-ray underneath him. They are Emerelda’s dangerous familiars: ‘She reached down under the seat and scooped up a large purple-crested sand ray, cradled it in her hands and began to stroke the smooth velvet wings that clothed her wrists, her fingers deftly

93 It will not have escaped the notice of a newly trained pilot that the triangular shape of a sand-ray, or sting-ray fish, bears a striking resemblance to the shape of the cold-war Vulcan bomber, which was introduced into service in Britain in 1956. A prototype was shown at Farnborough Air Show in 1954, and in 1953 the aircraft was included in Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation fly-past: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/coronation-fly-past/query/ Vulcan (accessed 26 September 2013).

18 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard avoiding the huge neural sting that flexed as the drowsy ray revived.’ (fig. 8). However, having

Fig. 8. ‘She reached down under the seat and scooped up a large purple-crested sand ray….’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 4). introduced us to the sand-rays, and having begun to persuade us that they enjoy a mysterious affinity with Emerelda, they aren’t integrated into the development of the story, and their lack of integration is indicative of a general problem of coherence that besets the draft. Emerelda is not as over-powering as a femme fatale should be, or as Ballard’s subsequent sirens will be. In true film noir style, Max breaks free from her seductive spell with an over-powering physical gesture, pushing her back onto the sofa; in return, Emerelda can only threaten to spit like a helpless snake (fig. 9). Also, the time and isolation experiments that Hardoon had

Fig. 9. ‘It look [sic] like that on a snake about to spit.’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 16). made Max’s particular responsibility gradually drop away from the story, and they have been struck through in one of Ballard’s revisions. The isolation experiments and the labyrinth never unite as a single focus, or form any particular binary thematic relationship, as they do, for example, in ‘The Voices of Time’. Elsewhere in the draft story, we find other labyrinths, in the narrow streets that separate the jumble of follies, and, not surprisingly, in Hardoon’s private apartment, which is ‘a miniature maze of leather padded doors and ante-rooms’ (fig. 10).

Fig. 10. ‘… a miniature maze of leather padded doors and ante-rooms filled with slab sofas that reminded me of the labyrinthe [sic] Hugo was supposed to be building for him.’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 4).

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If there is another text that might be said to succeed the avant-texte of the draft story, it is ‘The Screen Game’ (written in 1962).94 Both stories feature a blue-haired ‘Emerelda’ who is, or believes herself to be, imprisoned in her father’s grand property. Like a figure of legend, she is already known from afar in both stories as the ‘haunted Venus of Lagoon West’.95 Both stories feature a labyrinth, a built structure in the draft story, a mobile structure made from screens in ‘The Screen Game’. Both stories are much concerned with the subject and the substance of time, which is given a geological rendering in ‘The Screen Game’. Both stories present a father-figure who is over-bearing and obsessive, yet psychologically weak, who meets his death in the centre of the labyrinth. Emerelda’s mother is dead in one story and absent from the other story. The sand-rays that were introduced in the draft story return in ‘The Screen Game’, and so does ‘Café Fresco’. In ‘The Screen Game’ the terrace café is presented in the very language of the draft story: the ‘hot empty afternoons’ at the Café Fresco of the draft story (see fig. 7 above, second paragraph) become ‘the long, empty afternoons’ of ‘The Screen Game’. The narrator in both stories is connected to the fine art world. Paul Golding in ‘The Screen Game’ has a profile in ‘the art reviews’ and has painted the labyrinth screens. Max Caldwell’s connections to the art world are more secondary: he has a girlfriend called Beatrice in the Museum of Abstract Art, and when we first meet him on the terrace in Red Beach he is ‘staring out over’ his enigmatic ‘Burckhardt’. The opening section of the draft story bristles with references to art history, from the Museum of Abstract Art where Max is ‘pursuing a fragmentary affair’ with Beatrice to the book by Jacob Burckhardt that he is holding (presumably The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy).96 The art historian’s name evokes, in turn, Florence, and another Beatrice, the idealized Beatrice of La Vita Nuova and La Comedia. Dante’s divine love is implicitly contrasted with Max’s ‘fragmentary affair’. And it seems only fitting that the name of the café in which Max sits also recalls Italian Renaissance painting, although there is little that is fresh (or water-based, like a fresco) about the desiccated landscape of Vermilion Sands. Burckhardt’s name is struck through in the draft (fig. 7, line 5) as if Ballard were content that its associations elsewhere in the text would hold lightly together and had kicked away their originating support as redundant and obscure clutter. The opening paragraphs of the draft story, where revision and annotation is most evident, sometimes offer more than a single reading pathway: in an avant-texte, all text – added, erased, or marginal – is equally available, equally informative, and equally provisional. The presentation of cinema in ‘The Screen Game’ – a story whose title refers as much to film as it does to the painted labyrinth screens – is foreshadowed by cinema’s presence in the draft story, particularly film noir. ‘Out of the simplest materials – two cars, a cheap motel, a gun and a tired brunette – they [the films] conjured up a hard and unsentimental image of the primeval city, a psychological space that existed first and foremost in the characters’ minds.’97 Ballard’s remarks on film noir, from Miracles of Life, remind us of his characterization of Vermilion Sands as ‘an exotic suburb of my mind’. The ‘psychological space’ of the draft story takes many a cinematic turn. Superficially, we find it explicitly in Ballard’s similes: Hardoon’s

94 David Pringle, ‘Short Story Bibliography’, available at: http://www.jgballard.ca/bibliographies/short_story_bibliography.html (accessed 1 October 2013). In addition to supplying dates of first publication, the bibliography also indicates when each story is judged to have been written. I have relied on Pringle’s guide throughout in researching this paper. 95 ‘The Screen Game’, Vermilion Sands, p. 59. For the draft story, see fig. 7 above (half-way down the page). 96 Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien was published in 1860, and was translated into English, by S. G. Middlemore, in 1878. 97 Ballard, Miracles of Life, p. 129.

20 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard follies are ‘like a storelot of giant film sets’ (fig. 11); and Hardoon is ‘like a character in an early

Fig. 11. ‘… the incredible clutter of pavilions, temples and palaces, in a dozen different architectural styles, sprawling away across the sand like a storelot of giant film sets.’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 2).

German surrealist film, impelled by insane forces in a nightmare search for himself ’ (fig. 12). But we also find the cinematic turn conveyed implicitly in the tone of the dialogue, in Max’s

Fig. 12. ‘… like a character in an early German surrealist film, impelled by insane forces in a nightmare search for himself….’ Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 15). voyeuristic camera-gaze from the balcony as (nightly) he watches Emerelda swim naked in the pool, and in the presentation of the narrative episodes. As Emerelda escapes with Max in the car, she asks him to take her ‘Anywhere, Max. Paris – Casablanca – Rio. You can buy me any ticket you like so long as it’s got tomorrow on it’ (fig. 13). The trio of cities call up film

Fig. 13. “‘Anywhere, Max. Paris – Casablanca – Rio. You can buy me any ticket you like so long as it’s got tomorrow on it’” Add. MS. 88938/3/2 (sheet 13).

21 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard locations more than places, and the kind of ticket that she wants is conveyed by femme fatale smart-talk that might have been spoken excitedly by a blue-haired Rita Hayworth or Lauren Bacall. Car interior scenes are standard noir fare. They tend to feature the two shots or frames that Ballard’s story includes: Emerelda’s hair, framed in the passenger window, blowing in the car’s slipstream; and the visual frame of the rear-view mirror in which Hardoon House recedes ‘like a surrealist mirage’ (fig. 13, above). Ballard specifically refers in ‘The Screen Game’ to the moment in Cocteau’s Orphée when Orpheus unintentionally sees Eurydice framed in his rear-view mirror, which causes her to disappear, to return, that is, to death.98 And there is much of the mise-en-scène of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari that we observed in ‘The Screen Game’ in Hardoon’s maze of narrow streets and follies: ‘The long alleyways seemed almost like the vessels of the brain, interlocking in a thousand permutations, the lost tragic figure of Hardoon scurrying tirelessly through them in search for his own final peace of mind, like a character in an early German surrealist film, impelled by insane forces in a nightmare search for himself ’ (fig. 12, above). The key elements of the draft story have been, as it were, shaken in a bag and presented anew: Hardoon’s follies are like a film lot, but Van Stratten’s terrace is a film lot. So far I have suggested that the date of composition of the draft story lies somewhere between 1955 and 1960, pushed back into the 1950s by The Wind from Nowhere (1961), perhaps even by ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960), but also particularly by the subsequent realization of the draft story as another story, ‘The Screen Game’, a story whose greater sophistication – reflected in a more assured tonal range that spans elegy and satire – also prompts the allowance of some passage of time between composition and re-imagination (re-composition). Can we be more precise? I believe that we can, but the answer is not in the text. It is time now to take another tack, to consider Ballard’s draft story not only as a provisional text but also as an artefact. Literary drafts have material attributes – information-rich attributes – that the final, authorized, text leaves behind, or lifts free from, when it becomes fixed as an immaterial published work. We can hold the book that contains the work, as we may hold and inspect the literary draft in the archive, but we cannot hold the text. Happily, manuscripts give up their secrets in several ways and not by words alone: the typewriter Ballard used, the red and blue pens he revised with, and the paper itself, may offer clues and also tell a story. Fortunately, the seventeen sheets of paper that comprise the draft story are uniformly distinctive, and their distinctiveness brings us closer to determining the story’s date of composition (and the age of Max’s Ford Thunderbird). It is my contention that the paper on which Ballard typed the draft story derives from the period when he was assistant editor of the weekly publication Chemistry & Industry. Ballard worked at the offices of the Society of Chemical Industry, in Belgrave Square, between 1958 and 1963 (or 1964), where he undertook a range of duties in a small but busy publishing operation, including sub-editing, marking- up copy for the typesetter, site visits to laboratories, and even occasional book reviewing.99

