Arnold Bax: Privilege & Passion

Grove Koger

In my post for April 5, 2018, I mentioned that I once began writing a series of articles called “Counterpoint” for my city’s alternative newspaper, the Boise Weekly. As it turned out, however, the publisher wasn’t interested in anything that wasn’t local, and the series ended after only two installments. This piece on the great British composer Arnold Bax, who was born November 8, 1883, was the first, and appeared in the April 13, 2005, issue of the paper.

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Can you be too lucky?

Arnold Bax was born into a wealthy English family in 1883 and never had to work for a living. He was so talented a pianist that he could play the most difficult score at sight. He wrote music and poetry and short stories and an autobiography.

It’s entirely fitting, given his emotional makeup, that Bax started composing at the age of thirteen–in other words, at about the age of puberty. In later years his love life was messy and his home life just about nonexistent. As an adult he seldom had a settled abode, as they said in those days, putting up instead in hotels and inns, staying with friends.

Many of Bax’s influences turned out to be extra-musical. He fell in love early on with the Celtic world, declaring that the works of Irish poet William Butler Yeats “meant more to [him] than all the music of the centuries.” He spent much of his life in Ireland, losing several Irish friends to English firing squads after the abortive Easter Rising that preceded the Irish War of Independence. In “A Dublin Ballad 1916,” Bax wrote the sweeping lines: “Never before had such a song been sung, / Never again perhaps while ages run / Shall the old pride of rock and wind be stung / By such an insolence winged across the sun, / So mad a challenge flung!”

Later Bax turned his attention to Scotland, on whose wild western coast he spent most winters (yes, winters) from 1928 to 1939. By 1941 he had pretty much burned out, retiring “like a grocer” to spend his final days in an unheated room above a pub in staid, bucolic Sussex. Significantly enough, he called his autobiography Farewell, My Youth.

The gale of the world blows through Bax’s music. He called himself a “brazen romantic” and dismissed some of Bach’s compositions as “sewing machine music.” It’s a remark that, if I were to make it, would brand me a fool, but, coming from as great a figure as Bax, ought to make us sit up and listen. For Bax was great, the last significant figure in the romantic tradition that stretches back to Beethoven.

Bax wrote in almost every musical genre, but his very best works can be found in his seven symphonies (composed 1921-1939), his tone poems and a couple of almost-concertos for piano.

Bax’s First Symphony is a dramatic opening salvo, a gesture that the still, somber conclusion of the Second only partially allays. His Third is hauntingly lyrical, his Fourth languid and honey-golden, but with the Fifth and Sixth the drama returns with a vengeance. These are among the best orchestral works of the twentieth century, elemental pieces that (if we choose to hear them as autobiographical) reflect the windblown coast of Scotland where Bax spent those winters with the last great love of his life, Mary Gleaves. The Seventh Symphony, on the other hand, is a cloudless sunset of a work, a serene confession of all passion spent. Each symphony is cast in three movements with a brief, dramatic coda attached to the final one.

The best performances to date of Bax’s symphonies appeared in 2003 in a five-CD set from Chandos, with the late Vernon Handley conducting the BBC Philharmonic. Handley throws in a vigorous reading of the tone poem Tintagel, which evokes the coast of Cornwall and its heroic past; the premiere recording of the extrovert Rogue’s Comedy Overture; and a CD’s worth of interview and discussion. Bax orchestrated heavily, and slower performances are liable to bog down. Handley, I’m glad to say, pushes the composer to the limit.

If you don’t care to invest in the Chandos package, budget label Naxos offers perfectly good performances by David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. And if Bax turns out to interest you, be sure to investigate his tone poems. Besides Tintagel, look for the sea-drunk Garden of Fand and the windswept November Woods, both available on Chandos and Naxos. And listen to his Symphonic Variations and Winter Legends. As performed by pianist Margaret Fingerhut with Bryden Thomson conducting the London Philharmonic on Chandos, they show Bax at his passionate, melodic best.

I should add that since I wrote about Bax in 2005, YouTube has helped engineer a revolution in the music world, for better and/or worse. That means that you can sample Bax (or virtually any other composer) with a quick keyword search. For instance, here’s a link to Handley’s recordings of the symphonies, movement by movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAkytB04Aic&list=PL1YmMcEN_TABh4LNziuHS8Q8kf92IzYSq.)

If you’d like to know more about Bax, the biography by Lewis Foreman pictured above appeared in 2007 in a third, expanded edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell P).

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The 1926 portrait of Bax at the top of the post is by Elliot & Fry and is reproduced courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery under a Creative Commons License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode).

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A Ghost & His Spooks

Grove Koger

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 PM local time. A suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested within little more than an hour, but two days later he himself was shot. Oswald’s murder precluded a trial, and thus he will forever be Kennedy’s “alleged assassin”—which hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from routinely treating his guilt as a foregone conclusion.

Had Oswald received a fair trial, almost all the available physical evidence against him would have been thrown out of court, as such legal niceties as “chain of custody” procedures had been ignored wholesale. On the other hand, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence, and, given Oswald’s suspicious behavior immediately after the assassination, it’s clear that he was involved at some level. He himself claimed that he was a patsy, and he may well have been. Retired military historian John Newman has assembled a mass of evidence suggesting that Oswald had been acting as an operative for the CIA. It’s a damning accusation that, if true, would account for the agency’s long-standing refusal to make public a number of its files about Oswald.

