Nova Express (28 page)

177 “Great Gold Cup—Revived peat victory hopes of Fortria”: Fortria achieved fame in 1962 by winning the Mackeson Gold Cup for the second time. The other horse named here, Sheila's Cottage, won the Grand National in 1948. “Maharani” refers to the Indian Princess, celebrity, politician and horsewoman, Gayatri Devi,
“one of the world's most glamorous wealthy,”
as a source draft page describes her (OSU 2.2).

178 “already watched Identikit”: in a source draft this line follows a reference to the Duke of Edinburgh's visit to Peru in February 1962:
“Lima Wednesday Prince Philip—Wore a Peruvian sombrero of a man seen—‘Why, we all take satisfaction—Rode a dancing horse on Sugar Avenue—Well publicized visit to Peru's capital—'”
(OSU 2.2).

178 “The capsule was warm”: in a source draft the “capsule” is clearly identified even as its referent is scrambled with other elements in news items that competed for headlines in February and March 1962:
“On the heels of Colonel John Glenn Rickard's body—Triple orbit of the earth failed with another—There are many similarities—between the two killings and Colonel Glen's wife—Think it possible that children and parent of the same man may be Colonel and Mrs Glen—”
(OSU 2.2). John Glenn had become the first American to orbit the earth on February 20, 1962, his flight watched by a live television audience of up to 100 million. Burroughs mixes the historical milestone in space exploration and the cold war with a crime story in London: the “two killings” refer to the case of the “wardrobe killer” (the same draft page has the phrase
“wardrobe victim”
), whose victims were both homosexual men, Norman Rickard and then, in a “carbon copy” killing, Alan John Vigar, murdered in west London not far from where Burroughs was living that spring. These cases were linked at the time to the recent killing of two other homosexual men in Derbyshire, known as “the Carbon Copy Murders.” This last phrase appears several times in one draft page that includes verbatim the references to Vigar used in
Nova Express
.
While newspapers brought to lurid light the generally hidden world of gay men in early 1960s England—in contrast to “well publicized” royal visits and ticker tape parades—Burroughs also drew on murder cases where the key issue was not sexual identity but capital punishment. Hence, the reference in this section to “[James] Hanratty,” who was hanged amid much controversy on April 4, 1962: “Portman Clinic” was where Hanratty had received psychiatric treatment. Other draft source pages cite the British press coverage itself, one naming the
Daily
Mail
, another suggesting disagreements between papers (
“But one newspaper—
The Observer
[which is named in this section and in “Are These Experiments Necessary?”]
Another newspaper
The Express
”
) (OSU 2.2).

179 “He plays Mark even Anthony with Liz”: one of the few news stories that could compete with Glenn's orbiting of the Earth in spring 1962 was the scandal caused by the Taylor-Burton affair, which started during the filming of
Anthony and Cleopatra
. The affair
made the April 13, 1962 cover of
Life
, and the film nearly bankrupted the studio, which Burroughs names in one of the section's source pages:
“Twentieth Century Fox trying to eat my breakfast”
(OSU 2.2).

179 “Sir, I am delighted to see”: clearly taken from a Letters to the Editor column, in the source typescript this line is preceded by references that mix up anticolonial uprisings, cold war conflict, and the celebrity marriage of film stars:
“Today's killing as curtain raiser for Linda Christian and Romina and Taryn—See daughter by her marriage let loose the seven year old Algerian war to the late Tyrone Power—Both murdered men is Edmund Purdom 33—he and Linda terrorists of the European secret 37 have said they will marry next month—Opening national rumors about Castro—”
(OSU 2.2).
In March and February 1962, the U.S. Secretary of Defense received CIA plans for “false flag” covert ops designed to justify invading Cuba; although no “rumors” leaked out, the plans included proposals to blame Fidel Castro should Glenn's space flight end in disaster.

ONE MORE CHANCE?

