All bark, no bite.(The Yage Letters Redux)(Book review)

William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg The Yage Letters Redux. City Lights Books, 180 pages, $13.95

It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that Oliver Harris, a professor at a respectable British university, can devote his scholarly endeavor to the study of the life and works of William Burroughs, not as a case history of psychopathology, or as an example of how bad writing can sustain a large reputation among weak-minded intellectuals, but as if his literary output were worthy of serious consideration. A third of this volume is devoted to the professor's minute and scholarly reconstruction of how The Yage Letters came to be published in its present form (we learn, for example, that one part of it was first published by the no doubt aptly named Fuck You Press), which is as if all the resources of biblical scholar ship were utilized to explicate the provenance and deeper meaning of The Wind in the Willows. In ah age of academic hyperinflation, there is, it seems, no subject that does not find its scholar.

The book mainly consists of Burroughs's epistolary reports of his quest for a South American psychedelic substance prepared from the bark of a wild vine, together with a few interjected pieces by Allen Ginsberg which read like an adolescent's attempt to describe his first experience of the oceanic feeling, to which, because of the egotism natural to youth, he ascribes transcendent significance.

Burroughs and his ilk believed that wisdom and knowledge could result from the process of altering one's mind with chemicals--a lazy illusion that recurs throughout much of history. In ...