The Soft Machine Read online

  Following the 1962 MS, which is otherwise identical to the second edition, almost 80 capitals have been added, including a small number introduced rather than restored (in cases where Burroughs cut the opening words of a line).

  177“The penny arcade peep show”: the opening line derives from “doctor benway cut up,” the section in SM1 before “survivor, survivor,” which is the source of the following narrative.

  178“human faces”: SM1 152 has “races,” the first in a series of possible transcription errors or typos here; instead of “peeling other genitals,” SM1 has “feeling,” and instead of “Gusts of Frost Wind,” SM1 has “Gust.”

  178“green jelly genitals”: demonstrating how Burroughs redacted his material, SM1 152 has: “Green jelly soft tent flesh. Song of new bursts other genitals.” The phrase “song of new,” a Rimbaud fragment, featured twice in this section of SM1 but was cut both times for SM2.

  181“dark armadillo flesh”: SM1 154 has “dank.”

  182“Penny arcade peep show” to “braille”: the line does not derive from SM1 but was a typed insert onto the 1962 MS.

  182“Think Police”: in SM1 181, elsewhere in The Soft Machine and in many other contexts the phrase is always “Thing Police”; however, Burroughs let the alternative stand on his galleys for both SM2 and SM3. For SM3 171, he added an extra paragraph, written in January 1966, to conclude the text: “He waves his hand sadly from the soft machine. dead fingers in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. Jan. 25, Gibraltar.” This added final line made the first use of the title phrase in any edition of The Soft Machine, and the following Appendix then defined it. The final two paragraphs in SM2 were 40 percent longer in SM1, and as well as redacting the material Burroughs made other small changes, altering “my brain” to “your brain,” changing all the periods to em dashes, and inserting the phrase “Cross the wounded galaxies.” On the 1961 SM1 manuscript, the original version of this passage is introduced with the title, cancelled in hand, “FOR HASSAN i SABBAH” (CU 2.3).

  182“couldn’t reach flesh”: corrects the typo in SM2 178 (“coulnd’t”).

  183“‘See Mr. Bradly”: the 1961 typescript shows that the final two paragraphs of SM1 were originally in reverse order. The 1962 edition of The Ticket That Exploded ended with an em dash without the closure of speech marks, and likewise the first edition of The Soft Machine would, therefore, have ended not with “the Swedish River of Gothenburg.),” but with an em dash not closed by speech marks: “See Mr Bradly Mr—

  Appendix 1

  From the 1961 Soft Machine

  Since the 1961 edition features a wide range of formal experiment, “along the brass and copper street” can’t be called “typical” of material that Burroughs did not use for the second or third editions. It is entirely different, for example, from the section following it, “minraud,” which became the opening of the “I Sekuin” chapter; but it is a good example of what Burroughs considered too experimentally difficult to retain.

  Appendix 2

  “Operation Soft Machine/Cut,” The Outsider 1 (Fall 1961)

  This text was covered in the magazine as “from a work in progress,” although it was not intended to be part of the book published the following month as The Soft Machine. However, earlier versions of it were; or rather, very similar overlapping material appeared as a foreword to the “BRIEF HISTORY OF THE OCCUPATION” that Burroughs wrote in October 1960, and which in turn he described as “FROM WORK IN PROGRESS: ‘MR BRADLY MR MARTIN’” (Berg 10.47)—an early title for The Soft Machine. “Operation Soft Machine/Cut” is indeed something of a “primer” (ROW, 53), an introduction to a scenario also given in The Exterminator but never made clear in The Soft Machine itself. Although published in the Fall 1961 issue, the title page is dated “5/21/61,” just before the book was published.

  From 1964 onwards, Burroughs composed many newspaper format texts in three columns, but this was the first by some margin. The hand printed issue of The Outsider prefaced the text with an image of Burroughs against a background of newspaper headlines, while the text itself featured hand-drawn lines around the columns and images of insects crawling on the page.

  Arizona State hold a 72-page typescript identified as “Operation Soft Machine,” a fascinating mix of materials but unrelated to the magazine text.

  193“I find it a useful literary exercise”: the “FOREWORD TO BRIEF HISTORY OF THE OCCUPATION” has an earlier draft of this conceit: “I FIND IT A USEFUL LITERARY EXERCISE TO PLACE MYSELF IN AN EXTREME POSITION (IMAGINARY OF COURSE) AND PROCEED FROM THERE” (Berg 10.47).

  Appendix 3

  From The Soft Machine (1968)

  The six-page, 3,500-word typescript was the longest insert Burroughs made for the third edition. He wrote at least two drafts of this material and partial typescripts with significant variants. Curiously, the 1968 edition took the chapter title “The Streets of Chance,” even though the singular “Street” is consistent across all manuscripts.

  A re-edited version of this and other material from The Soft Machine was published separately as a limited edition book entitled The Streets of Chance in 1981 by Red Ozier Press.

  202“He got up stretched and yawned”: an early draft, which has many variant passages, continues: “His dreams were written by Francoise Sagan with musical accompaniment by Edith Piaf. I was not surprised to meet my old friend Cocteau but he was very surprised to meet me and did a double take from his last movie” (Berg 43.27).

  203“a pert little kiss”: an early draft continues, via a quotation from Macbeth: “doth trifle former knowings well sex among the manikins is for Vogue any case a sensible visitor does not feel the host’s orgasm that’s the way you get caught and I sure didn’t want to get caught here” (Berg 43.27).

  203“I’ll tell you a story”: in the only annotation by Burroughs on the galleys for this material (Lilly 66.4), he inserted “a” here, although the correction was not made for SM3 109.

  204“trained with Ma Curie”: corrects SM3 81 (“Ma Currie”), clearly a typo for the physicist Marie Curie, given the following references to radioactivity.

  Appendix 4

  Appendix to The Soft Machine (1968)

  The Appendix is interesting for several reasons, not least that it was only here that Burroughs finally defined the title of the book and directly referenced Freud.

  209“The soft machine is the human body”: the original draft, which includes another half-page of unused material, began with the lines; “I have been accused of being unintelligible. At this point I wish to make myself as clear as possible” (Berg 43.27).

  209“to deplore the spread of his couch”: instead of this phrase, the original draft has: “his practices why the man has castrated Madison Avenue out whole communications network rotten to its heart of ooze” (Berg 43.27).