The Soft Machine Read online

  In October 1966 Burroughs had invited Gysin to design a jacket for the Calder edition and although he could “not think how to do a new cover,” Gysin was anxious to see “the final revision” of a book of which he had “always been very fond.”40 When Gysin saw the page proofs in November he bluntly stated that the result of Burroughs’ revisions was “of course, no longer SOFT MACHINE.”41 Speaking of the long appendix article that lambasted U.S. drug policy, Gysin protested: “The apomorphine material—if you will excuse me and I presume you won’t—absolutely does not belong in the same book with the rest.” He was surely right: the article made an odd ending to The Soft Machine, where the drug is mentioned only once.42 Gysin thought Burroughs had lost his way, not just at the end but from the start of the revised edition: “Please, if you can, switch back to the original opening. That’s what the book is about, isn’t it?”

  Gysin’s suggestions to restructure The Soft Machine were impractical then and would be misguided now. The evolutionary logic of the book can’t be put into reverse, any more than it can remain frozen in time or turned toward perfection. But his objections are revealing for the response Burroughs made to them. Instead of arguing over what his book was “about,” he spoke at length of the trilogy’s complex manuscript history and of having been right to choose “straight narrative” for the beginning because of what others found more “readable” (ROW, 243). At the time of revising The Soft Machine in September 1962, Burroughs defined “straight narrative” in terms of Naked Lunch (114)—not a definition anybody else would use—and in that context it made sense to begin the book with “Dead On Arrival,” a chapter originating in early Naked Lunch manuscripts. What’s strange is Burroughs’ persistence in using the term straight and his application of it to “Dead On Arrival,” since the text is an object lesson in the queering of narrative, which makes it an ideal start to The Soft Machine, a sort of guidebook to what follows.

  The first line of “Dead On Arrival” (“I was working The Hole with The Sailor”) returned The Soft Machine to the realist, autobiographical world of Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, and echoes the moment in it when William Lee begins to support his heroin habit by rolling drunks on the subway: “The H caps cost three dollars each and you need at least three per day to get by. I was short, so I began ‘working the hole’ with Roy.”43 The hole is an underground term for the underground itself, and the joke in Junky is that Lee and Roy (the Sailor) work there to support their habits, in a parody of the straight, above-ground working world. The narration is realistic and trustworthy, even though its values are subversive. For Naked Lunch, Burroughs had also taken an innocent-looking paragraph from Junky set on the subway, and twisted it to create the opening passage where Lee vaults a turnstile and catches an uptown A train to escape the law. In Naked Lunch, instead of narrating in a straight deadpan, however, Lee puts on the voice of a brazen hustler, a con man literally taking the reader for a ride and implying that’s all anybody ever does. It’s an invitation to suspect our own motives as much as his: he’s on the hustle, but what are we looking for?

  Just as the beginning of Naked Lunch went back to rewrite Junky, so too The Soft Machine went back to rewrite Naked Lunch. “Dead On Arrival” takes the process of rewriting a step further by visibly re-writing itself, cutting up its own words in a beautifully judged poetic structure that queers not just the straight world but straight reality. “Dead On Arrival” is not more readable as narrative than the book’s original beginning (“The War Between the Sexes split the planet into armed camps”); it is about readability itself, about exposing our reading habits and the fixed narratives by which we live. Tracing a tragic orbit around the narrator, the chapter’s melancholic roll-call of the dead—deaths by overdose, drowning, hanging, stabbing—all come from Burroughs’ biography and point to our common narrative towards death. The premise of The Soft Machine is that, individually and as a species, we’ve been conned into embracing as natural a fatal realism. Although the scenario is elliptical and the tone elegiac, the message of “Dead On Arrival” is defiant: “No good. No Bueno.” The example of the text implies that cut-up methods look to chance as the only way out, a last desperate chance, sola esperanza del mundo.

