A Voice to Make the Rest of Us Go Home : RICHARD BURTON : A Life <i> by Melvyn Bragg (Little Brown; $22.95; 533 pp., illustrated) </i>

Popular opinion about him tended to be negative and dismissive long before Richard Burton died of a stroke at 58. He was, so the legend went (and still goes), a wild Celtic charmer who spoke with the tongue of angels but surrendered all too eagerly to the lure of liquor and financial plenty. The enduring myth about Burton sees him as an abundantly gifted man who had it within his grasp to become perhaps the greatest actor of his generation, but, lacking diligence and discipline, threw himself away in riotous living and all manner of foolishness.

Melvyn Bragg’s penetrating and entertaining biography first appeared in Britain last September under the unsatisfying title of “Rich.” It is the ‘authorized’ biography, published with the support and sanction of Burton’s widow, Sally, who selected Bragg as the chronicler of her husband’s career and made available to him Burton’s voluminous notebooks--about 350,000 words of confession, self-analysis, gossip and commentary that publishers had coveted for half a decade.

The notebooks, copiously quoted throughout Bragg’s book, are touching in a way that Burton could not have foreseen, for they reveal a man who revered intelligence and scholarship, nursing to the end of his days a kind of longing for the solitude of a book-lined study. He was a gluttonous reader. Even when he was drinking most heavily, Burton was reading three or four books a week. Bragg writes: “Everyone I have spoke to about him--without exception--brought up his reading, the breadth of it. . . .”

It is this lifelong reverence for literature and intellect that dignifies Burton’s life and Bragg’s book. Despite plentiful evidence of a flawed, unruly nature--compulsive drinking, sexual Don Juanism, and so on--Burton emerges from these pages as essentially civilized and elegant, a man of uncommon worth.

Much of Bragg’s book, as you might expect, is devoted to Burton’s long, tempest-tossed relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. Burton is utterly bewitched by her, and his notes return obsessively to what Bragg calls “the marital and sexual tornado’ of their years together.

“Elizabeth is an eternal one-night stand,” Burton writes enthusiastically. “She has become very slim, and I can barely keep my hands off her.” Much later he confides, “My God, she’s a beauty. Sometimes even now, after eight years of marriage, I look at her when she’s asleep at the first light of a gray dawn and wonder at her.”

Disillusionment eventually undermines enchantment. Exhausted by Taylor’s drinking and self-absorption, Burton unsparingly records the bad times. “Our quarrels sounded like the quarrels one hears from the next room in a cheap hotel by two middle-aged people 20 years married and bored witless by each other.”

Vast stretches of the Burton journal are devoted to food, drink, dinner encounters with the international glitterrati--the Windsors, the Rothschilds, Callas, Onassis. (“Aren’t we posh?” asks Burton disarmingly.)

Along the way, we discover that Elizabeth likes Jews, that Richard hates to be physically touched. He writes with an insider’s sardonic wit about Hollywood and its dream factories.

But repeatedly a darker note intrudes. For all his potent fame and wealth, Burton is never far from unexplained melancholia. Sometimes his notes come off the printed page like a howl of anguish. On Aug. 2, 1967, he writes: “I am stupendously disappointed in myself. Something went wrong in my head at the wrong time. Anyway . . . something went wrong. And will never be put right.”

These are words to haunt the reader long after he has turned the page. Something went wrong and will never be put right. Bragg can only guess at their meaning. Was it Burton’s guilt at leaving his loyal first wife and their children? Was it some medical mystery of which he dare not write fully--the fear of epilepsy, perhaps, with its unspoken undertones of stigma and satanic possession?

Or were the words a pitiless acknowledgment that he had squandered his great gifts as an actor? Burton and his biographer are at pains to deny this. Acting, in fact, bored Burton. Stemming as he did from Welsh mining stock--the men “hard as granite”--Burton never truly felt that acting was a “proper life for a man.” Only during periods of rehearsal was he fully engaged by the acting process. “Once the puzzle was cracked,” Bragg writes, “the conquest made, the enemy taken, interest fell away.”

So Burton remains an enigma to the end. This book is probably as close as we shall get to him. What was beyond doubt or dispute was the magical presence on the living stage. The English actor Sir Michael Hordern, who was Polonius to Burton’s Hamlet, said of him: “He only had to walk upon a stage and open his mouth and the rest of us could have gone home.”