The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

  This edition follows the 1962 MS in restoring the continuity of the original chapter and in reproducing the extra paragraph breaks also made for the 1968 text, while restoring a dozen capitals and making a couple of minor corrections.

  9“I knew this one pusher”: what is probably the earliest draft begins with a preceding opening line: “Doc Benway and me was pushing junk and the heat was so bad at that time” (Berg 9.13).

  10“a worthy vessel”: this is a direct overlap with the “Shift Coordinate Points” section of Nova Express.

  10“Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names”: in an early draft the narrator refers to the other as “Marty” (Berg 9.31).

  10“and all of a sudden the sex chucks”: in SM2 the chapter began here in mid-sentence. On the 1965 MS, this is where page 8 begins, following page 7 which ends “our eyes watering and burning” (ASU 6.4).

  11“Doc won a Duesenberg”: corrects the misspelling in SM2 13 (“Dusenberg”) and SM3 10 (“Dussenberg”) of a manufacturer of luxury automobiles until the late 1930s. One early draft has “and bought a Chrysler town and country” (Berg 9.31), while other typescripts have different versions of the line, including the 1962 MS which has “and Doc won a Dussenberg from this local and we headed for Mexico—By now we had floppy Panama hats and a tan, and dark glasses.” The Duesenberg returns in The Wild Boys and Port of Saints.

  12“So we stripped them” to “understand”: this was one of the few lines not in SM3, cancelled on the MS.

  13“slow fuck on knees”: a very early draft continues: “and he told me we could be burned to death for doing it and I said that might be kicks too” (Berg 9.31).

  14“But then who am I to be critical?”: in a rare cancelled line, the 1962 MS continues: “Die and let die I always say.” Another draft goes on to attribute the saying: “But then as the Sailor used to say who am I to be critical?” (Berg 9.31). In one of a small number of precise overlaps between texts, the Sailor’s words also appear in Minutes to Go (60).

  17“Take if off Take it off”: the line, and its connection to burlesque, appear in “Word” (Interzone, 170), from a passage not used in the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter here.

  19“the Green Boys”: Burroughs explained their origins in a letter to Ginsberg in March 1961 as the result of taking psilocybin mushrooms provided by Timothy Leary; “The Green Boys with purple fungoid gills I saw with the mushroom and have written a long section on these curious regions and the practices of the natives” (ROW, 67).

  19“smelling like a compost heap”: one draft includes the cancelled line; “But like Early Answer Larry used to say, Look down along the local line before you travel there” (Berg 11.34). The line echoes the 1927 folk song “The Lonesome Road,” used in Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded.

  19“So Iam rigged up”: corrects SM2 22 (“So I am”) by restoring the name Burroughs coined for Ian Sommerville throughout the Cut-Up Trilogy. Curiously, he let the error stand and on the 1965 galleys inserted in this sentence his other name for Sommerville (“Technical Tillie”; elsewhere spelled “Tilly”); it has been cut for this edition.

  20“scoffed the lot”: the 1962 MS has the cancelled line: “And I turned to Iam and said: ‘This means war—These cocksuckers are upsetting the balance of nature.’”

  21“secret meaning of the centipede motif”: in Queer (New York: Penguin, 2010) Burroughs had asked, “What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?” (85). The question must have occurred to Burroughs a decade earlier, since drawings of centipedes featured in his case file at Payne Whitney, where he received psychiatric treatment after severing the tip of his little finger in 1940. Although about a hundred centipedes, scorpions and crabs appear in SM2, there were twice as many in SM1.

  21“ready to play ball”: one draft that includes numerous variant lines adds the detail: “and hanged me with a vine naked to a turn” (Berg 11.28).

  22“shady or legitimate”: these words, and several others in this passage, derive from the “In Search of Yage” section of The Yage Letters.

  22“this 8267”: the 1962 MS had “8276” which also appears in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Either way, the digits added up to Burroughs’ special number: 23.

