The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell by Michael Hicks

ABSTRACT p 119

Thus far, published references to Henry Cowell's imprisonment consistently obscure the facts of his case and overlook virtually all of the essential primary sources, including court documents, correspondence, psychological evaluations, and even Cowell's own writings on the subject. Although Cowell acceded to a charge that he had engaged in homosexual activities with a minor, the charge was distorted by newspapers and both exaggerated and minimized by his friends. The extraordinary prison sentence Cowell received resulted largely from a misleading letter by a juvenile probation officer, written amid a political climate of sever antipathy toward sex offenders. During Cowell's incarceration, several leading psychologists, along with several officers of the court, expressed faith in the composer's "rehabilitation" and their recommendations helped secure the composer a parole. Political changes in California and the entry of the united States into World War II paved the way for a pardon, which was granted primarily so that Cowell could work on a government project known as "cultural defense." Despite his impressive accomplishments in prison and the positive resolution of his case, Cowell never fully recovered from the experience. Scholarly repression of the facts ensued and led to fragmented, inaccurate accounts of the prison years. hence, this part of Cowell's life provides a useful test case on some persistent issues in musical biography.

p 114-6

From his arrest to his pardon, the prison experience reshaped Cowell's career. The restricted access to a piano forced him to write for the instrument in ways that depended less on his playing technique and more on abstract musical structure. At the same time, his frequent access to wind and string players, especially during his last year and a half in San Quentin, allowed him to experiment with orchestral sonorities. His quest for parole drove him into an artistic circumspection that dissuaded him from some of the radical projects he envisioned. Perhaps most important, the damage to his reputation in California uprooted him from the west-coast counterculture that had nurtured his most experimental work.* (*This will be treated comprehensively in the monograph currently being prepared by the author and Steven Johnson, tentatively entitled Henry Cowell and the American Bohemia.)

Olive Cowell repeatedly described her stepson's response to the prison years as both inspiring and tragic. Although he seemed to have transcended his incarceration, she said, "he never accepted it ... it did something to him -- it did something to his music." Despite the consistently positive tone of his letters from prison, he never recovered from San Quentin. Peter Yates discerned the change when the composer visited him a year after his parole. As Yates remarked of the visit, "the old forwardness he must have had to drive himself and his purposes before unfriendly and amused audiences has been replaced by a fearfulness and suspicion. he is unlikely ever to lose the prison mark, the expression of something said or felt behind his back, the uncertain secrecy."

This last, telling phrase suggest how far he had gone from the person Lewis Terman once knew. As Terman described him in 1919, Cowell was fearless and "naively honest" in expressing himself; eighteen years later, with the composer behind bars, Terman still claimed, "I have never known a more honest, truthful, or guileless individual. he is utterly incapable of dissembling." One wonders how such a person, unthreatened by the biases of his time, might have recounted his prison experience. All biographical treatments published during his lifetime pass over it. Since his death only occasional, sketch accounts have surfaced, accounts that harbor fundamental errors. Thus, one finds Jackson giving wrong dates for incarceration and Lichtenwanger ironically crediting his pardon to Earl Warren. The errors that blur accounts of the prison years, however, only begin to suggest how pervasive and beguiling the mythology that obscures much of the composer's life. The imprisonment of Henry Cowell has become a metaphor for the state of his biography.