(#10 of 2010) The other day I was at D.E. Lake and Company and I got into a conversation with the guy who owns the place, the eponymous D.E. Lake, whose actual name, in case you're wondering, is Don. The store he runs is a weird amalgamation of art gallery and book store, down on King Street East near Sherbourne, with Don peering out at you through these haphazard stacks of books and ephemera, such as, the last time I was in there, just sitting out in the open, a framed cheque signed by Stephen Leacock. I was there to pick up a map I'd bought from Don, a Charles E. Goad fire insurance map (pics below), one of a series dating from 1890 that features highly detailed renderings of every building in downtown Toronto. During my previous visit I'd been delighted to find the one of my neighbourhood, which featured my actual house. Don and I got to talking about Goad, and the maps, and how it kills him to sell the collection because each one is one of a kind—once he's sold one of a certain area, it's gone. Interestingly he said, Goad's ancestors still live in Toronto.
Then the conversation turned to books because I noticed on top of another of the book stacks the memoir by JG Ballard, Miracles of Life. Which, hey, I didn't know Ballard wrote a memoir. Don said it was great, a page turner, and then he asked me whether I would recommend any page turners and I suggested he read Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, and Don kind of painstakingly wrote down the title and author. An awkward pause followed and I realized I should buy the Ballard book. Out of obligation. Because, you know, he'd just written down my recommendation. So I did. Then, as I was walking back to my car with my book and my enormous framed map, a red Audi passed going the opposite direction. The window rolled down and a guy stuck his head out the window. "Is that a Goad?" he called out. A bit bowled over by the recognition, I said it was. "Hey," he said, pointing to himself. "I'm a Goad!" He was still repeating himself as the light changed and off he drove: "I'm a Goad!"
OK, now about the Ballard book. I liked it. Before this I'd only read two books by Ballard: Crash and High-Rise. I really liked both of them. There's a conceptual brilliance to Ballard's fiction that gives his writing a zip I've never found anywhere else. His writing feels dangerous -- the characters are dangerous, but even more so, the ideas Ballard's books contain are dangerous. High-Rise in particular I love—It's the story of the breakdown in civil society that occurs in a completely self-contained skyscraper apartment complex, one I identify with after spending five years separated from the outside by two elevator rides in the Merchandise Lofts.
The problem with Ballard's writing in all of the three books I've now read by him is his trouble suggesting a subject's inner life. Reading Crash or High-Rise, one never has the sense of access to the individual's emotional complexity. There's a clinical, almost academic separation between Ballard and his characters. They may as well be wax figures or chess pieces. His memoir suggests a reason why that may be. Speaking of his parents' generation, he says, "I often wonder why many of them bothered to have children at all, and assume that it must have been for social reasons, some ancient need to enlarge the tribe and defend the homestead, just as some people keep a dog without ever showing it affection..." Ballard speaks in general of the kids of his generation, who "never saw their parents dressing or undressing, never saw them brush their teeth or even take off a watch... I rarely saw my father without a jacket and tie well into the 1950s... The vistas of polished furniture turned a family home into a deserted museum, with a few partly colonised rooms where people slept alone, read and bathed alone, and hung their clothes in private wardrobes, along with their emotions, hopes and dreams." Is Ballard unable to access his characters' inner lives because he didn't ever emotionally connect to his parents?
Ballard had a fascinating life. He was born in 1930 in Shanghai to a British businessman and his wife. His internment with other expatriates during the WWII Japanese invasion of China formed the basis for his novel, Empire of the Sun. Back in England after the war, he married, his wife bore a boy and two girls and then died while the children were still young. And Ballard raised the children himself in an era when single fathers were rare. It's as a father that Ballard appears finally to have connected with other human beings. "Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them," he says. As a parent he formed close relationships with each of his three children, and what I found most inspiring about the book is the extent he could birth from such a domestic milieu such deeply subversive novels. The dude who wrote Crash was a mild-mannered father of three from the suburbs of London? That is awesome. And Ballard says the domesticity powered the subversion. "A short story, or a chapter of a novel, would be written in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash, and watching Blue Peter. I am certain my fiction is all the better for that," he writes. "My greatest ally was the pram in the hall."
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Finally, a few close-ups from my Goad map. Sorry about the image quality. The last image is what the intersection of Bathurst and Dundas looked like, 120 years ago -- Dundas was called Arthur Street, back then.
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