  Public Agent

  Like “Dead On Arrival,” this chapter derives from a single long section of the 1961 edition of The Soft Machine, “white subway,” which was again used almost in its entirety. (The last page of the original section was omitted, although half of it was then used in “Case Of The Celluloid Kali.”) In the 1961 edition, “white subway” followed directly after “white score,” the basis for “Dead On Arrival,” so that Burroughs preserved the integrity and continuity of material from one edition to the next. However, the 1961 edition actually has little structural continuity and the narrative voice of each section differs greatly. In Dead Fingers Talk, the chapter forms the first half of a section entitled “the meat handler” where it is combined with Naked Lunch material (“Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry” and a page from “Atrophied Preface”)—although there’s no archival evidence that connects “Public Agent” to the Naked Lunch body of manuscripts and the Tangier era, as there is for “Dead On Arrival.”

  For the 1962 MS, Burroughs simply pasted onto his typewriter paper pages cut from a copy of the 1961 Soft Machine. For the 1968 text he made only minor, seemingly inconsistent changes in presentation (e.g., where the second edition has “The script for heavy drink,” the third has “the script for Heavy Drink”). Following the 1962 MS (which, in this case, has “The script for Heavy Drink”), this edition restores a dozen capitals from the 1961 text that were cancelled on the 1965 galleys.

  25“entrails from other mouth”: changes SM2 27 (“mouths”). SM1, the 1965 galleys for SM2, and SM3 all have the apparent error or ungrammatical idiom used elsewhere in this chapter (“everyone’s lung blew out”).

  26“zipper guns”: on the 1965 galleys the copyeditor commented: “‘zipper guns’ ‘zip gun?’ There is no zipper gun.” Burroughs replied on a duplicate page: “Leave it zipper. This being does not speak very good English or any language.”

  28“Then I had to check you”: corrects SM2 30 (“Them”), as in SM1 and SM3.

  30“turned the effluvia”: the final lines derive from an equally cryptic draft that includes unused material: “Species of ape with prehensile penis addicting farts. They know their worth and all the favors dearly to those unfortunates who fall under The Effluvia and become addicts of The Green Stuff” (Berg 4.55).

  Trak Trak Trak

  In complete contrast to the opening three chapters, here Burroughs made a series of selections from the first edition of The Soft Machine, passages that he restructured and rewrote and then combined with newly written material. The eight-page typescript for the chapter in the 1962 MS includes pasted-in pages cut from the 1961 edition but Burroughs retyped the bulk of it because he made so many revisions—cutting individual words, lines, or paragraphs, and radically re-sequencing the material. He took text from no less than eight different sections of the 1961 edition to make up almost half of this chapter, ending it with a long passage of new material. Further possibilities for recombination appeared in Dead Fingers Talk, which, with very minor differences, reproduces all but the final 250 words of the material deriving from the 1961 Soft Machine, but then follows it with the first two-thirds of “Gongs Of Violence” and the short “Uranian Willy” chapter to make a section called “cut city.”

  In one of the major differences between the second and third editions, the chapter in the 1968 text ends just over half way through the chapter in the 1966 edition, concluding at the point where the long section of new material began. Once again, for the 1966 edition Burroughs broke the chapter in the simplest of ways by inserting the title page in between two typescript pages in his 1965 MS (ASU 6.4). Up to the poi
nt where it ended the chapter, the third edition also had around 275 more words than the second and lacked about 90. The 1962 MS ends this chapter in line with the 1968 text (although not quite identically) and this structure has been followed here. In keeping with the 1962 MS, 70 capitals have been restored and a couple removed.

  31“The Sailor and I burned down The Republic of Panama”: versions of this opening line appear at the start of “In Search of Yage” in The Yage Letters (3) and in Naked Lunch (183).

  31“No glot—Clom Fliday—(Footnote”: the note glossing this phrase (taken from Naked Lunch) did not appear in SM1. In Dead Fingers Talk, the word “Footnote” appears on its own in parentheses—but the actual note is not given until several pages later, when it is indeed given as a note at the foot of the page, linked to a superscript number 1 inserted after the phrase “No glot” in the sign that Bradly reads (page 32).

