The Soft Machine. William S. Burroughs
walks” around Tangier, both of which responded to Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-influenced lament that modernity had killed the magic of color (“We have seen too much pure, bright colour at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting”).26 Burroughs’ writing was just one in a range of experimental practices in different media that were visually-oriented, so it was logical that, after submitting his manuscript to Girodias in April 1961, he would go back to the beginnings of the book by turning to Brion Gysin for cover artwork.
Gysin was duly credited with the jacket design—impressive, if rather grey calligraphic forms, replaced by Burroughs’ colored ink drawing on the cover of the second edition—but his name is otherwise absent from The Soft Machine. This is in marked contrast to Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded where Gysin is referenced several times and credited in prefatory notes along with other collaborators. And yet the 1961 edition was, more than the later volumes in the trilogy, a collaborative production involving both Gysin and Allen Ginsberg (who wrote the unsigned jacket blurb). Not only did Gysin and Ginsberg correct the proofs for Burroughs that April—help he always sought, since he was a poor proofreader—they helped organize the final manuscript, working together in Paris while Burroughs was away in Tangier. Unlike Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, which he wrote in sections or chapters, what Burroughs left behind for submission was a largely continuous text. The published book is subdivided into fifty short titled sections, whereas the typesetting manuscript had only nine—four of them handwritten in the margins by Burroughs in blue ink—plus a number of line-space breaks. As well as trying to give the reader some space to breathe by inserting the section breaks at more or less regular intervals, Gysin and Ginsberg also both wrote blurbs to help promote the book, as indeed did Gregory Corso.
Corso’s short piece suggests the extreme difficulty even those closest to Burroughs had in describing The Soft Machine (“a fine epitome of the cut-up” was the best he could manage), while Gysin’s two-page typescript focused on the book as “a journey into the unknown,” on Burroughs’ mythic persona (“Tall, thin, oyster-pale, a bit stooped and transparent”), and his expertise in plant hallucinogens (“poppy, hemp, coca, bannesteria caapi, sacred mushrooms”).27 Ginsberg’s handwritten draft is interesting for what was left out of the blurb used on the Olympia jacket, including claims that the cut-up method was “applicable” to both psychoanalysis and politics, and a striking final quotation which advocated Burroughs’ method as hope for colonized peoples: “Sola esperanza del Mundo—Take it to Cut City.” However, despite his enthusiastic gratitude for the blurbs, disagreements began even before the book was published: “I cannot agree with Allen about the ending,” he wrote Gysin, admitting that “the book is experimental and difficult” but insisting, “I can’t do it over” (ROW, 75)—and yet that’s exactly what Burroughs decided to do.
“YOU HAVE TO WRITE FINIS”
The publishing history of The Soft Machine makes it entirely obvious that the book changed from the first edition published by Olympia in June 1961 to the second edition published by Grove in March 1966, because for five years everyone told Burroughs the same thing—that it was too difficult to read—and so he made it less cut-up and more readable when he moved publishers. It is equally obvious that the same logic also applied for the third edition published by John Calder in July 1968. And yet what’s obvious turns out to be wrong.
To begin with, Burroughs didn’t need to wait five years to recognize that The Soft Machine was almost unreadable. When Timothy Leary visited Tangier to take hallucinogens with him at the end of July 1961, he reported Burroughs’ reflections on the book published just a month earlier and his determination to write a different one next time: “The soft machine is too difficult. I am now writing a science-fiction book that a twelve-year old can understand.”28 The new book was Nova Express, and while Burroughs’ idea of what pre-teens could read is a stretch or a joke at his own expense, the point remains that the second volume of his Cut-Up Trilogy was defined against his first.29 What led Burroughs to revise The Soft Machine, however, was not general regret or negative feedback from friends, but the publishing contract for a specific book. In August 1962 he starred at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference, coordinated by the Scottish publisher John Calder who commissioned Burroughs to make a book of selections from his Olympia Press titles (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) in order to pave the way for Calder to publish Naked Lunch in the UK.30 As he began compiling Dead Fingers Talk that September, Burroughs told Paul Bowles: “I am very much dissatisfied with The Soft Machine and had to rewrite most of the material included in the book of selections” (ROW, 114). One opportunity to rewrite the book led directly to another.
The months following his success at the Edinburgh Conference were a crucial time for Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy. Assembling Dead Fingers Talk coincided with revising The Soft Machine, completing The Ticket That Exploded and submitting a new draft of Nova Express. In November 1962, Burroughs updated Bowles to say that he had now finished rewriting The Soft Machine, adding the expected verdict “and it seems a lot easier to read.”31 The manuscript he completed in late November 1962 is almost certainly the 129-page typescript archived at Columbia University, identified by Burroughs as “the original manuscript of the rewritten and revised version of The Soft Machine.”32 It is very similar to the book published by Grove in 1966, which means that, far from being separated by five years, the first and second editions were effectively only eighteen months apart.
Just as significantly, while Burroughs invited interest from Grove Press—sounding out Barney Rosset that October—he didn’t rewrite The Soft Machine for a new publisher but once again for Olympia. The clearest evidence for that is the otherwise confusing note printed in The Ticket That Exploded published by Olympia in December 1962, which advertised a “New revised and augmented edition” of The Soft Machine scheduled for February 1963. The month the book was meant to appear, Girodias apologised for his failure to publish it (“The money situation is bad . . . very bad”), testing Burroughs’ loyalty to the man who had published Naked Lunch but who never cut a straight deal.33 For the next eighteen months Burroughs repeatedly asked Girodias whether he was arranging a contract with Barney Rosset or John Calder for the revised Soft Machine, and was discouraged to find himself caught in “a bitter feud” between the American and British publishers that was still ongoing in spring 1965 (ROW, 189). The final stages of the book’s publication were complicated enough without a backstory in which publishers who fought the law to publish Burroughs ended up in legal fights with each other.
Indeed, Richard Seaver at Grove Press had a problem with Burroughs’ continued revisions, which didn’t end at the galley stage in October 1965;34 when Burroughs requested still more changes in December, at the risk of sounding “like an old St. Louis preacher” Seaver insisted “there comes a point at which you have to write finis to the writing of a book.”35 Burroughs persisted, however, in early January 1966 sending even more new material; but it was now too late for further changes, and all Seaver could do was respect Burroughs’ reluctance “to let the book go until you’re fully satisfied with it.” The idea of Burroughs being fully satisfied with any of his cut-up books was a kind of philosophical category error, because his methods did not lend themselves to “finish” in any meaning of the term. When he said of Nova Express that it was not “in any sense a wholly successful book,” or of The Ticket That Exploded, “It’s not a book I’m satisfied with,” it was the book as a form that really dissatisfied him.36 Nevertheless, he tried to succeed with Calder where he had failed with Grove, and