The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

  The text went through detailed revision involving a ten-page typescript and several shorter drafts, which show that Burroughs made precise revisions of individual words (e.g., a “shabby” office became a “dingy” one) as well as cutting and adding to his typescript, although the structure remained the same. In addition to representing his longstanding anthropological interest in the Maya and the region, the chapter explores newspapers, time travel, and control systems, and the relationship between them. Burroughs even planned to incorporate a recently composed essay—“Insert article on photo montage,” says an aside early on in his typescript (Berg 15.47)—­suggesting he considered integrating different forms of research and writing about text and image.

  A few small corrections and punctuation changes have been made to follow more closely the 1962 MS, including restoring half-a-dozen capitals and a couple of the double colons which were almost always removed by Burroughs’ copyeditors.

  79“Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story”: possibly the earliest draft begins: “Starting next week in the Star Times Joe Brundige brings you the story of slave labor in the Mayan Empire—I have traveled a 1000 years through time and back with this sensational account” (Berg 5.5). The beginning of a later complete draft, which nevertheless has many variants and lacks numerous passages of the final version, shows Burroughs trying out newspaper titles: “Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story of slave labor in the Mayan Empire Caper exclusive to the Star Times News herald Express Bulletin Tribune” (Berg 5.4).

  79“I have just returned” to “It belongs to you”: instead of these lines, the earliest draft is more direct about the political control of time travel: “This is how it is done—You travel on a word and image beam—It’s as simple as that—Why didn’t some one think of it? Because the control machine blocked any thinking on that direction” (Berg 5.5).

  80“I did the same with photos”: at this point the 1962 MS has the instruction, cancelled on the galleys: “Insert article on photo montage.” Copies of “The Photo Collage” are held in the Berg and at ASU, which has a twenty-page version (10.4). The early draft, which lacks the next paragraph about using a film studio, instead continues: “This of course was only preliminary work—Basic training in time travel—Gradually I found that I could literally move back—I would suddenly slip into a 19th century scene and as if they had been cued in characters with beards and old cut clothes would appear in the pub or on the street” (Berg 5.4).

  81“burned by Bishop Landa”: here the early draft had a sensational claim: “I can tell you that history has now been rewritten—It was I Joe Brundige who burned the Mayan codices” (Berg 5.4). Rather than making “innumerable photomontages,” in this draft the narrator “made photos of the codices and artifacts and mixed those in with photos of modern Mexico and photos of myself and photos of my room.”

  83“you can have it back”: the 1962 MS continues with a line not in the galleys: “That is of course if you want it back.”

  85“other flesh the lookout different”: “It is a sensation difficult to describe,” adds the early draft: “I was myself and somebody else too” (Berg 5.4).

  87“We were walking along a jungle path”: corrects SM2 89 (“jungle hut”); the draft has “path” (Berg 5.4), so this was almost certainly a transcription error in the 1962 MS (repeating “hut” from the previous line). The version in Gambit has: “we were on a jungle trail the boy walking ahead.”

  88“As I stepped forward into the clearing”: the early draft begins the paragraph with the lines; “So I took a plane to Merida and soon found myself back a thousand years—And there ahead of me was a clearing and the Zombie slaves of the insect control machine working the fields—I shivered with anticipation—After almost a year of grueling spade work I was alone in the forbidden land a thousand years from help and home” (Berg 5.4).

  89“white-hot copper claws”: the early draft continues: “Sex was reduced to a minimum necessary to perpetuate the species and sodomy was strictly forbidden—The workers were however allowed to drink themselves into a stupor on certain ­occasions—Words cannot convey the brooding oppressive horror of that place” (Berg 5.4).

  89“to play these recordings”: the 1962 MS has “even to play,” as does SM3 56. However, in response to a query on the 1965 galleys, Burroughs noted, “omit even.”

  90“retaining human legs and genitals”: in a rare difference, SM3 56 has “human arms.”

