Nova Express
Page 19
21“Bob Schafer”: in first draft the name is spelled alternately “Schrmersrr” and “Shremser” and he is “a frustrated Fascist and Roosevelt hater” (OSU 2.4). In late 1942 Burroughs really did travel through Iowa with Merit Inc., or more precisely Merit Protective Services of Chicago, while working as a fraud investigator together with Robert J. “Bob” Schremser.
22“White Hot Agony Act”: in first draft: “And The Sailor could go into this Agony Act and change form like a horse picture and chase the doctor around his office with strange metal snarls and heat himself white hot while he gave off this smell of blowtorches and ozone” (OSU 2.4).
23“The Caustic Enzymes of Woo”: a certain obscurity and incompleteness is one of the essential features of the cut-up mythology, but archival typescripts reveal that Burroughs worked out more than shows, as is the case here: “The Children Of Wu: The Pain Planet which runs on Theta waves” (Berg 40.4).
23“the drugstores was closing”: the typesetter of the October 1962 MS corrected the plural to singular (“drugstore” in NEX 24), but Burroughs’ use of idiomatic expression is confirmed by his spoken-word recording of the section.
23“pool halls and chili”: echoing a line in Naked Lunch, the first draft continues: “Out of junk in East St Louis and i was traveling with Irene Kelly and her was sporting woman and we hit the sex charge and made it five times arc lights flickering over our mineral copulations” (OSU 2.4).
24“Lip Reading”: in first draft this is related to what a canceled line refers to as “host hopping” (OSU 2.4).
24“Cool heavy eyes”: the first draft features a pun here: “The cool financier finance seer eyes” (OSU 2.4).
26“Meester William was death”: the first draft has: “Meester William was The Cuban death disguised as any other person—And then I saw Meester William in a hotel room wanted me to go to bed with him and I wouldn’t because tried to reach him with the knife and he said: ‘If you kill me who will pilot this ship?’” (OSU 2.4).
26“transparent sheets”: the first draft continues: “like glass but thin and easy to move—And in Paris i saw this painter who used to run a night club in Tangier was painting on these sheets pictures in the air” (OSU 2.4).
NO GOOD—NO BUENO
Manuscript evidence, as well as their appearance together in Evergreen Review 7.29 (March 1963), confirms that this section was written as a continuation of “The Fish Poison Con.” Burroughs made a small number of minor revisions directly onto his manuscript, such as changing “wheeling vultures” to “sliding vultures” and “a bottle of aguardiente” to “a bottle of pisco,” while revising lower-case first-person “i” to upper case (OSU 2.4). Three-quarters of the section comes from The Soft Machine, the majority deriving from the “white score” section near the end of the 1961 edition (retitled “Dead on Arrival” and moved to the opening of both later editions).
27“smell of dust”: the October 1962 MS continues: “—must be love—Must be love.”
28“Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin”: a recurrent figure across the trilogy, embodying principles of dualism and conflict, he has a particular meaning in the context of Nova Express, clarifying why Burroughs so often refers in manuscripts and related texts to C.S. Lewis, author of his own “Space Trilogy.” In an early draft of his 1963 text “The Beginning Is Also The End,” Burroughs has Bradly Martin declare: “I’ve been called everything in the book. Mr C.S. Lewis refers to me as The Bent One” (Berg, 16.1).
28“looking at something I couldn’t see”: the first draft continues with the line: “but it must have been what makes maricas” (i.e., homosexuals) (OSU 2.4).
29“the thing I couldn’t see”: the first draft continues with a canceled line: “worse than hunger and mist and The Civil Guard” (OSU 2.4).
SHIFT COORDINATE POINTS
This section was titled “Pinball Led Street” up to and including the October 1962 MS, where the old title was canceled and the new one written in by Burroughs. Identifying a “1st draft” version as “Chapter 18” (OSU 2.2), he moved it from near the end of the March 1962 MS toward the beginning of the October 1962 MS; the result of this restructuring is that “Shift Coordinate Points” came to precede “Coordinate Points,” which appeared near the start of the March 1962 MS. Although Burroughs identified this as “1st draft” (for the benefit of Wenning in late 1961), an earlier version exists (Berg 4.35), which reveals significant variant material.
