Ten days ago I spent a wonderful afternoon at Quarry Farm, where Mark Twain wrote most of his great novels. While the house was very beautiful and quiet, it didn’t give me any insight into Twain’s novels except that, well, they were written in a beautiful and quiet place. But it was still an incredibly valuable afternoon — I spent three hours contemplating Twain’s life and work and I came out of the experience feeling like I understood Huckleberry Finn in a way that I didn’t before. Which is all to say that I don’t think the structure a writer lived in is very important, but the time we spend in and around it is.
Around the time that I was strolling the grounds of Quarry Farm, J.G. Ballard’s home in Shepperton, England went up for sale. Ballard, one of the 20th century’s most ingenious writers of fiction, lived and wrote in the house from 1960 until his death in 2009. In an excellent piece in The Guardian about Ballard’s home, Sam Leith writes, “When he came to Shepperton, Ballard was fascinated by the apparent perversity of civilisation pretending to be civilised. Here was his subject. Ballard went to where the weird was and stayed there. But what he saw as weird, we see as normal.” Christopher Hitchens described Shepperton as being notable for its “almost laughable tranquility,” in contrast to Ballard’s intense, abstract, and wholly unclassifiable fiction.
Simon Sellers, who runs the indispensable site Ballardian, has proposed that fans of Ballard’s work join together to raise the £320,000 (a lot in real money) asking price and turn the house into a museum. Full Stop wholly endorses this idea and will make a modest contribution to the effort, if anybody actually does anything about it. If fans can’t raise enough money, Leith proposes we build a statue instead, which is probably cheaper than a house:
His editor once told me that Ballard saw his role, as a writer, to be the man standing on the hard shoulder of a particularly hairy curve on the motorway of modernity, holding up a bent cardboard sign on which were scrawled words to the effect of “TROUBLE AHEAD!” or “BRIDGE OUT!” If we can’t buy the house, we could at least have a whipround for a statue of the man holding just such a placard. He could be hanging over the side of Laleham Road, just where it passes over the M3.
This is also a really good idea! Let’s do it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkbjGpE3Mc
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