  The Soft Machine was always difficult, and Burroughs’ decade-long efforts to straighten it out and make himself clear were perhaps doomed to radiant failure. In the end, he too was an inefficient guide: “I make no claims to speak from a state of enlightenment,” he once wrote Jack Kerouac, “but merely to have attempted the journey, as always with inadequate equipment and knowledge (like one of my South American expeditions), falling into every possible accident and error, losing my gear and my way . . .” (Letters, 226). Burroughs’ messianic side is always redeemed by his humour, which is also an act of defiance, a refusal to be just another soft machine: You win something like jelly fish, Meester?

  Oliver Harris

  September 16, 2013

  1. Joan Didion, “Wired for Shock Treatments,” Bookweek (March 27, 1966); 2.

  2. Burroughs, The Yage Letters Redux (San Francisco: City Lights, 2006), 21.

  3. References are to David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985) and Richard A.L. Jones, Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

  4. Undated typescript, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; 43.27. After, abbreviated to Berg.

  5. The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (New York: Viking, 1993). After, abbreviated to Letters.

  6. Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012). After, abbreviated to ROW.

  7. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text (New York: Grove, 2003), edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 249.

  8. Carroll to Burroughs, August 17, 1960 (The Paul D. Carroll Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; 1.18). After, abbreviated to Chicago.

  9. Burroughs to Carroll, August 23, 1960 (Chicago, 1.18).

  10. Burroughs to Bowles, October 8, 1960 (Paul Bowles Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; 8.10). After, abbreviated to HRC.

  11. Kerouac, in Beat Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 132; Corso, in Minutes to Go by Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, (Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960), 63.

  12. Burroughs to Carroll, January 20, 1961 (Chicago, 1.18).

  13. Minutes to Go, 43.

  14. Nine-page typescript, ca. late 1959 (Berg 7.44).

  15. All citations in block capitals in this and the next paragraphs are from un-sequenced typescripts, circa 1960 (Berg 48.22).

  16. That this phrasing originates in openly anti-Semitic material is clear from several 1960 texts, including: “I RUB OUT THE WORDS OF MARX LENIN EINSTEIN FREUD FRAUD FOREVER. I RUB OUT THE WORD JEW FOREVER” (Berg, 48.22).

  17. Nine-page typescript (Berg 7.44). See notes on the “Where You Belong” chapter for Luce’s presence in the “1962 MS” of The Soft Machine.

  18. Undated typescripts (Berg 3.52; 49.14; 49.32; 9.24).

  19. Parts had appeared in “Brief History of the Occupation,” which Burroughs started to write in October 1960 and which he described as “FROM WORK IN PROGRESS: ‘MR BRADLY MR MARTIN’”—his earlier title for The Soft Machine (Berg 10.47).

  20. Ginsberg to Kerouac, September 9, 1962, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2008) 270.

  21. Bowles to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, July 24, 1962 (City Lights Books Records, Box 1, University of California, Berkeley).

  22. A six-page typescript sequence, which includes elements of Soft Machine material such as Soul Crackers, features cut-up permutations of the “Composite City,” from “Expeditions leave fo
r unknown boys” to “Yage is space games with motion” (William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Columbus SPEC.CMS.87, 17.130A).

  23. Burroughs, Interzone, edited by James Grauerholz (New York: Viking, 1989), 128.

  24. The 1966 text has ten times the number of em dashes, almost 2,000; still far fewer than Nova Express or The Ticket That Exploded. The result is ironic, since the dash appears to be a visible sign of the cut, and the 1961 Soft Machine, the text with by far the fewest dashes, was the only true “cut-up” text in the trilogy, since Burroughs didn’t use “fold-in” methods for it, as he did for all other volumes.

  25. The importance of Rimbaud from the start of the cut-up project is evident from references in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. However, Burroughs’ use of “Voyelles” was more specifically associated with synaesthesia, hallucination, and the physiological effects of flicker, inspired by his reading of Walter’s The Living Brain, as a 1960 typescript makes clear: “WHEN I READ THIS PASSAGE I IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT OF RIMBAUD AND HIS IMAGES THAT SEEM TO BREAK DOWN BARRIERS. HIS COLOR VOWELS” (Berg 48.22). This was an artistic-scientific area emphasized by Ginsberg in his 1961 jacket blurb: “Stroboscopic flicker-lights playing on the Soft Machine of the eye create hallucinations.”

