The Denys Val Baker Story: Part 4
The Cornish Review
In 1972 Val Baker began a productive association with the publisher William Kimber that ultimately produced six further novels, nine collections of his own short stories and twenty three edited anthologies of short stories by such writers as Edna O’Brien, Alan Sillitoe, Hammond Innes, Fay Weldon, Winston Graham, Margaret Drabble, Daphne Du Maurier et al. In fact, a definitive listing of major British writers. These apart, he also found space in such collections for new, young writers.
Then, midway through the prolific decade of the sixties, Denys Val Baker launched a second run of the Cornish Review. Those were hopeful times, as Val Baker himself suggested: “…There was a new climate abroad and people had come to recognize that artistic ventures such as a regional literary review deserved some sort of practical support from Government…”
How far we have regressed from such optimistic times, with the abandonment of regional literary assistance, now followed by a national neglect of literature, is patent, But the second Cornish Review ran for twenty-seven issues and was never anything less that fulsome. Among poems and stories there were works by such as DM Thomas, now Cornwall’s most prestigious literary son, as well as by Jack Clemo, Charles Causley, Donald Rawe together with such figures of the Penwith literary establishment as Arthur Caddick, Frank Ruhrmund and W.S Graham.
There was also substantial exposure of the visual arts with reproduction of work by Bryan Pearce, Jack Pender, Peter Lanyon, John Miller and many more. The rich fund of material contained in the Reviews has still to be assessed.
Inevitably, Caddick had much more to say about this ‘Second Launching’, using Denys Val Baker’s own nautical connections to good effect:
The resurrection man who piles his decks,
With gallimaufries from the Cornish scene,
And brings his poets little Celtic cheques!
And it was those Celtic cheques that made the Cornish Review even more authentic, because Denys Val Baker recognized the importance of professionalism in the literary world as in all the creative arts.
From Des Hannigan’s obituary in Peninsula Voice, Penzance, August 1984.
