Curious quest
PATRICK ANDERSON
Mr Frank Baker is a romantic, which means that he has a considerable ego, is subject to neurotic confusion and guilt, and casts a visionary light not only across the Celtic land- scapes of his choice but also around the details of an episodic and somewhat precarious literary career which has produced many novels and plays. As early as the age of three, when he was the child of uncomprehending parents in Hornsey, he caught his reflection in a mirror, 'standing by the prison bars of the cot,' shaking and terrified,' and from then on he sought this mysterious but intriguing alter ego to whom he developed, as he says, a narcissistic addiction. Predictably enough, later pages reveal him con- templating 'the riddle of my growing and con- stantly fugitive personality,' groping my way into the heart of the labyrinth,' assessing the degree to which, with his 'incorrigible sense of drama,' he is no more than an actor and an exhibitionist, or facing up to the 'morbid streak,' the 'macabre side' of his daimon and the 'hellish moods' he has suffered.
It is easy to scoff at the melodrama of the self, especially when it is balanced by no great achievement in the outside world and not so very much in the way of lively incident or incisive social commentary. Nevertheless, Mr Baker's account has its own strongly authentic tang. In describing the inner life of his earlier years he has produced an existential document of some importance.
This, we feel, is how life is lived by many a sensitive and talented person of restricted education and few sophisticated contacts: this is the quasi-mysticism of a particular kind of parochial Englishman who, when
he retreats to a Cornish village after a sterile apprenticeship to insurance and an unmerited scandal at the School of English Church Music, expresses the move in the words, 'I took the road to Lyonesse'; these are the values and symbols glimmering about the high camp of Anglican- ism, a touch of timid homosexuality, a near-miss at becoming an alcoholic, and the sort of revulsion from mass slaughter in the last war which leads to a near-breakdown: 'Suddenly, I leapt into the air, screamed out something, and ran howling through the throng of the living who were dead.' Admittedly the visionary light is a fitful, often an infuriatingly selective means of illumination. Did Mr Baker help to kill his greatest friend by neglect, through con- centrating overmuch on that first novel which Peter Quennell was to describe as being written 'by the ghost of D. H. Lawrence seated on the grave of Mary Webb'? Did he really have a vision of Christ in the church of St Hilary? And how, for that matter, was the mystical poet and church organist able to become an actor in Dame Sybil Thorndyke's touring com- pany, a pianist at the Players' Theatre and now, as it seems, both happily married and some- thing to do with television drama in Cardiff?
The book, though, is not written as pure autobiography: it is woven around some nine characters who were especially important to him; and these include an emancipated aunt, a friendly and civilised Dean of Winchester, a seedy but intellectually invigorating queer who picked him up in St Paul's Cathedral, and so on to his three great literary influences, Edward Garnett, Mary Butts and Arthur Machen. To all these friends his attitude is sympathetic and chivalrous, for his daimon is chary of comic observation and quite without malice, although there are a few good jokes; some characters, indeed, he seems to have known for only short periods and not very well.
Garnett (a beautiful portrait) encouraged him to be a writer; Mary Butts, whose ex- patriate Parisian experiences are so remote that he condemns that whole fertile scene as 'neck-deep in the mud and dross of the Great War, awoke his deeper self: while Arthur Machen almost was that self, an octo- genarian alter ego and fellow drinker who knew all about the secret places which nourish Mr Baker's life, the glories and the grails, the mys- teriously significant fields by the Severn, the dark fly-spotted shop at Caerleon-on-Usk, the vestments in the candlelight, and those splendid. nightmarish reactions to fleshy New Forest trees and ferocious clouds of starlings and a car journey lost in mountain mist.
One may smile at the occasional outworn phrase—`the halls and temples of Thespis' for the theatre, perhaps, or the description of a lark as 'this divine messenger [who] gives wings to our stumbling earth-bound words'; one may note a quotation from Cavafy which seems in- appropriate, even as one respects the careful criticism accorded to Machen and Mary Butts: but the shaping spirit of the romantic imagina- tion is not to be gainsaid. Commonplace, even coarse, Mr Baker may be in verbal details, but the rhythm of his sentences, and even more of his chapters, does succeed in circling and closing in upon the subjects he admires and, if from a distance, loves. It is with regret that I leave him sipping his just permissible ginger wine ('hellish brew') as he scribbles his notes in a corner of some now modernised and ruined pub (`acting the writer') and spins a fantasy out of one of the beer-mats, for he.can 'make .1 secret out of a mildewed postage-stamp or a uttered piece of ragwort on a rubbish dump' and still, in his sixtieth year, not know pre- cisely what it signifies.
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