Clifford Bax



Clifford Bax (13 July 1886 – 18 November 1962) was an English poet and a versatile writer, known as a playwright, journalist, critic and editor,, lyricist and hymn writer. He also was a translator, for example of Goldoni. The composer Arnold Bax was his brother, and set some of his words to music.

Life
He was born in Upper Tooting, south London (not Knightsbridge, as sometimes stated). Education was at the Slade and the Heatherly Art School. He gave up painting to concentrate on writing. Independent wealth gave Bax time to write, and social connections. He had an apartment in The Albany. He was a friend of Gustav Holst, whom he introduced to astrology, the critic James Agate, and Arthur Ransome, amongst others. He met and played chess with Aleister Crowley in 1904, and kept up an acquaintance with him over the years, later in the 1930s introducing both the artist Frieda Harris and the writer John Symonds to him. An early venture (1908–1914) was Orpheus, a theosophical magazine he edited. His interest in the esoteric extended to editing works of Jakob Boehme, and helping Allan Bennett, the Buddhist.

His first play on the commercial stage was The Poetasters of Ispahan (1912), and he became a fixture of British drama for a generation. He was involved in the Phoenix Society (1919–1926), concerned with reviving older plays, and the Incorporated Stage Society.

He also edited, with Austin Osman Spare, Golden Hind, an artistic and literary magazine that appeared from October 1922 to July 1924.

A cricket enthusiast, he was a friend of C.B. Fry and wrote a biography of W.G. Grace.

Family
He married actress and jewellery-maker Gwendolen Daphne Bishop, née Bernhard-Smith, on 28 September 1910: they had a daughter, Undine, born 6 August 1911.

In 1927 he married Vera (nee Rawnsley), a painter and poet (1888–1974). She had previously married Stanley Kennedy North, an artist, and Alexander Bell Filson Young (1876–1938), a journalist; Bax's two stepsons by the second of those marriages were both killed in World War II.

Publications

 * Twenty Chinese poems (1910) with Arthur Bowmar-Porter
 * Poems Dramatic and Lyrical (1911) attributed (also to Arnold Bax)
 * The Poetasters of Ispahan (1912) play
 * Friendship (1913)
 * The Marriage of the Soul (1913)
 * Shakespeare (1921) play (with Harold F. Rubinstein)
 * The Traveller's Tale (1921) poems
 * Polly (1922) adapted from John Gay
 * Four Plays. London: Curwen Press for Cecil Palmer, 1922.
 * The Insect Play (1923) adaptation with Nigel Playfair
 * Midsummer Madness (1924) ballad opera
 * Inland Far. A book of thoughts and impressions (1925)
 * Up Stream (1925)
 * Mr. Pepys (1926) ballad opera
 * Many a Green Isle (1927) short stories
 * Waterloo Leave (1928) play
 * Square Pegs: A Polite Satire (1928) One-act plays
 * Rasputin (1929)
 * Socrates (1930)
 * The Immortal Lady (1930)
 * The Venetian (1931)
 * Twelve Short Plays, serious and comic (1932)
 * Leonardo da Vinci (1932)
 * Pretty Witty Nell. An account of Nell Gwynn and her environment (1932)
 * Farewell, My Muse (1932) collected poems
 * The Rose Without a Thorn (1933) play
 * April in August (1934)
 * Ideas and People (1936)
 * The House of Borgia (1937)
 * Highways and Byways in Essex (1939)
 * The Life of the White Devil (1940) biography of Vittoria Orsini
 * Evenings in Albany (1942)
 * Time with a Gift of Tears. A modern romance (1943) novel
 * Vintage verse; an anthology of poetry in English (1945)
 * The Beauty of Women (1946)
 * Golden Eagle (1946) play
 * The Silver Casket Being love-letters and love poems attributed to Mary Stuart (1946)
 * All the world's a stage: theatrical portraits (1946) editor
 * The Buddha (1947) radio play
 * Day, a Night and a Morrow (1948)
 * The Relapse (1950)
 * Some I Knew Well (1951) memoirs
 * Hemlock for Eight (1946) radio play with L. M. Lion
 * Rosemary for Remembrance (1948)
 * Circe (1949) muse
 * The Distaff Muse. An anthology of poetry written by women (1949) with Meum Stewart
 * W. G. Grace (1952)