The Soft Machine Read online

  Comparing the first to later editions, what Burroughs left out of The Soft Machine seems logical: from a paragraph where almost every sentence begins “And” to an 84-word long sentence punctuated by just one comma, and from pages of phrase permutations and word fragments to sections like “the word-strip,” which begins: “I am that I am yo soy lo que soy je suis ce que je suis Ich bin das Ich bin ana eigo io ese quello io eseyo soy ca je suis soy am est eso ana ist that eso am es ich das ce que bin am that quello eigo soy eso am ist ese quiego sat that am ce que ist is es am cat dam anoy iegos oys soys boys tat ta hat tama taick sick joys ass quam loy st ickythyyoanncnesnsosnnntatatamattatmattamaick-sick soy cn es n sos nnn.”

  The other key feature of the 1961 Soft Machine is its unique structural organisation into color Units (Red, Green, Blue, White), only traces of which would remain in later editions. The structure came from Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (minus black), and also reflected Burroughs’ intense preoccupation with color stimulated by other sources, including the drugs yagé and apomorphine and the orgones of Wilhelm Reich (all associated with blue), and the work of the British neurophysiologist, W. Grey Walter.25 In spring 1961 Burroughs was taking mescaline and developing what he called “color line walks” around Tangier, both of which responded to Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-influenced lament that modernity had killed the magic of color (“We have seen too much pure, bright colour at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting”).26 Burroughs’ writing was just one in a range of experimental practices in different media that were visually-oriented, so it was logical that, after submitting his manuscript to Girodias in April 1961, he would go back to the beginnings of the book by turning to Brion Gysin for cover artwork.

  Gysin was duly credited with the jacket design—impressive, if rather grey calligraphic forms, replaced by Burroughs’ colored ink drawing on the cover of the second edition—but his name is otherwise absent from The Soft Machine. This is in marked contrast to Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded where Gysin is referenced several times and credited in prefatory notes along with other collaborators. And yet the 1961 edition was, more than the later volumes in the trilogy, a collaborative production involving both Gysin and Allen Ginsberg (who wrote the unsigned jacket blurb). Not only did Gysin and Ginsberg correct the proofs for Burroughs that April—help he always sought, since he was a poor proofreader—they helped organize the final manuscript, working together in Paris while Burroughs was away in Tangier. Unlike Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, which he wrote in sections or chapters, what Burroughs left behind for submission was a largely continuous text. The published book is subdivided into fifty short titled sections, whereas the typesetting manuscript had only nine—four of them handwritten in the margins by Burroughs in blue ink—plus a number of line-space breaks. As well as trying to give the reader some space to breathe by inserting the section breaks at more or less regular intervals, Gysin and Ginsberg also both wrote blurbs to help promote the book, as indeed did Gregory Corso.

  Corso’s short piece suggests the extreme difficulty even those closest to Burroughs had in describing The Soft Machine (“a fine epitome of the cut-up” was the best he could manage), while Gysin’s two-page typescript focused on the book as “a journey into the unknown,” on Burroughs’ mythic persona (“Tall, thin, oyster-pale, a bit stooped and transparent”), and his expertise in plant hallucinogens (“poppy, hemp, coca, bannesteria caapi, sacred mushrooms”).27 Ginsberg’s handwritten draft is interesting for what was left out of the blurb used on the Olympia jacket, including claims that the cut-up method was “applicable” to both psychoanalysis and politics, and a striking final quotation which advocated Burroughs’ method as hope for colonized peoples: “Sola esperanza del Mundo—Take it to Cut City.” However, despite his enthusiastic gratitude for the blurbs, disagreements began even before the book was published: “I cannot agree with Allen about the ending,” he wrote Gysin, admitting that “the book is experimental and difficult” but insisting, “I can’t do it over” (ROW, 75)—and yet that’s exactly what Burroughs decided to do.

  “YOU HAVE TO WRITE FINIS”

  The publishing history of The Soft Machine makes it entirely obvious that the book changed from the first edition published by Olympia in June 1961 to the second edition published by Grove in March 1966, because for five years everyone told Burroughs the same thing—that it was too difficult to read—and so he made it less cut-up and more readable when he moved publishers. It is equally obvious that the same logic also applied for the third edition published by John Calder in July 1968. And yet what’s obvious turns out to be wrong.

  To begin with, Burroughs didn’t need to wait five years to recognize that The Soft Machine was almost unreadable. When Timothy Leary visited Tangier to take hallucinogens with him at the end of July 1961, he reported Burroughs’ reflections on the book published just a month earlier and his determination to write a different one next time: “The soft machine is too difficult. I am now writing a science-fiction book that a twelve-year old can understand.”28 The new book was Nova Express, and while Burroughs’ idea of what pre-teens could read is a stretch or a joke at his own expense, the point remains that the second volume of his Cut-Up Trilogy was defined against his first.29 What led Burroughs to revise The Soft Machine, however, was not general regret or negative feedback from friends, but the publishing contract for a specific book. In August 1962 he starred at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference, coordinated by the Scottish publisher John Calder who commissioned Burroughs to make a book of selections from his Olympia Press titles (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) in order to pave the way for Calder to publish Naked Lunch in the UK.30 As he began compiling Dead Fingers Talk that September, Burroughs told Paul Bowles: “I am very much dissatisfied with The Soft Machine and had to rewrite most of the material included in the book of selections” (ROW, 114). One opportunity to rewrite the book led directly to another.

