The Yage Letters – William Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg

The Burroughs I admired in The Naked Lunch as a uniquely talented poet of the drugged body and mind, comes across here as an asshole. He’s still smart and brutally honest, able to bring a sinewy travelogue from another angle altogether, but it’s a self-indulgent, disrespectful one. He just lusts after young boys and the ultimate high on ayahuasca (the “yage” of the title). I’m not saying that today’s selfie-taking experience-seekers are any less shallow and self-absorbed, but I don’t want to read their letters, either.
 
His account of Colombia piqued my interest, having been to Cali, Popayan and Pasto. Decades later, the perennial poverty holding back development in living conditions makes these places sound little different, while USA and Europe were racing ahead. The procedure of random police checks on buses between these places —noting name, marital status, profession— in 1953 was unchanged in 1987.
 
Ginsberg’s later contribution amounts to little more than a cry for help after a bad trip on ayahuasca. The slim volume concludes with a “poetic cut-up” by Burroughs. It’s a risky style that he made work in Naked Lunch, but here it is two pages of random snatches, like jottings for a feverish diary that was never put together.