Nova Express (4 page)

Returning his corrected galleys to Richard Seaver at Grove in July 1964 (a second set had gone, as requested, to Ian Sommerville), Burroughs resumed one last time his familiar refrain: “I found myself dissatisfied with a good deal of the cut up material so the corrected proofs contain considerable deletions and quite a few inserts.”
25
These changes were, he insisted, essential to “the integrity and impact of the book.” The ten separate inserts he made on the galleys, typed up and Scotch-taped in, added up to some 1,800 words, all inserted into the second half of the manuscript, which was also where he made all the deletions, using a thick black marker pen. By far the longest insert went into the “One More Chance?” section and significantly expanded the material in
Nova Express
about Scientology, a key factor that had been there from the start of the cut-up project. Apart from a long, entirely cut-up ninth chapter that Burroughs canceled completely, the cuts and additions he made at the galley stage balanced out in length. It's revealing that while everything he canceled on the galleys was cut-up material, so was a third of what he added: he hadn't lost faith in his methods, it was just that the older material now seemed too repetitive (which it was, especially in the ninth chapter). Overall, the revisions didn't much change the balance of the book, the second half of which has roughly twice as much cut-up material as the first half, although precise percentages are impossible to calculate and becoming progressively unable to tell the difference between what is cut-up and what is not is one of the book's strangest effects.
26

The cut-up text that Burroughs added in 1964 stands out formally through its heavy use of ellipses (. . .), in contrast to his earlier use of the em dash (—). There are 150 ellipses in
Nova Express
, but just one comes from a pre-1964 typescript. Useful for dating Burroughs' material, the ellipses of
Nova Express
also emphasize the larger significance of punctuation. Burroughs not only had an extraordinary ear for speech and idiom and a genius for enigmatic turns-of-phrase but a great sense of rhythm and pace, and he used punctuation to vary the tempo of the reading experience: like a cine­matic
dissolve
, ellipses are usually slow, enigmatic; like a cinematic
cut
, the em dash is sharp, rapid and urgent. The visual impact of punctuation on the page also makes a clear gesture against the formal limits imposed by mainstream publication. Commenting on the “multiplicity of punctuation” in the new ending he submitted in October 1963, Burroughs had told Seaver: “This is an experiment with format and the use of punctuation which I have carried further in the work I am doing now.”
27
On the other hand, the general practice of Grove's copyeditors was to normalize such distinctive practices as his use of lower case “i” for the first person pronoun and to regularize Burroughs' inconsistency in using punctuation.

Most important, Burroughs makes punctuation itself operate as a sign system, a language, when the dots and dashes are arranged into lines of “supersonic Morse code” at the end of the section “Will Hollywood Never Learn?” The Morse letters were again a gesture, a pragmatic way to assimilate into book form an equivalent to, for example, his “color alphabet,” a series of experiments with word and image he developed in spring 1961
,
inspired by a combination of Rimbaud's poetry and the use of hallucinogens—visually rich experiments which had no commercial possibilities. Visible, rather than audible like phonetic language, the lines of Morse code thus also anticipated the “silent writing of Brion Gysin,” embodied in the calligraphic design that closed
The Ticket That Exploded
. Although Grove did not use the “sketch by Brion Gysin for a suggested cover” that Burroughs sent Seaver in July 1964, when
Nova Express
appeared three months later he congratulated his editor on the results: “An excellent job I think as regards cover and typesetting.”
28
The question of cover design brings us finally to the book's title, and the bigger picture that lies behind it.

“CURSE GO BACK”

In spring 1965 Burroughs made an untitled collage for his and ­Gysin's “Book of Methods” (later published as
The Third Mind
)
that includes his earlier title for
Nova Express
constructed as a cut-up of words in two different typefaces: a Gothic “The” followed by “NOVA ­EXPRESS” in white Sans serif capitals against a black background. The title acts as a caption to the picture above it of a train wreck, while the words “By train” appear prominently nearby. The composition also includes typewritten text by Burroughs in two columns (beginning, “you are reading the future”), a photograph of him making tea, and the Spanish word “Sucesos,” identifying the train crash as an item in the
sección de sucesos
, the newspaper section dealing with crimes and disasters. In 1966, Jonathan Cape used parts of this collage for the cover of the British edition of
Nova Express
, omitting the Gothic article “The” and adding pictures of locomotive wheels to emphasize the obvious:
Nova Express
names the onrushing apocalyptic train crash of history, the railroad of time, “the total disaster
now
on tracks.”

However, to read the title in this way is to risk missing the point Burroughs was making in both book and collage, and indeed in the cut-up project as a whole: what mattered most was not the apparent referential content but the form, the message in the medium itself. The importance of form is precisely established in the
Nova Express
collage by the way it is reproduced
in
The Third Mind
, where in miniature it is juxtaposed alongside another
Nova Express
collage. This collage makes two changes to the book's title, omitting the article “The” and, after the same white-on-black capitalized “NOVA,” has the word “EXPRESS” in a different typeface. To British readers, the font and spacing of the letters in “EXPRESS” are unmistakable: it is from the masthead of the
Daily Express
. The other semantic content of the word “express”—referring to not trains but newspapers—is activated formally by the typography of the word and by the broadsheet page layout of the collage.
29
The term
nova
may refer to a nuclear explosion in white dwarf stars, but Burroughs was well enough versed in astronomy as well as in Latin to know this was an abbreviation of
stella nova
(“new star”), and that
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
.