Jack sez, "A year in the gathering, JG Ballard's archive – or the closest that is likely to exist – opens at the British Library and contains, amongst other treats, multiple versions of manuscripts for Crash, letters, notes and an outline for an unwritten novel."
In line with his wishes, much of the archive comprises the progress of his texts, which are all here – with a few exceptions – as drafts, manuscripts or typescripts. But there is also plenty of personal and family material: photographs, postcards, faxed interviews. In May I was privileged to have had a sneak preview while it was still being catalogued by the archivist Chris Beckett, partly because I'm writing a book about Ballard. As it's entirely composed of artefacts – Ballard never owned a computer – perhaps this is the last solely non-digital literary archive of this stature.
For Claire Walsh, Ballard's partner, the manuscripts of Crash are the highlights (she objected to her name being used in a first draft and Ballard changed it to Catherine). "The feeling of it being written when it was red-hot in his mind," she says, "and the handwritten changes, I think are absolutely fascinating."
JG Ballard: Relics of a red-hot mind
(Thanks, Jack!)
(Image: Empty building, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from neajjean's photostream)