29“K9 was in combat”: the earliest draft has two substantially different variants of the opening paragraphs, the longer of which begins: “Pin ball led street with elect of doorway—Shift lingual—Vibrate tourists—free doorways—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in grey Room—
As soon as the hash hit K9 was in combat with the Novia Guard—Thinking metal armed with electro-magnetic claws feeling for the virus punch cards twisting pulling him into vertiginous spins feeling the full weight of the alien mind screen’s crushing mineral hate for mammalian life—‘Back—Stay out of those claws—Shift lingual—Shift word patterns—Cut Word lines—Shift coordinate points—’” (Berg 4.35). Also starting “As soon as the hash hit,” the other version continues: “K9 moved in occupying the enemy mind screen taking over view points and right centers and ego positions—Feeling the full weight and evil of the alien screen the crushing mineral hate for mammalian life forms—The novia guards—He was all the way in now the guard weaker his claws fading in smoke—”
30“So many and sooo—”: the first draft continues with a paragraph canceled on the October 1962 MS: “Intersected in The Dark Guards—A machine with cool silver blew purple iodine and red nitrous fumes down corridors of that hospital to musical clock hands—Blue fashion plates faded opposite mirrors and hovered out—He walked through air hammers of coal gas and dust—” (OSU 2.2).
31“Doc Benway and me”: the earliest draft has “Me and The Sailor,” and it is the Sailor who sells the aphrodisiac and has the idea for a green fix (Berg 4.35).
33“At this point in our researches”: on the first draft the last word is canceled and Burroughs inserted the phrase “Research Project” (OSU 2.2). The earliest draft has longer final lines: “At this point in our researches we had a spot of bother with the biologic intersected The Nova Police—And furthermore the metal junkies were radioactive and subject to go up any place if two of them came together—So they lived in continual fear and hatred of each other and continual gang warfare—” (Berg 4.35).
Chinese Laundry
CHINESE LAUNDRY
Despite its length, this has one of the lightest archival histories of any section: five pages of early drafts in three Berg Collection folders and the full six-page typescript in the October 1962 MS. This is because “Chinese Laundry,” together with the next section, “Inflexible Authority,” almost certainly comprise the “ten pages of new material” referred to by Burroughs when sending Rosset his manuscript in October 1962 (ROW, 115). (Although the detail is not given in the published version, the archival original of Burroughs’ letter specifies that these “ten pages” are to replace existing pages 20–29 in the manuscript—where “Chinese Laundry” and “Inflexible Authority” are paginated 20–29 [Berg 75.1].) There is no evidence to clarify what the original ten pages were that Burroughs cut, although they probably included Chapter VII, “Pure Song of New Before the Traveller” (a title derived from Rimbaud’s poem “Genie”), published in Evergreen Review in January 1962. The October 1962 MS is near verbatim and, with its spelling of “nova” rather than “novia,” dates from after September that year.
35“The Lazarus Pharmaceutical Company”: Lazarus Pharmaceuticals was just one of many satirical business names Burroughs invented at this time, and in one typescript it is listed among others playing on phrases from Nova Express: “Focus Uranium Limited Shitola, Trak Tell and Tell, Martin Air Lines, Cobra Copper Kansas A.J., Nation
al Towers, OPEN FIRE—Keystone Concrete, Martin Chain, Lazarus Pharmaceuticals—Bell and Trak—Strafe pound blast, tilt Lynch Gass&Light—Vampire shares sagged sluggishly [. . .] Transvestite Airlines, Chemical Corn, Kali Polaroid, Bradly Bronze, Death Dwarf Packing, Ward Fruit, Burroughs B&M [. . .] General Fidelity of Minraud” (Berg 36.11). Other variations include specific military references, such as “Polaris missile for searing white blast—Hiroshima Optics, Nagasaki Pit & Forge” (Berg 36.11). One page referring to “Standard and Poor’s Index” has the phrase “Crazy new highs for 1962” (36.11), while another mixes in Nova Express phrases to declare a stock market crash: “Dow Jones Average explodes—paper moon—Gongs of violence and how” (36.10). In May 1962, Wall Street was indeed hit by a “flash crash,” in which companies such as IBM lost over 5% of their share value in less than twenty minutes. Burroughs’ cut-up crash—which probably followed rather than preceded the “real thing”—also features in Anthony Balch’s 1963 film Towers Open Fire, where he intones instructions to sell stock in a list of companies from Mayan Cosmetics to Lazarus Pharmaceuticals over archival newsreel of the 1929 Wall Street Crash (and the front page of the London Evening Standard, reporting another crash in late 1962 alongside coverage of the John Vassall spy case).
