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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, 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.

Crash would clearly be a challenge, and I was still not convinced by my deviant thesis. Then, in 1970, someone at the New Arts Laboratory, in London, contacted me to ask if there was anything I would like to do there. It occurred to me 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 offered me the gallery for a month. I drove around wrecked-car sites in north London and paid for three cars, including a Pontiac, to be delivered to the gallery.

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Background

• JG Ballard: My Empire of the Sun

• How I came to write Crash

• Extract from Miracles of Life by JG Ballard

• Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard

Background

• The original Times review of Crash by J.G. Ballard

• J.G Ballard: How I write

• Surrealist seer of suburbia

• Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

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. I suggested we hire a young woman to interview the guests about their reactions. Contacted by telephone, she agreed to appear naked, but when she saw the crashed cars, she told me she would only perform topless – a significant response, I felt at the time.

I have never seen the guests at a 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. Nobody would have noticed the cars if they had been parked in the street, but under the unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, 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 Frendz). 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.

During the month the cars were ceaselessly attacked, daubed with white paint by a Hare Krishna group, overturned and stripped of wing mirrors and licence plates. By the time they were towed away, unmourned, all my suspicions had been confirmed about the unconscious links my novel would explore. My exhibition had been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed. I suspect it’s no longer possible to outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone. A psychological challenge is needed that threatens one of our dearer delusions, whether a stained sheet or a bisected cow forced to endure a second death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling about the first.

In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all this entailed.

Two weeks after I had finished, my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found the doors had been jammed by the partly collapsed roof. The car lay in the centre of the oncoming carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true of Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.

Crash created little stir when it first appeared in Britain, but 25 years later, when the country was supposed to have liberalised itself, a preposterous storm in the largest teacup When it finally opened there were no copycat car crashes, and the controversy at last died down. Cronenberg, a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, was completely baffled by the English reaction. “Why?” he kept asking me. “What’s going on here?”

After 50 years, I was nowhere nearer an answer.

Fleet Street could find showed just how repressed and silly a nation we could be. David Cronenberg’s film of Crash was premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1996. The controversy continued for years afterwards, especially in England. Desperate Conservative politicians attacked the film in an attempt to gain moral credit as the guardians of public decency. One cabinet minister, Virginia Bottomley, called for the film (which she had not seen) to be banned.

The Cannes festival is an extraordinary media event, in many ways deeply intimidating to a mere novelist. I took part in all the publicity interviews and was deeply impressed to see how committed the stars of the film were to Cronenberg’s elegant adaptation of my novel. I was sitting next to Holly Hunter when we were joined by a leading American film critic. His first question was: “Holly, what are you doing in this shit?” Holly sprang into life and delivered a passionate defence, castigating him for his small-mindedness and provincialism. It was the festival’s greatest performance, which I cheered vigorously.

In England the film was delayed for a year when Westminster Council banned it from the West End, and a number of councils up and down the country followed suit.

Extracted from Miracles of Life by JG Ballard, published by Fourth Estate on Feb 4 at £14.99. Buy it for £13.49 (inc p&p) from The Sunday Times BooksFirst; 0870 165 8585

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