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

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.

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