The Soft Machine. William S. Burroughs

forward,” he wrote, insisting it was “no land of the imagination” but real and “dangerous in a most literal sense” (420). Burroughs had been through messianic periods before—in 1956 mocking himself as “Pop Lee Your Friendly Prophet”—and would do again—“the time to be messianic is now,” he declared a decade later, in absolute earnest this time, just after publication of his final edition of The Soft Machine (ROW, 286).6 He was serious too in July 1959, when the impact of living and working alongside Brion Gysin encouraged in him the self-belief for a mission to discover the unknown through his “sequel to Naked Lunch”: “I don’t know where it is going or what will happen. It is straight exploration like Gysin’s paintings, to which it is intimately connected” (Letters, 420). Such total conviction was what he needed in early October when Gysin showed Burroughs the first accidental slicings of newspapers he had made while cutting a mount for a drawing with his Stanley knife. Gysin’s knife fell into waiting hands, and led to Burroughs’ decade-long commitment to cut-up experiments in multiple media from film to photography, scrapbooks to tape recorders. More immediately, the question prompted by the origins of The Soft Machine is what “straight exploration” meant in the context of writing a “sequel.”

      “EXPLODED LUNCH”

      Over the next eighteen months Burroughs tried out three alternative titles and the content of his new work changed considerably, but he kept referring to it as a sequel to Naked Lunch. The connection was spelled out in the unimaginative first title he considered in September 1959: “Maybe Naked Free Lunch” (Letters, 427). That month he confirmed the material connection between the two books, asking Ginsberg to look for manuscripts not used in the recently-published Naked Lunch “on mythical South American places featuring Carl” and “Scandinavian (Trak) material” (425). This particular material, which indeed ended up in The Soft Machine, dated back two years and was written after and quite separately from “Interzone,” the manuscript completed in June 1957 that was the basis for three quarters of Naked Lunch. Such precision helps move beyond the long-circulated but always vague standard version, according to which the Cut-Up Trilogy was drawn from a “thousand page” Naked Lunch “Word Hoard.”

      What was the “Word Hoard”? A mixture of mythology and confusion (even in its title, sometimes given as “Word Horde” or, as if it referred to an actual book, Word Hoard). Kerouac and Ginsberg used the phrase in spring 1957 when retyping Burroughs’ mass of rough manuscripts in Tangier, and it appears a couple of times in Naked Lunch. But Burroughs himself used the phrase only briefly as an alternative for “Word,” the 60-page final section of his 200-page “Interzone” manuscript. A good deal of his “sequel to Naked Lunch” did come out of what he wrote between fall 1957 and fall 1959, but that material has a separate history to the loose “thousand page” myth. The mythology matters because it has had the effect of mixing up the chronologies of writing and blurring distinctions between books. Burroughs even made a gag out of the confusion of his trilogy, referring in the second edition of The Soft Machine to one “novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket” and another called “Expense Account” that in draft was originally titled “Exploded Lunch”—which begs the question; if the myth was so confusing and if the result has been a historiographic nightmare, why did Burroughs himself promote it?

      It was more than convenience, having an easy answer on tap for interviewers, and not entirely a philosophical position, a decision to refute fixed identities and epistemological certainty. There were also strategic reasons why Burroughs promoted the connection between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, and then Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. He worked on the cut-up books while helping Grove Press release an American edition of Naked Lunch, well aware of the censorship battle to be fought, and he recognized the publishing advantages of a common approach, especially involving Nova Express. That was why in the January 1962 issue of Evergreen Review, the house magazine of Grove Press, he prefaced early episodes of Novia Express (as it was then titled) with “Introduction to Naked Lunch The Soft Machine Novia Express”—making a trilogy out of those three titles. The following year Burroughs created another surprising trilogy in Dead Fingers Talk, a book made out of sections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. Before it became the first of the Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine therefore appeared as the middle volume of two different trilogies starting from Naked Lunch.

      Burroughs’ position was self-contradictory, however. On the one hand, he promoted cut-up methods as a radical cut in literary history, the literally cutting edge of a new revolutionary movement, most visibly in his two collaborative 1960 manifesto pamphlets, Minutes to Go (with Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso) and The Exterminator (with Gysin). On the other hand, he also wanted to present his work in terms of a continuous narrative, in which Naked Lunch was a prequel and The Soft Machine a sequel.

      Writing in July 1960 to Irving Rosenthal, as he prepared the American edition of Naked Lunch, Burroughs stated that “little of the old material” would be used for his new book because it was now “understanding out of date.”7 While he used much more than just a “little,” almost all the material he did use went only into The Soft Machine, and Burroughs brought Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded into the orbit of Naked Lunch despite the fact that—­contrary to the “Word Hoard” myth—their manuscript connections are actually negligible. If Burroughs was being strategic in connecting his books, this applied not only for publishers or interviewers but also in private. In a late 1966 letter he made probably his most emphatic statement on the trilogy and the “Word Hoard”: “You might say that Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded all derive from one store of material a good part of which was written between 1957 and 1959” (ROW, 243). You might say is an equivocation in itself, a telltale sign of what he should not have said, and Burroughs was saying it in order to defend his third edition of The Soft Machine against the hostile criticisms of Brion Gysin (to which we’ll return). Burroughs overstated the manuscript origins of the trilogy as a way to justify his new version to Gysin—“The assemblage of a book from this material is always hurried and ­arbitrary”—but he was also echoing the story of the book from the beginning, six years earlier.

      “OUT OF A HAT”

      By early December 1959, Burroughs had come up with a new title, “But Is All Back Seat Dreaming.” Initially used for one section sent to Big Table magazine, the title was soon applied to the book as a whole—which, he now told Ginsberg, he had “written most of,” “remaining only the task of correlating material” (ROW, 10). This was premature, and almost a year later he was again telling Ginsberg of his “next novel which is only a problem of putting it together,” even as he admitted it was an “inordinate amount of work” (59). In April 1960 Burroughs had moved from Paris to London and changed the title again, informing Gysin that he had “been writing a sequel to Naked Lunch to be called ‘Mr Bradly Mr Martin’” (25). In the first edition, “all back seat of dreaming” and “mr. bradly mr. martin” would be the titles of the final two sections. Meanwhile, Maurice Girodias began pressing him for a contract on the new book and in early August 1960 Burroughs quipped to Gysin, “Does he know what exactly he is trying to buy?” (42). It was a good question, bearing in mind the feedback Burroughs received on his work in progress later that month from Paul Carroll, who had published “Back Seat” in Big Table.

      Speaking “frankly,” Carroll tried to balance faith in Burroughs with deep scepticism about this “new, difficult work” which had “moved so far from NAKED LUNCH.”8 Burroughs’ reply is instructive. On the one hand, he promised to send “something else as near as possible” along “straight narrative lines,” and on the other he tried to reassure Carroll that the new material would be “readily understandable” once he saw the larger structure of which it was a part.9 Only four months earlier, when returning the corrected proofs of “Back Seat,” Burroughs had shown he already recognized that his cut-up texts needed framing for the reader, sending Carroll a “note on the method used, to be printed with the material” (ROW, 22).