Nova Express (21 page)

4 “
Naked Lunch
and
The Soft Machine
”: corrects
NEX
6 (“and
Soft Machine
”). Due to a change made by the copyeditor in the final long galleys (OSU 5.12), the 1964 edition introduced a confusion in the titles of Burroughs' books by dropping the definite article in order to impose an incorrect consistency.

4 “
hallucinogen drugs
”: in a sign of how new the term was, the copyeditor notes
“check spelling”
besides
“hallucigen,”
which was how Burroughs spelled the word on his typescript (OSU 4.10) and how it appeared in
Evergreen Review.

4 “blow the place up behind them”: closing speech marks have been added here, and cut before “And what does my program,” undoing changes made by the copyeditor in keeping with manuscripts (OSU 4.9, ASU 7) and
Evergreen Review.

5 “I order total resistance directed against The Nova Conspiracy and all those engaged in it”: an early draft (no date, but not later than early 1962) has the most substantive variant on these and following lines:
“I order total resistance to The Novia Conspiracy.
Rub out their words and images forever.

A narcotics agent infiltrated the beatniks by writing bad poetry. WE are not bad writers but our purpose is ultimately the same: to expose and arrest Novia Criminals. In
The
Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine
and
The
Novia Express
i have shown who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested.
These books were written to expose and arrest criminals. Minutes to go.
This is war to extermination”
(ASU 7).

5 “engaged in it”: closing speech marks have been added here, and cut from before “The purpose” and from around “Signed
. . .
Police,” in keeping with both manuscripts (OSU 4.9, ASU 7) and
Evergreen Review.

5 “prisoners of the earth to
come out
”: the “to” is not in any manuscript witnesses or
Evergreen Review
but the apparent error was allowed to stand in the galleys.

5 “(Signed)”: one typescript and
Evergreen Review
have:
“Signed The Regulator Interstellar Board of Health”
(Berg 11.18). The original made more sense of what follows in the text, which is “Post Script Of The Regulator,” while the use of the term “Post Script” and the signature confirm the original titling of “Prisoner, Come Out” as an “OPEN LETTER.”

6 “Apomorphine is made from morphine”: underscoring the centrality of the drug to his book, the note was an addition Burroughs made in October 1963.

PRY YOURSELF LOOSE AND LISTEN

This section appeared in neither the March or October 1962 manuscripts, but was composed in spring 1963 (note its reference to
Newsweek
March 4, 1963). That it was added to the manuscript at this time—as a five-page typescript on legal-sized paper (ASU 4.3 and OSU 4.9)—can be inferred from Burroughs' letter to Rosset of March 15: “Enclose another chapter for
Nova Express
. This chapter to be inserted immediately after ‘Prisoners, Come Out'. I think it makes the following section (‘Pack Your Ermines, Mary') considerably clearer” (
ROW
, 120).
The section was published incomplete (ending “You have to move fast on this job”), with minor differences, in
Gnaoua
1 (Spring 1964). Brilliantly capturing its terrific vitriol, Burroughs' live recording of the section is one of the standout tracks on
The Best of William Burroughs
(1998).

6 “We were on the nod”: the first draft of this line is both more and less precise astronomically: “
We were on the nod in Uranus after a rumble in a remote galaxy
” (Berg 15.46).

6 “theatre [
. . .
] theatre”: corrects
NEX
8 (“theater”). Although on the galleys (OSU 5.11) Burroughs specifically asked to respect his choice of British spelling, the copyeditor preferred the American spelling for “theatre” and “amphitheatre.” Burroughs wrote to Seaver: “As I have noted on your letter ‘grey' ‘theatre' should remain English” (October 24, 1963; SU). The one instance of “gray” (in
NEX
115) has been corrected to “grey” for this edition (p. 121).

8 “The Intolerable Kid and your reporter”: the first draft continues:
“He's a great guy is I&I or at least he's big—But Jesus Christ I hate him—Everyone does that of course being his ­profession—”
(Berg 15.46).

