The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

  For the third edition, Burroughs restructured the chapter by breaking it at a different point and adding nearly 900 words of more material taken from the 1961 Soft Machine—“lee took the bus”—material that is unusually coherent narrative and most of which he used in Dead Fingers Talk. What had been the ending of this chapter in the second edition therefore became part of the opening of the following chapter in the third. This, however, is only the visible tip of the larger iceberg of rewriting and restructuring involving not only “Gongs Of Violence” and Dead Fingers Talk but a larger body of trilogy-related manuscripts.

  On the galleys in October 1965 Burroughs cut a page of material from the end of this chapter, material that in the third edition he used at the start of its “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter. These passages came from The Ugly Spirit, and a longer version of them, entitled “This Is the Time of the Assassins,” was published in August 1961 in Metronome. In fact, “This Is the Time of the Assassins”—a title that pays homage to Rimbaud—was one of two small publications that derived from The Ugly Spirit. The other, published as “Pure Song of New Before The Traveller”—another title deriving from Rimbaud (cutting up a phrase from “Genie”: “the pure song of new evils!”)—appeared in the January 1962 issue of Evergreen Review as an episode of Nova Express (which it was, until being cut later that summer). The backstory clarifies how this one paragraph in the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine was connected to two magazine texts, the 1968 edition of the book, an abandoned cut-up novel, and Nova Express—signs of the larger, complex histories of publication involving Burroughs’ material. However, the most significant element in this history appears only in the 1965 Grove Press galleys and the 1962 MS.

  On the 1965 galleys Burroughs didn’t only cancel one page that originally came from The Ugly Spirit; he cut an entire chapter entitled “Male Image Back In,” which began with the last two pages of “Gongs Of Violence” as published in the 1966 edition. “Male Image Back In” also appears almost identically on the 1962 MS, and since its structure works more naturally with the organisation of the 1966 text, it is that version which has been included for this edition.

  For the 1962 MS, Burroughs retyped most of the 1961 material, usually preserving but sometimes changing the first edition’s ubiquitous use of capitals; for example, what had been the opening line of the 1961 Soft Machine, “The War Between the Sexes,” became “The war between the sexes.” Still, some 80 capitals have been restored for this edition.

  151“tight green uniforms”: SM1 7 has “right green uniform” and the 1962 MS “tight green uniform.”

  153“A network of bridges” to “aroused sharks” (154): here the chapter uses most of the “border city” section of SM1, the opening page of which was published as “The Border City” in Arcade in 1964.

  155“It was a transitional period”: the phrase, which gave the title to the opening Unit of SM1, was also the title of a text published in Two Cities 6 (Summer 1961), which reproduced verbatim the book’s opening section, “the war.” An early draft of this section has significant variations of this phrasing: “And so it was a transitional period and or The Down right Stupid Period as The White Father called it in all his speeches . . every day on the air . .” (Berg 4.52). A different version of the phrase on another page identifies the “White Father” as Dr Benway.

  155“the It-Never-Happened Department”: restores “the,” missing from the 1962 MS, SM2 and SM3, but present in SM1 and used in the Two Cities version.

  156“A.J.”: the character from Naked Lunch, supposedly based on Alan Ansen, was introduced in SM1 by two preceding references edited out for SM2.

  156“one of Shaffer’s blueprints”: Dr. “Fingers” Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, appears as a character in Naked Lunch, and was based on the real-life Curtiss R. Schafer, of the Norden-Ketay Corporation, whose 1956 lecture on biocontrol was quoted in Time magazine and then referenced in Vance Packard’s 1957 best-selling analysis of the advertising business, The Hidden Persuaders. One of Burroughs’ key recurrent phrases—“thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions” (here page 147)—derived from Schafer’s “mental processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory perceptions,” and The Exterminator (1960) opens with this line and credits its source in Time (October 15, 1956).

  157“turn the planet into a slag heap”: SM1 has “shag,” and both terms were used here and in The Ticket That Exploded.

