Unleashing a ‘Human Cry’ : FRANCIS BACON: His Life and Violent Times, <i> By Andrew Sinclair (Crown: </i> $30; 354 pp.) : THE GILDED GUTTER LIFE OF FRANCIS BACON, <i> By Daniel Farson (Pantheon: $25; 293 pp.)</i>

After dinner in private houses, Princess Margaret likes to sing Cole Porter. As sister of the most powerful monarch in the world, she can generally hold guests captive to her lack of ability. One night, though, at a fancy ball given by Ann, Lady Rothermere (later Mrs. Ian Fleming), the princess began the familiar lyrics of “Let’s Do It,” when the cheering of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects was drowned out by the sound of booing rumbling like thunder from the back of the ballroom. Unaccustomed to criticism, the princess abandoned the microphone, the band stopped playing, and Lady Rothermere’s guests asked what happened.

“It was that dreadful Francis Bacon,” a man said to Lady Caroline Lowell. “He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I just don’t understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in here.”

Inarguably the most original 20th-Century British artist, a creature like Francis Bacon gave a new twist to horror. His work has been equated with the pain and suffering of the 20th Century. These are paintings of writhing, corpulent wrestlers, blood-soaked Crucifixions and caged, screaming popes: “slimy, slithering, pure blind images,” in the words of novelist and art historian Anita Brookner. As recently as 1989, one of the artist’s paintings brought a bid of $6.2 million dollars at Sotheby’s in New York, and they are found in great collections worldwide.

But Bacon’s real fascination judging from two books that have appeared since he died at the age of 82 in 1992, is in the accumulation of Jacobean antics that colored the artist’s life. Bacon was openly gay--part gnome, part mischief-maker--”taking no part in society’s rituals, observing none of the canons or taboos,” according to Andrew Sinclair, a British novelist and social historian, in “Francis Bacon His Life and Violent Times,” the first complete biography. This has been augmented by “The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon,” a thoroughly entertaining memoir by Daniel Farson, a British art critic and friend of the subject.

He was born in 1909 in Dublin to Edward Bacon, a major in the British army who was a collateral relation of the Elizabeth philosopher, his namesake, and Christine Winifred Firth, whose family owned one of the largest Georgian houses in the center of the Irish capital. Shunted between relatives during outbreaks of the Irish Civil War, an asthmatic who turned purple the first time he rode with the hunt, his disruptive upbringing consisted of private tutorials with a priest and a truncated year of boarding school. A gambler and alcoholic who unsuccessfully operated a racing stable outside of Dublin, Edward Bacon was, “a complete bastard,” according to his famous son, a sissy who was encouraged by his mother to dress up in her clothes. Francis was introduced to sex by stable grooms who worked for his father. In turn, as punishment he was routinely horsewhipped by the same stable grooms in front of his father. At 16, he was finally expelled from this twisted setting when caught dressed only in his mother’s underwear, but he never forgot the pain of his childhood. “Surely there’s nothing worse,” he said, according to Sinclair, “than a dusty saddle appearing in the hall.”

When Bacon arrived in London in 1925, as Sullivan observed, his “violent upbringing curiously prepared him for life in the jungles of large cities.” Relying on published material and one interview with the subject, Sullivan’s many observations attempt to integrate the “homosexual milieu” with the subject. Slightly more than 25 years after Oscar Wilde was convicted on charges of gross indecency, homosexuality was still a punishable criminal act in Great Britain, and open gays, by virtue of their lawlessness, often lived alongside criminals. Entering this Faustian world, the young artist supplemented an allowance of 3 pounds per week from his mother with proceeds from theft, gambling and prostitution. “One is always helped when one is young,” he said airily, according to Sinclair, “I was what you call pretty. I had no trouble getting around and getting money.”

In 1933, Bacon exhibited a startling painting of a bloody Crucifixion at a gallery in London. It was an immediate success, illustrated in Art Now, an influential journal. With no formal training, his art was nurtured in the great museums and galleries of Berlin and Paris on a junket to Europe with a “sporting uncle.” Like many artists at this time, his first influence was Pablo Picasso, but a viewing of Nicolas Poussin’s “The Massacre of Innocence,” led the artist to realize he too could capture “the human cry” in paint. Although his avowed influences were also Francisco Goya and Diego de Velazquez, it was the Expressionism of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh that gave his early work its raw power.

Bacon’s patrons were inducted into a mysterious world of decadence. Farson knew this world as a firsthand participant, and he brings refreshing immediacy to the subject. The artist lived with his elderly nanny, an eccentric Victorian who slept on the kitchen table during the day. She startled visitors by calling out for capital punishment for the Duchess of Windsor. For the crime of stealing the King of England she wanted to see her drawn and quartered in a public gibbet in Marble Arch. At night, “Nan” doubled as a hat check girl in an illegal gambling den in the artist’s paint-spattered studio under a pair of enormous crystal chandeliers. Dressed in black leather jacket and boots, the artist appeared to his gaming guests with liquid make-up caked to his beard and Kiwi boot black in his hair, sometimes only in a set of elaborate garters supporting black fishnet stockings. “I am looking for a cruel father,” he admitted matter-of-factly, according to Sinclair.

Both authors make the connection between the release of new power in his art and the death of his father in 1940. This was first seen in a 1945 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, of “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.” With the horrors of Nagasaki and Dachau resting uneasily on people’s minds, according to art critic John Russell, people looking at the painting were “brought up short by images so unrelievably awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them.”

The Expressionism of his youth was eventually supplanted by a more sophisticated neo-mannerism during the 1950s. Using Velazquez’s portraits of Pope Innocent X as a springboard, Bacon turned out exquisitely styled paintings of purple screaming popes trapped in golden cages. Though he had been taught by Catholic priests, the artist refused to have his work linked to anti-religious sentiment, and resisted other obvious interpretations. They were personal, he said, as were his images of twisted wrestlers, which it was interesting to learn came directly from a 19th-Century photograph by Eadweard Muybridge he discovered in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Of the wrestlers, Sinclair presents a flimsy argument that Bacon, “saw images of aggressive homosexuality and used them to produced paintings that mocked the moral code and subverted the criminal law of the time.”

Bacon saw himself as a grand artiste, a divinely inspired purist with links to the Renaissance, reacting to forces beyond the petty concerns of day-to-day living. Trying to force him into a mold as a moral guardian for a gay movement, as Sinclair does, is irritating and wrong-headed. Far better it would seem to merely take Farson’s unjudgmental position, and join in the celebration of the high-spirited mischief-maker always thumbing his nose at convention, whose searing honesty and standards of perfection were sometimes painful for the recipient to bear.

“Someone had to stop her,” the artist explained candidly to Lady Lowell after he took the unheard of step of booing a member of the royal family in a private home and stopped Princess Margaret cold. “Her singing was really too awful. If you are going to do something, you shouldn’t do it as badly as that.”