The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

  “Will you be settling your account today Mr Jones?”

  “Yes Mrs Murphy I’ll be settling my account these stairs they’ll be the death of me/cough/you only use a pencil gun once remember I am the director of no repeat performance showed you the papers clear as ‘Annie Laurie’ in 1920 movie from a dying star . . . sad young image dripping stagnant flower smell of sickness to a distant window . . . I’ll tell you a story called the Street of Chance . . . Arab house in the suburbs cold coffee sitting right where you are sitting now it’s raining the roof leaks I am moving the sofa to a dry spot heavy Spanish thing when I saw a little dry niche behind the sofa I had not noticed before. In the niche is a book glazed grey cover written in letters of gold long hand ‘The Street of Chance’ I opened the cover”

  “Being the story of a 14 year old boy who died during

  the invasion.”

  picture of the boy there faded sepia at the attic window waving to a distant train.

  XII

  THE STREETS OF CHANCE

  CHAPTER I

  cool remote cobble stone street fresh southerly winds a long time ago boy there by the stream bare feet twisted on a fence followed a flight of wild geese across a violet evening sky then he was above the stream above the street and the houses looking down on the train tracks with no fear of falling. When he got back to the house he told his father about it in the attic room his father used as a studio.

  “I can fly father.”

  “We have no such powers my son.”

  sad train whistles cross a distant sky blue magic of all movies in remembered kid standing there face luminous at the attic window waving to the train dust on the window a sighing sound back the empty room held a little boy photo in his withered hand cross a distant sky the boy’s voice

  “long long expected call from you.”

  “I wrote son.”

  agony to breathe this message agony to remember the words used to be the man you were looking for used to be the man click click click of distant heels back down a shabby street dim grey stairs smell of old pain long long you could tell by his shoulders

  “Used to be me Mister. Mrs Murphy’s Rooming House remember”

  “Will you be settling your account today?”

  silver morning shadows on a distant wall jerky bureau drawer dawn in his eyes on the bed naked there shirt in one hand smell of young nights light years wash over his face sad middle aged smile

  “I was waiting there.”

  blue magic of all movies in remembered kid standing there fading streets a distant sky. He waves sadly from the Street of Chance. see the vacant film his face.

  “Quiet now I go.”

  sad middle aged face dim jerky faraway smile.

  “I was waiting there”

  boy standing by the empty bargain. He waves sadly from the Street of Chance.

  Appendix 4

  Appendix to The Soft Machine (1968)

  The soft machine is the human body under constant siege from a vast hungry host of parasites with many names but one nature being hungry and one intention to eat.

  If I may borrow the lingo of Herr Doctor Freud while continuing to deplore the spread of his couch no one does more harm than folks feel bad about doing it “Sad Poison Nice Guy” more poison than nice—what Freud calls the “id” is a parasitic invasion of the hypothalamus and since the function of the hypothalamus is to regulate metabolism . . .

  “Only work here me.”

  “Under new management.”

  What Freud calls the “super ego” is probably a parasitic occupation of the mid brain where the “rightness” centers may be located and by “rightness” I mean where “you” and “I” used to live before this “super ego” moved in room on the top floor if my memory serves. Since the parasites occupy brain areas they are in a position to deflect research from “dangerous channels.” Apomorphine acts on the hypothalamus to regulate metabolism and its dangers to the parasitic inhabitants of these brain areas can be readily appreciated. You see junk is death the oldest “visitor” in the industry.

  Notes

  All page numbers refer to the print edition of The Soft Machine. Please use the search feature on your reader to locate the text that corresponds to the notes below.

  Abbreviations

  SM1The Soft Machine, first edition; Paris: Olympia Press, 1961.

  SM2The Soft Machine, second edition; New York: Grove Press, 1966.

  SM3The Soft Machine, third edition; London: John Calder, 1968 (Fourth Estate, 2010).

  1962 MS 129-page manuscript (53-page typescript, 20-page carbon, 56-page paste-up), probably submitted to Olympia Press November 1962, described by Burroughs as “the original manuscript of the revised and rewritten version of The Soft Machine,” signed and dated “Paris, June 1, 1963” (CU 2.4).

