Frank Baker
The Man who let out 'The Birds'
Frank Baker (left) with Bernard Walke
I knew little about Frank Baker before I undertook some research on a mysterious happening in West Cornwall. This led me into sifting through a collection of his papers. Baker was born in London, in Hornsea, but his association with Cornwall started well before the Second World War and is partly set down in the popular study he wrote towards the end of his life The Call of Cornwall (1976).
The papers were owned by a relative (who kindly allowed me access for research purposes) and instantly I was aware of looking at material of tremendous value to Cornwall and literature in general – material that needed to be incorporated in a biographical study, for the author in question had known so many people of artistic significance and his notebooks vividly convey the people and atmosphere of Cornwall prior to World War Two.
Biographical
Outline
Born in London in 1908, Frank Baker was the son of a marine insurance underwriter. But he preferred the example of his grandfather who was a trained musician. From 1919 to 1924 he attended Winchester Choir School and, on leaving, worked as a clerk in the London Assurance Company. In 1930, after five years in an underwriting room and one in a school for church organists, he threw aside a steady career and set off for Land’s End where it was then possible to live on a pound a week. There he made friends with a young Cornishman named Marcus Tippet to whom he grew very close. At a cottage in Boscean the great literary editor, Edward Garnett, visited Frank and Marcus and held forth on Russian literature. Later, when told that Frank was an aspiring novelist, Garnett offered help and advice. At the time he was working on The Twisted Tree, his first novel, a melodramatic, febrile, Jack-the-Rippery yarn set in the blasted terrain of West Cornwall. When Marcus died of rheumatic fever, Baker was devastated and thought that, in pursuing his literary ambitions, he may not have paid sufficient attention to his sick friend. He grieved but found no spiritual help through the local canon who offered the bleak consolations of purgatory to his former companion. So profoundly shaken was he that, after an interval with John Raynor in the Isle of Wight, he took a cottage in the New Forest. There he walked his dog, brooded, taught a class of girls music and began a novel with the uncommercial title Multiply the Lord. But he was not at ease. The shuttered, arboreal character of the New Forest did not suit him after the gusty, savage openness of Cornwall. Fortunately, out of the blue, a letter came from Father Bernard Walke, offering him the job of organist at £1 a week at St Hilary's in Penwith. So he was able to return to what he had always instinctively felt was his spiritual home.
Throughout his personal crisis, Baker had managed to hold fast to a thread of authorial ambition and, when The Twisted Tree came out in 1935, it was greeted with approval by the popular press. A striking performance, shot through with passion, realism and psychological insight, it told of a young woman who gave birth to a child who turned out to be a monster. Intensely dramatic, it was written (as one critic remarked) "by the ghost of D.H. Lawrence seated on the grave of Mary Webb."
Frank Baker wrote some fifteen novels, varying from the zany to the mournfully introspective. A basic idea running through his work was the gripe found in Lawrence, Conrad and Huxley: that modern civilisation had taken the wrong turn – too much soulless mechanization and heartless greed and lust – and was heading for disaster and apocalypse. He seemed to believe, as William Golding did, that man secretes evil as the bee secretes honey. Alternately Baker appears a gentle, entertaining man and a serious bothered one, heavily reliant on alcohol towards the end when he sensed his faith was failing to provide the spiritual succour he needed.
Yet there was also a jaunty, thespian side to his character. He loved music and concerts and much of his youth was spent in repertory theatre – he once toured with Sybil Thorndyke and Lewis Casson. His great success was the whimsical fantasy Miss Hargreaves (about a fictional spinster poet who comes to life), successfully transferred to the stage with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role. A grimly contrasting piece is the early novella The Birds (1939) whose paperback cover shows people being attacked by various species of birds: “On the day of the claw, the birds swooped down in a black cloud of beating, shrieking rage… Un-born babes were torn from their mother's wombs…men, women and children became helpless victims of the malicious and angry talons… No one was safe from the terrible vengeance of THE BIRDS.”
The novel is thought to have inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film. Vastly more ambitious than Daphne Du Maurier’s later treatment of the same theme, it is not a short story, but a dystopian fable of power and metaphysical depth. Anna, the heroine, is told about the 'Days Before the Birds Came' by her dying father, who had watched the first mass bird attack on human beings in Trafalgar Square. He recalls feeling "a dread sense of the mock-world we had set up in place of the real world which was our heritage." This mock-memoir of a survivor swoops from the personal to the panoramic - from the narrator's story to his overview of London and its bustling populace. Aside from a description of a bird shoot and bodily organs being pecked and plucked out, there is not much gratuitous gore. But some of the set-pieces are rendered with a Zola-like skill and realism - in particular the climactic invasion of St Paul's Cathedral by a flock of winged avengers.
The birds comport themselves like bleak, ever-attentive emissaries, varying between savagery and stony indifference. Explicitly they are corrupt emanations from the soul of man taking revenge on the host that has betrayed them. Baker hints that man, selfish and morally in error, has invoked God's wrath. Hence the birds are akin to one of those plagues which God sent to punish the Egyptians. The story is on an equal level with the theological fantasies of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and yet has a gusto, inventiveness and humour that is Baker's alone.
