The Soft Machine

  There are several partial draft typescripts titled “Early Answer” and they include both variant passages that are as cryptic as those in the published text and also more narrative material that Burroughs made obscure through editing. It is at this point in the 1965 galleys that the first significant inserts and cancellations appear, and for the third edition Burroughs made further small cuts and half-a-dozen additions, including one of 350 words. Toward the end of the chapter in the third edition, he also redacted and reorganized the 1961 material and, in a final act of confusion, ended “Early Answer” with what in the second edition is the first page of the next chapter, “Case Of The Celluloid Kali.”

  The second edition removed many capitals, most of which were retained for the third; following the 1962 MS, about a hundred have been restored here. The 1962 MS also had half-a-dozen short blocks of unused lines, adding up to 150 words, that were cancelled on the 1965 galleys; the longest block is given here.

  44 “Jimmy Sheffields”: from this point on all the material in the chapter was written for the revised edition of the book. “Jim Sheffield” is a character in Henry Kuttner’s novel Fury, cited in The Ticket That Exploded, while Jimmy Sheffields appears in the “Inflexible Authority” section of Nova Express, other parts of which are recycled here.

  45 “where the awning flaps”: the “awning flapped” previously in The Ticket That Exploded but the phrase originated in the last page of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky. As he worked on revising The Soft Machine, Burroughs wrote to acknowledge Bowles: “Incidentally got 2 chapter headings from fold ins with The Sheltering Sky, Pages from Cold Point and A Distant Episode—Chapter titles are :: ‘Last Hints’ and ‘Where The Awning Flaps’” (Burroughs to Bowles, November 21, 1962; HRC). In his letter Burroughs quoted a short passage that appears near verbatim in “Where The Awning Flaps” (pages 103–4).

  47 “cook down the prisoners for jelly”: the 1962 MS has “for jolly,” a phrasing credited to Jack the Ripper and cited by Burroughs in Naked Lunch. The phrase appears with “jolly” in the same passage from the “Who Am I To Be Critical?” chapter as other phrases cut up here.

  51 “washed back on Spain repeat performance page”: this phrase was an insert typed by Burroughs onto the 1965 galleys, and marks the point at which the chapter ended in SM2 51. The phrase did not appear in the 1962 MS or in SM3 32 (which has a different line; “sad servant in sepia clouds of Panama”), both of which continue without a chapter break.

  51–52 “He walked through empty market booths”: an eight-page typescript titled “EARLY ANSWER” gives more detail of the scene: “He walked through eddies of dust and papers and onion skins—Empty market booths, shutters clattering—Boys with apple faces from 1910 loaded empty crates into wagons” (Berg 11.31).

  52 “Back to his room full of shadows”: the 1962 MS has cancelled lines at this point, which were themselves edited down from a longer version in what is probably the earliest draft: “Back to his room to face the ghosts of the assassins who had been sent out against him and failed—There he was sitting on the bed the Italian hood from the Mafia—‘The trouble with you is K9 you never learned to use your left—All you can do is slug with the right—I don’t feel against you—You were right with me so I’ve come to tell you—There will be others sent out and sooner or later’—He hummed a little tune—‘Why don’t you wise up and pack in’ K9 saw a vista of the yellow dry landscape of Minraud and prisoners eaten alive by white hot ants dying slowly over the centuries” (OSU 85; 2.2). Parts of this material were cut-up and used in the text (e.g., “You never learned to use your Jimmy”).

  53 “bought second hand in hock shops”: the earliest draft has a longer passage that dramatizes Burroughs’ famous “banker drag” apparel: “Biologic Agents are rarely allowed more than four hundred dollars per month—And most of that goes into equipment tape recorders and cameras that must often be abandoned or sold at a loss when the word comes as it always does sooner or later—‘Move—Fast—Be out of the country by tomorrow at the latest—They have your coordinate points—Your hotel is bugged—You are cut off—­Messages intercepted—’ Remember the enemy strategy is machine strategy and machines move slow even though they think fast—Slow but sure the enemy screens feeling converging—Time to move on—So K9 had very little money for clothes though he liked to dress well in conservative banker drag he called it” (OSU 85; 2.2).

  53 “and sorted out his name”: at this point the 1962 MS has a line that was cancelled on the 1965 galleys but appears in SM3 34: “On the bed wasn’t exactly a smile.”

