Nova Express

by William S. Burroughs

  From December 1961 to the end of February 1962, writing first in Paris and then London, Burroughs mailed Rosset more material at least four times, and then on March 30, mailed the first complete manuscript—only to admit three days later that it was “not in as good order as I would like,” enclosing more corrections, suggestions and material.20 Since there’s no more “plot” progression than there is “character” development, any structure would have been provisional because multiple permutations were possible. Burroughs’ constant shifts in location were also connected, practically as well as figuratively, to the material he produced and the difficulties he had finding the right order for it. The international geography of Nova Express’ writing history is as revealing as its chronology: as Burroughs explained to Wenning, “my methods of work and constant change of residence traveling with one suitcase makes for difficulty assembling complete typescripts.”21 Barney Rosset encouraged Burroughs to send sections as he wrote them, and several times Burroughs had to ask Rosset to send copies back, having either lost or lost track of what he had written. At least by selling his manuscripts Burroughs preserved them, because his working methods and need to keep moving ensured the casual destruction of much of it.

  During the next six months Burroughs started and finished The Ticket That Exploded for Olympia Press, assembled Dead Fingers Talk for John Calder and began revising The Soft Machine—but nothing happened on Nova Express. The last two projects suggest he had an agenda in mind when asking Rosset at the start of October 1962 whether Grove had “a definite publication date for Nova Express” (he had changed the spelling of the title the previous month): “That was a rush job and I am not satisfied with the arrangement of material and some of the sections could do with a rewrite job.”22 Contrary to appearances, Nova Express was not the one unrevised volume in the Cut-Up Trilogy, and in the third week of October Burroughs mailed Rosset a “revised and rearranged manuscript” (ROW, 115). He added a new chapter in March 1963 and submitted a new ending (which was never used) that October, when the typesetting was done, and then over a year later effectively revised Nova Express a second time, so extensive was the work Burroughs did on the galleys in July 1964, now back in Tangier where he had started the book three years earlier.

  The three major stages of Nova Express’ compositional history—the March and October 1962 manuscripts and the July 1964 revised ­galleys—generated a trilogy of alternative forms and resulted in a composite final text. Piecing together the March 1962 manuscript from incomplete archival copies, it was clearly similar in content to the published text, lacking for certain only three sections (“Pry Yourself Loose And Listen,” “Chinese Laundry,” and “Inflexible Authority”) and including three others that Burroughs later cut. However, the order was completely different and another eight sections differed significantly. The first ten chapters (often titled in block capitals in his first draft) began with “THE NOVIA EXPRESS” (later retitled “Uranian Willy”) and ended with “A DISTANT THANK YOU.” Other chapters followed in late December and mid-February, and a good deal more of the text was written in the six weeks leading up to his submission of the first complete manuscript on March 30, 1962. This was an especially significant period because Burroughs was now no longer cutting up his material, which is one reason he produced so much so quickly. As he announced on February 20, “I do not use scissors any more” (ROW, 99).

  In his Foreword Note to Nova Express Burroughs acknowledged that he had used an “extension of Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method,” a statement that begs many questions: How did the methods differ, in terms of materials used and results obtained? Is it possible to say which parts of Nova Express were cut-up and which folded-in? Should the book be called a “fold-in novel”? Telling Gysin in March 1962 that he was “using more and more cut up method of folding,” Burroughs seems to make “fold-in” a subcategory of “cut-up,” and while this is not the place to develop a taxonomy of forms, it’s obvious that Nova Express contains not one but various types of “cut-up” and “fold-in” texts and that we lack the terms to describe and differentiate them—or even to distinguish them from Burroughs’ “normal” writing: “he writes naturally now like cut up,” Allen Ginsberg observed in September 1962.23

  Burroughs’ 170-page October 1962 manuscript, which was used as the typesetting copy, restructured the material to give it the order of the published text. He revised the titles of more than half a dozen sections, cut one, redacted several others and divided the novel into nine chapters, the last of which would be cut only at the galley stage. In his covering letter, Burroughs referred to its internal divisions as both “chapters” and “sections” and as “sections” and “subsections” (ROW, 115). The self-contradiction was typical of Burroughs, and although “section” and “subsection” are more surgically precise, he used “chapter” and “section” more frequently, and I have followed his general if inconsistent practice. In terms of content, the broad direction of manuscript revision was clear: Burroughs redacted cut-up sections and expanded narrative ones. In October 1962 he added two long narratives (“Chinese Laundry” and “Inflexible Authority”), which he suggested to Rosset “would make good advance publicity for the book,” potentially in Evergreen Review. Although the house journal of Grove Press did not take up the suggestion, it had already published two selections from Nova Express, in January and July 1962, and would publish one more in March the following year, while, less strategically, Burroughs contributed other parts to several short-lived little magazines.24 In March 1963, he added another long piece, the 2,000-word “Pry Yourself Loose” section, adding what might be called a nova noir tone of hardboiled vitriol and giving a stronger narrative drive to the book’s opening chapter.

