William S. Burroughs wasn’t doing so well in the 1950s. While Naked Lunch and its accompanying obscenity trials put him on the international literary stage, he was also dealing with heroin addiction, alcoholism, and mental illness. He did some time in jail, got peripherally involved in a murder case, and had a son he didn’t want with the woman he married even though he was gay. He ended up shooting the woman and being a lousy father to William Burroughs Jr. So when he wrote The Yage Letters with a passage by Allen Ginsberg, he wasn’t in the best state of mind.
This slim volume is made up of correspondences Burroughs made with Ginsberg soon after he shot his wife Joan, fled from Mexico, and went traveling in South America. He wanted to find the drug yage which is now more commonly known as ayahuasca. His main interest in yage derived from a rumor that it made telepathy possible. Reading between the lines gives a sense that he hoped it would help him to cure his heroin addiction or, at the very least, escape from reality.
The overriding sense of absolute misery is present from the beginning of the book. Burroughs is racist and unfairly judgmental of everybody he encounters as he makes his way through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Other than the man who gives him yage, who may or may not be a legitimate shaman, he encounters researchers and scholars, government bureaucrats, corrupt police, and gay prostitutes. Burroughs can legitimately be criticized for being an asshole in these pages, but you have to admit he didn’t exactly associate with the best and the brightest members of Latin American society. His assessments of the countries he visits are based on his association with marginal people like petty criminals and police who abuse their power. If you think that corrupt police and bureaucrats aren’t a major problem in developing nations then I’d be more than certain that you’ve never set foot in a third world country. The shaman who gives him yage isn’t of high moral standards either since he is more concerned with collecting money for alcohol than he is for administering the drug. Burroughs suggests that he may even be a fraud. And as for the universities, let’s just say that not every researcher in the world is actually interesting to talk to. especially if they’ve gotten so deeply into their rabbit holes that they forget how to relate to other people.
The subjective mind of Burroughs lays like a thick coating of mud, sewage, and vomit over everything he sees. He was struggling with a lot of problems when he wrote this, one of which was a crippling low self-esteem. To make matters worse, dealing with addiction, mental illness, and the guilt of accidentally killing someone by wandering around foreign countries, getting drunk, and taking hallucinogenic drugs isn’t one of the most effective ways of coping with your problems. More than anything, this isn’t a book about South America or the drug experience; it is the details of a man in crisis. After all the racism and disillusionment, he does say one thing to redeem himself while traveling in Peru. Burroughs says he admires the Latin American people for their laid back, easy going approach to life, even believing that their cultural style should be the default for most humans. Maybe such a statement is too little too late, but it does drive home the point that all his nasty comments about the people there are nothing but projections from his own warped perceptions.
And there really isn’t much about taking yage in this book. He tries it once with the alcoholic shaman and not much happens except that he sees blue spots in his eyes and vomits excessively. Telepathy never happens. The one passage written by Allen Ginsberg describes the psychedelic experience under yage, but to be honest if I didn’t know that beforehand, I wouldn’t have known what the hell he was writing about. This book doesn’t do a good job of making me want to try ayahuasca.
But the crafting of the language is so good. Like in Junky, Burroughs writes in short, clear, direct sentences that paint a much bigger picture than what is presented on the surface. He writes the kind of simple sentences that Hemingway tried to write but failed. If there is anything worth recommending about this book, it is the prose itself more than the content, although I will say the content is interesting if you want to pick apart the mind of a deeply troubled man who is so lost in his wretched mind that he can’t see the world with clear eyes. It’s like he is wearing shit colored glasses.
The Yage Letters is a minor work of literature by any standard. It’s probably of little interest to anybody outside the counter-culture literary scene. That’s probably for the best. I wouldn’t judge the works of William S. Burroughs on this book alone. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he had regretted writing it when in the later years of his life.
