The Soft Machine. William S. Burroughs

in summer 1966 Burroughs sent Seaver the manuscript and then in October the galleys for the Calder edition, seemingly in hope Grove would release it too, but without success. In a final twist of misleading appearances, the book Calder published in Britain in July 1968—more than two years after the Grove Press edition—was simply what Burroughs had submitted in January 1966, two months before the Grove edition came out.

      Which leaves us with two questions: how exactly did Burroughs’ revisions change The Soft Machine from edition to edition? And how does this new edition aim to advance such a perplexing history?

      “WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT”

      “I have completely rewritten it,” Burroughs told Alan Ansen in January 1963, “taking out most of the cut ups and substituting sixty-five pages of new material in a straight narrative line.”37 Needless to say, it was not as straightforward as that.

      In raw statistical terms, to make the second edition Burroughs retained just under half of the first edition and, since the two books are very similar in length (38,000 words), the result was that half of the second edition was old writing, half new. Comparing the first three chapters of the 1966 edition to the 1961 text, at first sight Burroughs’ revisions seem simple enough: the first and third chapters reuse continuous material from the earlier book, while the second chapter is all new and uses no first edition material at all. However, after this point the majority of chapters consist of highly complex combinations of new and old. Burroughs changed and radically re-sequenced most of the 1961 material, which was also very unequally distributed across the book as a whole: the first half of the 1966 text (up to and including the long, newly written narrative “Mayan Caper” chapter) is only one-third based on material from the 1961 edition; in contrast, the second half of the 1966 text, starting from the “I Sekuin” cut-up chapter, is nearly three-quarters based on the 1961 edition.

      There was a broad logic to the kind of material Burroughs did and did not retain from the 1961 text for the 1966 edition, but some of his choices are unexpected. For example, he didn’t use one of the first edition’s longest narrative sections, entitled “lee took the bus”—only to change his mind and include it for the third edition. And on the other side, while he compromised it by changing every word from upper to lower case, he did include the opening of “I Sekuin,” a stunning but very challenging cut-up section. Above all, it is not the case that Burroughs simply took out cut-up material and substituted straight narrative. The general direction of revision may have been toward greater readability, but far less emphatically than he implied. Roughly speaking, the first edition is 55% cut-up and 45% narrative, the second edition 30% cut-up, 70% narrative. However, if the majority of new material was narrative, some 6,500 words of it—over one third—was cut-up. Some of this new cut-up material, such as in the “Early Answer” chapter, is among the most dense and difficult in the whole book. The impact of the new narrative is also highly focused, since most of it appears in only two, all-new chapters, “The Mayan Caper” and “Who Am I To Be Critical?” Those two chapters are fast-paced, thematically clear and very funny (the humor of the 1961 text is easy to miss), but they don’t represent the book as a whole. In fact, the biggest surprise is to realize that the majority of narrative in the second edition actually came from the first edition and the majority of cut-up material was new. Indeed, of the roughly 10,000 words of cut-up material in the 1966 edition, only about a third came from the 1961 text. To say “roughly” is a necessary caveat, since once you start counting, the initially clear distinction between “straight” and “cut-up” becomes meaningless, which is one of The Soft Machine’s strangest and most fascinating effects.

      As for the changes Burroughs made on the galleys in October 1965, they caused Grove Press difficulties because there were so many of them: the margins of almost every sheet are crowded with the repeated instruction in his distinctive hand: “No Caps.” “COST OF CHANGING UPPER CASE TO LOWER THROUGHOUT SOFT MACHINE, SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS STOP,” Seaver cabled him in early October; “IS IT ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL CABLE REPLY.”38 Burroughs must have replied in the affirmative, but at that stage made relatively few actual cuts or insertions. He added the 1,000-word narrative about Salt Chunk Mary and another 500 words in half-a-dozen short inserts scotch-taped onto the galley sheets. He also made some two-dozen short cuts adding up to about 500 words and, in his major late decision, retained just one paragraph from a cancelled chapter of almost 1,000 words. What this means in terms of content is that 95% of the book published in March 1966 was present in the “1962 MS” (i.e., the 129-page typescript probably submitted to Olympia Press in late November 1962). There were differences in presentation and structure, however—and they are highly significant for this new, fourth edition of The Soft Machine which has gone back to the 1962 MS as the basis to revise the text.

      The manuscript Burroughs completed in November 1962, which was scheduled to be published by Olympia in 1963, differs from the second edition in three main ways: it lacked the 1,500 words added to the galleys in 1965 and included the chapter of 1,000 words cancelled at the same stage; its chapters begin and end more often in keeping with the third than the second edition; and it made far fewer changes to the appearance of the material taken from the 1961 text. This fourth edition includes everything published in the second edition, while respecting the 1962 MS’s chapter divisions and restoring the cancelled chapter, entitled “Male Image Back In.” Burroughs had also cut a chapter at the final galley stage for Nova Express, but that was long and highly repetitious, whereas this short chapter works well in The Soft Machine, and he retained a little more of it in the third edition.

      In the most visible change, this new edition also restores how material from the first edition appeared by putting back a thousand capital letters removed on the galleys in 1965. Changes to capitalization are a major feature of Burroughs’ revisions to the Cut-Up Trilogy, and he revised on a massive scale in both directions: on the galleys of Nova Express in 1964 he changed from lower to upper case; and for the second edition of The Ticket That Exploded in 1967, he changed from upper to lower. Burroughs’ own apparent inconsistency doesn’t lend itself to consistent editing across the trilogy. However, restoring capitals for The Soft Machine makes sense since the second edition was the odd one out: following the 1962 MS means respecting the appearance of both the first and the third edition, which largely retained capitals. It also brings The Soft Machine visibly closer to how Burroughs reconceived it in late 1962—the period when he was working simultaneously and most intensely on all three volumes of his trilogy.

      The main reasons for turning to this 1962 manuscript in the first place are pragmatic: while there is something suitably Burroughsian about the status quo, with two quite different versions of The Soft Machine remaining in print, the great majority of readers have had to accept the edition that failed to grant Burroughs his “final intentions,” as textual editors used to say. However, the obvious ­alternative—to let the third edition replace the second—is even more unsatisfactory. Although Burroughs actually preserved more of the 1961 text in the British edition of 1968, through what he added much more was lost. This is the paradoxical value of his 1962 MS; in content it is close to the second edition, while in the appearance of its material it is close to both the first edition—his original—and the third edition—his last word on the book.

      When Burroughs mailed his manuscript to John Calder in late January 1966 he observed that he had “added approximately 45 pages of single space material” together with “an article on the apomorphine treatment as an appendix.”39 In statistical terms, for the third edition Burroughs cut 1,500 words from the second edition and added about 19,000 more, almost 6,000 in the Appendix. Of the 13,000 words added to the main text, some 3,000 were previously unused material from the 1961 edition and the rest were new. The new material reflected Burroughs’ writing in late 1965, especially a distinctive narrative style of great economy, evocative power, and simple, minimally punctuated prose. The end result was not just that the book became virtually 50% longer; it was quite simply a very different book—which was the basis to Brion Gysin’s objections.

      In October 1966 Burroughs had invited Gysin to design a jacket for the Calder edition and although he could