The composer Henry Cowell felt both blessed and a
little harassed by a group of working-class teenagers who got into the
habit of swimming in the pond behind his house in Menlo Park,
California. The boys exploited his homosexuality by
taking various liberties over a period of three years, but they also
granted him sexual favours which both enchanted and scared him. Then
one of them tried to blackmail him and he refused to pay up. The boy
went to his family, the family to the County Juvenile
Officer, and he to the District Attorney’s office, whereupon a warrant
was issued for Cowell’s arrest. The charge was that, on 30 April 1936,
he had engaged in ‘oral copulation’ with a seventeen-year-old, thereby
violating Section 288a of the California Penal
Code. The fact that the boy had consented was irrelevant to the law’s
blanket ban on oral sex. Officials delivering the warrant to Cowell’s
house at 11.00 p.m. on 21 May 1936 found three of the boys there, but
not Cowell himself. He came home a couple of
hours later with six of the others, whom he had taken skating in San
Francisco. At first he denied the specific charge, but he soon
volunteered information about the actual nature of his friendships with
the boys, and he handed officials photographs he had
taken of them. As a friend of Cowell’s later said, ‘I believe Henry
was glad to have it end, at almost any price’.
Cowell co-operated fully with the
authorities, with the intention of saving the boys from having to give
evidence. He admitted to having had sex with fourteen young men in his
lifetime, seven of them in the recent period leading
up to his arrest; the youngest partner had been sixteen, and all had
consented. However, the County Juvenile Officer consistently referred
to Cowell’s boys as ‘young children’ and the
San Francisco Examiner portrayed Cowell himself as a promiscuous
child-molester. Probation was denied, and the judge sentenced Cowell to
the standard term of one to fifteen years, to be served in what had
recently been rated the second worst prison
in the USA, San Quentin. Cowell arrived there on 8 July 1936. The
parole board subsequently, on 13 August 1937, fixed his sentence at the
maximum term, fifteen years—a level of punishment more usually
associated with serial rapists.[1]
At no point in the process had Henry
Cowell appealed to his homosexual friends for support. He does appear
to have thought of his homosexuality as a psychological flaw, and to
have hoped he could somehow leave it behind him.
Presumably, also, he must have known how reluctant some friends would
now have become to be associated with him. Some figures were
conspicuous in their failure to provide support or even otherwise to
convey sympathy. Charles Ives was one such. When she
heard of Cowell's imprisonment, Ives' wife Harmony wrote to a friend:
‘Have you heard this hideous thing about Henry Cowell—that he has been
guilty of Oscar Wilde practices[?]’ (3 July 1936). In a subsequent
letter to the same friend she reported that, when
she told her husband, he decided never to see Cowell again, adding: ‘I
thought he was a man & he's really A g— d— sap’ (12 July 1936).[2]
The fact is that, as all his biographers agree, Ives reacted
defensively to all references to sex or sensuality, rigorously policing
his own behaviour and nervously watching out for any imputation, actual
or imagined, that he himself was anything but sturdily
normal in these respects. His fears affected his approach not only to
his own art but to that of others. As one biographer puts it, ‘Ives
felt threatened whenever the subject of sex was broached; he
rationalized his attitude, however, by choosing to believe
that any appearance of sex in art, literature, or public discussion was
a form of commercial exploitation. Sensuality was his bête noir’.[3]
In his youth, Ives had not been averse
to a bit of male bonding, but he was already clear about what he would
permit himself by way of student friendships. Another biographer says
of this early period: ‘the specter of homosexuality
carried with it the threat of the loss of potency, and ultimately
fantasies of castration. Certain forms of sentimentality, however, were
permitted and even favored’. Friendships were permitted only to the
extent that they could be demonstrated to be unequivocally
masculine. The same went for his musical compositions, since he
allowed himself to be terrorised by that philistine strain of American
culture which regards artistic sensitivity as unmasculine. As an adult,
‘Ives ended up virtually phobic of anything feminine,
including the powerful emotions he himself experienced’.[4]
Yet another biographer concurs with this analysis of his fear of being
thought a sissy: ‘Violence and panic exactly describe Ives’s response to
the specter of homosexuality, which was part of a fear of feminization
even more threatening to him than to most
artists of his time’.[5]
The friend who was most
supportive of Cowell was Percy Grainger, who regarded his case as an
instance of the state oppressing the artist. In October 1938, he
offered Cowell work as his secretary, so as to persuade
the parole board that, even if he would no longer be allowed to make a
living by teaching, Cowell was not unemployable. Cowell conspicuously
qualified for the concessions due to ‘good behaviour’, having set up a
successful music school in San Quentin and
taught in it for twenty-two hours a week, as well as having founded a
prison orchestra; and so, in due course, his sentence was reduced and he
won parole. On his release in June 1940, he went to live with, and
work for, Percy Grainger at White Plains, New
York.
One of the more interesting
consequences of Henry Cowell’s long campaign for parole had been a
striving for respectability, not only in the demonstrable aspect of his
own character, but even in his art. The music he composed
in jail, and then after his release, tended to be less experimental,
less radical, than he had been attempting before; and the move to New
York cut him off from the more daring musical subcultures of the west
coast. It may be, in other words, that his arrest
and conviction led ultimately to a diminished achievement in his
musical career. But at least, on his release, he was still able to work
in his chosen field. Indeed, thanks to a federal ‘cultural defense’
programme which had been instituted as part of the
American war effort, when his civil rights were restored on 3 July 1941
Cowell was able to become a government employee, editing Latin American
music for publication to counter Nazi claims that Latino culture was
not valued by the USA. Fully pardoned by 1943,
Cowell was appointed senior music editor in the overseas branch of the
Office of War Information.[6]
In the long run, Henry Cowell got some
kind of revenge on Charles Ives. In 1955, a year after Ives’ death, he
published an aggressively sycophantic book,
Charles Ives and His Music, in which, referring to himself in the
third person, he reminded the world that he had been instrumental in
first making Ives’ reputation in the late 1920s: ‘Cowell immediately
began to include Ives’s name among the really
important creative figures of the early twentieth century, and to write
and lecture about him persistently both abroad and at home’.[7]
[1]
The papers of a major symposium on Cowell are not forthcoming about
this episode in his life, any more than they are about his sexuality.
San Quentin is mentioned several times, but the reason for imprisonment
only once (pp.155-156), by William Lichtenwanger.
Although Cowell is never treated as homosexual or bisexual, the papers
contain many references to his wife, Sidney Robertson Cowell—David
Nicholls (ed.),
The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997).
[2]Stuart
Feder, Charles Ives, “My Father’s Song”: A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), p.343.
[3]Frank
R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), p.169.
[4]Feder,
p.336.
[5]Jan
Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music (New York: Norton, 1996), p.375.
[6]
Michael Hicks, ‘The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 44 (1991), pp.92-119.
[7]Henry
Cowell & Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (New York: OUP, 1955), p.105.
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