Nova Express (3 page)

The books' reception in the United States and Europe were mirror opposites of each other, since American readers only started the trilogy in 1964 with
Nova Express
, by which time
The Soft Machine
and
The Ticket That Exploded
had been out in Europe for two years. But this is to simplify, since British readers also had a cut-up trilogy-in-one, in the shape of
Dead Fingers Talk
(1963), which was made from revised selections of
Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine,
and
The Ticket
. In 1968 John Calder also brought out the much-revised British edition of
The Soft Machine
, so that the trilogy's first title had now become its final text, and then to cap it all, in 1980 Grove unwisely brought out in one volume a “trilogy” comprising
The Soft Machine
,
Nova Express,
and
The Wild Boys
.

In light of this confusion's masterpiece, it's less surprising that the history of
Nova Express
, the one “unrevised” edition, turns out to be more complicated than assumed. Constructing the history of its composition clarifies its position within Burroughs' oeuvre, but the initial clues to its status as part of a trilogy are given in the opening pages of the text itself.

One way that
Nova Express
distinguishes itself from the rest of the trilogy
is by naming other books by Burroughs, and in its second section it refers to
Naked Lunch
and
The Soft Machine
twice—in surprising terms:
“The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In
Naked Lunch
,
The Soft Machine
and
Nova Express
I show who they are.” Burroughs identifies
Nova Express
as the third of three books, but this is a trilogy
beginning with
Naked Lunch
and excluding
The Ticket
—an omission that turns out to be crucial for understanding the “trilogy.”
15

Contrary to the history of publication—in which
Nova Express
appeared in November 1964, almost two years after
The Ticket
—Burroughs had in fact written almost all of
Nova Express,
including this passage, months
before he even began
The Ticket
. Had it not been for delays at Grove Press and the speed with which Burroughs wrote
The Ticket That Exploded
for Olympia,
Nova Express
would have followed
The Soft Machine
, so that
The Ticket
would have been the third book of the trilogy. As much a composite text as the others,
Nova Express
was written and rewritten over a three-year period and, time-traveling back and forth within the trilogy's history, it would be entirely plausible to place it
first, second, and third in different trilogies of composition and publication. Perhaps the most meaningful paradox is that Burroughs began
Nova Express
as a sequel to
The Soft Machine
and completed it as a sequel to
The Ticket That Exploded
. Burroughs' own view was certainly paradoxical: hearing in 1963 that Grove Press had been offered contracts for
The Soft Machine
and
The Ticket
, he wrote confirming to Barney Rosset that Grove was “the only American publisher for this work but I certainly think
Nova Express
should be published first as a measure of logical sequence.”
16
The
logic
is hard to see, but Burroughs wrote
Nova Express
hoping that Grove would publish it before
Naked Lunch
,
as a way to strengthen their case against censorship, which is why for this book he cut down the sex.

Finally, it's astonishing to realize that throughout the 1960s Burroughs never once refers to “the cut-up trilogy” in any correspondence, manuscripts or interviews. In fact his only use of the term “trilogy” in this period, in a typescript from early 1962, alludes to the trilogy surprisingly given in
Nova Express
: “My present work is
Novia Express
[sic]—reference is to an exploding star or planet it could happen here—This is the last book of a trilogy—
Naked Lunch The Soft Machine
—The work I am writing now should make it clearer to the reader exactly what I was doing in
The Naked Lunch
and
The Soft Machine
.”
17
What's clear is that “the trilogy” is not what we thought it was, and that our readings need to be based on a more accurate history of the writing and rewriting of texts that are both multiple and composite.

“A REWRITE JOB”

In August 1961 Burroughs was living in Tangier at the Villa Muniria, where he had written most of
Naked Lunch
five years before. After completing
The Soft Machine
, that April he had made a false start on a novel called
The Ugly Spirit
, which was intended to be a “joint operation for Painter and Writer,” and spent the summer drawing, painting, making photo-collages and listening to static on transistor radios. At the end of July, Timothy Leary came to visit, bearing hallucinogenic drugs. Leary would later write in vivid detail about that psychedelic summer in Tangier with Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ian Sommerville, and Alan Ansen. As well as describing “When the Celestial Messenger Comes Wearing a Fedora,” Leary reported Burroughs' decision to write a new kind of cut-up novel, one that would be less “difficult” than
The Soft Machine
.
18
It was in this context that in August Burroughs announced to Brion Gysin: “I am writing a straight action novel that can be read by any twelve year old entitled
The Novia Express
” (
ROW
, 83). A week later, still apparently serious that his new work was suitable for teenage boys, he clarified that this was a “science fiction adventure story.”
19
Burroughs would drop one word and then change the spelling of another so that the title has its own trilogy of forms—
The Novia Express, Novia Express, Nova Express
—but, for reasons I will return to, it's significant that he began with a definite title in mind. Having decided the title, identified the genre, and made a start with what became the “Uranian Willy” section—which in places does read like a space invader video game—in mid-August Burroughs left Tangier for a three-month trip to the United States.

Leary had invited Burroughs to Massachusetts to research psilocybin mushrooms, and although the trip turned out very badly, it was important for
Nova Express
at this early stage in its writing. The impact shows in the text's categorical warning about ­hallucinogens—revising Burroughs' earlier enthusiasm and running against the grain of 1960s counterculture—in favor of promoting nonchemical means of consciousness expansion, which implicitly included his own writing. As he had told Leary at the start of the year, “I have achieved pure cut-up highs” (
ROW
,
64). Based in Brooklyn and with little to do but write—“No pot no sex no money” (91)—from September to November 1961 Burroughs concentrated on the book, leaving New York for the Beat Hotel in Paris as soon as he received an advance from Grove.