  26. Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell” (1956), in The Doors of Perception (London: Vintage, 1994), 76.

  27. Gysin, “On The Soft Machine,” two-page typescript (Berg 5.37). Corso, untitled one-page typescript (Berg 5.39). Ginsberg, untitled two-page autograph manuscript (Berg 5.38).

  28. Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York: Ronin, 1995), 225.

  29. In another case of the trilogy’s misleading publishing history, Nova Express appeared two years after The Ticket That Exploded but was mainly written a year before, straight after The Soft Machine.

  30. Of the thirty sections in Dead Fingers Talk, half feature material from The Soft Machine, although in all but three sections it is combined with material from one or both the other texts. In contrast, twice as many sections feature only material from Naked Lunch or The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs also used more from those books than from The Soft Machine—another sign of his relative dissatisfaction with it.

  31. Burroughs to Bowles, November 21, 1962 (HRC).

  32. The manuscript is signed “Paris, June 1963”—a date probably added when Burroughs sold it.

  33. Girodias to Burroughs, February 8, 1963 (Berg 75.8).

  34. It’s likely that in early 1965 Burroughs submitted a manuscript of The Soft Machine to both Seaver and Calder—copies of a 162-page typescript, probably made in late 1962 or early 1963 for Olympia Press, cleanly retyped from the November 1962 MS.

  35. Seaver to Burroughs, December 20, 1965 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries). After, abbreviated to Syracuse; Seaver to Burroughs, January 14, 1966 (Syracuse).

  36. Burroughs, The Job (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27; Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e): 2000), 77.

  37. Burroughs to Ansen, January 23, 1962 (Ted Morgan Papers, Arizona State University; Box 1).

  38. Seaver to Burroughs, October 6, 1965 (Syracuse).

  39. Burroughs to Calder, January 26, 1966 (Calder & Boyars mss 1939–1980, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Box 66).

  40. Gysin to Burroughs, November 21, 1966 (Berg 85.12).

  41. Gysin to Burroughs, December 14, 1966 (Berg 85.12).

  42. If the article belonged anywhere it was with Nova Express, where apomorphine is referred to three-dozen times, and Burroughs had indeed twice tried to interest Grove in adding an earlier version of the article to that text when submitting his first and revised manuscripts in spring and fall 1962.

  43. Burroughs, Junky: the definitive text of “Junk” (New York: Grove, 2012), 36.

  THE SOFT MACHINE

  Dead On Arrival

  I was working The Hole with The Sailor and we did not bad. Fifteen cents on an average night boosting the afternoons and short-timing the dawn we made out from The Land Of The Free. But I was running out of veins. I went over to the counter for another cup of coffee. . . in Joe’s Lunch Room drinking coffee with a napkin under the cup which is said to be the mark of someone who does a lot of sitting in cafeterias and lunchrooms. . . Waiting on The Man. . . “What can we do?” Nick said to me once in his dead junky whisper. “They know we’ll wait. . .” Yes, they know we’ll wait. . .

  There is a boy sitting at the counter thin-faced kid his eyes all pupil. I see he is hooked and sick. Familiar face maybe from the pool hall where I scored for tea sometime. Somewhere in grey strata of subways all-night cafeterias rooming house flesh. His eyes flickered the question. I nodded toward my booth. He carried his coffee over and sat down opposite me.

  The croaker lives out Long Island. . . Light Yen sleep waking up for stops. Change. Start. Everything sharp and clear. Antennae of TV suck the sky. The clock jumped the way time will after four PM.

  “The Man is three hours late. You got the bread?”

  “I got three cents.”

