A User's Guide to the Millennium, page 18
All this sounds like envy, and probably is – I’m only too keen for the BBC to take my own thirteen-part series on the social history of the car park. But having myself read medicine for a couple of years, which gives me about the same level of medical expertise as the average viewer with fifty Horizons stored away in the back of his head, I found The Body in Question oddly flat and unoriginal. At its best Desmond Morris’s imagination can throw up a genuinely strange idea – the subliminal confusion of breasts and buttocks, for example – and The Naked Ape and Manwatching even hint at a new kind of novel. In The Body in Question, however, Jonathan Miller has carefully side-stepped any temptation to be speculative. He seems to have set out to explore the way in which the vital functions of the human body – respiration, the circulation, its response to illness – become a series of ‘metaphors’ through which we, often misleadingly, view our entire universe; but in fact this series of TV lectures soon becomes an easily digestible mix of popular medical history, A-level biology and dissecting-room anecdotes. The author was one of the last people to be described as ‘brilliant’ before the term went out of use in the mid-sixties, but I found not a single arresting or original idea in the entire volume. Take its opening sentence, typical of the book as a whole: ‘Of all the objects in the world, the human body has a peculiar status: it is not only possessed by the person who has it, it also possesses and constitutes him.’ Is that an original insight, or the smooth packaging of the banal?
A remarkable omission from this illustrated account of our vital functions is any reference to sex and reproduction. But perhaps the BBC have leased the franchise on these topics to another thirteen-parter, and at this very moment Alex Comfort is interviewing himself outside a massage parlour in Bradford. It may be that we have all had a surfeit in recent years of revelations about the functions of our bodies and that the subject needs to gather a little mystery again (or, more worryingly, is sex itself losing its charms – I keep thinking about those 500,000 women who have gone off the pill; is it in fact sex that they have given up?).
To a large extent the deficiencies of this book lie within the particular private jargon which Dr Miller displays so engagingly on TV, and which so brilliantly mimics originality without ever actually revealing it. ‘Metaphor’, for example, is a particularly potent term for him – ‘Like blood, metaphors circulate through the intellectual community’, he says in the chapter on the circulation. One of the vague fears of anyone who has ever been wheeled into an operating theatre is that the surgeon behind his mask and gown will turn out, after the operation, to have been one of those likeable impostors, usually an out-of-work actor or would-be writer, who seem so effortlessly to masquerade as senior members of the medical profession. Reading this book, and watching Dr Miller on television, I sometimes have the impression that he is reversing the process – a genuinely qualified physician who has left his hospital rounds and feels compelled to play the roles of actor, satirist, theatrical producer, TV presenter, author. But which body in question wrote The Body in Question?
New Statesman
1978
6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
From Shanghai to Shepperton …
Unlocking the Past
One can never go home, the American novelist Thomas Wolfe has written, meaning that everything changes, the past and one’s memories of it. Since coming to England in the grey, austere days after the war, I had kept alive my precious memories of Shanghai. Teeming, cruel but always exhilarating, Shanghai in my mind had become a cross between ancient Babylon and Las Vegas. But what if my memories were false? My great fear was that, far from evoking new memories, the visit might erase the old ones that had sustained me for so many years.
An hour before midnight, after flying through the darkness from Hong Kong, we approached the western rim of a vast metropolis of lights, and touched down at Shanghai International Airport, on the site of the old Hungjao aerodrome where as a boy I had played in the cockpits of rusting Japanese aircraft. A sea of superheated air covered the tarmac, carrying the forgotten scents of the Yangtse countryside. The Chinese immigration officials were amiable, asking me to declare that I suffered from neither Aids nor psychosis (except, perhaps, an excess of memory?) and that I was not importing ‘salacious materials’ – what did they mean? The new Julie Burchill or, conceivably, a biography of Donald Trump?
James Runcie, the director of BBC-2’s Bookmark film, was waiting for me. I greeted him with the line I had rehearsed all the way from London, suggested by Conrad’s novel about a European trader driven mad by an impenetrable Africa: ‘Hello, James. Mr Kurtz returns to the Heart of Darkness.’ The problem was that Mr Kurtz had arrived without his luggage, or at least the kind of luggage carried in one’s hands. A few minutes earlier I had stood by the crowded carousel as suitcases were wrenched away, only to find myself alone by the eerily rotating band.
Was my tea-planter’s suit, my ‘costume’ for the film, on its way to Caracas, Honolulu or even Darjeeling? Happily Mr Gao and Mr Zhung of Shanghai Television leapt forward and took control. Super-efficient, they exchanged telexes with Hong Kong Airport, and my suitcase was on the next flight to Shanghai. Thanking them, I remembered that, before the war, one of my parents’ steamer trunks had appeared a year after the P & O boat had docked.
At midnight we arrived at the Shanghai Hilton, a forty-storey tower in the former Avenue Haig. The fuzzy street lights, perspiring trees and microwave air seemed to be those of any sub-tropical city, and I was still not sure that I had returned to the Shanghai I knew. The next morning, when I looked out from my room on the thirtieth floor, I was even less convinced. Like the London of the 1930s, Shanghai had been a low-rise city. But the Shanghai I saw from the Hilton was a panorama of immense high-rises that stretched from the northern industrial zones of Chapei and Yangtsepoo all the way to Lunghua in the south.