  90“I took over the priest’s body”: a partial draft adds: “This technique I had learned from Doctor Benway and he had warned me to use it only during an emergency since the transfer last only a few hours—A few hours would be enough” (Berg 12.14).

  91“and photographed the books”: the early typescript lacks almost all the following lines, from “Equipped now” to “burned the codices”, and instead has a longer version of the chapter’s climax: “Hunger weakening the control lines—I made another visit to begin mixing pictures of riot and revolution in with the codices—But still the control system continued to operate like crippled centipede—But the priests were worried—They did not know what was happening and spent most of their time in the temple burning incense and inaugurated a round of sacrifices to placate the Gods—This was a mistake—Open rebellion broke out—The overseer was overpowered by a group of workers who put out his eyes with planting sticks and forced corn seed up his ass with hot planting sticks—Finally I made my last visit to the room where the books were kept and burned the books—As I left the temple I could feel the preliminary quivers of an earthquake—The wind was rising and whipping the palm trees to the ground—A tidal wave came in and swept the village and the temple fell—Pandemonium and the workers free of control rushed about with planting sticks and clubs killing the priest—I broke out my camera gun and gave myself the long delayed pleasure of killing the priest who had been my unwelcome lover—A great weight seemed to fall from the sky—Wind rushed in and blew the ashes away—the priests were torn in pieces by the workers and the stellae destroyed—there was nothing but a mound of rubble where the city had stood” (Berg 5.4).

  92“Mayan control calendar”: an early draft describes the codices as “these evil books” (Berg 12.12). The version in Gambit adds a final paragraph: “Note: The Mayan control calendar is not dead—Using precisely the same techniques supplemented with IBM machine and electronic brains it is operating now, controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions, controlling and monopolizing your life your time your fortune—The techniques for dismantling the machine I have described here are still valid—A machine is a machine and can be redirected—Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process—Cut, shift, tangle word and image lines—Disconnect the control machine of the world press, of Madison avenue and Hollywood.”

  I Sekuin

  Although the opening headline refers to the Mayan Caper and so makes a connection back to the previous chapter, the material could not be more different. Instead of continuous and coherent first-person narration, “I Sekuin” confronts the reader with the kind of stylistic experiment that made the first edition of The Soft Machine so distinctive, even in context of the Cut-Up Trilogy. The title, with its bizarre name, seems to derive from Brion Gysin’s “First Cut-Ups” in Minutes to Go (10). For the 1966 edition, Burroughs used all the opening page-and-a-half of the 1961 text’s “minraud” section, and completed the chapter by combining a series of fragments from the rest of it, omitting the section’s many long permutations of single phrases (“I To Johnny. Johnny To Me. I Two Johnny. Johnny Two Me. I Johnny Too . . .”). In places, Burroughs rewrote the original to make it less obscure, but his major intervention was to change the appearance of the opening page-and-a-half. For the third edition, as well as adding a new ending of just over 100 words, Burroughs returned to how the opening passages appeared in the first edition, retaining capital letters for every word
(with a single exception). This was also how the 1962 MS presented the text, and as well as making a couple of small corrections, over 150 capitals have been restored.

  93“THE MAYAN CAPER”: SM1 63 has a longer opening in block caps that lists more of the cons and conspiracies that make up the nova plot: “THE SHORT-TIME HYP, THE CENTIPEDE SWITCH, THE MAYAN CAPER, THE HEAVY FLUID, HEAVY METAL GIMMICK.”

  93“Minraud Time”: the mythical location had for Burroughs specific literary correlates and in one text from 1960 linked to SM1 by references to the Mayan Caper and the Centipede Switch, he associates the text’s preoccupation with “alien” temporality directly to the key poetic influence on The Soft Machine: “‘CONFOUND ALL THE PLAGUES BEGINNING WITH TIME’: RIMBAUD LIBERATE THE CAPTIVE HEADS FROM MINRAUD TIME” (OSU 85; 1.1). The quotation comes from Rimbaud’s “A une raison,” which Burroughs made into two cut-up poems in Minutes to Go.

