`Glowing Still'

Three hours earlier, when I was pulling newspapers from the azaleas, Venus burned low and bright in the eastern sky, but now, at 8 a.m., dirty clouds skimmed the rooftops as my 4-year-old and I crossed the schoolyard. Humidity turned the outdoors into a long-locked room until a raucous cackle from above threw open the windows and doors. A blue jay, the bossiest of birds, lectured us from his perch in a live oak. We laughed and I thought of J.A. (John Alec) Baker, the elusive English librarian whose book I had finished reading the night before:

“Swallows and martins call sharply, fly low; jays and magpies lurk and mutter in hedges; blackbirds splutter and scold. Where the valley widens, the flat fields are vibrant with tractors. Gulls and lapwings are following the plough. The sun shines from a clear sky flecked with high cirrus. The wind is moving round to the north. By the sudden calling of red-legged partridges and the clattering rise of woodpigeons, I know that the hawk is soaring and drifting southward along the woodland ridge.”

Note how Baker moves seamlessly from the sounds of birds to the tractor and sky and wind, and finally to the unseen hawk. In The Peregrine (1967), a profoundly strange book, Baker sees the landscape of coastal Essex and its inhabitants as a whole, indifferent to human purposes, as in Auden’s poem where “everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster.” Nature mystics and Bambi sentimentalists will find small comfort in The Peregrine. It’s an austere, brutal book, because that is nature’s way, and Baker writes it with love and fidelity to the natural world. But for the occasional tractor or stonewall, the landscape might be Neolithic. The narrator – Baker – is the book’s only significant human presence, and he wishes not merely to observe the peregrine but to become one.

I had never heard of J.A. Baker before 2005, when New York Review Books returned The Peregrine to print. My spur to reading it was Bryan Appleyard recently calling it “astounding.” There are no footnotes or other references to previous ornithological studies, though the text is dense with information about the birds, theirs habits and habitats – all derived from Baker’s observations. For 10 years he watched his peregrines almost daily, an act we can rightly call devotional, like Thoreau’s reports on the ice on Walden Pond. The prose is stark, deeply focused, unpurple and reliant on the Anglo-Saxon inheritance of English:

“The peregrine swoops down toward his prey. As he descends, his legs are extended forward till his feet are underneath his breast. The toes are clenched, with the long hind toe projecting below the three front ones, which are bent up out of the way. He passes close to the bird, almost touching it with his body, and still moving very fast. His extended hind toe (or toes – sometimes one, sometimes both) gashes into the back or breast of the bird, like a knife. At the moment of impact the hawk raises his wings above his back. If the prey is cleanly hit – and it is usually hit hard or missed altogether – it dies at once, either from shock or from perforation of some vital organ.”

For most of us, the scene would be reduced to a blur of motion, but Baker counts the toes. Basil Bunting was a master of precision and concision, but his description of a falcon in “The Spoils,” though beautiful, seems almost generic beside Baker’s:

“His wings churn air
to flight.
Feathers alight
with sun, he rises where
dazzle rebuts our stare,
wonder our fright.”

Baker’s devotion was doubly intense because by the nineteen-sixties, as the result of DDT and other pesticides, peregrines, bald eagles and other raptors were headed for extinction. Baker wrote knowing he might be among the last humans ever to witness these magnificent birds in the wild. In the first chapter he writes:

“For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me. Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.”

His mention of the grail announces a quiet theme running through the book. The bird’s Latin name is Falco peregrinus, meaning “wandering falcon.” Falco is related to falx, Latin for “sickle,” presumably a reference to the bird’s silhouette in flight. I say “wandering,” but peregrinus, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can also mean “coming from foreign parts, foreign, alien, exotic, concerned with foreigners or aliens.” In post-classical Latin it came to mean, as an adjective, “on a pilgrimage,” and as a noun, “pilgrim,” so it’s fitting the OED’s first citation dates from 1395 – Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”: “A faukon peregryn thanne semed she/Of fremde land.” By identifying so closely with the peregrine, Baker announces his self-elected status as an alien, an outsider from the human and avian worlds. He is also, while never using the word, a pilgrim, one who wishes to merge with the object of his worship. Consider Eliot’s non-ornithological use of “peregrine” in the “Little Gidding” section of Four Quartets:

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.”

Baker is a “spirit unappeased and peregrine,” one who disturbed protocol by moving “between two worlds.” Fittingly, we know little about him, even when or if he died. In 1969, he published a second and final book, The Hill of Summer, which I also have and plan to read. Baker’s apparent disappearance does not surprise me, but the existence of a second book does. How could he move on after the apotheosis of The Peregrine? In Falcon (2006), one of the best-written titles in the “Animal” series published by Reaktion Books, Helen Macdonald notes the religious significance humans lend to falcons:

“Such unexpected religiosity reaches its highest pitch in The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. This classic of natural-history writing is a diary of one man’s obsessive quest for wild peregrines across the winter landscapes of East Anglia. An ecological Confessions of St Augustine or modern-day Grail-search, these are at heart the diaries of a soul’s journey to grace, a man looking for God.”

R.S. Thomas, I suspect, would have appreciated Baker’s book and vision. In his Autobiographies he writes:

“Anyone who has seen a peregrine falcon falling like lightning on its prey is sure to experience a certain thrill that makes him feel quite humble. These are the masters of the world of nature. One of the unfailing rules of that world is that life has to die in the cause of life. If there is any other way on this earth, God did not see fit to follow it. This is a doctrine that plays straight into the hands of the strong. As far as this world is concerned, Isaiah’s vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb, and the leopard lying down with the kid is a myth.”