Dozens of huge buildings rose into the sky, roofs decked with satellite dishes. But far below I was relieved to see the old Shanghai of the 1930s was alive and well, if a little crumbling in the sunlight. There were the Provençal villas of the French Concession, and the International Settlement’s handsome art deco mansions with port-hole windows and ocean-liner balconies. I gave James the slip and for an hour walked around the nearby streets through which I had cycled as a child, staring up at the faded apartment houses and office buildings that I recognized after nearly half a century’s absence. I saw the old General Hospital where I had been born, the municipal park from which the Chinese had been excluded (‘No dogs or Chinese’), and the modern trolley buses that still followed the routes of the giant French trams.
Shanghai, which had once been an American and European city filled with Buicks and Packards, was now entirely Chinese, packed with cyclists, its pavements lined with market stalls piled high with water melons, bootleg Hong Kong videos and mounds of writhing eels. In the Hilton lobby the Bookmark team was waiting for me. A thirteen-year-old Belgian boy, whose father was working for a foreign company in Shanghai, warily shook my hand. He would play my younger self in the film, and James had misguidedly told him that he resembled me.
Together we set off for our first location, my childhood home in Amherst Avenue, now the library of the Shanghai Electronic Industry Information Bureau. It had been built in the early 1930s in the classic stockbroker style of the Home Counties, though the interior was that of an American house with five bathrooms, air conditioning and a squash court-sized kitchen. The staff welcomed us in the friendliest way, but I had the weird sense that I was exploring a ghost. I walked around the dining room, now lined with shelves of electronics manuals, where my father had entertained American officers and Chinese tycoons, and the veranda where my mother had organized her bridge parties.
The affable director, Mr Chang, greeted me like a long-lost colleague and invited me into his office, crammed with computers, which had once been my mother’s dressing room. We conducted an animated dialogue, neither speaking a word of the other’s language, but apparently understanding everything. Later I climbed to the top floor and stood in my childhood bedroom, which still had its original pale blue paint and the bookshelves where I had methodically arranged my Chums annuals and American comics. Now they were stacked with scientific journals and Chinese textbooks. In the bathroom there was even the original lavatory seat on which, as a small boy, I had been ordered by the punitive White Russian nanny to sit uselessly for hours – the 1930s baby-minding equivalent of television, and probably far more educational.
That first day I moved around Shanghai in a daze. Memories jostled me like the Chinese crowds who surrounded the film crew. Watching as the Belgian lad cycled past the Cathay Hotel, where Noël Coward had written Private Lives, I remembered the Shanghai of gangsters and beggar-kings, prostitutes and pickpockets. I had opened a door and stepped into a perfectly preserved past, though a past equipped with a number of unattractive reflexes of my own – walking along the Nanking Road, I caught myself expecting the Chinese pedestrians to step out of my way.
Would Shanghai ever return to its former gaudy self before the Communist take-over? The beggars and cripples exhibiting their open wounds had thankfully gone for good, and there were no armies of coolies labouring under immense loads disgorged from the sampans along the Bund. The people looked confident and well fed, young couples strolling arm-in-arm past the Sun Sun and Wing On department stores, men in shirtsleeves and the women in what might have been C & A frocks. Of course, there were no bookstalls selling newspapers critical of the government, and no posters urging the merits of rival political parties. Yet everywhere, clearly, capitalism was waiting to be reborn, in thousands of small shops and back-street businesses. Like the Europeans in the years before the Opium Wars, the western visitors are again confined to their compounds – the Hilton and Sheraton Hotels – drinking their imported Carlsberg and watching their Hollywood videos. But this time no British or American gunboat will force the Chinese to grant them concessions, which in due course will not be territorial but financial – tax havens and rent-free enterprise zones.
Already I was bored with the Bund and its great banking houses, and determined to find the last elusive piece of the past, the camp at Lunghua where the Japanese had interned some 2000 British civilians during the war. For nearly three years my father, mother, sister and I had been imprisoned there, living together in one small room.
For the next two days, as our time ran out, we embarked on a fruitless search. The unbroken expanse of paddy-fields that I remembered between Shanghai and Lunghua, eight miles to the south, had now been swallowed by greater metropolitan Shanghai – endless industrial estates and science parks, giant cement works and townships of high-rise flats. I began to despair of ever finding the camp, but at last an old policeman at a dusty wayside station confirmed that there was a high school in the Lunghua district which had once housed European prisoners, though during which war he could not remember. Ten minutes later, miraculously, I was walking through the gates of what had once been Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, and staring at F block, the main administrative building where the Japanese commandant, Mr Hyashi, had his headquarters – now, appropriately, his office was the headmaster’s study.
