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.
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