Saturday Ramble: Obscure authors – Garstin and Val Baker
To take our collective minds off the beastly business of Brown and bung politics, here are some rambling thoughts on two obscure, but interesting, authors.
Our new website, Devon & Cornwall Online (launching on the Solstice, June 21) has provided a welcome opportunity to delve more deeply into West Country ways, especially a very special group of writers, Cornish authors.
They are surprisingly underrated, although they include such well-known bestsellers as Daphne Du Maurier and Derek Tangye, of Minack fame.
However, I want to indulge myself with two of my favourites: Denys Val Baker and Crosbie Garstin.
Denys Val Baker
Denys is rarely heard of nowadays, but if you ever come across one of his books: acquire, read, enjoy.
Denys Val Baker (1917 – 1984), owner and editor of The Cornish Review, was the author of 20 hilarious autobiographies. Titles included, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Petrified Mariner, which give you a flavour of them.
He wrote in the 1950s through the 70s, and was a full-time professional author, by which I mean he was always broke.
Nevertheless, he managed to buy an enormous old tramp steamer, MVS Sanu, and, with no sailing experience whatever, took his large brood of wild children and long-suffering wife, Jess, on incredibly dangerous voyages. He was on the rocks more times than Jack Daniels.
Denys lived in Penzance, Land’s End and St. Ives in Cornwall, and was usually seeking some means of financing his next outrageous project. He was an adventurer in the grand English tradition, although always amusingly shambolic.
In the old days, when libraries were libraries, you could find his books on the shelves. These days they’re not so easy to come by, although Amazon has a good listing of second-hand titles, mostly at premium prices. Denys would have been proud. If you want a really good humorous read, do seek them out.
His character never allowed a moment to pass without doing something absolutely beyond the pale. When I lived in Penzance, we occupied a house across the road from his, although he had been dead for a decade. There was no blue plaque on his house, which is a pity, although everyone remembered him in the library, where he did most of his research.
At the time I was there (late 1990s) his son still ran a print business in the town, and his wildest daughter, Demelza, lived there too.
Denys was one of the old school of writers. He spent a lot of time in London, mostly in the literary pubs around Soho where he hung out with the likes of Dylan Thomas and other luminaries of the scribbling fraternity. But his heart was in Cornwall, as was most of his written output. He will be best remembered for his 20 or so autobiographies.
Gerald Durrell is probably the nearest comparison. Let’s hope he will not be totally forgotten, especially in the county that inspired his best work.
Crosbie Garstin
Crosbie Garstin is best known for his trilogy of novels about the Penhales family, published before the last war by Heinemann.
The Owls’ House, High Noon and The West Wind are all cracking adventures set in Cornwall and on the high seas in the days of sail. China Seas, his last book, continued the genre, and was made into a Hollywood film starring, I believe, Clark Gable.
Garstin was an interesting character, a true adventurer and traveller. He served during the first world war in King Edward’s Horse and was commissioned on the battlefield in 1915.
His early years were spent working in lumber camps in Canada, as a ranger in Africa, a miner on the Pacific coast, and as an army horsemaster and intelligence officer.
He was, by all accounts, a very private man (I can’t find a photograph of him on the internet) and, at the age of 40, he bought “Rosemerryn”, a house in Cornwall, near Penzance.
The fictional home of the Penhales family, “Bosula” in The Owls’ House, is almost certainly located on the site of Rosemerryn. Set in the Keigwin Valley, six miles south-west of Penzance, the valley drains the Penwith backbone of tors into Monks Cove, the physical setting for the novels.
Just down the way, towards Penzance, is the fishing port of Newlyn, which doubled-up then as a world-famous artists’ colony, boasting its own art movement. Garstin wrote this vivid rondeau about Newlyn Hill :
On Newlyn Hill the gorse is bright;
Upon the hedgerows left and right
Song-dizzy birds the Spring-time greet;
The bluebells weave a purple sheet;
Primroses star the lanes’ green night.
Across the Bay each moorland height
Glows golden in the evening light,
And Dusk walks violet-eyed and sweet
On Newlyn Hill.
A swarm of lights, pearl-soft and white,
A fairy-lamp-land exquisite,
Opens its star-eyes at the feet
Of hills where shore and wavelets meet;
Then dreams come, mystic, infinite,
On Newlyn Hill.
Newlyn now is but a shadow of its former self thanks to the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. I don’t think he would be amused.
It’s difficult to get hold of Garstin’s books now, but I managed to entreat copies of the trilogy from Penzance library’s reference section a few years ago for a writing project, and I wasn’t disappointed. Sadly, he has rather sunk without trace in recent years. Not even the Cornish remember him, except for a few beavering upcountry literatis.
In 1930 he vanished without trace. Nobody really knows what happened to him. Some say he faked his death and went back to the East where he had spent his youth.
It seems likely though that he drowned while rowing back to a friend’s yacht after a party. The boat overturned and a woman friend survived. His body was never found although he was a strong swimmer. Presciently, the final page of his last book, China Seas, written in his study at Rosemerryn overlooking a bank of rhododendrons, has this death scene :
“Heavily he sank beside her … felt her arms go round him clinging desperately as to the last refuge in a yawning sea … A bank of rhododendrons with crimson flowers … fading fast, fading away.”
Even better, at the conclusion of his trilogy, the death of his hero, Penhales, drowning in the sea off the Twelve Apostles rocks in Cornwall, is one of the best death scenes in all literature :
“The boom of the surf was the deep roll of drums. The wind blew with the sound of trumpets, piercing, exultant. The phantom clippers dipped their gilded beaks, most stately, the ghostly soldiers tossed their lances, ‘Come on, old comrade,’ they cried. ‘Fear not! Death is but a pang and life immortal. Ride on with us, ride on forever.’”
Cornwall inspires mysticism in its writers and inhabitants. It’s a shame those upcountry folk in the London salons don’t give it more attention.
It’s better than politics.
John Evans
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