Frank Baker Read online

  THE BIRDS

  Frank Baker was born in London in 1908. From a young age, he had a deep interest in church music, serving as a chorister at Winchester Cathedral as a boy from 1919 to 1924. From 1924 to 1929, Baker worked as a marine insurance clerk in the City of London, an experience that he later fictionalized in The Birds (1936). He resigned in 1929 to take on secretarial work at an ecclesiastical music school where he hoped to make a career of music; during this time he also worked as a church organist.

  He soon abandoned his musical studies and went to St. Just, on the west coast of Cornwall, where he became organist of the village church and lived alone in a stone cottage. It was during this time that he began writing; his first novel, The Twisted Tree, was published in 1935 by Peter Davies after nine other publishers rejected it. It was well received by critics and prompted Baker to continue writing. In 1936, he published The Birds, which sold only about 300 copies and which its author described simply as “a failure.” Nonetheless, after the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s popular film of the same name in 1963, The Birds was reissued in paperback by Panther and received new attention. Baker’s most successful and enduring work was Miss Hargreaves (1940), a comic fantasy in which two young people invent a story about an elderly woman, only to find that their imagination has in fact brought her to life.

  During the Second World War, Baker became an actor and toured Britain before getting married in 1943 to Kathleen Lloyd, with whom he had three children. Baker continued to write, publishing more than a dozen more books, including Mr. Allenby Loses the Way (1945), Embers (1947), My Friend the Enemy (1948) and Talk of the Devil (1956). Baker died in Cornwall of cancer in 1983.

  Ken Mogg lives in Melbourne, Australia. He writes on film and other topics. His recent publications include a chapter on “Hitchcock’s Literary Sources” in A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and a piece on “The Cutting Room” in 39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock (British Film Institute, 2012). An earlier discussion by him of Frank Baker and Alfred Hitchcock appeared in the online journal Senses of Cinema (#51).

  By Frank Baker

  Fiction

  The Twisted Tree (1935)

  The Birds (1936)

  Miss Hargreaves (1940)

  Allanayr (1941)

  Sweet Chariot (1942)

  Mr. Allenby Loses the Way (1945)

  Before I Go Hence (1946)

  Embers (1946)

  The Downs So Free (1948)

  My Friend the Enemy (1948)

  Lease of Life (1954)

  Talk of the Devil (1956)

  Teresa: A Journey Out of Time (1960)

  Stories of the Strange and Sinister (1983)

  Nonfiction/Autobiographical

  The Road Was Free (1948)

  I Follow but Myself (1968)

  The Call of Cornwall (1976)

  THE BIRDS

  by

  FRANK BAKER

  With a new introduction by

  KEN MOGG

  Kansas City:

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  2013

  The Birds by Frank Baker

  First published London: Peter Davies, 1936

  Reprinted as a Panther paperback 1964

  This revised edition first published 2013

  Original text copyright © 1936 by Frank Baker

  Revised text copyright © 2013 by the Estate of Frank Baker

  Introduction © 2013 by Ken Mogg

  Published by Valancourt Books, Kansas City, Missouri

  Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins

  20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Frank, 1908-1983.

  The birds / by Frank Baker ; with a new introduction by Ken Mogg.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-939140-49-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Dystopias–Fiction. I. Mogg, Ken. II. Title.

  PR6003.A453B57 2013

  823’.912–dc23

  2013015376

  All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

  Cover by Laedan Galicia

  Set in Dante MT 11/13.5

  INTRODUCTION

  For me, Frank Baker’s The Birds (1936) is both a finely crafted suspense thriller that could show even Alfred Hitchcock a few things, and an authentic account of pre-War London. As London was where Hitchcock lived and worked, before going to Hollywood at the end of the decade, the Cockney director’s many admirers have a double reason to read this book. Of course, they also have a more specific reason. Baker’s “apocalyptic” novel anticipates Hitchcock’s 1963 film of the same title. Both in particular details—like a woman attacked by birds in a telephone booth—and in broad situation—involving a male character and his widowed mother, and a smart foreign girl whose arrival in the family circle sparks the mother’s jealousy—you could be forgiven for thinking that the novel inspired Hitchcock’s film. Certainly it resembles the film more nearly than the latter resembles its official source, Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds,” a short story first published in 1952. Indeed, Hitchcock instructed screenwriter Evan Hunter to forget the short story, to keep only “the title and the notion of birds attacking human beings.” Yet there is no evidence that the director knew of Baker’s novel until, in 1962, with the film already in production, the author wrote to him, seeking compensation (which came to nothing). The resemblances of novel and film can be attributed to several factors. Among these are a preference by both men to make exciting “soul-drama”—superior melodrama—that grips a general audience; and a mutual concern with visual story-telling.