  53 “She started screaming”: a preceding line cancelled on an early typescript which shows numerous revisions, explains who “She” is: “All good things come to the woman who lived here” (Berg 11.31).

  54 “Come level on average—Careful”: an early draft that lacks these final phrases has instead a passage where the narrator works out where he is from the language spoken (concluding, “France obviously, or Belgium”), and then makes what would have been the only explicit reference in the text to the influence of L. Ron Hubbard: “He walked out into the street past 2 girls who were discussing Scientology in English” (OSU 2.2).

  55 “Identical erections in the kerosene lamp”: “in the” has been restored from the 1962 MS; the words were cancelled on the 1965 galleys, while SM3 35 has “in a.”

  56 “rotten smell of ice”: the 1962 MS has one cancelled line immediately after this phrase—“Have to move fast”—and another after the following phrase; “Wait til the signs are right.” This second phrase is given in Junky as a definition of the word mañana (95).

  56 “the Homicide Act”: Burroughs followed and cut up newspaper reports of the successful campaign in Britain during the early 1960s to abolish the death penalty for murder. “Parker” is almost certainly a reference to Lord Parker, Lord Chief Justice of England throughout the decade.

  56 “being in position”: changes SM2 58 (“ebbing”). The version in SM2 is plausible given the recurrence of the phrase “ebbing carbon dioxide.” But on the 1962 MS Burroughs typed “ebing,” an obvious typo for “being,” and he corrected “ebbing” to “being” by hand on the MS for SM3 (Lilly 66.1).

  56 “K9 stood in the shadow”: an early draft has “Lee” throughout, rather than K9 followed by one anomalous use of Lee. The draft also has several variants, including an additional line before Lee shoots The Broker: “Always nail them with their own gimmicks” (Berg 11.1).

  57 “One more change”: both SM2 and SM3 and their galleys have “change,” although it is “chance” on the 1962 MS, and the phrase “one more chance” appears later in the chapter.

  58 “J’aime ces types vicieux qu’ici montrent la bite”: in the 1967 edition of The Ticket That Exploded the line appeared incorrectly (“ces type vicieux qu’ici montre”), even though the ungrammatical French in the phrase had been fully corrected in 1961 by the Olympia Press copyeditors of SM1, who restored the plurals (“types” and “montrent”) and also changed “qu’ici” to “qui se” (CU 2.3). The French copyeditors seem to have assumed the words had been misheard; however, their correction changed not only the grammar but the meaning, from “I like the vicious types who show their cocks here” to “I like the vicious types who show their cocks.” Burroughs deliberately restored his version, both for The Ticket and twice for the revised edition of The Soft Machine (see also page 119). In 1962 he typed this line as he wanted it (“J’aime ces types vicieux qu’ici montrent la bite”), correcting by hand one error (changing “montre” to “montrent”), albeit missing his typo (“viciuex” for “vicieux”) and then, even more emphatically, later in the 1962 MS he carefully typed out and pasted the line onto his typescript in between the other pages cut and pasted from a copy of SM1 (CU 2.4), although again he made an apparent typo (“q’ici”). The reason for preferring the bad French, and the significance of it, is hinted at in the word that
always precedes the line in the text: “pissoir.” In “Paris Please Stay the Same” (an essay in which he directly discusses “Ungrammatical French”) Burroughs specifies where “here” was and why it mattered; citing the phrase with every error as “J’aime ces type vicieux, q’ici montre la bite,” he recalls having read it on the wall of a Parisian pissoir—and declares them “words that could have been written by Rimbaud” (The Adding Machine [Grove, 2014], page 131). As pissoir poetry, as a text of homosexual desire, and as an authentic record of a certain place and time, the ungrammatical words had a specificity and deviance that Burroughs respected.

  59 “a brass bed in Mexico”: at this point the 1962 MS has a phrase that was cancelled on the 1965 galleys but appears in SM3 48; “Mucous of the world.”

  60 “The Mexican boy dropped his pants”: on the 1965 MS for SM3 Burroughs cancelled a small number of phrases in the preceding paragraphs, but from this point on he redacted and reordered the material more substantially. SM2 63 had the lines from “whiff of dried jissom” to “the other two watched” here, but, like SM3, the 1962 MS has these lines in the final paragraph of the chapter, where they have been moved for this edition.

