Nova Express (20 page)

I have said the basic techniques creating and aggravating conflict officers—At any given time dictate total war of the past—Changed place of years in the end is just the same—I have said the basic techniques of Nova reports are now ended—Wind spirits melted between “enemies”—Dead absolute need dictates use of throat bones—On this green land recorders get your heavy summons and are melted—Nothing here now but the recordings may not refuse vision in setting forth—
Silence
—Don't answer—That hospital melted into air—The great wind revolving turrets towers palaces—Insubstantial sound and image flakes fall—Through all the streets time for him to forbear—Blest be he on walls and windows people and sky—On every part of your dust falling softly—falling in the dark mutinous “No more”—My writing arm is paralyzed on this green land—Dead Hand, no more flesh scripts—Last door—Shut off Mr. Bradly Mr.—He heard your summons—Melted into air—You are yourself “Mr. Bradly Mr. ­Martin—” all the living and the dead—You are yourself—There be—

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.

September 17, 1899 over New York

July 21, 1964

Tangier, Morocco

William Burroughs

Notes

All page numbers refer to the print edition of
Nova Express.
Please use the search feature on your reader to locate the text that corresponds to the notes below.

Abbreviations

NEX
Nova Express
, Grove Press, 1964.

March 1962 MS First Draft of
Nova Express
, sent to Barney Rosset, March 30, 1962 (typescripts in several archival collections, mainly OSU 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.5).

October 1962 MS Second Draft of
Nova Express
, 170-page typescript dated October 24, 1962 and sent to Barney Rosset that day (a single typescript used as the typesetting manuscript, OSU 4.9).

ASU William Seward Burroughs Papers 1938–1997, Special Collections, Arizona State University.

Berg William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

CU Columbia University (William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac Collections).

OSU William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, SPEC.CMS.85.

SU Grove Press Records, Special Collections, Syracuse University.

Foreword Note

“
The section called ‘This Horrible Case
'
”: the October 1962 MS refers to “Section VII” and “Section III.” The change from numbering was made on the long galleys, where “section” is written in and the word “chapter” canceled, so that the book opens with a history of revision relating to its structure and the identification of its separate parts. Unlike the first editions of
The Soft Machine
(1961)
and
The Ticket That Exploded
(1962),
Nova Express
was published with a contents list of chapters. This was probably based on a two-page typescript entitled “Section Heading And Layout of
Nova Express
” (Berg 36.7), which Burroughs mailed Barney Rosset in October 1962. The list included an anomaly in using “Chinese Laundry” as both a chapter and a section heading. (The same anomaly also applied to the single-section Chapter 9, which was cut in the galley stage.) This duplication has been generalized for each chapter in this edition.

Last Words

LAST WORDS

The stunning opening of
Nova Express
has the richest manuscript history of any section and contains some of its earliest material. However, it was not originally intended for the book and had a curiously tentative relationship to the first draft manuscript that Burroughs mailed Barney Rosset on March 30, 1962. Writing from London on that date, Burroughs suggested that “Last Words” be “used as a foreword or preface” (
ROW
,
102), which was how it had been recently published along with two other prefatory texts in
Evergreen Review
6.22 (January 1962). Appearing under the title “LAST WORDS OF HASSAN I SABBAH,” the
Evergreen
version is textually almost identical and differs mainly in punctuation (using fewer em dashes, more periods, block capitals instead of italics, and lower-case first-person “i”—all characteristic of early drafts).

“Last Words” was therefore a last-minute addition to Burroughs' first draft manuscript and a paratext rather than part of the text proper—just as it had been in
Evergreen Review
, where it precedes and is distinguished from actual “episodes” of his novel. Burroughs had originally sent “Last Words” to Rosset from New York in September 1961 as he began work on
Nova Express
, and gave a brief account of both the circumstances of its original composition and its current purpose, enclosing “the testament of Hassan i Sabbah which came to me under mescaline over a year ago and which I consider to be a final statement of what I am doing in
Naked Lunch
and
The Soft Machine
and the novel now in progress entitled
The Novia Express
. ‘Play it all play it all play it all back. For all to see.' I hope you can include this statement in
The Naked Lunch
” (Burroughs to Rosset, September 27, 1961; SU). Since Burroughs had just arrived in New York following a disastrous visit to Timothy Leary, his identification of “Last Words” as mescaline-inspired is almost as revealing as his intention to publish the text in Grove's forthcoming edition of
Naked Lunch
. As Burroughs indicates, its origins go back another year, to spring 1960.