  Yet the novel The Birds also has its unique voice. Throughout his life, Baker (1908-1983) was aware of “two actors” contending within him, two halves of the one soul. Accordingly, although his novel was conceived, late one wintry afternoon, as a means of settling past scores—its author had just watched with a gleam in his eye a gigantic flock of starlings blanket a field in Cornwall—the vengeful side of him was soon being admonished by its opposite number. You can see this happening in the scene where the narrator apologises if he has given the impression that the world was once “so miserably governed, humanity so dense and apathetic, that I never spent a happy moment in their midst.” Several charming passages follow. A typical one expresses longing “for the roar of an underground train; the babble of humanity crowding in the refreshment-room of some theatre. . . .” Another must have been added at the last minute, for it describes the funeral of King George V, in January 1936, and begins: “Our people were discovered at their best and simplest, whenever any special occasion called them to unanimity.” However, in Baker’s interior life, unanimity was always elusive; the division there ran deep. You could call it eros versus thanatos—the life instincts battling the death instincts—yet Baker was scarcely alone in housing such a civil war. It comes of being civilised! What was special in his case was how keenly he felt it and the literary uses he put it to, including in a doppelgänger motif that surfaces in The Birds and whose apotheosis would fuel another fine thriller, My Friend the Enemy (1948).

  His ability, then, to construct drama out of his grievances and intimate conv
ictions distinguishes Baker’s work. And although his biographer Paul Newman sounds an admirable caution—“Biographical details should never be turned against a writer or masquerade as literary criticism”—even Newman concedes that such matters in Baker’s case “booby-trap his writings” and were “burned into his memory.” A reader of The Birds needs to know some background, starting with the five tedious years young Frank spent commuting between his parents’ house in north London and his first job, as a clerk in the marine department of an insurance firm in the City. The novel’s hated Underwriter is based on a real person. So, too, clearly, is the novel’s narrator, referred to as the Elder because he is recalling events many years later for his daughter Anna, but who features in those events as a young insurance clerk with literary aspirations. One fateful evening, the clerk is sitting alone with his notebook in a busy London café when a “tall, thin man” enters and, seeing the youth, comes straight to his table where he tries to show him dirty pictures. The youth flees. When they meet again, in the novel’s magisterial climax in St. Paul’s Cathedral, it becomes evident that the man is the very Devil. In real life, though, he was one Alfred Rose, and in Baker’s memoirs he apologises for the depiction. Then adds: “Yet in a way it was the highest compliment I could pay him; I think he would have appreciated it.”

  Rose was a middle-aged, lapsed Anglo-Catholic monk, apparently gay—but with two schoolgirl daughters—who effectively picked up young Baker on Ascension Day 1925 during the teenager’s lunch-break when both parties found themselves attending a High Mass in St. Paul’s Cathedral. That just about says it all! At least, it would, but for some further facts about Baker. First, he was a moral lad. Although he and Rose maintained a friendship, on and off, for about five years, and he often visited Rose’s first-floor flat in Chancery Lane, almost certainly they never slept together. Baker was precocious in some ways—he was musically gifted and played a church organ on Sundays—but he was not ready for unorthodox sexual adventures. Not ready in one sense, at least. In his superbly humane memoirs, I Follow but Myself (1968), he explains: “I was dismally unaware of the nature of the [sexual] forces that bewildered me—infinitely less approaching maturity than my own sons at the same age . . . I had come almost to despise my unfortunate parents.” Nor, one gathers, had those benighted parents stocked their house with fine literature, something else which Frank keenly felt. (He had, though, discovered Dickens.) Accordingly, the urbane, well-read Rose now became like a surrogate parent and confidant to the youth, and the topics they conversed about ranged from the shortcomings of the Anglican Church to masturbation. (When Frank’s sense of humour prompted him to pen a short ditty about onanism, beginning, “Now Onan was a naughty man and Onan he was wise,” his mentor was delighted.) Nonetheless, about one sexual topic Frank seems to have remained uninformed—until painful new events exposed his ignorance and gave him further cause for grievance.

  In 1929, when Baker turned 21, he felt emboldened to quit his job with the London Assurance. He had found two new positions: the main one as an assistant secretary at the School of English Church Music, Chislehurst, the other, another organist’s job, in Holborn. Yet, within months, both positions were abruptly terminated. As Baker tells it, an innocent friendship with a 14-year-old choirboy was misinterpreted, so that one day he was informed by the Warden of the School that his intentions were suspect and that he must stop seeing the boy. When Baker and the boy secretly rebelled against this, they were reported. And Baker was summarily dismissed. “In less than a year,” he writes in his memoirs, “I [thus] found myself sacked for a crime I had not only never committed but of whose nature I was totally ignorant.” It was presumably Alfred Rose who duly informed him of its nature; certainly Rose was the only person to whom Frank could turn, for his parents, he says, “looked at me as though I stood in the dock at the Old Bailey.” Whether directly or indirectly is not clear, but they pressured him to leave home. For a while he languished in a nearby flat in Stroud Green, north London, but eventually he turned his eyes to Cornwall and the real possibility of a writer’s life.