  1965 MS162-page typescript, probably retyped from the 1962 MS by Olympia Press; copies submitted to Grove Press in 1965 (ASU 6.4) and with insertions and deletions to Calder & Boyars in January 1966 (Lilly 66.1).

  1965 galleys63-page corrected galley proofs, dated “Received Oct 12 1965,” for the 1966 Grove edition (CU 2.5).

  ASUWilliam S. Burroughs Papers, Arizona State University.

  BergWilliam S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

  CUWilliam Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976, Columbia University.

  LillyCalder & Boyars mss, 1939–1980, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  OSUWilliam S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Columbus SPEC.CMS.85 or SPEC.CMS.87.

  Documenting differences between all three editions is revealing but also complex, and to document at the same time the manuscript histories of each edition, from rough drafts to final galleys, is both difficult to do and difficult to follow. Too much documentation becomes counter-productive, but the messy richness of the textual and manuscript histories is integral to the books themselves, so these notes strike a balance between completeness and usefulness. Taking the 1966 edition as the reader’s main point of reference, the notes focus on all significant and some typical variations between editions or the 1962 MS, the key typescript for this new edition.

  Dead On Arrival

  The opening has the longest and most significant manuscript history of any section. To begin with, biographically and textually the origins of the chapter go back to Burroughs’ mid-1940s experience as an addict in New York and to his debut novel, Junky, published in 1953. The archival drafts confirm what the content strongly suggests: that this material, traversing drug scenes set in not only North America but Mexico and Morocco, emerged from Burroughs’ Naked Lunch manuscripts going back to 1955. The overlap between The Soft Machine and Naked Lunch is evident from the “Outtakes” in the “Restored” edition of Naked Lunch, an important array of archival manuscripts.

  The most complete early draft of “Dead On Arrival”—partially reproduced from a rough typescript in the “Outtakes”—surprisingly shows that Burroughs revised and then revised again the gender of the addict, which was at one time about a “chick.” This draft (Berg 15.3), which features several important variant passages, also demonstrates how he reworked his material to downplay its first-person narrative tone. Other unpublished typescripts feature equally intriguing discoveries. One of the earliest partial drafts directly connects “Dead On Arrival” to the opening passage of Naked Lunch, the line “So we called him ‘Short Count Tony’” appearing immediately before “I can feel the heat closing in” (Berg 17.1). Possibly the earliest manuscript of all (Berg 54.1), later dated by Burroughs 1956, focuses on the death of his boyfriend Kiki, and although the dating is mistaken (since Kiki died in September 1957), it confirms the basis in openly autobiographical narrative. The title phras
e itself, abbreviated to “DOA,” appears in several Naked Lunch typescripts associated with one figure in Burroughs’ roll call of the dead: “Jerry,” based on Eugene Terry, who in November 1950 arrived DOA at the hospital in the Mexican border town of Reynosa after being mauled by a lion.

  “Dead On Arrival” makes a strong bridge back from The Soft Machine to Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ autobiographical experience, and this connection between the two books was also built into the start of Dead Fingers Talk, where the opening chapter of The Soft Machine appears under the title “no good no bueno” after a chapter that combines the opening and closing first-person narrative sections of Naked Lunch. However, in the first edition of The Soft Machine the material in “Dead On Arrival” (titled “white score”) appeared near the end of the text, a structural position that gave it a very different impact. Rather than echoing Naked Lunch, it echoed The Soft Machine itself: having previously encountered numerous scattered phrase fragments, the reader is already primed to experience the section’s formal and thematic focus on the recycling and return of memory. A five-page paste-up (OSU 1.1) confirms how Burroughs created this complex structure of repetition by literally cutting out and assembling a series of passages. Under the title “No Bueno,” the section was first published in the May 1961 issue of the jazz magazine Metronome with very minor differences (e.g., the replacement of “Fucking” by “F…..g”).