  Returning his corrected galleys to Richard Seaver at Grove in July 1964 (a second set had gone, as requested, to Ian Sommerville), Burroughs resumed one last time his familiar refrain: “I found myself dissatisfied with a good deal of the cut up material so the corrected proofs contain considerable deletions and quite a few inserts.”25 These changes were, he insisted, essential to “the integrity and impact of the book.” The ten separate inserts he made on the galleys, typed up and Scotch-taped in, added up to some 1,800 words, all inserted into the second half of the manuscript, which was also where he made all the deletions, using a thick black marker pen. By far the longest insert went into the “One More Chance?” section and significantly expanded the material in Nova Express about Scientology, a key factor that had been there from the start of the cut-up project. Apart from a long, entirely cut-up ninth chapter that Burroughs canceled completely, the cuts and additions he made at the galley stage balanced out in length. It’s revealing that while everything he canceled on the galleys was cut-up material, so was a third of what he added: he hadn’t lost faith in his methods, it was just that the older material now seemed too repetitive (which it was, especially in the ninth chapter). Overall, the revisions didn’t much change the balance of the book, the second half of which has roughly twice as much cut-up material as the first half, although precise percentages are impossible to calculate and becoming progressively unable to tell the difference between what is cut-up and what is not is one of the book’s strangest effects.26

  The cut-up text that Burroughs added in 1964 stands out formally through its heavy use of ellipses (. . .), in contrast to his earlier use of the em dash (—). There are 150 ellipses in Nova Express, but just one comes from a pre-1964 typescript. Useful for dating Burroughs’ material, the ellipses of Nova Express also emphasize the larger significance of punctuation. Burroughs not only had an extraordinary ear for speech and idiom and a genius for enigmatic turns-of-phrase but a great sense of rhythm and pace, and he used punctuation to vary the tempo of the reading experience: like a cine­matic dissolve, ellipses are usually slow, enigmatic; like a cinematic cut, the em dash is sharp, rapid and urgent. The visual impact of punctuation on the page also makes a clear gesture
against the formal limits imposed by mainstream publication. Commenting on the “multiplicity of punctuation” in the new ending he submitted in October 1963, Burroughs had told Seaver: “This is an experiment with format and the use of punctuation which I have carried further in the work I am doing now.”27 On the other hand, the general practice of Grove’s copyeditors was to normalize such distinctive practices as his use of lower case “i” for the first person pronoun and to regularize Burroughs’ inconsistency in using punctuation.

  Most important, Burroughs makes punctuation itself operate as a sign system, a language, when the dots and dashes are arranged into lines of “supersonic Morse code” at the end of the section “Will Hollywood Never Learn?” The Morse letters were again a gesture, a pragmatic way to assimilate into book form an equivalent to, for example, his “color alphabet,” a series of experiments with word and image he developed in spring 1961, inspired by a combination of Rimbaud’s poetry and the use of hallucinogens—visually rich experiments which had no commercial possibilities. Visible, rather than audible like phonetic language, the lines of Morse code thus also anticipated the “silent writing of Brion Gysin,” embodied in the calligraphic design that closed The Ticket That Exploded. Although Grove did not use the “sketch by Brion Gysin for a suggested cover” that Burroughs sent Seaver in July 1964, when Nova Express appeared three months later he congratulated his editor on the results: “An excellent job I think as regards cover and typesetting.”28 The question of cover design brings us finally to the book’s title, and the bigger picture that lies behind it.

  “CURSE GO BACK”

  In spring 1965 Burroughs made an untitled collage for his and ­Gysin’s “Book of Methods” (later published as The Third Mind) that includes his earlier title for Nova Express constructed as a cut-up of words in two different typefaces: a Gothic “The” followed by “NOVA ­EXPRESS” in white Sans serif capitals against a black background. The title acts as a caption to the picture above it of a train wreck, while the words “By train” appear prominently nearby. The composition also includes typewritten text by Burroughs in two columns (beginning, “you are reading the future”), a photograph of him making tea, and the Spanish word “Sucesos,” identifying the train crash as an item in the sección de sucesos, the newspaper section dealing with crimes and disasters. In 1966, Jonathan Cape used parts of this collage for the cover of the British edition of Nova Express, omitting the Gothic article “The” and adding pictures of locomotive wheels to emphasize the obvious: Nova Express names the onrushing apocalyptic train crash of history, the railroad of time, “the total disaster now on tracks.”

  However, to read the title in this way is to risk missing the point Burroughs was making in both book and collage, and indeed in the cut-up project as a whole: what mattered most was not the apparent referential content but the form, the message in the medium itself. The importance of form is precisely established in the Nova Express collage by the way it is reproduced in The Third Mind, where in miniature it is juxtaposed alongside another Nova Express collage. This collage makes two changes to the book’s title, omitting the article “The” and, after the same white-on-black capitalized “NOVA,” has the word “EXPRESS” in a different typeface. To British readers, the font and spacing of the letters in “EXPRESS” are unmistakable: it is from the masthead of the Daily Express. The other semantic content of the word “express”—referring to not trains but newspapers—is activated formally by the typography of the word and by the broadsheet page layout of the collage.29 The term nova may refer to a nuclear explosion in white dwarf stars, but Burroughs was well enough versed in astronomy as well as in Latin to know this was an abbreviation of stella nova (“new star”), and that nova also designates what is new or news: it was in this double sense that he originally titled his novel The Novia Express.