Writing from London, on June 21, 1960, Burroughs mailed an early version to Allen Ginsberg, then in Pucallpa, Peru, in response to his friend's plea for help after taking the drug
yagé
(“write, fast, please”), and the letter published three years later in
The Yage Letters
includes most of the opening and closing lines of “Last Words” as published in
Nova Express
(Burroughs and Ginsberg,
The Yage Letters Redux
[San Francisco: City Lights, 2006], 65)
.
The letter also demonstrates the essential formal feature of Burroughs' text in the many drafts he would compose during mid to late
1960, beginning: “LISTEN TO MY LAST WORDS ANY WORLD” (70). The setting of the text in block capitals, which declares its urgency in visual terms, goes back to the earliest manuscript, dated by Burroughs “May 20, 1960
Past Time
” (CU; Ginsberg Collection). On this date he wrote to Dave Haselwood that “these LAST WORDS OF HASSAN SABBAH might be used as a Post Script to
The Exterminator
,” the pamphlet he was then co-authoring with Brion Gysin (Burroughs to Haselwood, May 20, 1960; The Outsider Magazine Collection, Northwestern University). Before it appeared in
Nova Express
, therefore, “Last Words” had not only appeared complete in one publication (
Evergreen Review
) and partially in another (
The Yage Letters
) but had also been proposed to appear in two others (the Grove Press
Naked Lunch
and
The Exterminator
).

In May 1960 Burroughs had sent a “final version” to Haselwood: “The first version was flaked out here and there so that Mr K came off better than he deserves. I think it is all said now” (Burroughs to Haselwood, May 22, 1960; Auerhahn Press records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). Two variant early drafts from 1960 have survived that identify the mysterious “Mr K,” who is the clue to a very different “Last Words” than the version published in
Nova Express
. One typescript begins: “AND YOU MR K MR KRUSHEV WHO THOUGHT TO MONOPOLIZE SPACE UNDER THE NAME OF HASSAN SABBAH” (ASU 7). The other draft names the Soviet leader in a context that mixes political, media and business figures, and is indicative of the range of explicit reference that characterized many of Burroughs' early drafts of “Last Words” material, elaborating on the generic phrasing “boards, syndicates, and governments of the earth”: “YOU WANT HASSAN SABBAH TO EXPLAIN THAT? TO TIDY THAT UP
. . .
YOU HAVE THE WRONG NAME AND THE WRONG NUMBER MR LUCE GETTY ROCKEFELLER ANSLINGER KRUSHEV” (Berg 49.1).

Other drafts of “Last Words” include racist and sexist invective, signs of an ugly anti-Semitism and misogyny that went unchecked during Burroughs' early, messianic period. Sometimes, he would edit this out: “Deleted [Ezra] Poundish Anti-Semitism” he told Gysin, referring to similar materials intended for their proposed sequel to
The Exterminator
(Burroughs to Gysin, August 30, 1960; Berg). Other times, he would address it openly,
asking, “WHY DO THE JEWS ALWAYS MANOEVER ONE INTO ANTI-SEMITISM?” or seek to transcend it by identifying every­one as a victim of the same anti-human conspiracy: “I HAVE PULLED THE BIG CON HEY RUBE SWITCH. MARKS OF THE WORLD WOMEN JEWS COMMUNISTS ALL ALL ALL. WE HAVE ALL BEEN TAKEN. [
. . .
] DON'T KILL THE JEWS AND THE WOMEN. RUB OUT THEIR WORDS” (Berg, 48.22).

Although the fit seems perfect—Hassan i Sabbah is invoked far more in
Nova Express
than in
The Soft Machine
or
The Ticket
—the “Last Words” section was therefore drawn from a very large body of alternative, overlapping and expanded drafts composed from mid-1960 onward. Above all, these earlier forms reveal the specifically political investment of Burroughs with the text. The material was also formally distinctive, the text always typed in block capitals, at least until summer 1961 when Burroughs cut up “Last Words” and experimented with variations similar in layout to the spaced lines that would appear in the “Uranian Willy” section (Berg 26.13).

