Nova Express. William S. Burroughs
nova also designates what is new or news: it was in this double sense that he originally titled his novel The Novia Express.
A year before making these two collages, in spring 1964 as he waited to receive the Nova Express galleys, Burroughs had been building filing systems modeled on newspaper archives: “Your reporter selects a clipping from the file labelled Daily Express, Saturday, April 25, 1964 (London).”30 In July, as he corrected the galleys, he physically framed his book in terms of newspapers by inserting the same phrase to give a new final line to both the first and last sections of the text: “September 17, 1899 over New York.”31 Burroughs became obsessed with this date, using it in many texts, but its significance lies in its provenance in a newspaper. In February 1964 he wrote Gysin of his discovery: “The New York Times for September 17, 1899 came through a few days ago. I saw at once that the message was not of content but format. Newspapers are cut up by format […] This is the secret of their power to mould thought feeling and subsequent events” (ROW, 139). Restating what he had already made explicit in Nova Express in terms of “Juxtaposition Formulae” (“Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content”), Burroughs was inspired to produce his own newspaper format pieces using three columns, and during 1964 and 1965 he made many such texts. Although these have always been seen as entirely separate from his book-length cut-up work, the ending of Nova Express insists otherwise: “Well that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks . . . fresh southerly winds a long time ago.” Those “city desks” of newspaper offices parallel the sección de sucesos in his Nova Express collage and were a clear reflection of Burroughs’ vision in February 1964: “Why not write a novel as if you were sitting at the city desk?” (ROW, 143). And those “fresh southerly winds” would be associated with newspapers in the archives Burroughs later assembled for sale; Folio 108, which he titled “Fresh Southerly Winds Stir Papers On The City Desk,” gathers together a dozen mid-1960s newspaper-format publications, from “The Daily Tape Worm” to one called “The Nova Express.”32
Burroughs may not have had in mind his late-1950s character “Fats” Terminal, who “edits a newspaper known as the Underground Express,”33 but Nova Express was definitely “underground.” Not quite, perhaps, like the underground press of little magazines to which Burroughs contributed—since a publishing house like Grove was “alternative” but still commercial, not aligned with the self-publishing networks that sprang up in the 1960s. Rather, it was underground in its aim to serve a resistance movement against an occupying power, its cut-up methods intended to sabotage an essentially fascist aboveground world. Nova Express is “about” the Nova Mob, but from the start Burroughs saw it as opposed to and directed against what in 1960 he called “the Beaverbrook Mob,” referring to the Anglo-Canadian owner of the Daily Express, and fascist sympathizer, Lord Beaverbrook.34 In fact, Beaverbrook was one of a trio of press barons in Burroughs’ sights, alongside Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune) and William Randolph Hearst (from the San Francisco Examiner to New York’s Daily Mirror). Many early drafts of what became “Last Words,” were addressed directly to all three: “PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL BACK. PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL BACK. RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW FOR ALL TO SEE. MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HURST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE.”35 Dating from as early as May 1960, this and other “Last Words” drafts were written over a year before Burroughs began work on Nova Express, but he never used any such material for The Soft Machine and would make relatively few references to the press in The Ticket That Exploded. However, he saw Nova Express in terms of newspapers from first to last.
The most striking instance of how early and how emphatically Burroughs associated the book’s original title with newspapers appears in a long canceled passage from the section “Too Far Down The Road.” Probably composed in late 1961, the typescript repeats the phrase “To readers of The Daily Express” twice in order to frame a reference to “The Novia Express,” and also cites the title of one of Luce’s magazines (“Looking through Time”). Readers of “The Novia Express” would have got the point, and this material stayed in until the galley stage in July 1964. Burroughs didn’t simply cut it, however: he transferred it from one medium to another, in April 1965 recording “Are You Tracking Me,” a sonic experiment that includes the key phrase “To readers of The Daily Express.”
In August 1961 the first chapter heading of the manuscript in its earliest draft had carried the original title of the book as a whole, “THE NOVIA EXPRESS.” Here, the “one hope left in the universe” is to “wise up the marks”: “Show them the rigged wheel of Life-Time-Fortune. Storm The Reality Studio.” The book therefore opened with not only the clearest possible assault on the fraudulent “reality” projected by Luce’s newsmagazine empire; in the context of references to Life, Time, and Fortune, the section and book title “The Novia Express” also identified Burroughs’ text as alternative reportage, “news” of a different reality. But it’s significant that the book uses words cut from newspapers quite recognizably in just three specific sections (“Extremely Small Particles,” “There’s A Lot Ended,” “Are These Experiments Necessary?”), and that these are all introduced by dates: from “Dec. 17, 1961—Past Time” to “March 17, 1962, Present Time Of Knowledge.” Attacking the temporality and referentiality standardized by Time magazine, Nova Express mainly uses cut-up news items that were of passing, topical interest in December 1961 and March 1962 (crime reports, celebrity events), and renders them deliberately obscure. For Burroughs, “Present Time” was not determined by public events or the official historical record but was a point of personal intersection, and from many pages of cut-up newspaper source material he chose to keep few fragments of “historical” significance for use in Nova Express.
Burroughs’ attitudes toward history, news, and time are suggested by the revisions he didn’t make for the revised manuscript he submitted in October 1962, even though the historical context could scarcely have been more urgent or more resonant. Two days before he mailed his manuscript, Kennedy was addressing Khrushchev on television at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were upgrading the alert status for nuclear war to DEFCON 2, its highest-ever condition of readiness. Cut up with tittle-tattle about film stars and murder stories, Burroughs’ typescript for “There’s A Lot Ended,” written in March 1962, had included prophetic “rumors about Castro,” but that October he neither restored the line nor updated his manuscript, even though the eyes of the world were on Cuba and the world seemed on the brink of nova.
Burroughs’ attack on Time was also a personal counterattack, most directly in response to its review of the Grove Press Naked Lunch, which was so offensive he sued the magazine, winning token damages of £5 in November 1963. The Time review had also attacked the then-unpublished Nova Express, which it described as coming “daringly close to utter babble, according to reports.”36 Burroughs cut up the text from Time (and the libel case documents) and recycled the phrase “utter babble” in two magazine-format publications printed in 1965, his own version of Time and APO-33, in the spirit of what goes around comes around. Or as he put it in Towers Open Fire, intoning the words over canisters of reality film: “Curse go back.”
Of the trinity of media magnates attacked in early drafts of “Last Words,” by far the most significant was Henry Luce. Nova Express was Burroughs’ central weapon against the monopolistic power of Luce’s own “trilogy” of Time, Life, and Fortune, titles that not only named but in effect copyrighted Time, Life, and Fortune. Luce’s name appears in dozens of typescripts dating from 1960, several addressed directly to him, demanding he dismantle his “Time Machine.”37 Burroughs’ public counterattack had started in 1960 with Minutes to Go, a manifesto that both addressed potential allies in the cut-up