  157“The cold heavy fluid”: apart from odd words in this paragraph, from here until the end of the chapter does not derive from SM1.

  158“Tortured Metal Ozz”: “Oz” appears in SM1 (twice) and in SM3 113 (and Nova Express, 81), so “Ozz” seems a typo on the 1962 MS; however, Burroughs let the spelling stand on his 1965 galleys even though he made changes to words on the same line. While the word seems an allusion to The Wizard of Oz, it probably derives from a cut-up combining the phrases “a blast of tortured metal” and “a viscous tainted ozone,” from an early draft typescript about Lee, Benway and “Soul Crackers” (Berg 17.9).

  159“Paper moon and muslin trees”: taken from the jazz standard “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the phrase also appears, like much of this paragraph, near the end of the “winds of time” section in The Ticket That Exploded. This line and the beginning of the following paragraph (from “Outside a 1920 movie” to “good naborhood”) appeared on Burroughs’ early draft of “Where You Belong” after the line “So I walk out and the lid blew off”—confirming that the material was at one point continuous.

  159“Biologic film went up” to “human attic”: not present in the 1962 MS, these lines were an insert scotch-taped into the 1965 galleys.

  159“room in a good naborhood”: the chapter ends at this point in the 1962 MS, and the lines from “Captain Clark” to “distant sky” were an insert scotch-taped into the 1965 galleys. After the insert, SM3 continued with nearly 900 words, comprising a lightly edited version of three-quarters of the SM1 narrative section titled “lee took the bus.” The SM2 edition ended with a repetition of the line “Captain Clark welcomes you aboard” after a paragraph (beginning “WAS WEIGHTLESS”) that appeared near the start of the following chapter in the 1962 MS and in SM3.

  Male Image Back In

  Almost identical versions of this chapter appeared in the 1962 MS, in the 1965 MS (where it appears as Chapter XVI), and on the 1965 galleys—at which stage Burroughs cut the chapter and most but not all of the material in it, which is why it did not appear in the second edition of The Soft Machine. Since he made corrections to this material on the 1965 galleys (cancelling several capitals), the decision to drop almost all of it seems to have been made at a late stage, after which he then decided to use more parts of it for the third edition. The overlapping text in Metronome combines at greater length Burroughs’ fictional projection of Alamout, the legendary base of Hassan i Sabbah, with the street-based experiments he referred to as “color line walks” around Tangier (Burroughs to Gysin, April 18, 1961; Berg 85.4). The magazine text named the title of his planned sequel to The Soft Machine, and the term “Ugly Spirit”—which Burroughs defined as possession by psychic or political evil—recurs in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded but appeared only once in the 1961 Soft Machine, and not at all in the second and third editions.

  161–162 “The Boy From The North” to “great rivers”: these paragraphs appeared at the start of the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter in SM3. In “Pure Song of New Before The Traveller,” in Evergreen Review (January 1962), the boy from the North is named “Yeldarb”—a near-mirror of “Bradly.” “This Is The Time of The Assassins,” in Metronome (August 1961), has this paragraph up to “Bradly in the door,” and the passage from “Move The Boy From The North” to “Break Through in Grey Room,” as well as an additional 500-word central section describing the boy’s arrival in Alamout. The Metronome text also begins with a paragraph introducing Hassan i Sabbah (“He
was strictly a counter puncher […] Master Of The Jinn Assassin of Ugly Spirits”).

  162“Hassan i Sabbah along newsprint”: “Hassan I Sabbah” on the 1965 galleys; three of the half-dozen minor differences between versions concern capitals.

  162“NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE PARIS APRIL 17, 1961”: the Tribune had been source material for the “First Cut-Ups” in Minutes to Go, and this report of Yuri Gagarin orbiting the earth was probably Burroughs’ earliest use of a newspaper dateline to fix the present time of writing—appropriately so, given his aim in the trilogy to develop a new “Mythology for the Space Age.”

  165“Young faces over the midway careening”: the 1962 MS continues with cancelled words that do not appear on the 1965 galleys: “to drum beats, pounding shivering.”