  93“Wax Work Of Minraud”: SM2 95 has “Works” but SMI, all later manuscripts and galleys, and SM3 have the singular, restored here.

  93“Saw Thee Dummies”: corrects SM2 95 (“the”), as in SM1 and SM3.

  94“Under Sing Of The Centipede”: corrects SM2 96 (“sign”), as in SM1 and its typesetting manuscript (CU 2.3), although the error also appears in SM3 58. In the next paragraph, the phrase “Sing Sign” clarifies that what appeared to be a typo (one Burroughs would have made often) is here intentional, and he later expanded on the sign/sing “sign”; see note in The Ticket That Exploded ([Grove, 2014], page 266).

  95“Bradly ate the krishnus”: here and elsewhere, SM1 has “Martin,” signs of an earlier draft where it was not Bradly who landed but “Mr Martin” (Berg 5.6).

  96“Smear it in”: corrects the typo in SM2 98 (“Semar”). In the following line, “phosphorescent” corrects another typo (“phopho-rescent”).

  96“the sick morning—”: at this point Burroughs made a 130-word insert on his typescript to end the chapter in SM3 59–60.

  Pretend An Interest

  Like the earlier “Trak Trak Trak,” Burroughs created this chapter by recombining and rewriting a series of passages from the 1961 Soft Machine. Featuring the character of Carl, the material not only goes back to Naked Lunch (where Carl Peterson appears in the “Joselito” and “The Examination” sections), but to the creative beginnings of The Soft Machine—one of the first references to which comes in Burroughs’ September 1959 letter asking Ginsberg to send him any manuscript material “on mythical South American places featuring Carl” for “the book I am writing now” (Letters, 425).

  Cutting back and forth across the original sequence of the material in the 1961 edition, Burroughs drew on five sections and assembled his text from almost thirty separate blocks, some reproduced verbatim, others heavily redacted. For the third edition, he made a couple of small cuts and seven short inserts, mostly of first edition material adding up to just over a hundred words, and ended the chapter with several new lines. Passages were used in a different sequence for three sections of Dead Fingers Talk. The 1962 MS has a further 120 capitals, restored here, and a small number of unused lines; those that appeared in the third edition are given below.

  97“juggling five or six bureaus”: this whole paragraph comes verbatim from the “doctor benway cut up” section of SM1 and a longer, very early draft makes visible how Burroughs had redacted already elliptical material still further: “juggling five or six bureaus in the air at once, farther and farther out thinner and more tenuous drifting away like cobwebs in a cold spring wind leaving him finally without bureau one sitting in a court yard under the dead crab eyes of Soul Crackers . . . Always there out in the cold and the dark always waiting . . . Some day . . Benway siphoned himself out of the area . . He stared down a soul cracker in a green doorman’s uniform who carried an ambiguous object composite of club and broom and toilet unstopper . . . The cracker snickers obscenely and slid into the shadow of a broom closet—ammonia odors and sweaty suety scrub woman flesh stung Benway’s eyes as he walked through the space vacated by the Cracker . .” (Berg 4.21).

  97“Soul Cracker”: an early draft which shows numerous small differences, continues with the phrase: “The Untouchable Crab Men” (Berg 9.24). Burroughs first used the term “Soul Cracker” in a letter from July 1959 that goes back to the origins of The Soft Machine, identifying his new work with Gysin’s paintings: “We are doing precisely the same thing in different mediums. The Soul Crackers who move BETWEEN layers of light and shadow and color” (Letters, 420).

  98“In Guayaquil sat on the river bank”: the lines echo Burroughs’ 1952 description of the Ecuadorian city in Queer, and he repeated them in the 1967 Ticket That Exploded (page 34). A very early rough draft has variant lines: “We remember the days as one long process of the evil and hateful secret police always everywhere and in Guayaquil walked along the shore of the river and sat down watching the big lizard crawl in the mud flats and the melon rind” (OSU 17 130A).