INFLEXIBLE AUTHORITY
Like “Chinese Laundry,” this section was written shortly before completion of the October 1962 MS. There is also a two-page early draft of the opening half, which has a few minor variants (Berg 5.5).
43“The District Supervisor”: on an early draft he is identified as “the Inspector” (Berg 5.5).
44“The police patrol pounded into the”: the early draft continues: “virus machine headquarters in America England Switzerland and France—” (Berg 5.5).
45“This, gentlemen, is a death dwarf”: a related typescript defines the death dwarf as “a synthetic organism” and “a parasitic creature” (Berg 6.3), while another expands on its role as an antihuman instrument radio-controlled from enemy installations, including “Life Time Fortune Headquarters NYC—There is also an encephalographic center in Wisconsin—No doubt others exist—But if these could be taken over and the equipment used to confuse and destroy enemy broadcast the whole conspiracy would collapse—because the Death Dwarf is only a transmitter” (Berg 49.31).
45“My Power’s coming”: on the early draft the death dwarf turns into “a Negro faith healer” who spits at “the young agent” rather than at Uranian Willy (Berg 5.5).
47“Jimmy Sheffields is”: corrects NEX 47 (“Jimmy Sheffield is”), an error introduced by the copyeditor on the galleys (OSU 5.12). “Jim Sheffield” is a character in Henry Kuttner’s novel Fury, cited in The Ticket That Exploded.
COORDINATE POINTS
This long section is one of the most heavily redrafted of all and underwent several revisions of title: “THE NOVIA POLICE” (OSU 2.3); “The Biologic Police and Courts” (OSU 2.4); “THE BIOLOGIC POLICE” (Berg 36.3), until Burroughs wrote “Coordinate Points” onto his October 1962 MS. The very first time Burroughs refers to writing Nova Express, in an August 7, 1961 letter to Gysin, he would allude to this material, sending a photograph “to illustrate chapter on The Novia Police” (ROW, 83).
Early drafts make the material more explicit as a lecture address and include several passages discussing in detail the concept of criminality. Some of these drafts were clearly written early in the history of the Nova Express manuscript: one draft includes the early variant spelling “novae criminals” and “novae mob” (Berg 11.28); another uses the term “Novia Guard,” rather than “Mob” (OSU 2.4). Burroughs identified the “1st draft” six-page typescript, titled “THE NOVIA POLICE,” as “Chapter II” of his March 1962 manuscript (OSU 2.3). Complicating this history is an early, five-page typescript entitled “The Biologic Police and Courts,” which Burroughs identified as “Chapter 14” (OSU 2.4). This typescript begins with a version of material that appears almost halfway into the section as published and then continues with most of “This Horrible Case,” suggesting that these two sections were originally joined.
Central to most drafts is the subsection “PLAN DRUG ADDICTION.” An autograph note by Burroughs written onto the OSU 2.3 typescript identifies this page as an “original cut up made in 1959 before Novia Express was started or conceived”; the manuscript page is near verbatim compared to the published text, the main difference being the absence of em dashes and the use instead of three- or four-dot ellipses. This was one of Burroughs’ earliest cut-up texts and one he would return to over time in different ways, from making a collage with this title in 1965 that cut up almost the entire page from the Grove edition of Nova Express, to reproducing the text in the British edition of The Soft Machine (1968) and in several magazines including Mayfair (August 1969).
Burroughs’ fondness for the whole section is evident in how extensively he reworked drafts of it and from his inclusion of an expanded section in The Ticket That Exploded (“the nova police”) that includes almost a thousand words of “Coordinate Points” verbatim. He expressed his feelings in a letter to Alan Ansen in early 1963: “Did you like the nova police in Ticket?—I endeavoured to distil an archetype of the perfect police officer in Inspector Lee and find that the part has taken over to an extent where some of my old connections have been alienated—Well it’s all show business what?” Burroughs signed his letter “Bill B / Inspector J Lee / Nova Police” (Burroughs to Ansen, January 23, 1963; ASU).