  165“Captain Clark welcomes you aboard”: this line did not appear on the 1962 MS, but was a typed insert on the 1965 galleys at the end of its version of the chapter.

  Dead Fingers Talk

  Burroughs took most of the final 500 words of this chapter from the first edition of The Soft Machine, but for the first three-quarters he went back to Naked Lunch. Taking its title from a phrase in the “Have You Seen Pantopon Rose?” section, he created “Dead Fingers Talk” from some 40 separate short selections of unused material taken from “Word,” the longest section of the 1957 “Interzone” manuscript on which Naked Lunch was largely based. Since he had already made quasi cut-up composites out of lines of “Word” to create “Pantopon Rose” and—using some 30 separate blocks—much of the “Atrophied Preface,” by returning to this material Burroughs asserted an important technical and stylistic continuity across books. Typing out eight pages of selections from the original “Word” manuscript (Berg 11.29), he completely re-sequenced the material for this chapter, although the original was itself a seemingly discontinuous collage. The fact that this connection has passed unnoticed by Burroughs critics suggests how well the material fits in. It is often said that cut-ups turned the “madness” of Naked Lunch into a “method,” making a system out of what had been spontaneous, but the difference was not so clear, and Burroughs often claimed that Naked Lunch had been cut-up without his realizing it. On the other hand, although he had planned to re-edit “Word” in October 1959, and asked Ginsberg for a copy since “missing passages are landmarks for present work” (Letters, 434), this connection between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine wasn’t made until three years later, when Burroughs constructed “Dead Fingers Talk” for the second edition.

  For the last part of the chapter, Burroughs used a quarter of the 1961 section entitled “all back seat of dreaming.” As well as providing the earliest title for what became The Soft Machine, this section was the first to be published, in almost complete form, as “But Is All Back Seat of Dreaming” in Big Table 4 (Spring 1960). (In Autumn 1966, it was republished as “Mais est-ce tout arrière siège de reverie” in the seminal French avant-garde magazine, Tel Quel.) Added to passages from Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs used this material to complete the “dead fingers talk” section of Dead Fingers Talk.

  In the third edition, this chapter had begun with material from the cut chapter “Male Image Back In.” Burroughs also added a page more first edition material in two blocks, made numerous small changes and, as so often, gave the chapter in the 1968 text a different ending by adding just over two pages of new writing. Apart from half-a-dozen capitals, restored here, the 1962 MS is identical to the second edition.

  167“Glad to have you aboard reader”: for this line and, with many minor variations, the following text up until “But is all back seat dreaming” (174), see the “Word” section of Interzone as well as the “Outtakes” for “Atrophied Preface” in Naked Lunch.

  168“the Senator from Wisconsin”: reference is to Joseph McCarthy, who held that office at the time Burroughs wrote “Word,” although by the time SM2 was published in 1966 McCarthy had been dead almost ten years.

  170“statue of Bolivar”: corrects SM2 166 (“state”).

  170–171 “A hanged man plummets” to “Lesbian abolitionist”: curiously, despite being stylistically similar, these lines do not seem to come from “Word,” and appear verbatim in SM1 95.

  171“Rivington rings the Home Secretary”: before he makes the call, an early rough draft has: “‘I say’ he exclaims crisply, ‘there’s been some sort of mistake . . . I distinctly ordered a dancing boy to emerge out of a vast cherry pie’” (Berg 4.14).

  171“pale blue eyes”: the 1962 MS continues with an extra paragraph of “Word” material cancelled on the 1965 galleys, beginning; “When the writer was raising marijuana in East Texas” (see Interzone, 155).

  174“a story about crayfish”: almost certainly refers to a dirty joke that is given in an early draft of “Dead On Arrival”: “The boat sank on the way back with all hands, I heard later. Sitting in a Copenhagen bar, I told the story about the French politician who wanted to be reincarnated as a crayfish: ‘Afin que meme après ma morte une jolie petite femme suce ma queue dans un cabinet particulier . .’” (Berg 15.3).