  98“That was the year of The Rinderpest”: corrects the spelling in SM2 100 (“Rindpest”) of the contagious cattle plague disease. One of Burroughs’ favourite gags, the line recurs in Queer and Naked Lunch.

  98“You know what that means?”: in a possible answer to the question, one early partial draft continues; “Let some frantic old character hang you for a plate of beans” (Berg 4.59).

  99“growing tendrils through his body”: up until this point Burroughs made almost no changes to SM1 material pasted into his 1962 MS, but from here onward he cancelled numerous individual words (e.g., “growing neon tendrils”) or phrases (e.g., “plops feeling over spine centers rubbing twisting liquid hand inside his liquid bones drain out into the green eating jelly”).

  99“The naked Initiate”: an early rough draft has a longer variant passage: “The naked Initiate was strapped to a wooden drum shaped like a man engaged in the act of sodomy standing up the initiate arranged of course in the position of the nameless asshole—initiates do not have names” (Berg 4.56).

  101“the youth is carried through the streets”: corrects SM2 103 (“street”) as in SM1, and corrects the typo in SM2 (“cere-nominally”). In an early draft, which suggests a more self-conscious use of the ethnographic journal form, the Purified One selects a youth “with whom he indulges in unspeakable practices which I will sketch in some detail on a later page” (Berg 4.59). An even earlier draft expands on the youthful appearance of the Purified Ones: “in point of fact they do present a surprisingly youthful appearance . . . But their vampirism does not go unpunished since, in course of time, they need more and more youths to retain the appearance, the false façade until finally a monster crustacean forms inside and breaks the marble shell of the boy shell. The crustacean is destroyed by an Old Junky with a flame thrower . . And a new Purified one is selected by The Earth Mother . .” (Berg 4.14).

  101“Green-Baum Early Explorer”: the name caused confusion on the 1961 typescript, where it was written in autograph in no less than four hands using different colored inks, including the Olympia Press copyeditor’s transcription “Green Balm” (CU 2.3).

  101“Howler monkeys”: after this line, SM3 inserts another 30 words of material taken from later in the SM1 section.

  103“One must pretend an interest”: SM3 64 has a short insert at this point, as Burroughs updated the 1961 text’s reference to South American “soccer scores” by referring to a tragedy that took place in Peru in May 1964: “318 known dead in Lima soccer riot . . . panic in the stadium . . . 323 dead . . .”

  103“The Assistant put a pail over his head”: an early rough draft continues: “A Barbary Ape leaped onto the pail beating on it with a copper hammer” (Berg 4.61).

  105“I will call The Guide”: SM3 adds several more following lines from the original SM1 section.

  105“In a green savannah stand two vast penis figures”: although he rarely mentions the poet, Burroug
hs was surely echoing the beginning of Shelley’s poem about fallen empires, “Ozymandias”: “I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.’”

  109“A pimp leans in through”: the 1962 MS has the SM1 version redacted on the 1965 galleys, but in SM3 68: “A pimp steps out of him and leans through.”

  111“Scores are coming in”: the 1962 MS continues with a line from SM1 cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 69: “Rate shoe.”

  111“chewing gum with a hypo”: the 1962 MS has the SM1 version cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 69: “gum with a slight creak. The Manipulator applies oil with a hypo.”

  112“virus flesh of curse”: the 1962 MS has the SM1 version cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 69: “brown virus.”

  112“Berdache”: the term, which refers to men who took on women’s dress and social roles in Native American cultures, was probably one with which Burroughs was familiar from his graduate studies in anthropology.

  112“Young boys need it special”: after this line, SM3 70 adds concluding lines to the chapter: “faded sepia genitals in the drawer of a tattoo parlor . . . silver paper in the wind . . . frayed sounds of a distant city.”

  Last Hints