Beryl Markham

Describes growing up in an Africa that no longer exists, training and breeding race horses, flying mail to Sudan, and being the first woman to fly the Atlantic, east to west

West with the Night

Colleen

5 Stars
 
All my life I have loved stories about travel and adventure. I’ve particularly sought out stories of adventurous women both fiction and nonfiction. I devoured books like  The Valleys of the Assassins  and  Maiden Voyage . So it completely confounds me how I never read West with the Night before now. It’s a travesty that I finally rectified. And it was absolutely worth it! West with the Night is in the top five best memoirs I have ever read!
 
It’s hard to believe that this book was almost lost to time. After doing well initially, Markham’s fame and the attention on this book faded away. It quickly went out of print. It lay in the dust of time until a chance encounter decades later. A restaurateur and literary enthusiast named George Gutekunst came across high praise of Markham’s book in a letter written by Ernest Hemingway. The praise was so high that Gutekunst felt compelled to track down the book. Gutekunst’s enthusiasm for West with the Night led to a reprinting and a revival in its popularity.
 
West with the Night chronicles parts of Markham’s life growing up in Kenya and her path to becoming the first person to fly across the Atlantic from East to West. The book is episodic in nature and covers bits and pieces of her younger years. It isn’t a comprehensive biography or a novel with a linear overarching plot. Rather, it is a collection of stories from her life exploring the path she took in life as well as her love of Africa and of flying. Although the book has the feeling at times of being separate short stories about her life, nonetheless, I found each section riveting.


  “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

The writing is absolutely stunning. It is detailed, spirited, vivid, beautiful, gripping, exciting. She brings the place and time to life with her down-to-earth yet lyrical descriptions. Markham clearly struggled with the world’s expectations both as a woman and as a white colonist in Africa. She had no interest in being a meek, little housewife. Nor did she shun the cultures of the place that she considered her only home.


  “We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

To call her a tomboy is understating things. She learned to hunt with the Nandi. She became a well-known horse trainer. Then she became a famous, record-setting pilot. All things that many of her English peers said women couldn’t/shouldn’t do. It is an inspiring and feministic story. Markham is strong-willed and erasable – certainly not fitting into any niche of society’s expectations. She is a flawed person, but that is what makes her so compelling. She followed her dreams no matter what the naysayers said.


  “We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.”

This is a powerful look at the times even though it is seen through the eyes of a single viewer. But though Markham’s love for her country is clear, I felt that she provided a rounded look at its complex culture without romanticizing it. She does address Colonialism and racial prejudices as seen through a child’s eyes. It was also interesting to see WWII from Africa’s point of view and how the war affected places as far away as Kenya.
 
The only thing I didn’t enjoy about the book was the description of big game hunting for sport. Although it is not a part of history that should be ignored or forgotten. And Markham does bring up views from both sides of the debate as well as talking about her own reservations. But it’s hard to look back at those trophy hunters and know how much they decimated the populations of so many species.
 
The story leaves out large parts of her personal life, and she did have a very enthusiastic love life. But I actually liked that omission. It allowed the story to focus on her own journey and accomplishments rather than defining herself by her lovers (as many biographers have done). Certainly, if you want a detailed biography, those are out there. But this isn’t about chronicling every facet of her history. This is a book about exploring freedom – from expectations, from prejudices, and even from your past. It’s about travel and how you can never truly go home. This is truly a beautiful book and one I am sure to reread in the future.

“One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.”

RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 5 Stars
Writing Style: 5 Stars
Level of Captivation: 5 Stars
Attention to Details: 5 Stars
Emotional Level: 5 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 4 Stars

Cindy Lieberman

A memoir of a young white woman’s childhood and young adulthood in Africa, with an emphasis on the land, large game animals, tribespeople, racehorses, and, eventually, airplanes. Most of the book takes place in the early 1900s. Beryl Markham was the first person of any gender to fly solo from the UK to the US. That historic flight is the last chapter in the book. It took me a while to get into this memoir despite her beautiful prose. It wasn’t until the story of training her first horse that things really picked up. She was a remarkable, independent woman who had a very interesting, adventurous, and at times scary, life.

Melody Izard

I want to know everything about Beryl Markham. A marvelously written memoir about a very free-spirit about whom I'm sure there is much more to tell.

Jeremy Anderberg

“We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.”

As noted at the start, Markham grew up in Africa, with Kenya and its native people in her soul. She started as a horsewoman, but Markham became enamored by the machines of the air after a fortuitous encounter with a famed pilot, who sat beside his broken down car on a dusty Kenyan road. She writes:

“It will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.”

The beginning of the book, though, starts on a different scene: Markham brings us right into her atmospheric world with a stirring description of a night flight to deliver oxygen to a man who was badly injured in a mining accident. The dark sky—darker than dark, the faint and homespun lights of the runway, the stress of a dangerous landing. I was immediately hooked by not only the story, but the lyrical and yet readable prose.

Beyond her escapades in the air, we’re treated to all kinds of anecdotes from the entirety of her life. Being bitten by a lion, run-ins with fierce warthogs, her first race as a horse trainer.

It’s only at the very end, the last few dozen pages, in fact, that Markham gets to what she’s most famous for: the first solo east to west crossing of the Atlantic ocean by any pilot, man or woman.

On every single page, Markham writes vividly—masterfully, beautifully—about all of these episodes of her adventurous life. I took a ton of notes from West With the Night; her prose was just irresistible.

I’m stingy with my 5-star ratings, but this was an easy choice. Hemingway, in fact, sums it up best, in one of the great literary endorsements of all-time:

“she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

Sarah Sammis

Elaine Wherry

Darcy Lambert

Francine Corry

Laura Mauler

Andrew John Kinney

West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.

West with the Night

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