Miracles of Life (23 page)

Life with Claire has always been interesting – we have
often driven together across half of Europe and never once
stopped talking. We share a huge number of interests, in
painting and architecture, wine, foreign travel, politics (she
is keenly left-wing and impatient with my middle-of-theroadism),
the cinema and, most important of all, good food.
For many years we have eaten out twice a week, and Claire is
an expert judge of restaurants, frequently finding a superb
new place long before the critics discover it. She is a great
reader of newspapers and magazines, has completely
mastered the internet and is always supplying me with news stories that she knows will appeal to me. She is a great cook,
and over the years has educated my palate. She has very
gamely put up with my lack of interest in music and the
theatre. Above all, she has been a staunch supporter of my
writing, and the best friend that I have had.

When I first met Claire I was dazzled by her great beauty,
naturally blonde hair and elegant profile. Sadly, she has suffered
more than her share of ill health. Soon after we met,
she underwent a major kidney operation at a London hospital,
and I remember walking with her down the Charing
Cross Road on the day she was discharged, on the way to
Foyle’s to buy the ‘book’ of her operation, a medical text of
the exact surgical procedure. It is typical of Claire that she
took the trouble to write a letter of thanks to the surgeon
who invented the procedure, then retired to New Zealand,
and received a long and interesting reply from him. Ten years
ago she faced the challenge of breast cancer, but fought back
bravely, an ordeal that lasted many years. That she triumphed
is a tribute to her courage.

Together we have travelled all over Europe and America,
to film festivals and premieres, where she has looked after me
and kept up my spirits. At the time we met, Claire was
working as the publicity manager for a publisher of art
books, and she went onto be publicity manager of Gollancz,
Michael Joseph and Allen Lane. Her knowledge of publishing,
and many of the devious and likeable personalities
involved, has been invaluable.

Looking back, I realise that there is scarcely a city,
museum or beach in Europe that I don’t associate with
Claire. We have spent thousands of the happiest hours with
our children (she has a daughter Jennifer) on beaches and
under poolside umbrellas, in hotels and restaurants, walking
around cathedrals from Chartres to Rome and Seville. Claire
is a speed-reader of guidebooks, and always finds some
interesting side chapel, or points out the special symbolism
of this or that saint in a Van Eyck. She had a Catholic
upbringing, and lived in a flat not far from Westminster
Cathedral, whose nave was virtually her childhood playground.
Whenever we find ourselves in Victoria she casually
points out a stone lion or Peabody building where she and
her friends played hide-and-seek.

I was so impressed by Claire’s beauty that I made her the
centrepiece of two of my ‘advertisements’, which were published
in
Ambit, Ark
and elsewhere in the late 1960s. I was
advertising abstract notions largely taken from
The Atrocity
Exhibition
, such as ‘Does the Angle Between Two Walls Have
a Happy Ending?’ – a curious question that for some reason
preoccupied me at the time. In each of the full-page ads the
text was superimposed on a glossy, high-quality photograph,
and the intention was to take paid advertisement pages in
Vogue
and
Harper’s
Bazaar
. I reasoned that most novels
could dispense with almost all their text and reduce themselves
to a single evocative slogan. I outlined my proposal in
an application to the Arts Council, but they rather solemnly

Claire Walsh in 1968
.

refused to award me a grant, on the surprising grounds that
my application was frivolous. This disappointed me, as I was
completely serious, and the Arts Council awarded tens of
thousands of pounds to fund activities that, unconsciously
or not, were clearly jokes –
Ambit
itself could fall into that
category, along with the
London Magazine
, the
New Review
and countless poetry magazines and little presses.

The funds disbursed by the Arts Council over the decades
have created a dependent client class of poets, novelists and weekend publishers whose chief mission in life is to get their
grants renewed, as anyone attending a poetry magazine’s
parties will quickly learn from the nearby conversations.
Why the taxes of people on modest incomes (the source of
most taxes today) should pay for the agreeable hobby of a
north London children’s doctor, or a self-important Soho
idler like the late editor of the
New Review
, is something I
have never understood. I assume that the patronage of the
arts by the state serves a political role by performing a castration
ceremony, neutering any revolutionary impulse and
reducing the ‘arts community’ to a docile herd. They are
allowed to bleat, but are too enfeebled to ever paw the
ground.

Still, what the Arts Council saw as a prank at least put
Claire’s beautiful face into the
Evening Standard
.

And, last but not least, she introduced me to the magic of
cats.

If
The Atrocity
Ehibition
was a firework display in a charnel
house,
Crash
was a thousand-bomber raid on reality, though
English critics at the time thought that I had lost my bearings
and made myself into the most vulnerable target.
The
Atrocity Exhibition
was published in 1970, and was my
attempt to make sense of the sixties, a decade when so much
seemed to change for the better. Hope, youth and freedom
were more than slogans; for the first time since 1939 people
were no longer fearful of the future. The print-dominated
past had given way to an electronic present, a realm where
instantaneity ruled.

At the same time, darker currents were flowing a little too
close to the surface. The viciousness of the Vietnam War,
lingering public guilt over the Kennedy assassination, the
casualties of the hard drug scene, the determined effort by
the entertainment culture to infantilise us – all these had
begun to get between us and the new dawn. Youth began to
seem rather old hat and, anyway, what could we do with all that hope and freedom? Instantaneity allowed too many
things to happen at once. Sexual fantasies fused with science,
politics and celebrity while truth and reason were shouldered
towards the door. We watched the
Mondo
Cane
‘documentaries’
where it was impossible to tell the fake newsreel
footage of atrocities and executions from the real.

