The Ticket That Exploded. William S. Burroughs
the great majority of the book published as Nova Express in November 1964 had been written by March 1962. Burroughs’ first reference to what would become The Ticket That Exploded—informing Rosset, “I am currently working on a new novel” (ROW, 106)16—does not appear until late June 1962, and although he must have started it the previous month, this still confirms that The Ticket was not even begun until at least a month after the first draft of Nova Express was finished. And so while the history of publication invites us to think of The Ticket as preceding Nova Express by two full years, the history of composition tells us to see it as following straight after.
Then again, since almost all readers of The Ticket only know the revised edition of 1967, to understand how the parts of Burroughs’ trilogy relate to one another we need to know the writing history of not one but two versions of the text—even as one of the results of the trilogy is to call into question our very concept of “version” or “original.”
“WHAT AM I AN OCTOPUS?”
While he refers to it as a “short piece” rather than as part of his new novel, Burroughs first mentions material destined for The Ticket in a letter to Paul Bowles sent from the Beat Hotel in mid-May 1962.17 Titled “East Clinic Information,” it formed the start of the “vaudeville voices” section, although what’s most revealing is not the material Burroughs began with but the method: “Using the fold in technique more and more, results usually interesting if sometimes cryptic.” As Burroughs implies, he had already been folding rather than cutting his material for some time, and had in fact hung up his scissors almost three months earlier. The significance of this change in method is to separate The Ticket from The Soft Machine and Nova Express, both of which were begun (although not in the latter case completed) using his original cut-up technique. In contrast, The Ticket was a fold-in from the start.
As for the method itself, Burroughs gave the fullest descriptions in his talk “The Future of the Novel” at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference in August 1962, an event that was a turning point for his reputation, and as a Note published with a longer version of “vaudeville voices”: “In writing this chapter,” he begins, “I have used what I call ‘the fold in’ method that is I place a page of one text folded down the middle on a page of another text (my own or someone else’s)—The composite text is read across half from one text and half from the other—The resulting material is edited, rearranged, and deleted as in any other form of composition.”18 In private letters and in published statements such as this, Burroughs would repeatedly stress not the radical difference of his compositional methods but their similarity to others in respect of editing. This was a strategic counter to those who accused him of lazily producing haphazard nonsense, like the famous “UGH” reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement who in 1963 derisively compared his work to “the unplanned dribbling and splashing of the action painter.”19 Likewise, the review in Time magazine in November 1962 dismissed the fold-in method for taking pages of “newspaper, Shakespeare, or whatnot” and sticking them together “at random,” so that The Ticket “came daringly close to utter babble.”20 Burroughs’ counterattack included cutting up both hostile reviews, a ritualistic act of revenge that produced new material for the 1967 edition of the book in which he mocked Time’s own mocking phrases. But just as importantly, his insistence on exercising artistic control through careful editing responded to those who praised him for his techniques, including his own publishers.
In particular, Burroughs must surely have been frustrated by John Calder—as staunch a supporter of his work in London as Girodias in Paris or Rosset in New York—for the jacket blurb on Dead Fingers Talk. Published in Britain in 1963, this composite trilogy, made from selections of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and a good deal of The Ticket That Exploded,21 hailed Burroughs’ style as having “much in common with American action painting.” Around this time Burroughs drafted a defense of his methods, insisting “I am not an action writer whatever that may mean.”22 “The procedure,” he explained, “is not arbitrary but rather directed toward obtaining comprehensible and useable material—There is careful selection of the material used and even more careful selection of the material finally used in the narrative.” On the other hand, the comment he made in September 1962 when submitting his manuscript of The Ticket—“Find myself returning to straight narrative style of Naked Lunch” (ROW, 114)—suggests the problem he had lost sight of, since Naked Lunch is nobody else’s idea of a straight narrative.
The other problem with Burroughs’ experimental methods, and one of the difficulties they pose for anyone discussing them, is that there is no typical cut-up text or, within a book like The Ticket, even a typical cut-up section: he used multiple methods with multiple results and made multiple claims for their function—creative, political, therapeutic, scientific, even mystical (“Table tapping? Perhaps”).23 Burroughs used cut-ups for “poetic bridge work” and as a “fact assessing instrument” (ROW, 45), and the only common denominator was that his methods were neither random nor indiscriminate but driven by an empiricist’s sense of curiosity. Burroughs prized cut-up and fold-in techniques as ways to make discoveries that exceeded the predictable reach of the rational mind, so that the material itself led him to discover meanings and make connections. The Ticket illustrates Burroughs’ creative procedures through its blurring of distinctions between poetic fantasy and scientific fact and its equation of textual body with human body—pointing to the book’s origins as a testing of limits in terms of publishable form and content.
When Burroughs informed Barney Rosset that he was working on a “new novel” in June 1962, he specified that he was pushing the limits precisely in terms of the text’s most recurrent word, the body: “I am elaborating some far out areas with scenes and concepts more ‘obscene’ than anything in Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine,” he explained; “I was interested to carry certain concepts to the furthest possible limits as an experiment in writing technique” (ROW, 106). A thesis regarding sexual repression was essential to his analysis of power in his new book—“Now do you understand who Johnny Yen is? The Boy-Girl Other Half striptease God of sexual frustration”—and was implicit in The Ticket’s alternative working titles “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” and “If You Can’t Say It Sing It” (108). Openly homosexual, Burroughs in the early 1960s was at the forefront of enlarging the scope of what could be said, and Grove Press’s publication of Naked Lunch in 1962 duly became a legal and cultural landmark in that history.
The Ticket has more orgasms and penises than The Soft Machine and Nova Express put together and its descriptions of alien sex are perversely poetic, but Burroughs seems to have emphasized how sexually far out his new book was in order to deter Grove Press. Although he asked Rosset in June if he wanted to see the “thirty or forty pages” he had already written, and although the editor’s autograph note on the received copy states “yes very much,” Burroughs was already in negotiations with Maurice Girodias.24 And unlike Rosset, who was still anxiously holding back Naked Lunch (keeping copies locked in the warehouse until November 1962), Girodias had no fear of obscenity trials in Paris for publishing an English language book. Whereas Burroughs worked on Nova Express throughout 1962 expecting it to help pave the way for Grove to publish Naked Lunch, he wrote The Ticket for Olympia without worrying about its sexual, censorable content.
Burroughs composed The Ticket at almost twice the pace of Nova Express, which had taken eight months. At the start of July 1962 he announced he had already “half finished” the novel, which he “wrote at the rate of ten pages a day while writing a film scenario with the other hands, making recordings.”25 The rapid progress of The