What is undeniably true, as Jefferson Morley’s biography makes clear, is that Boise native James Jesus Angleton and a small group of fellow CIA officers had maintained close surveillance of Oswald for years and subsequently hid the fact from the Warren Commission. The question that Morley’s book asks, but can’t answer, is whether the agency was concealing something much worse than its own monumental incompetence.

I wrote about the clash between Angleton and another Idaho native, Senator Frank Church, in an article in the Boise Weekly for November 22-28, 2006. It’s too long to reprint here, but I plan to share it on Facebook on the upcoming anniversary. Or  you can read it at boiseweekly.com/boise/assassination-politics/Content?oid=930218.

This review of The Ghost appeared in the Weekly for October 25, 2017. For more information about John Newman’s study, see the bottom of the post. 

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The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, by Jefferson Morley. St. Martin’s Press

Born in Boise a century ago, James Angleton befriended poet and fellow Idahoan Ezra Pound in Italy before beginning what would be a legendary but checkered career in espionage. Along the way he saw a beloved mentor unmasked as a traitor and was forced to hide his own puzzling role in what journalist Jefferson Morley calls an “epic counterintelligence failure.” He retired in 1974 after it was revealed that he had been involved in a massive and illegal domestic surveillance program, much of it aimed at Vietnam War protestors. In the wake of that revelation, he clashed publicly with another Idaho (and Boise) native, Senator Frank Church, over his questionable conduct.

Angleton served brilliantly in American intelligence during World War Two, thanks in large part to his friendship with British intelligence agent Kim Philby, who, he would later write, taught him “a great deal.” He was also willing to protect Axis war criminals when they might be useful in what he correctly foresaw as the impending struggle with Communism.

Angleton joined the newly created CIA in 1947, serving under a series of directors, including Allen Dulles, who was deeply involved in the successful Anglo-American effort to overthrow the nationalist government of Iran in 1953. Angleton himself took control of counterintelligence—the painstaking craft of thwarting enemy spying—in 1954, and proceeded to build his own little empire.

Angleton had become an ardent champion of Israel after visiting the new nation in 1951, but, as the CIA’s Israel “desk officer,” he was obligated to do everything possible to derail its alarming push for nuclear weapons. However, his normally keen eye proved to be blind as Israeli scientists, using enriched uranium purloined from a handily accessible facility in Pennsylvania, began to develop a nuclear arsenal. As Morley points out, the effects of Angleton’s negligence, if that’s all it was, “will be felt for decades, if not centuries.”

Dulles’s reign came to an end in 1961 when CIA-trained Cuban exiles were defeated by Fidel Castro’s forces after landing at the Bay of Pigs. Believing that he had been misled by the agency’s assurances of the invasion’s probable success, President John Kennedy refused to provide air support. “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” he fumed afterward, threatening “to splinter” the agency “in a thousand pieces.” Not surprisingly, his anger was reciprocated.

Angleton’s own slow downfall may have begun in early 1963 when his old friend Philby showed up in Moscow to acknowledge his decades-long role as a Soviet spy. He and Angleton had become serious drinking buddies and “soul mates in espionage” when Philby took over the American office of British intelligence in 1949. Looking back, Angleton realized how thoroughly he had been played, and became obsessed with the idea that one or more “moles”—long-term spies embedded in their enemies’ espionage services—were at work in the CIA. Apparently there were none, which Morley calls Angleton’s “greatest accomplishment.” But the increasingly paranoid Angleton never realized it, paralyzing his own counterintelligence operation in a fruitless search.

It was later in 1963 that Angleton and the CIA suffered that “epic counterintelligence failure”—Kennedy’s assassination. The alleged perpetrator was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, only to return to the United States less than three years later. Angleton told the Warren Commission, which had been created to investigate the crime, that the CIA had just not paid much attention to the defector. That was an outright lie—probably the most revealing of his career.

As Morley makes clear, Oswald had been of “intense” interest to the agency, and Angleton himself had control of the growing file on him. The most charitable explanation for Angleton’s actions is that he was hoping to catch one of those moles who, he was convinced, had riddled the agency. But was his involvement more sinister? Morley raises the possibility that Angleton “manipulated Oswald as part of an assassination plot,” but admits that we simply don’t know. However, “he certainly abetted those who did. Whoever killed JFK, Angleton protected them. He masterminded the JFK conspiracy cover-up.”

Preternaturally intelligent, ruthlessly amoral, intensely patriotic, destructively suspicious—what should be our final verdict on Angleton? Here his own words may provide the answer. “The founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” he mused near the end of his life. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you were to be promoted.” He called Dulles and a few others “grand masters,” adding that “if you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.”

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The study by John Newman I mentioned in my introduction is Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth about the Unknown Relationship between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK, which originally appeared in 1995. In his revised edition of 2008. Newman goes even further in placing Angleton at the center of the web of deceit that continues to envelop the assassination and its aftermath.