  Thus his path was set. Baker’s first published novel, The Twisted Tree (1935), a melodrama about a girl, Tansy, half attracted and half repelled by a wandering artist, Chailey (who resembles Alfred Rose!), was written while Baker supported himself by playing the organ at the church of St. Just, near Land’s End. The book’s modest sale of a few thousand copies encouraged him, and he began The Birds. Something remarkable about the latter is how prescient it is. Like the 1936 film of H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, it foresees the approaching war. The climactic service in St. Paul’s Cathedral not only invokes God’s intercession against the increasingly pesky avians, but specifically requests that He “dispel the savage cloud that brewed a thunderstorm over Europe.” Equally, the novel lays down a template for Baker’s future life. Early chapters are candid about the narrator’s sexual confusion. But then (1) he glimpses for the first time the Russian girl Olga, and (2) soon afterwards he makes a trip to Cader Idris in Wales—his and Olga’s future home, as it turns out—where he receives a virtual “oceanic” experience. This impassioned chapter feels almost Biblical, both when the narrator goes up into the mountain and again immediately afterwards, when he has successive moments of temptation. There is a clear message:

  I came away then . . . With all my being I longed to press against me the form of another human person, young, beautiful, and desirable . . . that we could derive from each other the twofold act of creation, taking and giving . . .

  I remember how quickly I walked, almost ran past the lake and then homewards, for fear that if I lingered my desire would drive me to turn in upon myself; to take from myself and give nothing . . .

  Did Baker first encounter such wisdom in Alfred Rose’s apartment, perhaps in some Catholic pamphlet he found (or was handed) there? Well, then, God moves in mysterious ways!

  About Olga now. She enters the narrator’s life all at once and by stages, so to speak. There is a passage in the memoirs, marvelling how a period existed “when the partner who was to share some of the most beautiful and some of the most stormy passages in the long voyage, was not even within knowledge.” Olga empowers the narrator (as, from 1942, actress Kathleen Lloyd, Baker’s future wife, would empower him). But she is adamant that he must do certain things himself. Her previous boyfriend, a bohemian poet (based on the composer “Peter Warlock”/Philip Heseltine), had committed suicide, “because he could not face himself as he really was.” For a time, she mourned. Then one evening in a café she had seen the narrator and detected something in his eyes which she knew was true. “Only—only it isn’t true until you see yourself.” With those words, we reach the crux of the novel, including what most provokes its avenging avians. It is marred humanity.

  * * *

  I want to return to Alfred Hitchcock. Exegesis of his films, including The Birds, seldom acknowledges that issues from ordinary life enter into them. (A notable exception is a recent article by Mervyn Nicholson, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents Class Struggle.”)1 It sounds counter-intuitive that an “escapist” filmmaker would concern himself that way. Yet in 1936 he was already declaring, “we grow sluggish and jellified . . . our civilisation has so screened and sheltered us that it isn’t practicable to experience sufficient thrills at first hand.” Frank Baker’s novel not only illuminates that statement with much topical detail but can throw into relief life issues—as distinct from the structural and/or psycho-analytic ones favoured by Hitchcock scholars—informing the Hitchcock film. Furthermore, Baker grew up, like Hitchcock, in the era of silent cinema, and had enjoyed some of the early serials. For these and other reasons, his novel and Hitchcock’s film overlap and can throw light on each other.

  1 Monthly Review, December 2011, pp. 33-50.

  Their essential modernism has already been touched on. I have called them “soul-dramas.” Recently John Gray2 distilled what he sees as the lesson of Sigmund F
reud. It is less psycho-analytic than existential. According to Freud, people harbour impulses that sabotage their self-fulfilment: compare the refrain in Baker’s The Birds about “a man made to mar himself” (a phrase taught him by Alfred Rose). Freud’s classic description, reflected in both Baker and Hitchcock, is of the war between eros and thanatos. But Freud did not see his job as being to intervene in that war. Rather, he sought “to effect a change in the mind through which both [elements] could be accepted.” According to Gray, Freud echoed Nietzsche in envisioning a form of life “beyond good and evil.” He once wrote a reproving letter to a colleague, telling him he was too virtuous. “One has to be a bad fellow, transcend the rules . . . and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife’s household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model. Without such criminality there is no real achievement.” Both Baker and Hitchcock would explore that idea—although in Baker’s early novel his clerk is still very uptight, very “moral,” as Olga laughs one day. Nor could Freud accept a self-transformation based on an “oceanic feeling of oneness.” In Gray’s words: “The oceanic feeling was real enough, but it could not be the basis for a way of living. Whatever moments of release they might experience, humans were fated to a life of struggle.” After Baker’s narrator has literally out-faced his Demon bird, by seeing himself as he really is (“I saw and I lived”), he understands the corollary:

  2 The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (London, 2013), pp. 83-90.

  I stood up. My ankles ached, my limbs were bruised, blood was dripping from my chin. But . . . I saw [now] that I had not to go to a mountain to fill my lungs with life. I saw that I made my world what it was; that all died around me if I died in my Soul; that all lived if my Soul lived.