I am halfway through After Midnight, a new collection of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, and, as always, I am struck by her story “The Birds.” And so I am reposting my essay comparing her short story “The Birds” (1952) to Frank Baker’s novel, The Birds (1936).

But first I want to make myself clear about what spoils this particular edition of du Maurier’s short fiction for me. The answer is: Stephen King’s preface, which is titled “An Appreciation.” He writes, “Every story here possesses the gotta, meaning you gotta keep going.” And this makes me wonder if the target audience is young readers of science fiction and horror rather than adult fans of du Maurier’s flexibility in different genres.

Personally, I think someone like Lucy Scholes, an English critic who specializes in 20th-century women’s literature, or the American writer Leslie Jamison, who has written a brilliant introduction to Jeany Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, would have dealt with these stories in a way that is meaningful to women readers. And let’s face it, most of du Maurier’s fans are women.

My post below originally was published at Thornfield Hall on March 12, 2024

The Birds is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s eeriest movies.  I was terrified when I saw it on TV,  and in a theater it might have utterly overwhelmed me.  In this apocalyptic movie, flocks of birds of all kinds and sizes swoop into a small town in California and attack the residents.  The birds fight with wings, beaks, and claws and kill when they can.

The movie begins innocuously enough.  In the opening scene Rod Taylor buys a pair of lovebirds for his niece’s birthday and flirts with gorgeous Tippi Hedron in the shop.  Then he drives to a small town in California, presents the lovebirds to his niece, and suddenly seagulls attack the birthday party.  In the days to come,  hundreds (thousands?) of birds line up on telephone wires, trees, and roofs.  They watch, then attack, and eventually kill the schoolteacher (Suzanne Pleshette). Rod Taylor  boards up the windows and doors of his family’s house, but the birds peck and claw their way and burst through a window.  Rod Taylor saves Tippi Hedron (who is staying with them for some reason) from the birds in her bedroom.  She is, after all, the prettiest blond woman in the film and must be saved– while Suzanne Pleshette, a pretty brunette – but blond trumps brunette – is killed off. 

But what set the birds off?  Nobody knows.

Hitchcock’s movie is based loosely on Daphne du Maurier’s macabre 1952 short story, “The Birds.”  Her suspenseful short story  is well -plotted, though it certainly is not in the class of “Don’t Look Now,” another of her stories that inspired a movie. Set in the countryside near the sea, the story focuses on Ned Hocken, a war veteran with a disability who is a farm worker: he must save his family from the invasion of the birds.  They attack people at random: he finds two friends dead on the farm. He boards up the windows, the doors, and the chimney. There is no radio after a few days, and they huddle in the kitchen. Before the radio dies, they learn that London has been attacked, and everyone has been ordered to stay indoors.  How long the Hochens will survive, or if they can survive, is not revealed.  They huddle in the kitchen, listening to the birds tapping.

The tapping began at the windows, at the door. The rustling, the jostling, the pushing for position on the sills. The first thud of the suicide gulls upon the step. – Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds”

Here’s what you may not know:  the English writer Frank Baker wrote a novel called The Birds published in 1936.  Reading his novel and  du Maurier’s story back to back, I concluded that du Maurier’s version may have been a case of mild plagiarism.  She  tells the story from a different angle, and sets it in in the country rather than London, so the birds’ invasion is analyzed from a different perspective.  Instead of describing the chaos created by murderous birds in a city, she deals with the issue of the survival of one family.   I doubt, however, that she  independently came up with a premise so similar to that of Baker’s.  And yet the two versions are very different – different enough that no one noticed.

Frank Baker’s novel is more complex than du Maurier’s short story.  It does, alas, get off to a slow start, beginning with the reminiscences of an 85-year-old man who is dictating his memoir to his daughter.   The Elder (as he refers to himself), his wife Olga, and his mother escaped from the invasion of the birds in London decades ago and live quietly and happily on a farm in Wales with their children and grandchildren.  He briefly revisits London in old age but is so dismayed by the ruins and collapse of civilization that he turns around almost immediately and goes home. 

 The novel does not really begin till page 10.  “ In that old life before the birds came, I was a marine insurance clerk.”  (Baker, too, was an insurance clerk.) The character of the youthful narrator is remiciniscent of Arnold Bennett’s  clumsy, earnest young protagonists.   One thinks of Edwin Clayhanger in Clayhanger:  he is coerced to work in the family pottery business but longs to become an architect and spends hours at night making blueprints.. 

Frank Baker’s narrator, a young, discontented man, is unhappy in his work but of course he must make money. He writes poetry in his spare time (sometimes on the job) and alienates the Underwriter, the head of the firm.

I love descriptions of the workplace:  he spends hours copying pointless documents into a ledger that no one will ever look at again. Eventually it will be stored in the basement with thousands of other ledgers. When he realizes that no one consults the ledgers, he begins to copy only part of each document and even mischievously burns some of the ancient ledgers.  He also spends a great deal of time fantasizing about various women and men while he is copying documents.  (Baker is open in his discussion of bisexuality.)

And then the birds come to Trafalgar Square during a drought. An old woman tries to feed them:   a bird attacks her and follows her into the underground, where she is pecked to death in a phone booth.  It turns out she was not a nice old woman who fed the birds but a procurer.  The birds kill many people: some are simply in the way, others seem to be killed because of some fault. 

The birds get scarier as time goes on. Sometimes a single bird detaches itself from the flock and follows one person everywhere, even tapping at the person’s windows at night.  This happens first to the narrator’s mother, then to him. It is terrifying and embarrassing. When the narrator meets Olga, a Russian immigrant , she explains that she had been followed by a bird, too, but you can get rid of the shadow bird if you look at it, let it do what it wants, and don’t show fear.   

Without the assistance of the outsider (Olga, the immigrant), he would not have survived. The birds ignore him after this, but when he attends a service at St. Paul’s, the birds swoop in and kill some of the panicked people; others are trampled to death. And, much to his horror, he meets the devil, whom the birds also leave alone.

In this strange novel, which is a none-too-cozy “cozy catastrophe,” the birds represent something metaphysical -and the narrator’s metaphysical theories add to the strangeness of the invasion of the birds. But if you tire of Baker’s philosophizing, read the book as the straightforward dystopian novel it is, with only dashes here and there of Milton – and the novel is of special interest because of Hitchcock’s film.

The birds now seldom appeared over the City in great massed swarms such as had first been their habit. The scene in Trafalgar Square was never repeated. It was now their pleasure to fly about in smaller groups of, perhaps five or six hundred. They no longer disappeared into the sky; they were always about us – chattering, croaking, screaming…. They took evident delight in disfiguring our most important buildings with their offal. – Frank Baker’s “The Birds”