Walled In by Words : IN TOUCH: The Letters of Paul Bowles, <i> Edited by Jeffrey Miller (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $30; 604 pp.)</i>

In “A Distant Episode,” one of Paul Bowles’s most famous short stories, a linguist studying native dialects in Morocco asks the owner of a cafe to help him find a local curio: boxes made of camel udders. For reasons left unspecified, the owner takes offense, lures him onto the desert and dumps him amid a group of nomadic thieves who, siccing their dogs, ambush him in the darkness, beating him unconscious and then yanking his tongue taut to hack it off at its root. Tarted up like a scarecrow in a net of wire and tin cans, he is stuffed in a sack and lugged around for an entire year from encampment to encampment where he is “emptied out” before crowds of other Bedouins who put him through his paces, an endless sequence of cartwheels, obscene gestures and somersaults.

Bowles evokes the gratuitous violence of this event through an intricate series of omissions, of things left unsaid, the peripheral but nonetheless vital information that shadows everything he chooses to include.

We are, for instance, deprived all access to the linguist’s thought during his abduction and mutilation so that he is finally reduced to an insentient bundle of tin and motley, which is summarily wadded up and slung like a parcel over a camel. Never once does Bowles show him formulating plans for escape, thinking aloud, pleading with his captors or feeling fear, disgust, shame.

The most conspicuous omission of all, however, is the reaction of horror on the part of the narrator, who, rather than engaging in anguished dialogues with his readers, relates these events almost mechanically, thereby allowing them to register with their full concussive force.

We are always searching for the expression on Bowles’s face as we read the story, for a grimace, a wince, a wry mouth, for some gesture of empathy and compassion that will enable us to discover what reassuringly familiar attitude--shock, regret, disapproval--he is inviting us to assume toward the professor’s kidnaping.

But Bowles is never forthcoming, and the face that hovers mistily behind his narrative is stony and impassive, the mysterious and utterly indifferent mask of the witness.

While Bowles’ impersonality as a narrator contributes to the violence of his short stories, it also contributes to the self-effacing quality of “In Touch,” a somewhat disappointing collection of more than six decades of letters that span virtually the entire 20th Century, from Bowles’ days in the late 1920s as an ether-sniffing surrealist enrolled at the University of Virginia to his present life as an expatriate in Tangier.

“I can’t believe,” he once responded to the complaints of a close friend exasperated by his systematic avoidance of personal disclosures or, for that matter, even a trace of introspection and analysis, “that you find a similarity between my letters and a seed catalogue,” an unflattering comparison whose accuracy he took in stride, agreeing with Gore Vidal that “if you get a letter from Paul, it’s about what he had for breakfast.”

In his curiously flat, if amazingly conscientious, correspondence, Bowles exercises the same refusal to editorialize, to intervene in the action, to step out from behind the screen of authorial omniscience, that heightens the remorselessness of stories that even as a child caused his apprehensive grandmother, in some sense his most discerning literary critic, to plead with him, at the ghoulish age of 6, to “write about pretty things instead of horrid things.”

But if, by his own admission, he has never been a good letter writer but has filled his voluminous correspondence with details about such things as the death of his green parrot, which was found “in rigor mortis, on the bathroom shelf,” or his wife’s wig, which was found “in the hatbox with the egghead Sonia made a face on,” he has always been an indefatigably loyal and prolific letter writer.

As early as the late 1920s, he established lifelong epistolary pacts with a vast circle of writers, artists and musicians whom he met when he dropped out of college in 1929 at the age of 19 and ran away to Paris, thus beginning the life of incessant travel that made letter writing indispensable to his emotional survival in places as far-flung as Bangkok and Sri Lanka.

While living abroad as a young man in the 1930s and scrambling to make ends meet, he succumbed to the enticements of a frenzied social life and, to the detriment of his letters, which occasionally disintegrate into dizzying lists of famous contacts, was introduced to an entire host of pivotal 20th-Century figures, whose names he drops with implausible nonchalance.

The major stars of the European avant-garde parade through these pedestrian jottings: Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Gide, Virgil Thomas and even Gertrude Stein, who adopted this eccentric dandy, reeking of homemade patchouli, as one of her prize proteges.

Perennially broke and yet, as one acquaintance called him, “a virtuoso at being taken care of,” he pursued his studies in music and poetry by sponging off many of his wealthy friends, who helped him to achieve fame on Broadway as the composer of the incidental music for “The Glass Menagerie” and “South Pacific.”

Only in 1949 with the publication of his best-selling novel “The Sheltering Sky” (which Bertolucci was later to make into a film) would he finally receive recognition for what he is known as today, the elder statesman of the American short story as well as an eminent novelist, the last surviving and, in my mind, the best of the so-called Lost Generation.

Given the complicated career of this inveterate traveler, who deliberately settled in countries far away from the United States, which he once reviled as “a degenerate adolescent giant on a rampage,” it is surprising that his letters rarely rise to the level of much more than trivial postcards about such things as the cost of his electric bill or the extraction of two teeth, the prosaic details he dubbed “my seed cataloguing of the day.”

One reason for their banality is that, while he has led an extremely active social and personal life, including a tumultuous 35-year marriage to the novelist Jane Bowles (a bitterly unhappy woman who spent much of the 1950s and 1960s traipsing in and out of mental institutions), he finds boredom and monotony the states most conducive to writing and composing.

What’s more, his letters are weakened by his aversion to confessional prose, which he views as symptomatic of the cult of personality so characteristic of American literature, the inane obsession with gossip that led his good friend Tennessee Williams to perform in his memoirs what Bowles contemptuously refers to as a “striptease of the soul.”

Even when one is unwillingly disrobed by someone else, Bowles is appalled by the results of such exhibitionism. In reference to Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s mediocre biography “An Invisible Spectator” (published in 1989), Bowles objected so vigorously to the author’s violation of his privacy that, after the “unfortunate volume” appeared without the promised caption “an unauthorized biography” on its title-page, he strongly “regret(ted) not having arranged for his poisoning on his first visit to Tangier.”

In light of his fierce guardedness, one can’t help but wondering if he would also have been well advised to have served something out of “The Lucrezia Borgia Cookbook” to the editor of “In Touch” as well.