The manuscript history comprises a one-page untitled rough typescript (OSU 2.2), which has numerous minor differences compared with the published opening of the section, and a verbatim one-page neat typescript with the title in Burroughs' hand in the October 1962 MS. The last three-quarters of the section, over 1,200 words, were added only at the final galley stage in July 1964, a distinction made visible on the page through the difference in punctuation (ellipses replacing em dashes).

180 “Told me to sit by Hubbard guide”: L. Ron Hubbard had previously been named in
Minutes to Go
, already establishing the connection between cut-up methods and Scientology.

181 “hotel room in London—”: from here until the end of the section was inserted onto the long galleys in July 1964 (OSU 5.12).

184 “It has a 3D effect sir”: corrects
NEX
173 (“third effect”), an error introduced by the copyeditor, who misinterpreted “3d” in Burroughs' typed insert. Needless to say, the error is peculiarly serendipitous, since the copyeditor's “collaboration” had the effect of creating the very
third
defined by Burroughs and Gysin's “third mind.”

ARE THESE EXPERIMENTS NECESSARY?

Composed by cutting up a good deal of the previous two sections, this section exists as an untitled two-page typescript with a number of small differences and about 175 extra words compared with the published version (OSU 2.2), and the final verbatim typescript (OSU 4.9). Most of the unused material comprises phrases used in the previous two sections.

185 “Saturday March 17, 1962”: the early draft begins:
“New York Saturday March 17 present time of ­knowledge—”
(OSU 2.2).

186 “creating and aggravating conflict”: the early draft continues with a phrase not used elsewhere:
“The game of life demands total war of the past—”
(OSU 2.2).

MELTED INTO AIR

On March 15, 1962 Burroughs mailed Kerouac a four-page typescript to illustrate the new fold-in technique he had used in his current novel: “Page I was made by folding your letter and placing it on a section i had just written entitled The Carbonic Caper—Page 2 i copied out of the ending section of
The Subterraneans
—Then I folded page two and laid it on the end of
Naked Lunch
and some other texts including the end of
The Soft Machine
—Result was page 3 which i consider not only contains some beautiful prose but is most meaningful to me” (Burroughs to Kerouac, March 15, 1962; CU, Kerouac Collection). Page 3 is, absolutely verbatim, the “Melted Into Air” section as published in
Nova Express
. The result was exactly “half Kerouac half Burroughs” in terms of word length, while almost every word not deriving from
The Subterraneans
appears in the earlier section “A Bad Move.” Burroughs' choices were highly calculated: by using a phrase that names the title of Kerouac's novel, for example, he invited the reader to recognize the source text, while he chose the openly self-reflexive last words of
The Subterraneans
(“this book”) for the last words of his section (the penultimate section of his own book).

187 “Mr. Beiles Mr. Corso Mr. Burroughs”: Gregory Corso appears in Kerouac's
The Subterraneans
(as Yuri), while he and Sinclair Beiles were, together with Brion Gysin, Burroughs' collaborators on
Minutes to Go
(1960).

188 “Yas, he heard your”; corrects
NEX
177 (“Yes”), confirmed by the recurrence of this apparent typo in other drafts; also later used in
The Ticket That Exploded
.

188 “And I go home having lost—”: what is lost at the end of Kerouac's novel
is itself lost in Burroughs' cut-up of his last lines: “And I go home having lost her love. And write this book” (
The Subterraneans
[London: Penguin, 2001), 93).

CLOM FLIDAY

Taken from the last words of
Naked Lunch
,
the section title certainly seems like a gesture of finality, but “Clom Fliday” was not the final section of either the March or October 1962 manuscripts. The first rough draft of this section (OSU 2.2), which was a fifth longer, and the final draft lack the last half-dozen lines, including the date and signature after “You are yourself Mr Bradly Mr Martin—” (OSU 4.9). The existence of a different ending to
Nova Express
is confirmed in a letter Burroughs wrote to Rosset just after mailing the first draft, which he admitted was “not in as good order as I would like”: “The last section I forgot to put in the chapter head which is: Punishment And Reward, What?—Never Existed At All—” (Burroughs to Rosset, April 2, 1962; SU). In fact, as the October manuscript and the galleys reveal, “Clom Fliday” was followed not only by the ninth chapter to which Burroughs refers here (which consisted of a single section entitled “Never Existed At All”) but also by another short section at the end of Chapter Eight, entitled “Wind Hand Thy Father.”