  For the second edition of 1966 Burroughs used all of “white score” except its opening two paragraphs, material that was written separately and framed the text very differently. Apart from adding a single word to the first line, the only other changes Burroughs made to the 1961 section were in presentation, cutting capitals. However, he deliberately confused the integrity of the material by concluding the chapter with what, in retrospect, we realize is the first page of the following chapter. The break was made very simply by inserting the new chapter title page in between the first and second pages of “Who Am I To Be Critical?” in the 1965 MS. For the third edition, Burroughs restored the natural chapter break, while making further changes in punctuation, adding more ellipses, and cutting a small number of words.

  Structurally, by following the 1962 MS the chapter now ends at its natural break point. In terms of content, the 1962 MS kept to the 1961 text: indeed, to create this chapter Burroughs simply cut the relevant pages from a copy of the first edition and pasted them onto typewriter paper (bearing the watermark EXTRA STRONG BASSEAU). The 1962 MS therefore retained the distinctive capitalizations of the 1961 text, and some fifty capitals have been restored for this edition. In his 1962 MS list of chapter headings, Burroughs began almost every word of his titles with a capital, and this practice has been followed here and throughout (i.e., “Dead On Arrival” rather than “Dead on Arrival”).

  1“I was working The Hole”: in SM1, the “white score” section begins with two paragraphs not used in either SM2 or SM3, whose relevance is suggested by the Trak motto (“Invade. Damage. Occupy”) which recurs later in the chapter: “The usual procedure is virus filter. Agent plants cold-sore on lip feeds back precise map of oral cavity: flu explores nasal passage and spongy lung substance: liver maps from The Yellow Sickness (lives in straw the Arabs say): penis wart moulds blood streets of neon: junk haunts the cold limestone spine Souks. Contour maps trace shrunken limbs of polio. The maps codified into Board Room Reports and Life Scripts. Service and control the Earth Puppets. You strictly from monkey without the Utilities Trak Service. Trak. Trak. Trak. Invade. Damage. Occupy.

  On the junk is Time the only begetter of. I was taking junk impressions. From the beginning agent and point of argument. In the beginning was such a deal. The human race was fixed from the beginning. The words of an Old Junk Agent drifted cool and casual as a ceiling fan in Panama we split a four-ounce bottle of PG (paregoric). In the green watercloset. ‘Universe strictly from warring powers and the agents of warring powers.’”

  All the early typescripts of this chapter locate the opening line in a longer narrative starting in Joe’s Lunch Room (e.g., the “Outtake” in Naked Lunch, 281). From the way the very earliest draft begins, it is likely Burroughs considered this as an opening page for Naked Lunch, which, he told Ginsberg in October 1957, “is introduced as a long junk-sick night of reminiscences and what happened to so and so” (Letters, 372): “I fall into Joe’s Lunch Room really thin, carry a coffee over from the counter and sit down in a booth. When I sit down a little shiver goes through me, a hot cold flash like malaria in a way, but really like nothing else but junk sickness . . There is a kid sitting at the counter about eighteen years old and he keeps giving me the eye. Good looking kid with yellow hair and brown eyes, and the hair over his eyes and little white teeth . . Little pieces of song are drifting through my head and I start humming them over and turning them into The Waiting Junky Blues and my mind keeps drifting off in a light fever . . I mean I had an oil burner . . Quarter piece of H a day . . I was working the Hole with The Sailor and we did not bad . . Fifteen cents each on average night” (Berg 17.8).

  1“The Sailor”: early drafts are more expansive about a character who clearly fascinated Burroughs: “He never talked to me about himself, I never knew what his real name was or where he came from, and I knew him as well as anyone did . . There was a doomed intense aura about him […] He was one of the few people I ever respected” (Berg 17.8). The Sailor was based on Phil White, to whom Burroughs originally planned to dedicate Junky, where he appears as Roy.