  The months following his success at the Edinburgh Conference were a crucial time for Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy. Assembling Dead Fingers Talk coincided with revising The Soft Machine, completing The Ticket That Exploded and submitting a new draft of Nova Express. In November 1962, Burroughs updated Bowles to say that he had now finished rewriting The Soft Machine, adding the expected verdict “and it seems a lot easier to read.”31 The manuscript he completed in late November 1962 is almost certainly the 129-page typescript archived at Columbia University, identified by Burroughs as “the original manuscript of the rewritten and revised version of The Soft Machine.”32 It is very similar to the book published by Grove in 1966, which means that, far from being separated by five years, the first and second editions were effectively only eighteen months apart.

  Just as significantly, while Burroughs invited interest from Grove Press—sounding out Barney Rosset that October—he didn’t rewrite The Soft Machine for a new publisher but once again for Olympia. The clearest evidence for that is the other­wise confusing note printed in The Ticket That Exploded published by Olympia in December 1962, which advertised a “New revised and augmented edition” of The Soft Machine scheduled for February 1963. The month the book was meant to appear, Girodias apologised for his failure to publish it (“The money situation is bad . . . very bad”), testing Burroughs’ loyalty to the man who had published Naked Lunch but who never cut a straight deal.33 For the next eighteen months Burroughs repeatedly asked Girodias whether he was arranging a contract with Barney Rosset or John Calder for the revised Soft Machine, and was discouraged to find himself caught in “a bitter feud” between the American and British publishers that was still ongoing in spring 1965 (ROW, 189). The final stages of the book’s publication were complicated enough without a backstory in which publishers who fought the law to publish Burroughs ended up in legal fights with each other.

  Indeed, Richard Seaver at Grove Press had a problem with Burroughs’ continued revisio
ns, which didn’t end at the galley stage in October 1965;34 when Burroughs requested still more changes in December, at the risk of sounding “like an old St. Louis preacher” Seaver insisted “there comes a point at which you have to write finis to the writing of a book.”35 Burroughs persisted, however, in early January 1966 sending even more new material; but it was now too late for further changes, and all Seaver could do was respect Burroughs’ reluctance “to let the book go until you’re fully satisfied with it.” The idea of Burroughs being fully satisfied with any of his cut-up books was a kind of philosophical category error, because his methods did not lend themselves to “finish” in any meaning of the term. When he said of Nova Express that it was not “in any sense a wholly successful book,” or of The Ticket That Exploded, “It’s not a book I’m satisfied with,” it was the book as a form that really dissatisfied him.36 Nevertheless, he tried to succeed with Calder where he had failed with Grove, and at the end of January Burroughs submitted to him the revised manuscript with all the new material that Seaver could not accept. In fact, in summer 1966 Burroughs sent Seaver the manuscript and then in October the galleys for the Calder edition, seemingly in hope Grove would release it too, but without success. In a final twist of misleading appearances, the book Calder published in Britain in July 1968—more than two years after the Grove Press edition—was simply what Burroughs had submitted in January 1966, two months before the Grove edition came out.

  Which leaves us with two questions: how exactly did Burroughs’ revisions change The Soft Machine from edition to edition? And how does this new edition aim to advance such a perplexing history?

  “WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT”

  “I have completely rewritten it,” Burroughs told Alan Ansen in January 1963, “taking out most of the cut ups and substituting sixty-five pages of new material in a straight narrative line.”37 Needless to say, it was not as straightforward as that.

  In raw statistical terms, to make the second edition Burroughs retained just under half of the first edition and, since the two books are very similar in length (38,000 words), the result was that half of the second edition was old writing, half new. Comparing the first three chapters of the 1966 edition to the 1961 text, at first sight Burroughs’ revisions seem simple enough: the first and third chapters reuse continuous material from the earlier book, while the second chapter is all new and uses no first edition material at all. However, after this point the majority of chapters consist of highly complex combinations of new and old. Burroughs changed and radically re-sequenced most of the 1961 material, which was also very unequally distributed across the book as a whole: the first half of the 1966 text (up to and including the long, newly written narrative “Mayan Caper” chapter) is only one-third based on material from the 1961 edition; in contrast, the second half of the 1966 text, starting from the “I Sekuin” cut-up chapter, is nearly three-quarters based on the 1961 edition.