51“The case I have just related”: this opening sentence appears as an overtype onto the October 1962 MS, and was clearly added by Burroughs to integrate the preceding two sections after they were included in this manuscript.
51“I doubt if any of you”: the rest of this line was revised in almost every draft: “have ever seen a criminal” (Berg 11.4); “have ever really seen a criminal” (Berg 11.40); “have ever seen a criminal for what they are” (ASU 7). The most substantial variant of this paragraph, a one-page carbon, is probably the earliest: “I am sure none of you have ever seen a police man before and many of you retain romantic concepts of ‘The Criminal’ [. . .] A criminal is quite simply some one who will do anything for money—Throw acid in a baby’s face? Straightaway if the price is right? You got it? Servants scheduled for ‘Total Disposal’ no matter what they were promised—Now you understand something about the structure of the enemy and the servants it employs—The enemy has no feeling and conceives feeling in others as a weakness to be exploited—By any means—” (Berg 12.10). Another early variant begins: “Ladies and gentlemen may I have your attention please—I am Inspector J Lee of the Novae Police—boo booo—Exactly—Now I doubt if any of you on this copy planet have ever seen a novae criminal” (Berg 11.28).
51“Apomorphine”: one typescript develops the role of apomorphine further and continues with a discussion of criminality that includes an unusual autobiographical reference: “Of course morphine is only one police problem and a minor one at this intersection point. Morphine alone never exploded a planet. Certain of the hallucinogen drugs Venusian imports can explode the planet. The control of these drugs is now a more pressing problem. Apomorphine is the key to all drug control.
Now let us look at ordinary criminals a moment. They are important as tools used by the Novia mob. What is a thief? Someone who confiscates property of doubtful ownership as all property is on this planet. No. A thief is someone who takes from you what is yours. I quote a Texas sheriff Robert Vail Ennis on the subject of theft. ‘It’s no good taking from a man what he makes honest’” (Berg 11.24). Sherriff Ennis arrested Burroughs in 1948: see Rob Johnson’s The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas (Texas A&M, 2006). The similar passage on the March 1962 MS concludes its definition of a thief with an allusion to Henry Luce’s magazine empire: “They monopolize life time and fortune. They take sex and love dream and function from you so that you will buy it back at house odds” (OSU 2.3).
&n
bsp; 52“First they create a narcotic problem”: in one typescript: “First they import morphine from Uranus” (ASU 7).
52“PLAN DRUG ADDICTION”: Burroughs’ manuscript page identified as the “original cut up made in 1959” (OSU 2.3) has a few unused words in the opening paragraph (“Protect the disease from its crime”) and in the penultimate paragraph (“only sick people understand that menace [. . .] direct dreaming of Narcotics Commissioner”).
54“remain in present time form”: one very early draft continues with an illustration of stupid life forms, and concludes: “The Novia Guard has turned loose on the world the terrible weapon of mass stupidity” (OSU 2.4).
55“‘Iron Claws’”: the clue to the identity of this member of the Nova Mob is given in “Simple as a Hiccup,” where the phrase occurs followed by a reference to the drug dimethyltryptamine. In “Overdose of Synthesized Prestonia,” a typescript enclosed in a letter to Gysin, Burroughs refers to “Souls torn into insect fragments by the Iron Claws of chess masters—Who Synthesized Dim-N” (Burroughs to Gysin, April 27, 1961; Berg 85.4). A separate text, which calls DMT “the oven drug,” refers to using it in experiments on prisoners prior to their being hung: “The technician who performed the experiments is known as Iron Claws—(Actually he has no hands as result of a birth injury—He exists in a speed up film and was himself an experiment in film technique)” (Berg 16.32). DMT-inspired imagery appears directly in Nova Express, for example in “Chinese Laundry,” where the sensation of “white hot bees swarming in the body” is taken from an April 1961 letter describing Prestonia, the “nightmare hallucinogen” (ROW, 70).
56“casualties and fuck ups”: one early draft has an alternative illustration: “As a result the agent was captured by The Novia Mob and barely escaped death in their ovens. However we were able to turn this goof to our advantage since the enemy is basically a stupid organism like all criminals and never more stupid than when they think they are being clever. [. . .] You can hear the prisoners screaming two galaxies away. Such noise. Such people” (Berg 11.6).