At the start and end of December 1961, Burroughs sent early chapters to Barney Rosset at Grove Press. More surprisingly, he also mailed them to Henry Wenning, a manuscript dealer in Connecticut. The fact that Burroughs was now selling typescripts of a work-in-progress made
Nova Express
a symbolic landmark in his career. This was not a financially lucrative deal, but the sale separated
Nova Express
both from Burroughs' previous novels and from the many short texts he sent to “no-paying far-out experimental magazines” (
ROW
, 59). The sales helped sustain Burroughs through times when he needed to pawn the tools of his trade: his typewriter, camera, and tape recorder.

From December 1961 to the end of February 1962, writing first in Paris and then London, Burroughs mailed Rosset more material at least four times, and then on March 30, mailed the first complete manuscript—only to admit three days later that it was “not in as good order as I would like,” enclosing more corrections, suggestions and material.
20
Since there's no more “plot” progression than there is “character” development, any structure would have been provisional because multiple permutations were possible. Burroughs' constant shifts in location were also connected, practically as well as figuratively, to the material he produced and the difficulties he had finding the right order for it. The international geography of
Nova Express
' writing history is as revealing as its chronology: as Burroughs explained to Wenning, “my methods of work and constant change of residence traveling with one suitcase makes for difficulty assembling complete typescripts.”
21
Barney Rosset encouraged Burroughs to send sections as he wrote them, and several times Burroughs had to ask Rosset to send copies back, having either lost or lost track of what he had written. At least by selling his manuscripts Burroughs preserved them, because his working methods and need to keep moving ensured the casual destruction of much of it.

During the next six months Burroughs started and finished
The Ticket That Exploded
for Olympia Press,
assembled
Dead Fingers Talk
for John Calder and began revising
The Soft Machine
—but nothing happened on
Nova Express
. The last two projects suggest he had an agenda in mind when asking Rosset at the start of October 1962 whether Grove had “a definite publication date for
Nova Express
” (he had changed the spelling of the title the previous month): “That was a rush job and I am not satisfied with the arrangement of material and some of the sections could do with a rewrite job.”
22
Contrary to appearances,
Nova Express
was
not
the one unrevised volume in the Cut-Up Trilogy, and in the third week of October Burroughs mailed Rosset a “revised and rearranged manuscript” (
ROW
, 115). He added a new chapter in March 1963 and submitted a new ending (which was never used) that October, when the typesetting was done, and then over a year later effectively revised
Nova Express
a second time, so extensive was the work Burroughs did on the galleys in July 1964, now back in Tangier where he had started the book three years earlier.

The three major stages of
Nova Express
' compositional history—the March and October 1962 manuscripts and the July 1964 revised ­galleys—generated a trilogy of alternative forms and resulted in a composite final text. Piecing together the March 1962 manuscript from incomplete archival copies, it was clearly similar in content to the published text, lacking for certain only three sections (“Pry Yourself Loose And Listen,” “Chinese Laundry,” and “Inflexible Authority”) and including three others that Burroughs later cut. However, the order was completely different and another eight sections differed significantly. The first ten chapters (often titled in block capitals in his first draft) began with “THE NOVIA EXPRESS” (later retitled “Uranian Willy”) and ended with “A DISTANT THANK YOU.” Other chapters followed in late December and mid-February, and a good deal more of the text was written in the six weeks leading up to his submission of the first complete manuscript on March 30, 1962. This was an especially significant period because Burroughs was now no longer cutting up his material, which is one reason he produced so much so quickly. As he announced on February 20, “I do not use scissors any more” (
ROW
, 99).

In his Foreword Note to
Nova Express
Burroughs acknowledged that he had used an “extension of Brion Gysin's cut-up method which I call the fold-in method,” a statement that begs many questions: How did the methods differ, in terms of materials used and results obtained? Is it possible to say which parts of
Nova Express
were cut-up and which folded-in? Should the book be called a “fold-in novel”? Telling Gysin in March 1962 that he was “using more and more cut up method of folding,” Burroughs seems to make “fold-in” a subcategory of “cut-up,” and while this is not the place to develop a taxonomy of forms, it's obvious that
Nova Express
contains not one but various types of “cut-up” and “fold-in” texts and that we lack the terms to describe and differentiate them—or even to distinguish them from Burroughs' “normal” writing: “he writes naturally now like cut up,” Allen Ginsberg observed in September 1962.
23

Burroughs' 170-page October 1962 manuscript, which was used as the typesetting copy, restructured the material to give it the order of the published text. He revised the titles of more than half a dozen sections, cut one, redacted several others and divided the novel into nine chapters, the last of which would be cut only at the galley stage. In his covering letter, Burroughs referred to its internal divisions as both “chapters” and “sections” and as “sections” and “subsections” (
ROW
, 115). The self-contradiction was typical of Burroughs, and although “section” and “subsection” are more surgically precise, he used “chapter” and “section” more frequently, and I have followed his general if inconsistent practice. In terms of content, the broad direction of manuscript revision was clear: Burroughs redacted cut-up sections and expanded narrative ones. In October 1962 he added two long narratives (“Chinese Laundry” and “Inflexible Authority”), which he suggested to Rosset “would make good advance publicity for the book,” potentially in
Evergreen Review
. Although the house journal of Grove Press did not take up the suggestion, it had already published two selections from
Nova Express
, in January and July 1962, and would publish one more in March the following year, while, less strategically, Burroughs contributed other parts to several short-lived little magazines.
24
In March 1963, he added another long piece, the 2,000-word “Pry Yourself Loose” section, adding what might be called a nova noir tone of hardboiled vitriol and giving a stronger narrative drive to the book's opening chapter.