Forty-five years had turned the camp into a pleasantly landscaped secondary school, filled with trees and flowers. Caretakers looked on in amazement as a sixty-year-old Englishman sprinted through the trees towards a small two-storey building – G block, where my parents, sister and I had lived in one of the forty rooms that each housed a British family. I burst into the silent entry hall, where our daily ration of rice congee and sweet potatoes had been served, and into the dark corridors where twice a day we stood to attention for roll-call. The schoolchildren were on holiday, their rooms locked, but one room was open and served as a storage cupboard, filled with cardboard boxes and assorted rubbish. This was the Ballard family room, every ceiling crack, every piece of chipped plaster, every worn window frame as familiar to me as the lines on my palm.
I was standing in the debris of my own memories when James and the film crew caught up with me. ‘They’ve been waiting for you to come, Jim,’ said our Australian cameraman. ‘They even left the door unlocked for you.’
I thought about this three days later when we left for the airport. I had come to puberty in the camp and developed the rudiments of an adult brain, and I had seen my parents’ generation endure years of stress and illness. I had watched a world war from the ringside, and sometimes within the ring and between the feet of the combatants. Going back to the camp had been, without my realizing it, my main reason for returning to Shanghai, and visiting Lunghua again had opened a door that I thought was sealed for forty-five years. I had made contact with a lost younger self, and confirmed that my memories of Shanghai had been clear and accurate.
As our plane took off I felt elated, my spirits as bright as the gold Rolexes on the wrists of the new China entrepreneurs who packed the Hong Kong flight. One could go home after all, and somewhere there was always one waiting door that was open and unlocked.
Daily Telegraph
1991
The Pleasures of Reading
As I grow older – I’m now in my early sixties – the books of my childhood seem more and more vivid, while most of those that I read ten or even five years ago are completely forgotten. Not only can I remember, half a century later, my first readings of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, but I can sense quite clearly my feelings at the time – all the wide-eyed excitement of a seven-year-old, and that curious vulnerability, the fear that my imagination might be overwhelmed by the richness of these invented worlds. Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves on Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text. I suspect that these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.
By contrast, I can scarcely recall what I read in my thirties and forties. Like many people of my age, my reading of the great works of western literature was over by the time I was twenty. In the three or four years of my late teens I devoured an entire library of classic and modern fiction, from Cervantes to Kafka, Jane Austen to Camus, often at the rate of a novel a day. Trying to find my way through the grey light of post-war, austerity Britain, it was a relief to step into the rich and larger-spirited world of the great novelists. I’m sure that the ground-plan of my imagination was drawn long before I went up to Cambridge in 1949.
In this respect I differed completely from my children, who began to read (I suspect) only after they had left their universities. Like many parents who brought up teenagers in the 1970s, it worried me that my children were more interested in going to pop concerts than in reading Pride and Prejudice or The Brothers Karamazov – how naive I must have been. But it seemed to me then that they were missing something vital to the growth of their imaginations, the radical re-ordering of the world that only the great novelists can achieve.
I now see that I was completely wrong to worry, and that their sense of priorities was right – the heady, optimistic world of pop culture, which I had never experienced, was the important one for them to explore. Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky could wait until they had gained the maturity in their twenties and thirties to appreciate and understand these writers, far more meaningfully than I could have done at sixteen or seventeen.
In fact I now regret that so much of my reading took place during my late adolescence, long before I had any adult experience of the world, long before I had fallen in love, learned to understand my parents, earned my own living and had time to reflect on the world’s ways. It may be that my intense adolescent reading actually handicapped me in the process of growing up – in all senses my own children and their contemporaries strike me as more mature, more reflective and more open to the possibilities of their own talents than I was at their age. I seriously wonder what Kafka and Dostoevsky, Sartre and Camus could have meant to me. That same handicap I see borne today by those people who spend their university years reading English literature -scarcely a degree subject at all and about as rigorous a discipline as music criticism – before gaining the experience to make sense of the exquisite moral dilemmas that their tutors are so devoted to teasing out.
The early childhood reading that I remember so vividly was largely shaped by the city in which I was born and brought up. Shanghai was one of the most polyglot cities in the world, a vast metropolis governed by the British and French but otherwise an American zone of influence. I remember reading children’s editions of Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels at the same time as American comics and magazines. Alice, the Red Queen and Man Friday crowded a mental landscape also occupied by Superman, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. My favourite American comic strip was Terry and the Pirates, a wonderful Oriental farrago of Chinese warlords, dragon ladies and antique pagodas that had the added excitement for me of being set in the China where I lived, an impossibly exotic realm for which I searched in vain among Shanghai’s Manhattan-style department stores and nightclubs.
I can no longer remember my nursery reading, though my mother, once a schoolteacher, had taught me to read before I entered school at the age of five. There were no cheerful posters or visual aids in those days, apart from a few threatening maps in which the world was drenched red by the British Empire. The headmaster was a ferocious English clergyman whose preferred bible was Kennedy’s Latin Primer. From the age of six we were terrorized through two hours of Latin a day, and were only saved from his merciless regime by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (though he would have been pleased to know that, sitting the School Certificate in England after the war, I and a group of boys tried to substitute a Latin oral for the French, which we all detested).