  174“a town in Ecuador can’t remember the name”: on a very early rough draft, Burroughs did seem to remember the name of the town, before cancelling the line: “carried that wall with me to La Manta” (OSU 87; 17.130A). In Queer, written in 1952, only a year after the events that gave rise to the narrative, the beach is further south on the Ecuadorian coast, at Salinas. Although the lines appeared in both SM1 173 and the Big Table version of “Back Seat,” for SM2 Burroughs cut details that further identified this as a reference to Lewis Marker; “time slipped on the beach with my phantom and his precise disgust for my person—sex twice a week with ‘intrusions’ and ‘plants.’” The early draft expanded further in more cancelled lines, significantly using a key term from Scientology: “and interlaced always with derogations and engram planting . . I bought him an engram at a time and it’s fifteen years and I’m still giving Time . .”

  175“dragging one leg”: at this point, SM3 continues with almost 300 words more SM1 material from the same section.

  175“Finnies nous attendons une bonne chance”: SM1 178 had “Finis nous attendons bonne chance,” which it translated as “We await a good chance.” On the final SM3 page proofs, the line drew a sharp comment from Gysin: “THIS IS NOT FRENCH” (Berg Folio 38.2). Gysin repeated the comment in a letter to Burroughs, adding, “where did it come from? It means nothing unless it is meant to be Amex [i.e. American Express] French” (Gysin to Burroughs, December 14, 1966; Berg 85.12). Complicating rather than resolving the question, Burroughs replied: “‘Finnie nous attendons uno bezze chance’ were the actual words” (ROW, 243).

  175“Footnote: Last words”: the “Footnote” started out as a “Note” in parentheses preceding the text published in Big Table: “Back Seat of Dreaming is part of my current novel. It is based on recent newspaper account of ? four young explorers.” The section in SM1 began similarly and also used a line from a letter to Ginsberg in December 1959, when Burroughs covered the original manuscript for Big Table: “So if my fictionalized??? account is difficult to follow so was the action, pops” (ROW, 10). Burroughs retained newspaper clippings of the incident (housed in the Burroughs-Hardiment collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence; MS63 Cn: 6). The clippings confirm that he drew on events in October 1959 when four bodies were discovered in the Nubian desert, initially identified as an American, John Armstrong; two Frenchmen, Yves Tommy Martin and Jean Pillu; and their guide, Ahmed Akid. The guide appeared to have been murdered and another American, Donald Shannon, was reported missing. Later evidence showed that the missing man was in fact the guide.

  176“writing in each others’ diaries”: SM3 continues with further SM1 material, omits the last line of SM2, and concludes the chapter with 750 words of new cut-up material combined with more from SM1.

  Cross Th
e Wounded Galaxies

  Burroughs made his final chapter from half-a-dozen blocks of text drawn from four sections of the 1961 Soft Machine, mainly from the last sections of the book. The title phrase does not come from the first edition, but recurs in Nova Express. The “creation myth” narrative probably dates back to July 1958 when Burroughs came up with a “great novel idea . . . The period in human history when there were many species of homo” (Letters, 393). The phrase “Millions died in the mud flats. Only one blast free to lungs,” which appears in Naked Lunch (94), was very likely a fragment from an early draft. As well as the published version, Burroughs wrote an untitled typescript of at least five pages only three of which seem to have survived (Berg 4.4), which is similar in substance and tone, although lacking some of the stylistic features that make this narrative so distinctive (e.g., the use of hyphenated phrases).

  While he used parts of the “creation myth” from the 1961 Soft Machine verbatim for the second edition, Burroughs made many small and seemingly arbitrary cuts in several passages. The chapter’s final page, which is a revised version of the last page in the 1961 Soft Machine, became part of the penultimate section of Dead Fingers Talk. For the third edition Burroughs made a series of cuts so that overall the 1968 text lost almost 300 words. He also tacked on a final line to give the 1968 chapter a new ending—before adding that edition’s long Appendix.