1 “Listen to my last words anywhere”: before this line, a post-September 1962 version has:
“You may call Hassan i Sabbah to write for you. You will stay to write for Hassan i Sabbah: Last words of Hassan i Sabbah”
(ASU 7).

2
“Listen: I call you all”: before this phrase, one draft headed “THE TESTAMENT OF HASSAN I SABBAH” has:
“
‘These things take time and that's my business—'
/
As usual?”
(Berg 12.4).

2 “Play it all play it all play it
all
back”: corrects
NEX
4 (“Play it all pay it all”), which reproduced an error made in the October 1962 MS; all other manuscript witnesses and recorded versions confirm the typographical error.

2 “In Times Square. In Piccadilly”: one 1960 typescript has a variant that changes the order and adds Paris to New York and London:
“IN PICCADILLY IN TIMES SQUARE IN PLACE DE LA CONCORDE” (
Berg 48.22). The Parisian reference also appears in the 1960/61 spoken-word version of “Last Words” recorded by Ian Sommerville, which features on
Nothing Here Now but the Recordings
(1981).

2 “Alien Word ‘
the'
: one draft continues:
“‘The'
Golden Word
of Alien Enemy that exists only where no life is. [
. . .
] I Hassan i Sabbah rub out The Golden Word forever” (
Berg 11.15).

3 “And the words of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel”: what
appears
to be a typographical error occurs in all witnesses from the earliest drafts to final galleys, and in the first, 1961 edition of
The Soft Machine
, where these lines also appear.

3 “writing of Brion Gysin Hassan i Sabbah”: one early draft continues with a fragment from
The Tempest
;
“leave not a wrack behind”
(Berg 12.4); while another, much later draft, continues;
“/////////////////////////////////
” (Berg 12.8).

3 “September 17, 1899 over New York”: the section's final phrase was only inserted onto the galleys in July 1964, at which time it was also added onto the last page of the book. The date and place recur across a mass of short texts in the mid-1960s, some clarifying that what was being recycled were fragments from the front page of the September 17, 1899
New York Times.
The page itself, copies of which Burroughs asked Richard Seaver to send him in October 1963, is unremarkable except for a reference to “the Bradley-Martins.”

PRISONERS, COME OUT

As for “Last Words,” Burroughs asked Barney Rosset to add this section to the March 1962 manuscript of
Nova Express
as part of a “preface.”
The section was clearly written later than “Last Words,” and its central warning against hallucinogens echoes in tone and substance Burroughs' May 6, 1961 letter to Timothy Leary describing recent bad trips on DMT: “I would like to sound a word of urgent warning with regard to the hallucinogen drugs with special reference to Dimethyl-tryptamine” (
ROW
,
73). The section was most likely composed in September 1961, in the wake of Burroughs' acrimonious split with Leary that month, when he also delivered a paper to the American Psychological Symposium promoting nonchemical alternatives to drugs such as DMT. Burroughs told Ginsberg the section “expressed quite clearly” what he thought “about Leary and his project” (
ROW
, 98). Compounding Burroughs' antipathy was Leary's indirect connection to Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce, whose enthusiasm for LSD was reflected in the drug's remarkably extensive and positive coverage in
Time
and
Life.

The section appeared in
Evergreen
in January 1962 with only minor differences under its original title: “OPEN LETTER TO MY CONSTITUENTS AND CO-WORKERS IF ANY REMAIN FOR THE END OF IT.”

3 “And
love love love
in slop buckets”: one draft, titled like the version in
Evergreen Review
, has an alternative line:
“Sacred mushrooms and mescaline for the asking. And something better than that. Hash and junk in one shot”
(Berg 11.15).

3 “and history is fiction”: several typescripts add
“—toute ca c'est invention—” (
Berg 11.15, ASU 7), anticipating the phrase, used correctly, in “A Distant Thank You.”

3 “Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer”: the surprising textual origins of this opening line of Inspector Lee's address on behalf of Hassan i Sabbah, which had previously appeared in
The Exterminator
along with other parts of this passage, are revealed in a draft typescript:
“I swear by the night and all that it brings together / that you shall march onwards from state to state / if an evil doer brings you a piece of news inquire first into its truth”
(Berg 58.28). Reference is to Book 49
Al-Hujurat
(“The Chambers”) and Book 84
Inshiqaq
(“The Rending”) of
The Koran.