  1“and we did not bad. Fifteen cents on an average night”: in one of the few textual changes to the original SM1 material, SM2 added “do,” an insert that was not made for SM3 and which has been cut for this edition. For SM3 Burroughs recreated his early draft (see Berg 17.8, cited above) by cancelling “an” on the 1965 MS (Lilly 66.1).

  1“coffee. . . in Joe’s Lunch Room”: most of the ellipses in SM2 were spaced in this chapter so that the first and third periods were not separated from the words either side, creating a very odd impression. Following the 1962 MS, ellipses here are spaced as they were in SM1, with a space after.

  1“There is a boy sitting at a counter”: “There was a chick at the counter giving me the eye,” runs an earlier draft (in Naked Lunch “Outtakes,” 281–82). In what is probably a still earlier draft, the “kid sitting at the counter about eighteen years old” has a “nice voice . . Groton or St Marks or one of those pseudo English traps . . I always hide my Harvard accent as deep as it will stay down without jumping on me like a vaudeville skit” (Berg 17.8).

  2“Say kid I know an Old Aunti Croaker”: corrects a typo in SM2 6 (“known”) and changes spelling from “Auntie.” In the typesetting manuscript for SM1 the word was revised from “Aunti” to “Aunty” and then back to “Aunti” (CU 2.3), and it is spelled this way in both the 1962 MS and the 1965 galleys.

  2“Take the phone”: the earliest drafts give clear motives for why the narrator wants the young addict to speak with the doctor:

  “‘I had a beef with him last time . .’

  I dialled the number and the croaker answered . . I covered the receiver . .

  ‘It’s him . . Just say you want an appointment and let your voice break.’

  ‘But do I haveta make it with this old character?’

  ‘Take the phone . . We’ll talk about that . .’” (Berg 17.8).

  2“About this time I meet this Italian Tailor”: see the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (256–57) for an early draft.

  3“The Man I Italian Tailor”: in SM1 this is “i Italian”; on the galleys for SM3 Burroughs corrected it to “an Italian” (Lilly 66.4). On the galleys for SM2 (where he made changes to other words in the same line) he let “I” stand.

  4“Say you’re looking great kid”: the earliest drafts develop this material further, and identify the seduction more explicitly with the narrator, one—a cleanly typed 7-page typescript from 1958–59—continuing
: “It’s like I was following the junk right in to feed on the young kid stuff, watching it wither under my hand, each day taking a little something for my old hope chest . . (Baby faces fade the quickest . .) Communion of flesh with flesh deeper and more precise than any sex act, juxtaposition of nodding satiety and quivering need . . tracing a line of goose pimples along the vein with one finger and sliding the needle in slow, and then watching the stuff hit that’s the moment” (Berg 15.3). An even earlier draft expands further on the “hope chest”: “And how I loved to crack the whip and make them cringe and beg and whine for it . . . I mean forcing some sex act on them was of course purely symbolic of the deeper excitement” (Berg 17.1).

  5“Leif repatriated by the Danish”: writing “in a complete state of desolation” in January 1955, Burroughs related to Allen Ginsberg many of the details given here about the “Danish boy” he knew in Tangier who drowned at sea (Letters, 257–58). There are several very early drafts featuring Leif, and also Kiki, in openly autobiographical terms.

  Who Am I To Be Critical?

  This chapter did not appear in the 1961 edition and was written from scratch for the 1962 MS. Going through several drafts, it was very probably conceived as following on from “Dead On Arrival,” and the chapters are clearly connected despite being narrated and structured in completely different ways. As noted above, the major difference in its appearance across the second and third editions of the book is to do with where this chapter begins, the 1968 text creating the integrity that was broken for the 1966 edition. The 1968 text also made changes in presentation, reducing the number of capitals, introducing more paragraph breaks, and making a small number of cuts (cancelling about twenty words on the galleys). With numerous minor differences, almost half this chapter was also published in the New York magazine East Side Review in January 1966 under the title “Fun and Games, What?” Given its geographical and cultural focus on Central America, it’s no surprise the chapter references details in Queer and The Yage Letters, based on Burroughs’ amorous and anthropological expeditions through the region in 1951 and 1953.