The Yage Letters, by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, City Lights, 68 pages, $8–$54 used
Long before it was popular for New Age norteamericanos to visit the Andes Mountains seeking psychedelic enlightenment from ayahuasca, the Beat novelist William Burroughs made the trek. But he took the journey in 1953, when the literary template for a psychonautic vision quest had not yet been set—not that a grumpy cynic like Burroughs was likely to write that way in the first place. Instead his account feels like the diary of an easily aggravated American tourist with firm views on the quality of the local hotels, officials, "god awful greasy food," and prostitutes.
I say that as an endorsement. I yield to no one in my affection for mind-bending dispatches from inner space, but Burroughs' bitter commentary makes for much funnier reading—especially since he wrote it in the same hard-boiled crime-story voice that he brought to Junky, the novel he published the same year he undertook his trip. The narrative in question is The Yage Letters, a book that collects his letters from South America to a friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg. (Yage is essentially another word for ayahuasca.) In the very first line, Burroughs announces that he has hemorrhoids, thus setting the tone for his tales.
"On my way back to Bogota with nothing accomplished," the traveler declares a dozen pages later. "I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent back woods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four). Finally I was prostrated by malaria."
As is often the case with Burroughs, the artist complaining of being conned sometimes comes across as a bit of a con artist himself. (In one excursion, he reports, "I was treated like visiting royalty under the misapprehension I was a representative of the Texas Oil Company travelling incognito.") He certainly isn't prettifying the less appealing parts of his personality; if anything, it feels like he's deliberately leaning into them for comic effect. The results may be the only psychedelic diary that reads like a W.C. Fields routine.
Ayahuasca itself is famous for fusing intense religious visions with severe physical discomfort. When Burroughs finally samples it, we get several paragraphs of descriptions of the physical effects ("I vomited violently leaning against a tree and fell down on the ground in helpless misery") and nothing at all about the visions on offer. Never fear: Having made the drug sound like the most gruesomely unpleasant ordeal of his life, Burroughs nonetheless tries it again a page later, this time preparing it in a different manner. He has a better experience, but evidently not a life-changing one: The effect, he informs us, "was similar to weed."
The book also includes a letter Ginsberg wrote to Burroughs from Peru when he tried ayahuasca in 1960. Ginsberg, unsurprisingly, says much more about his visions, which terrified him. The slim volume is filled out with Burroughs' reply to Ginsberg, a brief comment from Ginsberg looking back from 1963 (the year the book was published), and an experimental Burroughs text with Latin American imagery.
My beat-up old City Lights edition of Yage calls it an "epistolary novel," a choice of words that raises a question lurking behind countless travelogues: How much of this is true? Burroughs really did go searching for this drug in South America, he really did send Ginsberg these letters, and I suspect that most or all of this really did happen, but it's not hard to imagine the man embellishing a bit in the manner of many raconteurs. Or just coming up with a great phrase like "Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam" and deciding that he simply had to use it.
This is, in any event, one of the most entertaining books in the Beat canon. And amid all its grumblings about the towns and jungles that Burroughs traversed, one of his letters briefly breaks character to strike a more positive, almost utopian note.
At this point in his life, Burroughs was an Old Right libertarian who despised socialism and welfare-state liberalism while also having little love for the sort of conservative who preaches sexual moralism or racial purity. That spirit comes through in a letter from Peru that starts waxing rosily about mestizo culture, praising South Americans as a sexually liberated ethnic blend ("part Indian, part white, part god knows what"). He blames the region's troubles on the lingering influence of the Spanish colonists, and he suggests that the civil war then raging in Colombia—classical liberals on one side, Catholic conservatives on the other—reflects "the fundamental split between the South American Potential and the Repressive Spanish life fearing armadillos." He adds that he has "never felt myself so definitely on one side and unable to see any redeeming features in the other." What the continent needs, he dreams, is "a new Bolivar who will really get the job done."
The letter ends. A page later, he gets robbed twice and his old voice returns. "This is a nation of kleptomaniacs," he complains.
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