Burroughs, 79, has backed away from the edge in his personal life. Since 1981 he’s lived in Lawrence, Kans., the quiet university town to which he was introduced by James Grauerholz, his longtime secretary and a Kansas native. He own; a one-story wood-frame house, with a half dozen much–loved cats and an array of guns–which he uses to blast spray cans of paint, yielding Pollock-meets-Peckinpah art works. His business affairs and personal needs are seen to by Grauerholz and his staff at William Burroughs Communications, a computer-and-fax-equipped office nearby. (The man who inspired cyberpunk sci-fi still uses a typewriter.) In New York in the late ’70s, Burroughs was again addicted to heroin; in Lawrence, he drinks vodka and Coke and goes to bed early. “I usually work in the afternoon,” he says, “say from about 12 to 6. 1 don’t always do anything at all.” But right now he’s editing and adding to a new 600-page manuscript (“I think it’s going to be called ‘My Education.’ Perhaps. Perhaps”), which he says “could be gotten ready in about a month of very concentrated work”; when that’s done, he can go back to a longerrange project, a Robert Wilson opera combining Milton’s “Paradise Lost” with the supposed 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, N.M.

Lately el hombre invisible–so Spanish boys in Tangier called him, for his wraithlike wanderings after junk–has become nearly as visible as he was in the early ’60s, when “Naked Lunch” was praised by Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy and, more usefully, banned in Boston. He’s got a CD single out (“The ‘Priest’ They Called Him,” on Portland’s Tim Kerr Records) with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. After upstaging Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film “Drugstore Cowboy,” he may do the same to Uma Thurman in Van Sant’s new “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Barry Miles’s new William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (263 pages. Hyperion. $22.95) has made him a two-time biographee–an even surer index of fame than his being introduced on “Saturday Night Live” in 1981 by Lauren Hutton as “in my opinion the greatest living American writer.” In September he releases his second album on Island, “Spare Ass Annie & Other Tales.” And best of all, we now have The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959 (472 pages. Viking. $25). Burroughs used his correspondence, it turns out, as both a journal of the years in which he became a writer and a sketchbook for his early work: “Junkie,” “Queer,” “The Yage Letters” and “Naked Lunch” itself

Burroughs hasn’t gotten around to Miles’s biography yet; he’s been reading advance proofs of Edmund White’s new biography of Jean Genet while rereading Genet himself, along with Fitzgerald, Conrad (“who rereads very well”) and Hemingway. “I have a copy,” he says. “Unless someone borrowed it.” But except for recent events–a paragraph on Burroughs’s 1991 triple bypass and an account of a 1992 sweat-lodge ceremony in which a shaman took on his “Ugly Spirit”–Miles’s unfootnoted book is far less detailed than Ted Morgan’s 1988 “Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs,” which Burroughs calls “a very good, workmanlike job.” Miles, a longtime acquaintance, is as forthright as Morgan about Burroughs’s drug use and homosexuality; since Burroughs built his literary career and public persona on self-revelation, “discretion” would be absurd. But Miles omits such painful yet crucial incidents as Burroughs’s cutting off the last joint of his little finger with poultry shears after being cold-shouldered by a would-be lover.

Still, he can’t avoid dealing with Sept. 6, 1951: the night Burroughs, drunk, tried to shoot a glass off his commonlaw wife’s head and killed her instead. In a 1985 preface to “Queer,” Burroughs wrote that he was “forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death … I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from … Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” The horror of Control, from political tyranny to sexual repression to drug addiction to conventional literary structure, is a constant in Burroughs’s work, both in his collage-like books and in his aleatory “shotgun art.” paradoxically, striving for liberation has often put him in intellectual thralldom to fringe science: Wilhelm Reich’s orgone boxes, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, Whitley Strieber’s UFOs. Surely part of the appeal is that academic Nobodaddies say it’s fringe science; another constant, one that marks Burroughs as an essentially American writer, is his cussedness.

Nowhere does Burroughs revel in this cussedness with less inhibition than in his early letters; most were to Ginsberg, who understood that his rants about people and places were sometimes (in Ginsberg’s words) “just a WC. Fields act.” Fields himself (had he been homosexual and stoned out of his mind) could hardly have improved on this piece of sardonic self-mockery: “It’s like I been to bed with 3 Arabs since arrival, but I wonder if it isn’t the same character in different clothes, and every time better behaved, cheaper, more respectful…I really don’t know for sure. Next time I’ll notch one of his ears.” This is about as far as possible from the “complete sincerity” Burroughs idealized–and later achieved, sometimes making his work both preachy and obscure. But it’s his true voice nonetheless.