Stephen Bayley

Knowing that we "can't take [our] eyes off a traffic accident" (pg. 11), Stephen Bayley's book was already on to a winner, but the author's erudite idiosyncrasies elevate Death Drive beyond macabre titillation, beyond a mere chronicle of celebrity car crashes.

That is, on the face of it, what Death Drive is: short biographical pieces of the usual suspects like James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Eddie Cochran, Marc Bolan and Grace Kelly, charting their careers with the usual foreboding before describing their fateful end, that "pattern of elegy and absurdity" (pg. 18) that makes the celebrity car crash so strangely compelling. That pattern also makes lesser-known unfortunates, such as Isadora Duncan, Mike Hawthorn, Ernie Kovacs and Tara Browne (who inspired the lyric 'he blew his mind out in a car' in the Beatles' song 'A Day in the Life'), just as fascinating to read about as their more well-known counterparts in Bayley's book.

It is Bayley who makes the book far less tawdry than it ought to be, identifying a strange dignity in these sudden, mundane, public-road ends. Most of the celebrities come from the Fifties or Sixties (though a passing mention of Paul Walker, star of the Fast and the Furious franchise, shows it's a phenomenon not entirely historical) and, because the car has become relatively safe, familiar and 'democratic', "the strange, defunct aristocracy of its victims has acquired a special allure" (pg. 12). Bayley has a good grasp of language and a wide range of cultural knowledge, which enhances his prose, and he tries to delve into wider connections, embracing both the Freudian principle of the 'death drive' and a J. G. Ballard quote that 'there are no coincidences', only 'deep assignments' (pg. 18). These two ideas create the title and the sub-title of Bayley's book.

Though never complete enough to become a thesis, Bayley particularly excels at this. He always has an eye for a piece of colourful trivia (for example, the Oldsmobile Rocket 88 driven by Jackson Pollock had advertisements written by a young Elmore Leonard (pg. 83)) and for those eerie coincidences which always seem to bubble up in public tragedies, such as Marc Bolan's Mini (registration plate FOX 661L) colliding with a tree a few years after he wrote and sang 'picking foxes from a tree' in a pop song (pg. 188). He is adept at sniffing out ironies, such as the road safety film James Dean shot (pg. 69), the movie poster of Grace Kelly behind the wheel in Monaco not far from where she would die behind the wheel in Monaco (pg. 202), or the line by Albert Camus, the Absurdist philosopher, about how there is 'nothing more absurd than to die in a car accident' (pg. 115). Though never 'proving' Ballard's line correct, it is certainly interesting to note, for example, that Jayne Mansfield starred in The Girl Can't Help It, a movie containing music by Eddie Cochran – who, on his final, fateful tour, had his guitar carried by a young Marc Bolan.

Death Drive is a hard book to categorize, but that sort of originality and idiosyncrasy is bracing, particularly when allied to good writing. Bayley is the ideal writer for this material: an experienced commentator on art and design, bold enough to flirt with tastelessness in dealing with his subject matter but charming enough to make it seem valid rather than exploitative. And he is ideal in other ways: Bayley speculates on the extent to which John Lennon was inspired by the death of the afore-mentioned Tara Browne in writing 'A Day in the Life', providing a cursory analysis of Lennon's lyrics. Some months after the crash, Lennon received a letter from a student at Quarry Bank, his old high school in Liverpool, informing him that teachers were now analysing Beatles lyrics. Lennon was amused but irked by this information and it led to him writing something deliberately nonsensical: 'I Am the Walrus'. That student was a young Stephen Bayley, and here he is now, in Death Drive, analysing a Lennon lyric. Maybe there really are no accidents. There are certainly ironies.… (more)

Inevitably selective, as it's intended for the busy person with just two days to spare, this book is not at all appealing to the ordinary visitor. If the mistakes in the entry for HMS Belfast are common elsewhere in the book, then it's poor value for money and a lazy effort, as if the commissioning editor did not bother to do any work, rather, relying on the fame of the author to shift copies (HMS Belfast is a cruiser, not a battleship, and she was not involved in the Battle of the River Plate; some of his other comments about this museum ship are trite).… (more)