98 Alluded to in ‘The Screen Game’ (Vermilion Sands, p. 54), in the description of Kanin’s film Blind Orpheus. 99 See Mike Bonsall, ‘J. G. Ballard’s Experiment in Chemical Living’: http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballards-experiment-in-chemical-living (accessed 7 October 2013). Bonsall states that Ballard left employment at the Society in 1964; Ballard, in Miracles of Life (p. 191), remembers it as 1963. Founded in 1881, the Society is still active and still based in Belgrave Square, London: http://www.soci.org/ (accessed 7 October 2013). For Ballard’s memories of working there, see David Pringle’s composite interview, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, Re/Search: J. G. Ballard (San Francisco, 1984), pp. 119- 20. Bonsall’s article identifies much material in Chemistry & Industry (especially trade advertisements) that quite evidently relates to Ballard’s fiction, particularly The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.

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On the back of every sheet of the draft story are two vertical boxes, or empty twin columns (fig. 14). Slight irregularities in the outlines of the boxes, identical on each sheet, indicate

Fig. 14. The verso of a typical manuscript sheet, showing two rectangles (all sheets identical). that they were originally drawn by hand before being duplicated. Intrigued, and working on a hunch prompted by the unusual size and appearance of the paper, I photocopied a typical two-column page from a copy of Chemistry & Industry from 1959, cut closely around the columns of text, and placed my photocopy over the boxes. I found an exact match between the printed column widths and the widths of the two boxes. The distance

23 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard between the two boxes exactly matched the distance between the two printed columns of text (fig. 15). I then compared the paper on which the draft story is typed with pages of the

Fig. 15. The verso of a typical manuscript sheet overlaid with a photocopy of a typical page from Chemistry and Industry (7 March 1959, p. 322), showing an exact match in dimensions. bound issues of the journal held at the British Library. From a simple examination by eye, the paper is of the same weight and colour (yellowing now), and has the same semi-gloss sheen. A comparison of paper size revealed that Ballard’s loose sheets are slightly larger, but, allowing for printing, trimming and binding, the paper size is broadly correspondent. The magazine pages are 10 x 8 inches; the draft story sheets are 11 x 8 3/4 inches.

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Given the dates of Ballard’s employment on the journal, and acknowledging the pressure of other compositions that, as I have argued, seem to succeed the draft story, the paper match strongly suggests that the story was typed between 1958 and 1960 on paper that Ballard obtained from his office. Indeed, it may well have been typed at the office. After the death of the editor of Chemistry & Industry in 1960, Ballard tells us that he was ‘left alone to produce the magazine’, and he thereafter adjusted his time so that he could ‘write in the office’.100 By his own account, a little disenchanted with ‘SF’, and a little ‘blocked’, Ballard wrote no stories in 1958, or none that were published, and four in 1959. Five stories were published in 1960, one of which was ‘The Voices of Time’ and the other was ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (Vermilion Sands). This chronology, together with the composition considerations outlined above, leads me to propose 1958-59 – years of disillusionment with ‘SF’ and also years of formal experiment (‘Collages for a New Novel’ were produced at this time)101 – as the period when, on the balance of textual and physical evidence, the draft story was most likely to have been typed. If that is the case, some open questions are then resolved. If the story was typed in 1958-59, there is no longer the need to contort chronology and read the narrative as though it had been written into a near future. Disneyland had been open for three or four years when Emerelda made her sharp remark to Max. And if Hugo had bought his Thunderbird in 1955, it really was an old model when he drove Max to the labyrinth. There remains one aspect of the document yet to be considered, and one more date to be teased from the document. The additions by hand to the typescript range from close textual revision to more distanced and critical comments in the margins. On the first sheet, Ballard remarks that the dialogue is ‘too slangy’. He revises ‘Ever heard of Samuel Hardoon?’ to the more formal ‘Have you ever heard […].’ And ‘That’s pretty mean’ becomes anglicized to ‘That’s rather mean’. Was Ballard preparing the story for an English readership? One of the annotations in the margin of sheet 5 is particularly intriguing since it strongly suggests that Ballard returned to the draft after 1962, and perhaps even as late as 1966. Against the scene when Max first meets Hardoon in his private wing of the house, and Hardoon is explaining to him the experiments to measure time, Ballard has written in the margin that Hardoon ‘looks like a Francis Bacon executive’ (fig. 16). This remark, which is not textual revision but Ballard’s

Fig. 16. Margin annotation: “looks like a Francis Bacon executive”. Add MS 88938/3/2 (sheet 5).

100 Miracles of Life, p. 190. 101 See ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, Re/Search: J. G. Ballard (San Francisco, 1984), p. 122: ‘I produced quite a lot of stuff in 1956, ’57, and then I went to the Science Fiction Convention in London. That shattered me, and then I dried up for about a year. For over a year I didn’t write any SF at all. I was disillusioned and demoralised.’ Four (of the five) ‘Collages’ Ballard made at this time are reproduced in Re/Search: J. G. Ballard, pp. 38-40 (the four original collages are Add MS 88938/3/3). On the Convention, see also John Baxter, The Inner Man: The Life of J. G. Ballard (London, 2011), pp. 92-4. 25 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard writerly prompt to himself, gives pause for thought since the first mention of Francis Bacon in Ballard’s work is in two stories that were written in the mid-1960s: ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (written in 1965) – which includes the simile ‘like some disintegrating executive from a Francis Bacon nightmare’102 – and the Vermilion Sands story ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’ (written in 1966). In the latter story, we recall that Bacon was one of the artists who had been commissioned by Leonora Chanel to paint her likeness as a ‘bizarre’ psychological study.103 Ballard was still in Canada when Bacon held his first major show, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1955 (20 January – 19 February), but he seems to have gone to Bacon’s much larger retrospective held at the Tate in 1962 (24 May – 1 July), where he would have seen several disturbing portraits of tortured executives, and Popes in extremis, screaming inside and out. In Miracles of Life, Ballard described Bacon’s exhibition as ‘a revelation’.104 The introduction to the exhibition catalogue, by John Rothenstein, discussed Bacon’s executives and Popes in terms of their ‘awful vulnerability’ and ‘loneliness’, and ‘the sense of their being the victims of catastrophe, actual or impending’. Rothenstein quoted two ‘ardent advocates’ of Bacon, one of whom has a name that is recognizable, beyond coincidence, from ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’: Robert Melville, the faux-marine ray-hunting narrator of the story.105 In the story, his name is linked to Moby-Dick and to the irreversible crime of the Ancient Mariner, a crime committed when he kills a white sand ray, but the source of his name would seem to be the name of the ardent Bacon critic. ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ was written in 1966. Evidently, Bacon’s paintings were playing on Ballard’s mind in the mid-1960s.106 If Ballard looked at the draft story again in 1965 or 1966 with a revisionary eye, red ballpoint pen in hand (a mid-sixties medium point Biro), was he perhaps prompted by his contemporaneous revision (1966) of the story ‘Mobile’, which became the Vermilion Sands story ‘Venus Smiles’? Did Ballard’s Guardian review of Michel Siffre’s book, in 1965, also send him back to Hardoon?