  There was a broad logic to the kind of material Burroughs did and did not retain from the 1961 text for the 1966 edition, but some of his choices are unexpected. For example, he didn’t use one of the first edition’s longest narrative sections, entitled “lee took the bus”—only to change his mind and include it for the third edition. And on the other side, while he compromised it by changing every word from upper to lower case, he did include the opening of “I Sekuin,” a stunning but very challenging cut-up section. Above all, it is not the case that Burroughs simply took out cut-up material and substituted straight narrative. The general direction of revision may have been toward greater readability, but far less emphatically than he implied. Roughly speaking, the first edition is 55% cut-up and 45% narrative, the second edition 30% cut-up, 70% narrative. However, if the majority of new material was narrative, some 6,500 words of it—over one third—was cut-up. Some of this new cut-up material, such as in the “Early Answer” chapter, is among the most dense and difficult in the whole book. The impact of the new narrative is also highly focused, since most of it appears in only two, all-new chapters, “The Mayan Caper” and “Who Am I To Be Critical?” Those two chapters are fast-paced, thematically clear and very funny (the humor of the 1961 text is easy to miss), but they don’t represent the book as a whole. In fact, the biggest surprise is to realize that the majority of narrative in the second edition actually came from the first edition and the majority of cut-up material was new. Indeed, of the roughly 10,000 words of cut-up material in the 1966 edition, only about a third came from the 1961 text. To say “roughly” is a necessary caveat, since once you start counting, the initially clear distinction between “straight” and “cut-up” becomes meaningless, which is one of The Soft Machine’s strangest and most fascinating effects.

  As for the changes Burroughs made on the galleys in October 1965, they caused Grove Press difficulties because there were so many of them: the margins of almost every sheet are crowded with the repeated instruction in his distinctive hand: “No Caps.” “COST OF CHANGING UPPER CASE TO LOWER THROUGHOUT SOFT MACHINE, SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS STOP,” Seaver cabled him in early October; “IS IT ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL CABLE REPLY.”38 Burroughs must have replied in the affirmative, but at that stage made relatively few actual cuts or insertions. He added the 1,000-word narrative about Salt Chunk Mary and another 500 words in half-a-dozen short inserts scotch-taped onto the galley sheets. He also made some two-dozen short cuts adding up to about 500 words and, in his major late decision, retained just one paragraph from a cancelled chapter of almost 1,000 words. What this means in terms of content is that 95% of the book published in March 1966 was present in the “1962 MS” (i.e., the 129-page typescript probably submitted to Olympia Press in late November 1962). There were differences in presentation and structure, however—and they are highly significant for this new, fourth edition of The Soft Machine which has gone back to the 1962 MS as the basis to revise the text.

  The manuscript Burroughs completed in November 1962, which was scheduled to be published by Olympia in 1963, differs from the second edition in three main ways: it lacked the 1,500 words added to the galleys in 1965 and included the chapter of 1,000 words cancelled at the same stage; its chapters begin and end more often in keeping with the third than the second edition; and it made far fewer changes to the appearance of the material taken from the 1961 text. This fourth edition includes everything published in the second edition, while respecting the 1962 MS’s chapter divisions and restoring the cancelled chapter, entitled “Male Image Back In.” Burroughs had also cut a chapter at the final galley stage for Nova Express, but that was long and highly repetitious, whereas this short chapter works well in The Soft Machine, and he retained a little more of it in the third edition.

  In the most visible change, this new edition also restores how material from the first edition appeared by putting back a thousand capital letters removed on the galleys in 1965. Changes to capitalization are a major feature of Burroughs’ revisions to the Cut-Up Trilogy, and he revised on a massive scale in both directions: on the galleys of Nova Express in 1964 he changed from lower to upper case; and for the second edition of The Ticket That Exploded in 1967, he changed from upper to lower. Burroughs’ own apparent inconsistency doesn’t lend itself to consistent editing across the trilogy. However, restoring capitals for The Soft Machine makes sense since the second edition was the odd one out: following the 1962 MS means respecting the appearance of both the first and the third edition, which largely retained capitals. It also brings The Soft Machine visibly closer to how Burroughs reconceived it in late 1962—the period when he was working simultaneously and most intensely on all three volumes of his trilogy.

  The main reasons for turning to this 1962 manuscript in the first place are pragmatic: while there is something suitably Burroughsian about the status quo, with two quite different versions of The Soft Machine remaining in print, the great majority of readers have had to accept the edition that failed to grant Burroughs his “final intentions,” as textual edito
rs used to say. However, the obvious ­alternative—to let the third edition replace the second—is even more unsatisfactory. Although Burroughs actually preserved more of the 1961 text in the British edition of 1968, through what he added much more was lost. This is the paradoxical value of his 1962 MS; in content it is close to the second edition, while in the appearance of its material it is close to both the first edition—his original—and the third edition—his last word on the book.

  When Burroughs mailed his manuscript to John Calder in late January 1966 he observed that he had “added approximately 45 pages of single space material” together with “an article on the apomorphine treatment as an appendix.”39 In statistical terms, for the third edition Burroughs cut 1,500 words from the second edition and added about 19,000 more, almost 6,000 in the Appendix. Of the 13,000 words added to the main text, some 3,000 were previously unused material from the 1961 edition and the rest were new. The new material reflected Burroughs’ writing in late 1965, especially a distinctive narrative style of great economy, evocative power, and simple, minimally punctuated prose. The end result was not just that the book became virtually 50% longer; it was quite simply a very different book—which was the basis to Brion Gysin’s objections.