/ 23 June 2010

British library acquires JG Ballard archive

Manuscripts, letters, notebooks and even the school reports of one of the most imaginative literary minds of the 20th century, JG Ballard, have been saved for the British public.

Ballard’s literary archive has been acquired for the nation through the acceptance in lieu (of tax) scheme and allocated to the British Library.

The 100-year-old scheme allows families to give exceptional works or objects to the nation instead of paying death duties, in this case £350 000 (about R3,9-million).

Jamie Andrews, the library’s head of modern literary manuscripts, said the archive’s arrival is “an incredibly important and precious addition” to its collection. The archive, which occupies approximately 12m of shelf space in the British Library, is expected to be fully accessible by mid-2011.

Ballard died last year, aged 78, and is probably best known for his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, inspired by his childhood in a Japanese-controlled internment camp and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. Then there is Crash, about the sexual fetishisation of car crashes, which was filmed by David Cronenberg. But more than that is a vast body of work, much of it science fiction, that made him one of the most influential British writers.

One of the items in the archive is a school report on the 16-year-old Ballard in which his English tutor wrote: “He has remarkable ability and general knowledge. With greater concentration his work could be even better.”

The heavily corrected manuscripts are of immediate fascination, shining a light into Ballard’s wildly imaginative mind and methods. One of the highlights is the far from neatly handwritten first 840-page draft of Empire of the Sun, which is a mixture of crossings out, revisions, corrections and additions.

After writing the first draft by hand, Ballard would then type it up and ruthlessly go through it again. The second draft of Crash is in the archive and it is even more crazily corrected. Andrews said: “I think some of those individual pages are works of art. There’s a determination and in some cases a violence.” —