Nova Express (27 page)

152 “message from stairway of slime”: the first draft continues with a line referencing either the American military medal or the amphetamine of choice for British Mods (Drinamyl, which came in blue triangular tablets):
“Voice fading into advocate—Not that a client ever gets The Purple Heart—”
(OSU 2.2).

152 “civilization and personal habits”: the first draft continues with lines that include a reference to Burroughs' publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, and the philosopher and writer Gerald Heard, whose work Burroughs had long known and whom he met with Timothy Leary in September 1961:
“With the Leica first pressure—Instructions to stay away from my supply—Flesh froze to supply Girodias—Amino acid directs all movement to “” that is—A book by Heard leapt into my hand to be read telepathic misdirection—”
(OSU 2.2).

153 “c-Sequential choice”: from here to “That is a ‘book'” is one of the few lines not present in OSU 2.2.

Pay Color

PAY COLOR

Under its original title, “Photo Falling—Word Falling,” the section appeared as “Chapter V” in the March 1962 MS (OSU 2.3), so that Burroughs moved it from near one end to near the other of his manuscript. He produced two three-page typescripts which he redacted, and the text was printed under the same title, almost verbatim, in the January 1962 issue of
Evergreen Review
. Only on the final draft (OSU 4.9) is this title canceled and “Pay Color” added in autograph. The new title emphasized this section's return to the “Pay it all back” call in the opening section, and Burroughs wrote numerous variants on this theme, including at least one directly related to
Nova Express
that he typed in blue ink to materialize on his page the color he associated with apomorphine (Berg 6.9). The origins of the section go back to summer 1961 in Tangier, when Burroughs gave himself a “brief rest from writing” to make color photo-collages (including one entitled “Word Falling—Photo Falling”), and came up with the “Pay Color” refrain that would conclude the section (
ROW
, 76, 82). In 1965, Charles Plymell literalized the color calls in the second issue of his
Now
magazine by printing the section's last paragraphs in red, blue and green ink.

Only mentioned in previous sections, The Subliminal Kid is here fully introduced, joining the ranks of Burroughs' other Western-style characters (The Intolerable Kid, The Carbonic Kid, The Heavy Metal Kid, etc.). The Kid uses the latest technological weaponry, and Burroughs saw the section as not just a fictionalization but a lesson, “suggesting some extended use of tape recorders”
(
ROW
, 97). The Kid also appears in the revised
Soft Machine
as “Technical Tilly,” and in
The Ticket That Exploded
he's identified as a “technical sergeant” and “charter defector from the Nova Mob.” The character was based on Ian Sommerville, and Burroughs paid tribute to the name by signing one 1965 text (in
My Own Mag
15) “for the subliminal kid.”

157 “the river of all language”: the first draft has a longer paragraph here and continues:
“So that people could not control their words or accents and no one knew what he was going to say”
(OSU 2.3, first version).

158 “watching a gangster movie”: early drafts continue:
“whether he was man woman beast or monster from outer space”
(OSU 2.3, both versions).

159 “
Pay Red
”: typed in blue and including four lines of text spaced out on the page, one typescript page overlaps and extends the color theme:
“Marx Freud colors you stole PAY RED pay back the red you stole for your Einstein decade—apomorphine in the beginning was the word Coca Cola signs and your lying flags pay back that red to penis and apomorphine pay blue pay back the only begetter the blue you stole for your police—”
(Berg 6.9).

PAY OFF THE MARKS?

The manuscript history of this section comprises only a few variant cut-up passages (OSU 2.2) and Burroughs' pre-October 1962 draft (with its spelling “novia”). He cut almost a third of this draft at the final galley stage in July 1964. At the same time, he made two short inserts, so that the section lost over 400 words and gained just over 100 (distinguished by their telltale use of ellipses).

163
“Comte Wladmir Sollohub”: from here to “exploded star).
. . .
” is an insert made on the galleys in July 1964.

163 “I watched the torn sky bend”: the phrase recurs in several texts, including “St. Louis Return” (1965), where Burroughs identifies it with a massive tornado that hit his hometown in 1927 (although he misdates it as 1929).

163 “
white white white as far as the eye can see ahead
”: in his essay “Hemingway,” Burroughs cites this as “the last line” of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (
Adding Machine
, 68). Neither the last line nor an accurate quotation from the short story, Burroughs' words rewrote the original: “and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going” (Hemingway,
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
[New York: Scribner's, 1961], 27). The phrase “where he was going” in turn gave Burroughs the title for a short text in
Tornado Alley
(1989) beautifully read by Burroughs on the 1990 album
Dead City Radio
.

164 “Bicycle races here at noon”: the October 1962 MS continues:
“Sombre anger steaming to a room is far away—Faded this violence is a calm by some boy thighs—Sad look caught in throat—Whiffs of my Spain—Lost dog space of lontanza.”
Burroughs' redaction of these last lines (to “boy thighs—Sad—Lost dog”) is characteristic of how he canceled phrases in his cut-up texts to produce a new, more elliptical text. Like numerous other word combinations, the phrase
“space of lontanza”
occurred repeatedly in drafts for
Nova Express
, but all were edited out.

164 “He had come a long way”: from here to “died during the night.
. . .
” is an insert made on the galleys in July 1964.