  31“Out in the bay little red poison sea snakes swim desperately in sewage”: illustrating how Burroughs rewrote and restructured his material at a sentence level, the original line in SM1 71 was: “Little red poison sea-snakes in the bay swimming desperately in sewage.”

  32“Footnote: ‘working The Hole’”: Burroughs’ complex and extensive use of notes is again apparent here, as he gives (in parentheses rather than at the foot of the page) his second “Footnote” in the first two paragraphs of this chapter—a note that should logically have been given in the book’s opening line, where the phrase it glosses first appears.

  32“And kicked a habit”: in SM1 71 this was not heroin addiction, but “a THEE Habit.”

  32“And the refugee German croaker you hit anywhere”: in Queer, Lee hits the German croaker and reports his dialog and “human look” in Quito (75). Although the narrator flies from Panama City to La Paz in the previous paragraph, this is because a line was cut from the original SM1 passage, where he indeed flies to Quito.

  33“And Joselito moved”: an earlier draft of this paragraph and the next gives a much clearer narrative and shows how Burroughs restructured his material for The Soft Machine; see the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (259–62).

  33“Through broken stellae”: a very rough early draft of this passage has a different list leading to an explicit commentary on the ecological toxic zone it describes: “Through a vast rubbish heap: empty H caps, KY tubes, broken condoms, shit stained comics, rusty iron, broken stellae, tin cans and pottery, worked stones, bones and excrement . . all the waste of man’s time on the earth” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

  34–36 “Flash bulb monster” to “Up a great tidal river”: almost none of this derived from SM1. For Dead Fingers Talk, Burroughs inserted this material in the middle of a long passage taken from the “all members are worst a century” section of The Ticket That Exploded, and framed the whole with other Soft Machine material.

  34“The orgasm is a 1920 movie”: corrects SM2 36 (“in”), as in the 1962 MS, Dead Fingers Talk, and the 1965 manuscript for SM3 on which, except for the last phrase, this paragraph was cancelled.

  34“stroke of nine”: a phrase recycled from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, along with several others in the next paragraph (which, as in the 1962 MS and SM3, has been set in speech marks for this edition).

  35“the drenched lands”: the phrase, which recurs four times in SM2 and seven in SM1 and which also appears in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, translates and truncates the phrase “pays poivrés et détrempés” (“spicy and drenched lands”) from Rimbaud’s poem “Démocratie,” a blistering critique of capitalist greed (“au service des plus monstreuses exploitation industrielles ou militaires”). Although it appears in capitals elsewhere, the phrase has been set in lower case here, following the 1962 MS.

  36“Up a great tidal river”: after the previous paragraphs which did not derive from SM1, from here until “Smell death bed pictures” (page 42), the text derives from a series of sections. An earlier typescript of this material is in the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (259–63).

  36“The coast people”: an early rough draft uses the term “the Costenos,” more specific to Latin America (OSU 87; 17.130A).

  37“like death in the throat”: at this point for SM3 Burroughs inserted over 100 more words from the “cut city” section of SM1.

  37“The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast”: a line used in the “Joselito” section of Naked Lunch, where “Trak” briefly appears.

  37“Bolivar in catatonic limestone”: one of the longer passages in an early rough draft elaborated: “statues of Byron and Bolivar and various generals stand about in the eternal catatonic postures advocating liberty under the lidless eyes of an iguana” (OSU 87; 17.130A). Lord Byron’s admiration for Simón Bolívar, “El Libertador” of Spanish colonies in Latin America, extended to naming his yacht after him.

  38“Albinos blink in the sun”: at this point in SM3 Burroughs added almost another 100 words from “cut city” and “the kid” sections of SM1.

