THE MAN

WHO

 UNLEASHED

 THE BIRDS

Frank Baker & his Circle

by

                    Paul Newman                 

 

In 1963 the world of entertainment was transfixed by the terrifying movie The Birds directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier. But what many people do not know was that the same story had been written thirty years earlier by a brilliant young writer called Frank Baker who depicted the city of London falling apart as it was mercilessly attacked by a mysterious flock of birds. This novel had been forgotten and Baker was smarting in penury as he watched what he saw as his own creation go on to reap thousands of dollars. Isolated and neglected, bisexual and devoted to alcohol, he felt very much a literary leftover, hiding away with his family mainly in the duchy of Cornwall, about which he wrote with tremendous passion in the brooding, melodramatic The Twisted Tree (1935), in which a mother sacrificed her son, and several other novels and stories. But he was actually a writer of worldwide renown whose classic supernatural comedy Miss Hargreaves was adapted for the London stage with his friend Margaret Rutherford in the leading role. And yet, although he’d been saluted by several critics and a film had been made, starring Robert Donat, of his heart-rending novel Lease of Life, the greater body of his work remained unknown.

This pioneering biography tells the full story of this talented, tormented and intensely likeable man who for a while was organist for Bernard Walke at St Hilary, near Land’s End, later becoming an actor and author in London, and finally settling in Cornwall amid a circle of gifted artists and friends. In these pages not only do we meet famous authors like Compton Mackenzie but refugees of the ‘forgotten generation’ of the 1920s like Mary Butts and that master of the macabre, Arthur Machen; also the zealous, morally stringent critic of the 1930s, Derek Savage, who lambasted George Orwell on the issue of pacifism; the audacious, satirical painter, Lionel Miskin; John Layard, the much-travelled, widely influential anthropologist and psychologist who killed himself (unsuccessfully) after the poet W.H. Auden had betrayed his affection; the loquacious ‘Jock’ or W.S. Graham, picked out by T.S. Eliot as one of the most remarkable poets of the 20^th century; the yachtsman, pacifist and supplier of yarns from Cornwall, Denys Val Baker, and the creator of charming songs and ballads, John Raynor. There is also the matter of his knowledge of Aleister Crowley on the Penwith Peninsula, and we hear the testimony of his wife, Katie Lloyd, who explains what exactly was the genesis of that strange, perplexing novel Talk of the Devil and the death of Ka Cox at the Carn.

Paul Newman, former editor of the literary magazine Abraxas, has written books and articles covering subjects as diverse as symbolism, topography and literature. Titles include The Hill of the Dragon (1979) and The Meads of Love (1994), a life of the poet-miner, John Harris. Together with the sculptor A.R. Lamb, he shared a poetry collection In Many Ways Frogs (1997), followed by Lost Gods of Albion (1998), a study of British hill-figures, and A History of Terror: Fear and Dread Down the Ages (2000). His Arthurian novel Galahad (2003) won the Peninsula Prize and his latest books are The Tregerthen Horror (2006) and Haunted Cornwall. He was among the international scholars asked to contribute to Scribner’s World Dictionary of Ideas.

 

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