WILLIAM BURROUGHS: JUNGLE FEVER

A new edition of William Burroughs' book 'The Yage Letters' reveals
how the writer was transformed by a trip to South America in search of
'the ultimate fix'. Tim Cumming reports

"Yage may be the ultimate fix," the writer and countercultural icon
William Burroughs concludes at the end of his first novel, Junky,
published in 1952. The man they called "el hombre invisible" is
perhaps the greatest in the 20th century's gallery of cultural
extremists; his novel Naked Lunch became the plat du jour of Sixties
counterculture, and his revolutionary "cut-up" technique - on tape and
film as well as on the page - presaged the viral, wireless, sampling
culture of our own century by decades, and has influenced countless
artists, writers and musicians through the decades.

More than half a century later, yage, the psychotropic jungle vine
also known as ayahuasca ("the vine of the soul") retains its status as
the most mysterious and powerful of natural hallucinogens. Burroughs'
book about his search for the "ultimate fix", The Yage Letters,
possesses an equally strange and secret history. Published in 1963 but
written a decade earlier, it has long been seen as a fascinating curio
in the Burroughs canon, yet a new edition of the book, edited by
Oliver Harris, places it more centrally in the list of key Burroughs
texts.

Harris introduces the original edition, which was based around
Burroughs' correspondence with the poet Allen Ginsberg, with an
in-depth survey of the book's fragmented history, and expands the
96-page text with extensive appendices of new material, including
unpublished articles by Burroughs that are considerably more revealing
about his experience and understanding of yage than much of what was
published in the book. The Yage Letters Redux is rounded off with
previously unpublished excerpts from Ginsberg's journals from the trip
he made in Burroughs' footsteps in 1960.

It was a harried and junk-sick Burroughs who left Mexico in early
1953, a little over a year after he had accidentally shot and killed
his wife, Joan Vollmer, while attempting a "William Tell" act - firing
at a glass she had balanced on her head. Racked as much by fear and
guilt as by opiate withdrawal, and leaving virtually unprepared for
what was to come, the author headed south to Colombia and Peru, in
search of the ultimate yage fix - and a way out of his addiction.

Yage has been used for thousands of years - a ceremonial cup dating to
500BC is held in a museum in Quito, Ecuador. More recently, yage-based
religions, such as the Uniao do Vegetal and Santo Daime churches, have
battled in court to preserve their right to sacramental yage use,
while drug companies such as Pfizer have embarked on legal battles of
their own to exploit its active properties.

At the time of Burroughs' trip, little was known or understood about
yage. It was lucky that on his arrival in the Putumayo region of
Colombia in 1953, in search of the right medicine man, he encountered
Dr Richard Evans Schultes, the famed ethno-botanist who would also
contribute much to our understanding of the drug.

Both were Harvard men, and despite Schultes' evident misgivings at
Burroughs' unorthodoxy, the two embarked on a 1,000-mile expedition
that led to the author's first overwhelming contact with yage: he
overdosed and went into convulsions. A second, more ecstatic series of
encounters, in Pacullpa, Peru, would in due course unleash some of the
most extreme works of fiction ever published.

The letters to Ginsberg are a restless mixture of anthropology,
travelogue, paranoia, poetry, epiphany, cut-ups, satirical junkie
cynicism and epistolary novel. "I stopped here to have my piles out,"
the first letter begins in January 1953, from the aptly named Hotel
Colon in Panama, and much of what follows is more about the
misadventures of the journey than the destination.

Until, that is, the letter describing the "composite city" - a vision
that is uniquely Burroughsian, and runs through much of his work.
"Minarets, palms, mountain, jungle. A sluggish river jumping with
vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass or play
cryptic games..." In the letter's pin-sharp panoramas lay the seed not
only of Naked Lunch but of the cut-up novels that followed. The Soft
Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express: each of them,
arguably, has its roots in the riotous, disorderly effects of the South
American vine.

In a detailed introduction, Harris reveals how The Yage Letters began
as a manuscript typed on Burroughs' return to Ginsberg's apartment in
New York in the autumn of 1953. Less than a fifth of the final
manuscript came from actual letters. It's typical of Burroughs that
what purports to be a casual and fragmentary travelogue is in fact a
much more arranged and reconstituted entity. For Harris, it
demonstrates that it was much more than a casual correspondence
preserved for posterity: "It's the developing of his imaginative
landscape out of the real one."

The book was finally published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City
Lights, who expanded the text with Ginsberg's 1960 letters from Peru,
where, seven years after Burroughs' trip, Ginsberg, too, encountered
the awesome spirit of the vine. "I light cigarette, blow a puff of
smoke over cup, and drain," he writes. "Lay down expecting God knows
what other pleasant vision and then I began to get high - and then the
whole fucking cosmos broke loose around me, I think about the
strongest and the worst I've ever had it."

Not that he hadn't been warned. "This is the most powerful drug I have
ever experienced," Burroughs writes in an unpublished article he sent
to Ginsberg in 1956. "Yage is not like anything else. It produces the
most complete derangement of the senses." These include intense sexual
hallucinations, flashes of phylogenetic memory, and full out-of-body
experiences. "There is a definite sense of space time travel that
seems to shake the room," he notes, and posits that the extreme nausea
that accompanies the visions is a form of "time-space motion sickness".

The active ingredient in yage that produces visions is harmeline, once
called telepathine, because of its supposed telepathic properties.
Harmela alkaloids are present in the pineal gland, the "third eye" in
the forehead, and it seems that out of all the psychotropic drugs,
yage reaches deepest into the psyche, which may explain why so many
users report near-identical Garden of Eden-like visions, as if there
were some direct connection to the collective human image bank.

The bark of the vine is cut into lengths and stripped, pounded and
boiled in water with the leaves of a plant called chacuna by the
Indians, and which Burroughs was the first to correctly classify as
Psychotria viridis. This is essential to achieve the full
hallucinogenic effect, for without the DMT in the chacuna leaves, the
harmeline alkaloids in the vine remain inactive.

The Yage Letters marks the point when Burroughs moved full-time into
his own, fully realised universe.

'The Yage Letters Redux' is published by City Lights, price UKP
9.99