The 'nemesis' aspect may seem censorious. While most readers accept the notion of a bad character being punished or frustrated in his scheming, they are less enthusiastic about the idea of a vengeful God waving his big stick at humanity in general. Such Jehovah-style patriarchalism is seen as belonging to our dark past. Fortunately 'The Birds' works on more than one level. The central symbol has ambiguity enough (recalling Poe's raven or the reptilian nightmares of the Id) to echo through layers of meaning. Hence the meaning transcends the purely doctrinal: man's reptile ancestors; death, the eternal predator; the existential terror that perches on the shoulder of each individual and rebukes and belittles his achievement.
Another intriguing work, quaint and pathetic, is Mr Allenby Loses His Way (1946). A not entirely comfortable mix of realism and whimsical fancy, one can detect the influence of Dickens strained through the H.G. Wells of The History of Mr Polly. The theme is the transformation of a single man. At the centre of this modern fairy tale is Sergius Allenby, a plump little tobacconist who leaves his home and family to seek out his true identity. Is he truly an Orcadian fairy child - a foundling with a special purpose? The story explores his dilemma through a series of revelatory encounters, shot through with diagnostic dialogues and bursts of pessimistic social criticism. The shadow of World War Two stains each page page. Along with a consciousness of the darkening political situation, there is a fascination with the darker aspects of belief, the kinkier aspects of sexuality and a love of elemental nature made clear at the climax. The latter is enacted in the dramatically remote Ring of Brodgar on Orkney. Mr Allenby discovers his identity - he is the son of Humphrey Nanson, the enigmatic, slightly ruthless magician figure who connives the drama. The major problem the story raises is Nanson's motives in drawing Sergius in a most complicated and improbable plot. The creak of stage machinery is a little loud.
With all its surface charm, "Allenby" is a haunted tract. It is the work of someone caged and contained, deeply critical of humanity, yet too romantic to plunge into politics or social reform. Sergius is unhappy yet there is an element of choice in his unhappiness. Nearly all of FB's novels are infused with this nervous, questing quality, a longing for a steadfast spiritual presence (often lightened by a glints of humour), and it is perhaps telling that, in 1938, he abandoned the Anglican console and was received into the Catholic Church. In 1942 he married Kathleen Teresa Lloyd, an actress, and continued to pursue a varied career – writing, broadcasting, lecturing and composing music – regularly returning to Cornwall where he spent his last years.
In postwar years his fiction took a dip in sales. At one point he and
his fellow author and namesake, Denys Val Baker, thought of creating a
book out of their exchanges of letters and Val Baker printed extracts from
this in Down A Cornish Lane (1983). Naturally Denys flatters ‘Dear
Frank’ as a writer, admiring his versatility and actor-manager looks,
adding that not only was he a novelist, but the author of two fine books
of memoirs, Before I Go Hence and I Follow But Myself.
(Taking this in good faith, I ordered these ‘memoirs’ but was
disappointed to discover Denys’s enthusiasm for his friend’s oeuvre
did not extend to opening the pages and checking the contents. For Before
I Go Hence is not a ‘memoir’ but a novel or, worse still, a ‘Fantasia
on a Novel’. The book is a writer’s razzle and a reader’s hangover
− in other words, a novel about the woes of writing a novel!)
Frank Baker followed Before I Go Hence (1945) with Embers
(1947), a sad, atmospheric tale of the twilight of an old eccentric,
Thomas Trevelyan Embers, living alone in an abandoned cricket pavilion.
Across the last weeks of his last winter falls the shadow of an old love
and the music of a young composer who loves him. “All who are not
drowned in the tumbling cataract of the flashy and second-rate,” wrote
John Betjeman of this novel, “will cling to this book as a rock of
refuge.”
Such enthusiasm did not influence the buying public. If FB’s readership was declining, his writing remained vivid and assured, and he brought out some late books of distinction, including The Call of Cornwall, part topography, part autobiographical pilgrimage, in which each sector of the Duchy is surveyed from a personal angle. Ghosts of old friends are resurrected and interwoven with history and myth. Against this splendidly orchestrated verbal score, the dramatic spray-glazed landscape rears, fumes and breaks into bud. Musicians feature prominently like FB's dear friend, John Raynor, with whom as a young man he explored the glories of Land's End district.
But FB's most searching, reflective cri de coeur was the intensely personal I Follow but Myself, in which a series of pen-portraits of his friends (Beatrice Carless, William Holden Hutton, Alfred Rose, Amy Carr, Edward Garnett, Mary Butts, Filson Young, Robert Walmsley, Arthur Machen) open a floodgate of entrancing, perplexing and sometimes painful memories - a provocative blend of memoir and confession. Baker analyses his own makeup in response to the stimuli offered by these long-gone worthies. Not only is it a valuable door on our Edwardian past but a model of autobiographical honesty.