  A year before making these two collages, in spring 1964 as he waited to receive the Nova Express galleys, Burroughs had been building filing systems modeled on newspaper archives: “Your reporter selects a clipping from the file labelled Daily Express, Saturday, April 25, 1964 (London).”30 In July, as he corrected the galleys, he physically framed his book in terms of newspapers by inserting the same phrase to give a new final line to both the first and last sections of the text: “September 17, 1899 over New York.”31 Burroughs became obsessed with this date, using it in many texts, but its significance lies in its provenance in a newspaper. In February 1964 he wrote Gysin of his discovery: “The New York Times for September 17, 1899 came through a few days ago. I saw at once that the message was not of content but format. Newspapers are cut up by format […] This is the secret of their power to mould thought feeling and subsequent events” (ROW, 139). Restating what he had already made explicit in Nova Express in terms of “Juxtaposition Formulae” (“Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content”), Burroughs was inspired to produce his own newspaper format pieces using three columns, and during 1964 and 1965 he made many such texts. Although these have always been seen as entirely separate from his book-length cut-up work, the ending of Nova Express insists otherwise: “Well that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks . . . fresh southerly winds a long time ago.” Those “city desks” of newspaper offices parallel the sección de sucesos in his Nova Express collage and were a clear reflection of Burroughs’ vision in February 1964: “Why not write a novel as if you were sitting at the city desk?” (ROW, 143). And those “fresh southerly winds” would be associated with newspapers in the archives Burroughs later assembled for sale; Folio 108, which he titled “Fresh Southerly Winds Stir Papers On The City Desk,” gathers together a dozen mid-1960s newspaper-format publications, from “The Daily Tape Worm” to one called “The Nova Express.”32

  Burroughs may not have had in mind his late-1950s character “Fats” Terminal, who “edits a newspaper known as the Underground Express,”33 but Nova Express was definitely “underground.” Not quite, perhaps, like the underground press of little magazines to which Burroughs contributed—since a publishing house like Grove was “alternative” but still commercial, not aligned with the self-publishing networks that sprang up in the 1960s. Rather, it was underground in its aim to serve a resistance movement against an occupying power, its cut-up methods intended to sabotage an essentially fascist above­ground world. Nova Express is “about” the Nova Mob, but from the start Burroughs saw it as opposed to and directed against what in 1960 he called “the Beaverbrook Mob,” referring to the Anglo-Canadian owner of the Daily Express, and fascist sympathizer, Lord Beaverbrook.34 In fact, Beaverbrook was one of a trio of press barons in Burroughs’ sights, alongside Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune) and William Randolph Hearst (from the San Francisco Examiner to New York’s Daily Mirror). Many early drafts of what became “Last Words,” were addressed directly to all three: “PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL BACK. PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL BACK. RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW FOR ALL TO SEE. MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HURST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE.”35 Dating from as early as May 1960, this and other “Last Words” drafts were written over a year before Burroughs began work on Nova Express, but he never used any such material for The Soft Machine and would make relatively few references to the press in The Ticket That Exploded. However, he saw Nova Express in terms of newspapers from first to last.

  The most striking instance of how early and how emphatically Burroughs associated the book’s original title with newspapers appears in a long canceled passage from the section “Too Far Down The Road.” Probably composed in late 1961, the typescript repeats the phrase “To readers of The Daily Express” twice in order to frame a reference to “The Novia Express,” and also cites the title of one of Luce’s magazines (“Looking through Time”). Readers of “The Novia Express” would have got the point, and this material stayed in until the galley stage in July 1964. Burroughs didn’t simply cut it, however: he transferred it fr
om one medium to another, in April 1965 recording “Are You Tracking Me,” a sonic experiment that includes the key phrase “To readers of The Daily Express.”

  In August 1961 the first chapter heading of the manuscript in its earliest draft had carried the original title of the book as a whole, “THE NOVIA EXPRESS.” Here, the “one hope left in the universe” is to “wise up the marks”: “Show them the rigged wheel of Life-Time-Fortune. Storm The Reality Studio.” The book therefore opened with not only the clearest possible assault on the fraudulent “reality” projected by Luce’s newsmagazine empire; in the context of references to Life, Time, and Fortune, the section and book title “The Novia Express” also identified Burroughs’ text as alternative reportage, “news” of a different reality. But it’s significant that the book uses words cut from newspapers quite recognizably in just three specific sections (“Extremely Small Particles,” “There’s A Lot Ended,” “Are These Experiments Necessary?”), and that these are all introduced by dates: from “Dec. 17, 1961—Past Time” to “March 17, 1962, Present Time Of Knowledge.” Attacking the temporality and referentiality standardized by Time magazine, Nova Express mainly uses cut-up news items that were of passing, topical interest in December 1961 and March 1962 (crime reports, celebrity events), and renders them deliberately obscure. For Burroughs, “Present Time” was not determined by public events or the official historical record but was a point of personal intersection, and from many pages of cut-up newspaper source material he chose to keep few fragments of “historical” significance for use in Nova Express.