  62 “You is feeling the hot quick” to “last review”: these lines do not appear in the 1962 MS and were an insert made on the 1965 galleys.

  63 “Maze of dirty pictures” to “in drag”: these lines, which are in the 1962 MS, are not in SM3; they appeared in SM2 despite being cancelled on the galleys.

  63 “silver paper” to “cemetery”: these lines were an insert made on the 1965 galleys, and did not appear in the 1962 MS.

  63 “Who?” to “meant if they start job for instance”: these paragraphs did not appear in SM3.

  64 “Whiff of dried jissom” to “watched”: at the same time that these lines were moved on the 1965 galleys, one preceding line in the 1962 MS (“Suitcases all open a man comes back to mucus of the world”) and several following were cancelled on the galleys: “A man comes back to summer dawn smell of his crotch—I was caught in the gymnasium jacking off your cousin twice removed in a wake of jissom—I cannot find words to castigate the lithe aloof young men whereby a boy’s mother takes over—They are all empowered to unfurl the nastiest colors—Belt her—Your bunk mates are rotten if they start job.”

  64 “street light” to “long time ago”: these lines, which do not appear in SM3, were a typed insert, scotch-taped onto the 1965 galleys.

  64 “Clom Fliday”: after the final phrase in the chapter in the 1962 MS and SM2, for SM3 Burroughs added 350 words of new material and concluded the chapter with the opening page of “Case Of The Celluloid Kali.”

  Case Of The Celluloid Kali

  Framed by newly written material, the middle half of the chapter derives from no less than seven different sections of the first edition of The Soft Machine. However, as several of their titles suggest, these sections had a single character in common: “hello i’m johnny yen,” “johnny comes on,” “yen in space,” “the total recall of the survival artist,” the danish operation,” “the cut,” and “white subway.” The sections were scattered in the first edition, and by re-ordering their sequence Burroughs actually created a stronger continuity. Early typescripts reveal a good deal more about Johnny Yen, who was probably inspired by a boy Burroughs met in Denmark—“A Danish cockteaser gave me essential character” (Letters, 365)—in August 1957.

  Several pages of the material originating in the first edition were used in two sections of Dead Fingers Talk. As noted, for the third edition, Burroughs added what had been the opening page of this chapter in the second edition onto the end of the previous chapter. Structurally, the second edition therefore followed the 1962 MS, which began the chapter with its title spelled out in block caps using (as did early drafts) the definite article (“The Case”); curiously the article was dropped in the 1962 MS list of chapter headings. For this edition, almost fifty capitals have been restored.

  65 “any identity any body”: an early draft adds a caveat: “The one thing i won’t do is change sex—But that may come—(know what they mean if they start job for instance)—” (Berg 12.15).

  66–67 “the Danish rights on my novel Expense Account”: an early draft had a cancelled alternative title for his Cut-Up Trilogy, referring to “the possibilities of a Danish edition of my novel Exploded Lunch” (Berg 5.5).

  67–74 “Bar backed by pink shell” to “with such hair too—red”; unlike the opening paragraphs, these passages derive from SM1, with very few changes. In Naked Lunch, “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” begins by describing a “bar backed by pink shell” (62), confirming the origins of The Soft Machine material. However, there’s also a more surprising textual and structural connection to SM2: here, Burroughs’ fictitious novel “Expense Account” marks the switch point between new writing and material from SM1, but the phrase “Expense account” came from Naked Lunch, where it appears in the final words of the section before the start of “Hassan’s Rumpus Room.”

  67 “A boy slid off a white silk bar stool”: Johnny Yen is introduced rather differently in an early draft: “Lee ordered a drink . . He was about to walk over and make some juke box conversation . . when the boy pivoted around with a sudden lithe movement . . It was the most beautiful face Lee had ever seen, but flat and dead as a tooth paste ad . . Lee looked straight into the eyes . . A low pressure area . . A sucking emptiness . .