  38“They were searching his room”: an early draft of this passage, which comes from the “sola esperanza del mundo” section of SM1 where it is explicitly set in “The River Towns of Ecuador” (77), is in the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (269). A more complete early typescript adds further details: “They were not finding IT . . IT wasn’t there . . Lee had no habits at all . . He had his routes nobody could find stashed in a used condom behind the gas meter . . Sewed into a moldy jock strap in a dusty suitcase on top of the armoire […] The whole apparatus of the state is riddled with campers. Lee was a camper himself.

  Lee saw another layer in faces incapable of any feeling other [than] total yen for the white juice that oozes out of broken souls and hate for anything stands between them and the juice.

  ‘Not only Campers but Soul Crackers.’ He spit the words out with contempt. ‘Peasants . . untouchables . . Red Necks . . gum it like snuff . . Must come from The Baths’” (Berg 4.18). For more about “Soul Crackers,” see note for page 81.

  38“The whole rancid oil scandal”: the phrase, inserted here out of sequence from SM1, references a case in Meknes, Morocco involving poisoned cooking oil that caused 10,000 casualties and which was featured in the same November 1959 issue of Life magazine that ran a major negative story on the Beats. Texts in Minutes to Go, including Sinclair Beiles’ “TELEGRAM FROM MEKNES,” cut up and combined references to the oil scandal and Life magazine.

  38“Bradly was reading the sign”: indicating how often Burroughs revised this material, in an early rough draft “Carl was studying” the sign (OSU 85; 2.4), while a longer draft, included in the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (261-62), is written as first person narrative.

  39“It is permiso, si”: SM1 75 had “see” (a copyeditor’s misunderstanding or a pun), while Dead Fingers Talk has “yes,” even though on the 1962 MS Burroughs had made the change to “si.”

  40“He dimed The Sex And Dream Utilities”: although seemingly an error, across all texts it was only corrected to “dimmed” for Dead Fingers Talk, probably by a copyeditor.

  41“the black obsidian Pyramid”: before this line Burroughs added as an insert on the 1965 MS for SM3 a couple of unused lines from the same section in SM1, and in the process the “gold fish five feet long” in the original became “three feet long” (27).

  41“The perfect product”: an earlier draft precedes these lines with a fuller explanation that includes the Trak motto used in “Dead On Arrival”; “The model always held up to a Trak man is the virus: INVADE? DAMAGE . . . OCCUPY . . . We don’t multiply we simplify the wants of the consumer . . Or more accurately we simplify the consumer himself . . People are merchandise . . We don’t sell things to people we sell people to things . . .” (OSU 85; 2.4). The methods of Trak parallel Burroughs’ description of junk as the “ideal product” in the “Deposition” added to Naked Lunch (201).

  42“Smell death bed pictures” to “Und
erstand: fee”: instead of these lines, which do not derive from SM1, at this point SM3 27 ended the chapter with a slightly revised version of the ending to the “trak” section in SM1: “Trak police made us . . . Joe get going . . .’ So that is the whole story . . . a low pressure area . . . Circuit judge’s sentence of death.” The last line therefore made a link to the hanging corpses that appear in the first line of “Early Answer” in SM3.

  42“erogenous smells to Monterrey”: the first line of “Early Answer” in SM3 28 has an alternative phrasing, “on the road to Monterrey,” a hand written insert made by Burroughs onto the 1965 MS for SM3 which repeats the source of this line as it appears in the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter (page 136).

  Early Answer

  In the 1966 Soft Machine this chapter only featured new material, whereas the 1968 edition—like the 1962 MS—broke the previous chapter in two and began “Early Answer” with a page assembled from the “street of idiot pleasure” section of the first edition. Burroughs’ redactions of the 1961 text made already obscure material more difficult to follow, but much of the new material he added in late 1962 is equally difficult, and the structural coherence of the chapter is not easy to see. The material is often as fragmented and repetitious as any part of the book, although the chapter does work within the text as a whole through its recycling of phrases used elsewhere, including chapters that come earlier (“Who Am I To Be Critical?”) and later (“Dead Fingers Talk”); in retrospect, on a re-reading, we recognize its larger function.