A Beatnik Tourist in Ayahuasca Country
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
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