8 “And I&I is fast”: heavily canceled on the typescripts is the original name before “I&I” was inserted;
“Percussion Paul” (
OSU 4.9, ASU 4.3).

11 “split this whistle stop wide open tomorrow”: one long early draft continues:
“And he rips into action—I mean he jumps right onto board and they are in a car three hundred miles an hour across solid ice—The Board Director at the wheel with the Kid clamped on him shoving his foot right down to the floor—‘All right you board gooks—You called me—You want action—I'll by God show you action—faster! Faster! Faster! Faster and uglier'—And The Board is shitting and pissing themselves as they begin to see just who they have called and just how much of a shit he cares what happens to them in the blow up—The whole fucking machine in a long fast skid for nova—
[
. . .
]

“
And I had to laugh till I pissed seeing those two-bit welching board bastards getting the nigger gook errand boy routine back with compound interest—Then I dig The Kid is wising up the marks and I say ‘What's with you? You wig already?'

“He just looks at me and says—‘Maybe I got a new angle—Sheets are empty many years.'

“
‘Well,' I says, ‘It's about time—The old angle is worn down to a white dwarf.
'
”
(Berg 37.15).

So Pack Your Ermines

SO PACK YOUR ERMINES

Titled “The Carbonic Caper” in all drafts until Burroughs retyped it for the October 1962 MS, this section was written shortly before he mailed Rosset the March 1962 MS. On March 15 he refers to “a section I had just written entitled The Carbonic Caper” in the course of explaining to Jack Kerouac how he had folded in this material together with the closing lines of
The Subterraneans
to form the penultimate section of
Nova Express
, “Melted Into Air” (Burroughs to Kerouac, March 15, 1962; CU, Kerouac Collection).
Earlier drafts show a large number of very minor revisions, indicating the care Burroughs took to revise small details: e.g., the Carbonic Kid “is turning purple” and “screams” in first draft (OSU 2.2), but “is turning blue” and “yells” in second draft (OSU.4.9), which is near verbatim the final text.

15 “I was traveling with Limestone John”: early drafts (Berg 15.56, OSU 2.2) lack the opening lines and begin here.

15 “It worked like this::”: restores the double colon that Burroughs indicated on the October 1962 MS, only one of which was not canceled by the copyeditor (after “special purpose”;
NEX
100, p. 105 here); thirteen other double colons have been restored throughout the text.

NABORHOOD IN AQUALUNGS

A cut-up of the previous section, “So Pack Your Ermines,” and the following section, “The Fish Poison Con,” this section was almost certainly written at the same time (March 1962) and as a second part of what was then titled “The Carbonic Caper.” The earliest version (OSU 2.2), a rough 4-page typescript, lacks the final 30 words and has about 360 more, almost half of which were canceled on the manuscript. Cut-up variants in this draft include permutations such as “Then he was an American fascist with old Surrealist lark.” Although the section is at first frustrating, its beautifully judged recycling and recombination of phrase fragments makes it one of the most evocative on repeat readings.

THE FISH POISON CON

The earliest complete manuscript of this section is a 6-page typescript using this title and identified by Burroughs (possibly for Barney Rosset but much more likely in late 1961 for the benefit of the manuscript dealer Henry Wenning) as “1st draft” of “Chapter 12” (OSU 2.4). The section was therefore moved from the second half of the March 1962 MS toward the beginning of the October 1962 MS. This typescript lacks about 100 words and has just over 100 more, and differs in phrasing and punctuation, including having far fewer capitalizations (e.g., for phrases like “Old Sow Got Caught In The Fence”). There is also a “2nd draft” which shows only minor differences from the published version, principally an even more extensive use of lower case first-person “i” than in the first draft. The section was published in
Evergreen Review
7.29 (March 1963) almost verbatim except for one significant difference: the text continues with the second half of “No Good—No Bueno” (from “I spit blood” onward). Burroughs recorded most of the section for his 1965 album
Call Me Burroughs
.

21 “checking store attendants for larceny”: the first draft continues:
“and a rattier crew never went on tour”
(OSU 2.4).

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).