And we rather liked it that way. Our willing complicity in
this blurring of truth and reality in the
Mondo
Cane
films
alone made them possible, and was taken up by the entire
media landscape, by politicians and churchmen. Celebrity
was all that counted. If denying God made a bishop famous,
what choice was there? We liked mood music, promises that
were never kept, slogans that were meaningless. Our darkest
fantasies were pushing at a half-open bathroom door as
Marilyn Monroe lay drugged among the fading bubbles.

All this I tried to grapple with in
The Atrocity Exhibition
.
What if the everyday environment was itself a huge mental
breakdown: how could we know if we were sane or psychotic?
Were there any rituals we could perform, deranged
sacraments assembled from a kit of desperate fears and phobias,
that would conjure up a more meaningful world?

Writing
The Atrocity Exhibition
, I adopted an approach as
fragmented as the world it described. Most readers found it
difficult to grasp, expecting a conventional A+B+C narrative,
and were put off by the isolated paragraphs and the
rather obsessive sexual fantasies about the prominent figures
of the day. But the book has remained in print in Britain, Europe and the USA, and has been reissued many times.

In New York it was published by Doubleday, but the
editor, an enthusiastic supporter, made the mistake of
adding an advance copy to the trolley filled with new titles
that was sent up to the president’s office. There Nelson
Doubleday broke the cardinal rule of all American publishers:
never read one of your own books. He leafed idly
through
The Atrocity Exhibition
and his eye lit upon a piece
entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. The then
governor of California was a close friend, and within minutes
the order had gone out to pulp the entire edition. The
book was later published by Grove Press, home to William
Burroughs and other prominent avant-garde writers, and
since the 1990s by the very lively and adventurous Re/Search
firm in San Francisco, one of the most remarkable publishing
houses I have come across, specialists in urban
anthropology of the most bizarre kind.

In the last few years
The Atrocity Exhibition
seems to be
emerging from the dark, and I wonder if the widespread use
of the internet has made my experimental novel a great deal
more accessible. The short paragraphs and discontinuities
of the morning’s emails, the overlapping texts and the need
to switch one’s focus between unrelated topics, together
create a fragmentary world very like the text of
The Atrocity
Exhibition
.

* * *

By the time that
The Atrocity Exhibition
was published in
1970 I was already looking ahead to what would be my first
‘conventional’ novel for five years. I thought hard about the
cluster of ideas that later made up
Crash
, many of them
explored in
The Atrocity Exhibition
, where to some extent
they were disguised within the fragmentary narrative.
Crash
would be a head-on charge into the arena, an open attack on
all the conventional assumptions about our dislike of violence
in general and sexual violence in particular. Human
beings, I was sure, had far darker imaginations than we liked
to believe. We were ruled by reason and self-interest, but
only when it suited us to be rational, and much of the time
we chose to be entertained by films, novels and comic strips
that deployed horrific levels of cruelty and violence.

In
Crash
I would openly propose a strong connection
between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven
by the cult of celebrity. It seemed obvious that the deaths of
famous people in car crashes resonated far more deeply than
their deaths in plane crashes or hotel fires, as one could see
from Kennedy’s death in his Dallas motorcade (a special
kind of car crash), to the grim and ghastly death of Princess
Diana in the Paris underpass.

Crash
would clearly be a challenge, and I was still not
completely convinced by my deviant thesis. Then in 1970
someone at the New Arts Laboratory in London contacted
me and asked if there was anything I would like to do there.
The large building, a disused pharmaceutical warehouse, contained a theatre, a cinema and an art gallery (there were
also a number of flues, intended to draw off any dangerous
chemical fumes and useful, so I was told, for venting away
any cannabis smoke in the event of a police raid.

It occurred to me that I could test my hypothesis about
the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by
putting on an exhibition of crashed cars. The Arts Lab were
keen to help, and offered me the gallery for a month. I drove
around various wrecked-car sites in north London, and paid
for three cars, including a crashed Pontiac, to be delivered to
the gallery.

The cars went on show without any supporting graphic
material, as if they were large pieces of sculpture. A TV
enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up a camera and
closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch
themselves as they strolled around the crashed cars. I agreed,
and suggested that we hire a young woman to interview the
guests about their reactions. Contacted by telephone, she
agreed to appear naked, but when she walked into the gallery
and saw the crashed cars she told me that she would only
perform topless, a significant response in its own right, I felt
at the time.

I ordered a fair quantity of alcohol, and treated the first
night like any gallery opening, having invited a cross section
of writers and journalists. I have never seen the guests at an
art gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a huge tension in
the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring. No one would have noticed the cars
if they had been parked in the street outside, but under the
unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to
provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows
were broken, and the topless girl was almost raped in
the back seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later
wrote a damning review headed ‘Ballard Crashes’ in the
underground paper
Friendz
). A woman journalist from
New
Society
began to interview me among the mayhem, but
became so overwrought with indignation, of which the
journal had an unlimited supply, that she had to be restrained
from attacking me.