Crash: The Collector’s Edition

‘In February 1972, two weeks after completing Crash, I was involved in my only serious car accident. After a front-wheel blowout my Ford Zephyr veered to the right, crossed the central reservation [ . . . ] and then rolled over and continued upside-down along the oncoming lane. Fortunately I was wearing a seat belt and no other vehicle was involved. An extreme case of nature imitating art.’

J. G. Ballard

Cover

Epigraph

Copyright

Crash (1973)

‘Jim’s Desk’ by Chris Beckett

Short Stories (1969–70)

‘Crash!’

‘Tolerances of the Human Face’

‘Coitus 80’

‘Journey Across a Crater’

‘Princess Margaret’s Face Lift’

‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’

Crash! BBC short film, directed by Harley Cokeliss (1971)

‘The Obsession of a Writer’: Initial treatment

Letter: Ballard to Cokeliss

Draft script by Ballard

J. G. Ballard: Introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974)

J. G. Ballard in conversation with Will Self (1994, extract)

Bibliographical note

Illustration credits

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Edited by Chris Beckett

Crash first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1973

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1973

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All archive material reproduced from British Library collections

copyright © 2017 J. G. Ballard Estate Ltd.

‘Jim’s Desk’ and introductory notes © Chris Beckett 2017

‘Crash!’, first published by Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1969

and subsequently in The Atrocity Exhibition © J. G. Ballard 1969. ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’, first published in Encounter, 1969, and subsequently in The Atrocity Exhibition © J. G. Ballard 1969. ‘Coitus 80’, ‘Journey Across a Crater’ and ‘Princess Margaret’s Face Lift’, first published in New Worlds, January, February, March 1970 © J. G. Ballard 1970. ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’, first published in Ambit, summer 1970 © J. G. Ballard 1970. Introduction to French edition of Crash © J. G. Ballard 1974.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007378340

Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780008257316

Version: 2017-03-16

This edition of Crash incorporates five extracts from the earlier of two draft manuscripts held at the British Library (BL Add MS 88938/3/8/1). The selections, which sometimes include autograph material on the backs of pages, are from chapters 1, 7, 17, 21 (numbered 22 in the draft) and 24 (25 in the draft). All selections correspond to the start of a chapter and precede the published text, except the third selection (Chapter 17, the car wash episode) which commences mid-chapter and has been placed at the end of the chapter:

draft pp. 1–5 correspond to Crash pp. 1–7 draft pp. 57–65 correspond to Crash pp. 77–87 draft pp. 167–73 correspond to Crash pp. 177–82 draft pp. 230–5 correspond to Crash pp. 227–37 draft pp. 257–62 correspond to Crash pp. 261–6

1

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

Could she see, in Vaughan’s posture, the formula of the death which he had devised for her? During the last weeks of his life Vaughan thought of nothing else but her death, a coronation of wounds he had staged with the devotion of an Earl Marshal. The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the instalments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery.