The most allusive and fascinating sections of "Last Words," for me, are a few scattered passages that cryptically recall long-lost wild and mysterious days. "How I miss the old Agent days of total fear and alertness," Burroughs writes; and "Can I bring it back, the magic and danger and fear of those days in 9 Rye Git-le-Coeur and London and Tangier ..."

Enigmatically referring to a "war" during which "they" turned on a "withering heat," he writes,

We had to retreat -- so many times. And we came back maimed. Whole areas of thought and feeling burned out ... Wonder what casualties the others suffered? Remember Mikey's black lover, who was psychic, said, "It is terrible here. Spirits fighting."

In another place:

I invoke: rows of naked red male forms moving forward in a definite pattern -- a killing fan-out: Kill! Kill! Kill! Like we used to kill. The pure killing purpose. Now? Turned out to pasture like old horses, is it? Well, I got one good kick left.

In these enigmatic lines, the man's life and his strange work come together in a mysterious and oddly harmonious way.

But if "Last Words" reveals Burroughs dreaming of the "war," it also reveals a gentler, more intimate side. The end of the final entry, which gained a measure of fame when the New Yorker published portions of "Last Words" after Burroughs' death, reads:

Thinking is not enough.

Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience -- any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, no Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict.

Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico. Pure love.

What I feel for my cats present and past.

Love? What is It?

Most natural painkiller what there is.

LOVE.

In his informative, heartfelt introduction to the book, editor James Grauerholz (who was Burroughs' best friend and lived with him in the writer's house in Lawrence, Kan.) writes that these words represent a kind of spiritual breakthrough for Burroughs, an epiphany: "In the last years of his life William Burroughs was allowed -- by effort, suffering and grace -- to finish his education."

Grauerholz is obviously in a far better position than a reviewer to evaluate Burroughs' spiritual education. But based on Burroughs' own declarations in "Last Words," it would seem that that education came sadly late. Burroughs himself confesses to a monumental case of arrested development. "One more thing to learn, and always too late," he laments. A few weeks later, he writes, "So at 83, I finally catch up with myself. In terms of where I came from, I am just emerging from a stormy adolescence with a modicum of sense."

That "modicum of sense" meant turning away from the anger and hatred that had consumed him and toward greater emotional openness. "I find myself knocking myself out to be charming, and how I love it -- to see the subject glow in response," he writes. "It's a great feeling, that I have only experienced in the last few years. Putting out charm and watching it hit. This [is] completely different from the fear hit, putting out fear and watching it hit and twist in a cold sore."

It is strange, and half-sweet, to think of Burroughs -- the ultimate naysayer, who confesses to having "a weakness for evil old men"; the man who in the course of his savage career burned down his relationships with his father, his mother, his wife, Joan, and his neglected, alcoholic, doomed son, Billy -- becoming a have-a-nice-day kind of guy. And his declaration that love is the "most natural painkiller what there is" is undeniably moving. But there is something irredeemably sad about "Last Words" as well, and the sadness outweighs Burroughs' late attempt at emotional redemption. Even the deepest, most genuine emotion in the book, his love for his cats, arouses pity more than any other feeling: What was it that channeled this man's emotions away from human beings?

Burroughs gives the answer:

The things I had to do to do the things I had to do. I sound like some tiresome old mean typhoon -- I mean tycoon, of course, mulling over all the people that he trampled down, like the bloody horse's ass he was. And I was obsessed, possessed by writing, after a late start at thirty-five with "Junky." Forgot about the cat that caught food in its paw. Forgot about Mother and Dad, Joan and Billy. I had to keep moving, New York.

In another passage, he writes, "Mother, Dad, Mort, Billy -- I failed them all."

And in perhaps the most painful passage in the book, written just days before his death, the thought of his mother unleashes an anguished stream-of-consciousness cry:

Mother said about Joan: "She was just like a tigress."Said no to any enforced confinement. She was right there, and other where's and there's. What can I say --

Why who where when can I say -- Tears are worthless unless genuine, tears from the soul and the guts, tears that ache and wrench and hurt and tear. Tears for what was.

The terrible, barely coherent fragment "Why who where when can I say" recalls the despairing words of another old man at the end of his life: Lear's lament that Cordelia will come no more -- "Never, never, never, never, never!" And when in the very next line Burroughs mourns his beloved Fletch, the link between his love of his cats and his failure to love human beings is inescapable. "In despair he threw himself somewhere, and was saved by his love for cats," he writes. This may be a salvation of sorts, an illumination, but it is an illumination that casts a pitiless light on a haunted, blasted past.

In the end, the paradox of Burroughs, and the contradiction that makes "Last Words" not just fragmentary in form but fragmentary in thought and feeling, are that this writer created his life's work out of barrenness -- out of a rage, hatred, nihilism and rebellion that at the end he began to realize were fatally limited. Burroughs truly was an inhuman writer; his muse descended from a planet wandering in the void, out beyond good and evil. This is why his gestures toward a positive morality are hopelessly confused -- and why he vacillates between celebrating his old, nihilistic self and embracing his new, softer one. He was far too intelligent not to know that it wasn't the gentler William S. Burroughs who was responsible for "Naked Lunch." Readers of "Last Words" may find the human Burroughs more congenial -- but if it hadn't been for the alien Burroughs, they wouldn't be reading him at all.

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