102 ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, Impulse (March 1966). Revised and incorporated (as Chapter Nine) in The Atrocity Exhibition (reprinted London, 2006), p. 134: ‘At times part of his head seemed to be missing, like some disintegrating executive from a Francis Bacon nightmare.’ 103 Vermilion Sands, p. 22. 104 Miracles of Life, p. 156. 105 John Rothenstein, ‘Introduction’ (no pagination), Francis Bacon exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery (London, 1962): ‘The element of horror in Bacon’s painting is too conspicuous to call for emphasis, but it has, it seems to me, sometimes been oversimplified both by his detractors and even by his most ardent admirers. Mr Alloway wrote of Bacon’s “fast-dating Grand Guignol” and his “creaking melodrama”, and Mr Melville that “he discovers in the act of painting the felicities of the death warrant” and that he “might be said to have covered the lamp-shades of his immediate predecessors with human skin”.’ Three of the nine entries in Rothenstein’s ‘Selected Bibliography’ are by Robert Melville. In Miracles of Life (p. 157), Ballard takes a similar historical perspective: ‘Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged executives and his princes of death in their pontiffs’ robes lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because they knew there was no god. Bacon went even further than the surrealists, assuming our complicity in the mid-century’s horrors. It was we who sat in those claustrophobic rooms, like TV hospitality suites in need of a coat of paint, under a naked light bulb that might signal the arrival of the dead, the only witnesses at out last interview.’ 106 A question arises: if attending Bacon’s exhibition in 1962 was ‘a revelation’ to Ballard, why does mention of the painter in his writing not appear until 1965-66, and then intensively so? Perhaps, in fact, Ballard did not go to Bacon’s exhibition in 1962 (he does not expressly say that he did) but was alerted or prompted by some other Bacon stimulus in 1965.

26 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard

A plaque at the entrance to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, reads: ‘Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy’ (fig. 17). Emerelda’s

Fig. 17. Disneyland entrance plaque, Anaheim, California. dismissive comparison of her father’s ‘jumble of architectural follies’ – his ‘pocket-city’ – with Disneyland is more than a topical reference. The comparison resonates across the architectural and cinematic rhetorical figures that the story employs. Emerelda’s greeting ‘Welcome to Disneyland’ echoes an older greeting, ‘Welcome to Hollywood’. Ballard’s Hollywood femmes fatales have not travelled very far when they retreat or retire to Vermilion Sands; they have only gone down the road – a brief cerebral journey – to another film lot. Hardoon’s follies perform a visual deception that is not unlike the deception of a film set. Strictly speaking, the buildings of Disneyland are not follies but novelty architecture. They were designed like film sets – with scale distortion and forced perspective – by film studio designers rather than architects.107 With its emphasis upon nostalgia and comforting narrative – ‘Here you leave today’ – Disney’s narrative architecture has been described as an architecture of reassurance.108 By contrast, Hardoon’s follies are an architecture of anxiety. It is the difference between Snow White’s Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Bavarian fantasy centre-piece at Anaheim, and Franz Kafka’s brooding castle. The draft story that Ballard eventually abandoned is not the same as the document in the archive: the seventeen sheets of paper are identical but their context is altered by the light of a necessarily belated reading. The draft’s fragile materiality captures past and process, and its uneven written surface, the roughness of its incompletion, casts shadows and reflections that a smooth and final draft cannot. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari remained a touchstone for Ballard’s imagination. In a review (1991) of George Melly’s invocation of the inter-war Paris of a generation of surrealists (companion text to a portfolio of evocative photographs of Paris by Michael Wood), Ballard turned to the film once more as a comparator, and seems to glimpse again the material phantasm of Hardoon’s neurotic toy city:

107 Beth Dunlop, The Art of Disney Architecture (New York, 1996), p. 29. 108 Karal Ann Marling (ed.), Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (New York, 1997).

27 eBLJ 2014, Article 1 Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard

Through [Michael Wood’s] self-effacing camera lens this touchstone city of charm and elegance becomes increasingly eerie, filled with strange passageways and arcades like sets from a remake of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. A forest of curious monuments and obelisks rises into the air, there are restless stone lions that seem to have strayed from a Magritte canvas, and art nouveau Métro stations whose metal railings and canopies seem to be evolving into vegetable forms.109

109 Ballard, ‘The Touchstone City’, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, p. 90. A review of George Melly, Paris and the Surrealists (London, 1991), published in The Guardian (13 June 1991), p. 25.

28 eBLJ 2014, Article 1