SHOCK APPEAL / Who Are These Writers, and Why Do They Want to Hurt Us? : WILLIAM BURROUGHS: El Hombre Invisible, <i> By Barry Miles (Hyperion: $22.95; 254 pp.)</i>

The subtitle of Barry Miles’ “William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible” is a tip-off. The nickname, given Burroughs by Spanish street kids in Tangiers in the late 1950s, was a compliment to his skill at slipping tracelessly through narrow alleys to score a drug fix. Its current implication is that here’s a subject who’s not going to sit still to have his portrait taken.

Luckily, Miles does manage to get Burroughs to leave an impression on his negative. He does so mostly by playing up the Boswellian advantage of having known his subject since 1965. Burroughs was then living in London and was already infamous for having written “Naked Lunch”--the origami of a novel banned in Boston while its author was being praised by Norman Mailer as “the only American writer conceivably possessed by genius.” Between 1965 and 1972, Miles worked for Burroughs, cataloguing his archives at his flat in Duke Street, St. James’s, and making occasional notes on their after-dinner talks. His comfort with his subject is warm enough for him to write this biography on a first-name basis: “Bill.” Its pleasures are those of access, of insider trading. Such a tack is all the more noticeable from Miles, whose 1989 “Allen Ginsberg: A Biography” was much more wide angle, hefty, detail-doting.

The animating connection made by Miles is between Burrough’s life--especially his friendships and romances--and his work. With Burroughs it’s a connection that’s been easy to disbelieve. Born in St. Louis in 1914, the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine who moved on to study English literature at Harvard, Burroughs has been able to pull off a stiff-lipped imitation of a WASP banker quite successfully over the years.

Indeed, he showed a talent for stock roles as early as 1943 when he moved into an apartment on West 115th Street with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac--ground zero for the beat movement. There he began to devise his “routines”--monologues in which he ventriloquially shifted from lesbian governess to gun-toting Southern sheriff to bald-skulled silent Chinese. Adapting such 2-D roles to his life, he became a sort of self-created American dandy, speaking in the flat tones of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett detective novel, dressing in a ‘40s trilby hat and trench coat. His odd jobs as detective and exterminator seemed as much skits as attempts to scrape by. Such role-playing became more darkly and ineradicably shadowed after he accidentally killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, in a Mexico City hotel room in 1949 while trying to shoot a six-ounce water glass off her head as part of “a William Tell act.”

More than 30 years later, Burroughs wrote, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.” Yet most of Burrough’s writings seem as disconnected from recognizable, daily life as his various personae.

After a period of writing fairly straightforward prose, “Junkie,” a first-person account of his heroin addiction, was published in a lurid trade paperback edition of 100,000 copies and received no reviews when released in 1953. “Queer,” its sequel, set mostly in Mexico City gay bars, was not released until 1986.

The rest of Burroughs’ novels are set in a surreal landscape pulverized from classic boyhood genres: sci-fi, detective, Western. The blank innocence of such fictional spots is then splattered by erotic hangings, viral invasions, paranoid rants. “Naked Lunch” is a masterpiece of spliced routines. “The Soft Machine,” “The Ticket That Exploded” and “Nova Express” were written as a trilogy in the 1960s, deploying the “cut-up” method by which Burroughs lined up unrelated texts to create new sentences by a process of educated chance. In a 1959 letter to Allen Ginsberg (quoted in “The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959,” just released from Viking with a perceptive introduction by Oliver Harris) Burroughs crankily refused even to supply a brief bio to Grove Press: “I just can’t write one of those autobiographical notes the way writers do, you know where they live and their pets.” In his cultivation of “impersonality” Burroughs seems closest in spirit to his fellow St. Louis native, T. S. Eliot, whose “The Waste Land” he once praised as “the first great cut-up collage.”

Miles’ service in “William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible” is to fill the life between the lines. The surprise is Burroughs’ admission in a letter to Ginsberg (quoted in both “El Hombre” and “The Letters”): “I have to have receivers for routine.” It turns out that Burroughs felt he was incapable of flourishing unless he was writing to, and for, a friend, especially a lover. (In this one respect he was unexpectedly similar to the poet Frank O’Hara, who compared his own poems written during the same era to unmade telephone calls.)

The first of Burroughs’ “receivers” was Allen Ginsberg. Miles tracks the ebb and flow of their love affair, which coincided with the first inklings and the eventual writing of “Naked Lunch.” Many of the “routines” in “Naked Lunch” were contained in Burroughs’ letters to Ginsberg from Tangiers: “Maybe the real novel is letters to you.”

Burroughs’ later cut-up phase coincided with his friendship with the painter Brion Gysin in Paris, and romantic attachment with the English mathematician Ian Somerville in London during the 1960s. Somerville, who became Burroughs’s adviser on such cut-up requisites as tape recorders, electronics and photographs, makes cameo appearances in “The Ticket That Exploded” as the Subliminal Kid and in “Nova Express” as Technical Tilly. Having relocated to the Bowery in New York City in 1974, Burroughs then had a brief affair with James Brauerholz, a 21-year-old Midwestern transplant who “still believed in the Midwestern values of hard work and efficiency” and who went on to edit his final trilogy, beginning with the unusually straightforward narrative of “Cities of the Red Night.” Miles makes a case for the personalities of Burroughs’s intimates actually being detectable in the seemingly impassive masks of his books.

Miles’s own role as an informed fan has its minuses. Too many works are described as “acclaimed.” Too many passages from Burroughs’ novels are deemed “prophetic”--as in the claim that the Southern sheriff ensconced in an outhouse in “Naked Lunch” foreshadowed Lyndon Johnson’s later invitation to reporters to interview him while he sat on the toilet. But the great plus is the feeling of intimacy brought to an elusive subject.

Most moving is a closing account of Burroughs’ attempt at exorcising the “Ugly Spirit” he felt was responsible for his shooting his wife. This ceremony took place in 1992 in a sweat lodge near Burroughs’ current home in Lawrence, Kansas, under the guidance of a Sioux medicine man. Burroughs emerges from the smoky ceremony, as from Miles’ biography, seeming quirky, brave, fragile, far-out, committed, adventuresome, very old and very young. As Miles writes of Burroughs’ Kansas life divided between typing, painting and shooting practice: “It is a fantasy male world taken from a boy’s adventure book, a life that a part of Bill aspires to, and which, it must be said, he has to some extent achieved.”

Burroughs’ Soft Spot

“Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and translucent. I am cuddling it. I don’t know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small but can walk and talk. ‘Don’t you want me?’ Again, I don’t know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.

”. . . Notes from early 1984: My connection with Ruski is a basic factor in my life. Whenever I travel, someone Ruski knows and trusts must come and live in the house to look after him and call the vet if anything goes wrong. I will cover any expense.

“When Ruski was in the hospital with pneumonia I called every few hours. I remember once there was a long pause and the doctor came on to say, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Burroughs’ . . . the grief and desolation that closed around me. But he was only apologizing for the long wait. . . ‘Ruski is doing fine . . . temperature down . . . I think he’s going to make it.’ And my elation the following morning: ‘Down almost to normal. Another day and he can go home.’ ”

From “The Cat Inside” by William S. Burroughs. (Viking: $12.50.) This combination of dream fragments, diary entries and anecdotes, originally published in 1986, is Burroughs’ tribute to his cats.