  The boy smiled . . He came over and sat on the bar stool beside Lee and looked straight into his face . . ‘Hello’ he said . . ‘I’m Johnny Yen’” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

  67 “Hello, I’m Johnny Yen”: in a rough typescript that is probably the earliest to feature this sexually ambivalent character, the name as well as gender are unexpected: “A nude figure of indeterminate sex stood up slowly on the dais . . . What looked like a pink jock strap ran around the figure’s middle, a sort of a band of undifferentiated tissue . . Actually his or her whole body seemed made of this strange pink substance […] At one moment a beautiful young woman, a hard eyes liz, a boy an angular graceless fag […] She said her name was Mary Jen . . I noticed her face was faintly delineated with scar tissue phosphorescent in the pink neon” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

  67 “The Big Physician”: the early drafts reveal the sexual history of the surgeon as well as his creation: “But you know he’s not a full time plastic surgeon . . It’s his hobby and he only takes cases that interest him . . And I’ll tell you something else . . He is really a woman. A sex change case . . They say he operated on himself . .” (OSU 87; 17.130A). Hinting at why he refers above to the Danish rights of his fictitious novel, in 1964 Burroughs published a part of this material about the doctor as “The Danish Operation” (Arcade 1), taken from the short section in SM1 of that title. In 1952 George Jorgensen had became the first famous case of sex reassignment surgery, becoming Christine after treatment in Denmark.

  67 “And I have All of ‘You’”: restores italics as well as capitals not in SM2 69. An early five-page draft typescript lacks this reference to the Cole Porter jazz standard but continues much more explicitly about Johnny’s ideological relationship to his audience, including an apparent invocation of George Orwell (whose Nineteen Eighty-Four was a reference point for Burroughs in 1959 and 1960): “he turned to the audience ‘yes just stay right at your little tables just where I put you only you don’t know it was me that put you there not so long as I keep talking you’ll never know it was me that put you where you are and made you think it was the only place and made you like it or say you do and say it often and remember Little Brother is so kind so very very kind to have given you any place at all you ungrateful little beast […] and you have to say I all the time and when you say I am there and try and get I out’” (Berg 4.20).

  67 “from the audience”: in a rare marginal correction to SM1 material pasted into the 1962 MS, Burroughs indicated “No Caps” for this phrase and for “hea
vy blue drink.”

  69 “The Spanish”: in SM1 119 this is idiomatically “The Spains,” which Burroughs changed on the 1965 galleys and for SM3.

  72 “The doctor was sitting” to “green juice”: these lines derive from “the danish operation” section of SM1 and were published, together with most of “the cut” and part of the “border city” sections, in the first issue of the British magazine Arcade in 1964.

  72 “my friend Mr D The Agent”: an early draft with several variants has “Mister Lee The Agent” (Berg 4.32).

  72 “between the two sides of him”: although Burroughs was unreliable in dating his manuscripts, one typescript page identified as “original MS of Naked Lunch 1954 Tanger, Morocco” is surely the earliest draft of this material. Overlapping the end of “the danish operation” and part of the next section in SM1, “the cut,” it features unused lines at this point, including: “He give you this wonder drug and you see him a beautiful woman . . But sometime the drug wear off in the act and a citizen comes up on him and wig” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

  73 “Empty space of the original”: the 1962 MS has a cancelled phrase that appears in Dead Fingers Talk (158); “Next step with Benway.”

  73 “So I tailed” to “pop out”: these lines do not derive from SM1.

  73 “The Mandrake Club”: this was a small London jazz club in Meard Street, Soho.

  73 “The boy looked at me” to “red”: after these lines, from the “white subway” section of SM1, the rest of the chapter was new material.

  75 “She bringa the heat three dimensional”: corrects SM2 79 (“brings”), as in the 1962 MS, SM3 49, and both the 1965 galleys and the SM3 galleys (Lilly 66.4), on both sets of which Burroughs made the correction by hand.

  The Mayan Caper

  Burroughs must have been writing this chapter in late 1962 while preparing The Yage Letters for City Lights, reinforcing the strong connection between The Soft Machine and South American material. The “drunken fraud” in Mérida who acts as the reporter’s “Time Guide” certainly inherits the cynicism of Lee’s encounters with medicine men in Colombia a decade earlier. The narrative, which appears almost identically across the 1962 MS and both the second and third editions of the book, was originally entitled “Prison Without Bars,” in keeping with its sensational newspaper genre. It was first published in the Edinburgh magazine Gambit in spring 1963. The text in Gambit has over 50 small differences, lacks about 90 words, and has some 200 extra words—almost half of which appear in a revealing final “Note.”