SMORBROT

The section's title seems to have been a late revision, added in autograph onto the October 1962 MS, and Burroughs first refers to this section under its previous title in a letter to Rosset at the end of February 1962: “Do you feel that the section called
Outskirts Of The City
can be published as it stands?— If not I will provide you with an expurgated version” (
ROW
, 100). In fact, an erasure on the archival typescript of the letter shows a still earlier title, one that more clearly relates to the section's content, which Burroughs canceled halfway through, typing: “
Operation Se
”—for “Operation Sense Withdrawal” (SU). Burroughs' concern about expurgating the material reflects the fact that “Smorbrot” contains the only sexually explicit passages in
Nova Express
(and, unusually for Burroughs, describes both heterosexual and homosexual acts), which in turn reflected the hopes of writer and publisher that this book would make it easier for Grove to publish
Naked Lunch
without a censorship trial. This strategy also explains the appearance of “Outskirts of the City” in
Evergreen Review
6.25 (July 1962), albeit in a redacted version (identical to the October 1962 MS, but with over 400 words cut—mainly of sexually explicit material, although much remained).

Aside from some early partial typescripts (ASU 7, Berg 9.11), the first draft proper shows a very large number of minor differences and about an extra page of material. This draft, identified as “Chapter 17” of the March 1962 MS (OSU 3.5), had the section's original title: “Operation Sense Withdrawal.” Burroughs canceled 50 words at the final galley stage.

165 “Doctor Lilly in Florida”: the draft of this footnote has:
“Doctor Lilly in Miami and by Doctor
[blank]
in Oklahoma”
(OSU 3.5). Lilly had worked on isolation tanks and sensory deprivation at the National Institutes of Health near Washington since the late 1950s. After the phrase ­“Science—Pure science,” which evokes Dr Benway from
Naked Lunch,
this draft has a canceled line:
“And what sex is this body floating half in and half out?”
The footnote is repeated verbatim in the “substitute flesh” section of
The Ticket That Exploded,
as is the following footnote regarding Reich's orgone accumulators, although in reverse order.

170 “one of them flicked my jacket”: the first draft alternates first- and third-person narration and, using a name recurrent in
Naked Lunch
and
The Soft Machine
, here has not “my” but
“Carl's jacket”
(OSU 3.5).

171 “white—red—white—”: Burroughs rewrote this passage across several drafts, and the earliest integrates color association with his special “coordinate” number:
“Jack off red—8 red
. . .
two green 7 blue 6 black—Flash red 8
. . .
green two
. . .
blue seven 6 black
. . .
In the underwater medium converse in flashes of color a system like Morse code—with two coordinates intensity and repetition—setting off immediately the appropriate response in the other nervous system color circuits
. . .
”
(Berg 9.11).

171 “Color-music-smell-feel”: the first draft has:
“Color-music-smell-taste-kinaesthetic—You got it??—Now associate without words”
(OSU 3.5).

171 “from ferris wheels”: corrects NEX 161 (“wheel”), as per the first draft. Burroughs used the incorrect lower case for “Ferris” throughout the trilogy.

173 “open shorts flapping”: “shorts” seems to be a typo, since in the first draft and elsewhere this is “open shirts”; however, the proximity of “genitals” to “shorts” warrants leaving the “error” alone.

ITS ACCOUNTS

A section made from cutting up other parts of
Nova Express
,
literary sources and news items from daily papers, “Its Accounts” has a short archival prehistory in scattered pages of cut-up variants (OSU 2.2) and a final, two-page typescript (OSU 4.9). Since it recycles material from numerous sections including “There's a Lot Ended” and “Are These Experiments Necessary?” and since these sections contain news items dating from March 1962, it is very likely that “Its Accounts” was written at the same time. In his “Section Heading And Layout of Nova Express” (Berg 36.7), Burroughs typed the title as “It's Accounts,” but dropped the apostrophe in autograph on the final typescript.

173 “Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston”: like several other phrases in the section, this derives verbatim from Brion Gysin's “First Cut-ups” in
Minutes to Go
. Burroughs also experimented with variations on the phrasing, adding
“Lgiers, Ran”
(Algiers, Oran) and
“Adrid”
(Madrid) to the list in one draft (OSU 2.2).

174 “Venus Vigar choked to passionate weakness”: on Vigar, see under “There's a Lot Ended.”

SIMPLE AS A HICCUP

Like “Its Accounts,” the history of this short section consists of scattered pages of cut-up variants (OSU 2.2) and a final, two-page typescript (OSU 4.9), where the spelling “novia” dates its composition as pre-October 1962. On the final typescript, Burroughs wrote in the title after canceling its original heading: “Notes on Distinction between Sedative and Hallucigen [sic] Drugs.” In 1961, he had delivered a controversial paper entitled “Points of Distinction between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs” to the American Psychological Association, later published in
Evergreen Review
8.34 (December 1964). When Burroughs sent Rosset the March 1962 MS of
Nova Express
he had suggested that a transcript of his talk “might serve as appendix” (
ROW,
102), but he seems to have changed his mind. For three days later he mailed Rosset what sounds like “Simple as a Hiccup”: “a cut up from the talk given to The American Psychological Symposium Sept 6, 1961 Points of Distinction Between Sedative And Hallucigen [sic] Drugs—” (Burroughs to Rosset, April 2, 1962; SU). A few fragments from the talk (“classified as narcotic drugs,” “Morphine is actually,” “Dimethyl­tryptamine,” “cortex”) are recognizable.

176 “blue sky writing of Hassan i Sabbah”: draft cut-up pages for this section include alternatives such as
“Glyphs of Hassan i Sabbah”
(OSU 2.2).

THERE'S A LOT ENDED

Burroughs opens this section with a dateline (“New York, Saturday March 17, Present Time”) that announces the provenance of its material in daily newspaper items, while the date is clarified by the complementary opening to the later section “Are These Experiments Necessary?”: “Saturday March 17, 1962, Present Time Of Knowledge.” The final two-page typescript (OSU 4.9) drew from a large number of variant cut-up pages, which include many other references to items in the news that spring, some clarifying the sources of enigmatic details in the published text, others suggesting the range of Burroughs' interests and the precision with which he made selections.