Some 250 words long, the text of “Wind Hand Thy Father” in Burroughs' manuscript is almost identical to that published in 1962 in the German magazine
Rhinozeros
7 as “Be Cheerful, Sir, Our Revels Touching Circumstance,” a title taken from the opening words of the piece. The text recycles familiar elements, including valedictory phrases from Shakespeare's “final” texts (both
The Tempest
and the playwright's epitaph, which had already been used in
Minutes to Go
) and from Joyce's “The Dead,” including a direct reference to the character Michael Furey. In July 1964, Burroughs canceled all but the very last line of this section on the galleys (leaving only: “all the living and the dead—You are yourself—There be—”), and then pasted in the ending as published.

As for the ninth chapter, it was probably composed just before Burroughs submitted his March 1962 MS, based on the occurrence of the date “Saturday March 17, 1962 Past Time” in the five-page typescript titled “PUNISHMENT AND REWARD, WHAT?—NEVER EXISTED AT ALL” (Berg 9.21). The title on this typescript was a typed addition, suggesting it is the manuscript to which Burroughs referred in his April 2 letter to Rosset. After recycling material from “Melted Into Air,” the typescript ends: “Good bye to ­‘William'—You are yourself ‘Mr Bradly Mr Martin' who never existed at all—
'
” Burroughs later redacted this highly repetitious material, and the October 1962 MS has a much shorter (590-word) version that also includes such new phrases as “Rings of Saturn in the morning sky” which would appear in
The Ticket That Exploded
.
Under the handwritten title “Never Existed At All,” this two-page typescript ends with Burroughs' autograph signature and the dateline: “Paris, Oct 24, 1962.”

However, Burroughs continued to revise the ending, and a year later he sent Grove a one-page text on legal-sized paper which he recommended “as a much more powerful end to
Nova Express
than the one we now have following right on from the present end” (Burroughs to Seaver, October 10, 1963; SU). Starting, “telling me/dead birds falling/lacer guns ‘washing'/''''''''' ‘Annie Laurie' had no luck,” this 350-word typescript concludes: “A distant
soldier
officer from uh special police never returns. He made an arrest.
. . .
‘September 17, 1899 over New York' (a silent Sunday to the post.),” after which the copyeditor added the signature and 1962 dateline. Whether this had, as he put it to Seaver, “much more impact and surprise than the present ending” is debatable; it was certainly different. But Burroughs was still not done revising the ending. In July 1964, he sent a 180-word insert to add onto the beginning of “Never Existed At All”; the insert was sent but may not actually have been made, since it does not appear on the galleys. Burroughs' indecision is reflected in the copyeditor's instruction on the galleys: “
delete to end / But do not kill. Hold until we tell you to kill”
(OSU 5.11). In the end, he changed his mind and indeed killed
the entire ninth chapter along with the “Wind Hand” section of the previous one. At the last minute, Burroughs recognized that the s
olution to a highly repetitious ending was neither to redact it
nor to add anomalous new material, but to just cut it.

190 “Melted into air—”: in one of a small number of variants, the first rough draft continues:
“And beings all went away—No good no universe in setting forth—Clom Fliday—Dead—”
(OSU 2.2).

190 “Well that's about the closest way”: from here to the end was a typed insert that Burroughs pasted onto the long galleys (OSU 5.12).

190 “July 21, 1964”: this was indeed the date on which Burroughs mailed Richard Seaver the corrected proofs of
Nova Express
.