  “Nothing less than a nickel. These double papers he claims.” I looked at his face. Good looking. “Say kid I know an Old Aunti Croaker right for you like a Major. . . Take the phone. I don’t want him to rumble my voice.”

  About this time I meet this Italian Tailor cum Pusher I know from Lexington and he gives me a good buy on H. . . At least it was good at first but all the time shorter and shorter. . . “Short Count Tony” we call him. . .

  Out of junk in East St. Louis sick dawn he threw himself across the wash basin pressing his stomach against the cool porcelain. I draped myself over his body laughing. His shorts dissolved in rectal mucus and carbolic soap. Summer dawn smells from a vacant lot.

  “I’ll wait here. . . Don’t want him to rumble me. . .”

  Made it five times under the shower that day soapy bubbles of egg flesh seismic tremors split by fissure spurts of jissom. . .

  I made the street, everything sharp and clear like after rain. See Sid in a booth reading a paper his face like yellow ivory in the sunlight. I handed him two nickels under the table. Pushing in a small way to keep up The Habit: INVADE. DAMAGE. OCCUPY. Young faces in blue alcohol flame.

  “And use that alcohol. You fucking can’t wait hungry junkies all the time black up my spoons. That’s all I need for Pen Indef the fuzz rumbles a black spoon in my trap.” The old junky spiel. Junk hooks falling.

  “Shoot your way to freedom kid.”

  Trace a line of goose pimples up the thin young arm. Slide the needle in and push the bulb watching the junk hit him all over. Move right in with the shit and suck junk through all the hungry young cells.

  There is a boy sitting like your body. I see he is a hook. I drape myself over him from the pool hall. Draped myself over his cafeteria and his shorts dissolved in strata of subways. . . and all house flesh. . . toward the booth. . . down opposite me. . . The Man I Italian Tailor. . . I know bread. “Me a good buy on H.”

  “You’re quitting? Well I hope you make it, kid. May I fall down and be paralyzed if I don’t mean it. . . You gotta friend in me. A real friend and if.”

  Well the traffic builds up and boosters falling in with jackets shirts and ties, kids with a radio torn from the living car trailing tubes and wires, lush-workers flash rings and wrist watches falling in sick all hours. I had the janitor cooled, an old rummy, but it couldn’t last with that crowd.

  “Say you’re looking great kid. Now do yourself a favor and stay off. I been getting some really great shit lately. Remember that brown shit sorta yellow like snuff cooks up brown and clear. . .”

  Junky in East Bath Room. . . Invisible and persistent dream body. . . Familiar face maybe. . . Scored for some time or body. . . in that grey smell of rectal
mucus. . . Night cafeterias and junky room dawn smells. Three hours from Lexington made it five times. . . Soapy egg flesh. . .

  “These double papers he claims of withdrawal.”

  “Well I thought you was quitting. . .”

  “I can’t make it.”

  “Imposible quitar eso.”

  Got up and fixed in the sick dawn flutes of Ramadan.

  “William tu tomas más medicina?. . . No me hágas casa, William.”

  Casbah house in the smell of dust and we made it; empty Eukodal boxes stacked four feet along the walls. . . dead on the surplus blankets. . . girl screaming. . . Vecinos rush in. . .

  “What did she die of?”

  “I don’t know she just died.”

  Bill Gains in Mexico City room with his douche bag and his stash of codeine pills powdered in a bicarbonate can; “I’ll just say I suffer from indigestion.” Coffee and blood spilled all over the place. Cigarette holes in the pink blanket. . . The Consul would give me no information other than place of burial in The American Cemetery.

  “Broke? Have you no pride? Go to your Consul.” He gave me an alarm clock ran for a year after his death.

  Leif repatriated by the Danish. Freight boat out of Casa for Copenhagen sank off England with all hands. Remember my medium of distant fingers?—

  “What did she die of?”

  “End.”

  “Some things I find myself.”

  The Sailor went wrong in the end. Hanged to a cell door by his principals: “Some things I find myself doing I’ll pack in is all.”