West with the Night

This is a companion piece to Isak Dinesen’s, Out of Africa, a love story of 1930 British East Africa, and beautiful descriptive writing whether Markham is in the jungle, on a safari, or flying her beloved airplane.

Plenty of adventure abounds in this nearly unspoiled Africa where Markham had an unconventional upbringing. Her strong, intelligent, and independent personality allowed her to accept this gift of Africa and appreciate it’s potential and beauty.

Her gift of writing shines through her stories of elephant herds, pet lions, horse racing and African friendships.

4,25 stars - English hardcover - I have dyslexia - What a lady, what an adventures in Kenya in the 20, 30-s. One of my favoutite lady's in history. When I was in the libary someone hand me a copy of this book. An older man. "I think you have to read this novel." And surely it was.

The order of some of the chapters is somewhat puzzling. I can only guess that she chose what she considered the most memorable events/periods in her life and wrote a chapter about each.
Some of the chapters were way more exciting than others. But overall the writing is quite impressive, considering she wasn't a professional writer. Things were so different in the time she wrote about! Everything was so new----automobiles, airplanes, telephones.

Beryl Markham grew up in British East Africa (now Kenya) in the early 1900s. She was motherless, and her father was busy running a horse farm/grain mill. So as long as she did her lessons, she was pretty much free to run around with the native Nandi people, more like a boy than a girl. I wish she'd told more about her childhood, but I suspect it didn't seem all that extraordinary to her.

Along with the chapter on her childhood (attacked by a tame lion!), I especially enjoyed the chapter about her work with the famously colorful Baron Bror Von Blixen-Finecke ("Blix"). There's some really fascinating stuff about elephant behavior, and suspenseful, harrowing stories about elephant hunting.

I loved her occasional very dry, extremely clever British humor. My favorite: "Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy."

I highly recommend the "illustrated" version. It's full of superb duo-tone photos that brought it all to life for me.

In some ways Beryl Markham reminds me of Hemingway, her way of thrusting around to discover, mount, rise above, over-hove. She loved her Africa, was dismayed as she got older and realized Her Africa was fading fast, just like all of us have a moment when it hits us between the eyes, that it is within our memories wherein "that place" may be the best it ever really was. . .for us.

Africa, Kenya, Dogs, Hogs, Spears, Lions, Horses, Elephants, Airplanes, War, Men, Fathers, Flying, Competition, Yearning, Privilege, Pain, Molo, Flying, Safaris, Women Can Do Anything . . .Just Do!

She's active, doing and dashing through her life, yet for all that there is a pathos, a trailing atmosphere, a silken thread of longing throughout. Articulating, writing, expressing her epiphanies, memories, and freedoms of her unusual life seems to bring her a kind of relief. . .as if she is begging for congruity of understanding, from the words she's laid out, turning back and looking straight into her reader's eyes. . . .

This was a haunting read for me. All to her point, wistful and hoping hard at the same time.

This memoir was so lovingly written that I'm going to have to reread it to fully appreciate it.

Beryl Markham was born in England but moved to Kenya with her family when she was 4. She has amazing stories about surviving a lion attack, becoming a bush pilot, training racehorses, and flying solo across the Atlantic -- and she flew the difficult way, from east to west, against the wind. She is my favorite kind of woman to read about: she's tough and adventurous, but also romantic and sentimental.

I listened to this on audio, which was narrated well by Anna Fields (I also enjoyed her audio performance of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto), but Markham's prose was so lovely that I wish I had read this in print, lingering over the paragraphs and pages. Some of the long stories were occasionally confusing, and I think it would have been easier to follow with a print copy.

I don't recall how Beryl Markham first got on my radar, but suddenly she was hugely popular thanks to the new historical novel Circling the Sun by Paula McLain. I wanted to read Markham's own book first before checking out the fictional version, and I'm glad I did. Highly recommended, especially for those who like travel/adventure memoirs or stories about Africa.

Favorite Quotes
"To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks."

"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."

"To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, 'Look at my two noble friends -- they are dumb, but they are loyal.' I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant."

"There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers. Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home."

Read in Dutch: 'De nacht achterna: vlucht over Afrika'.

While other women of her time and class were drinking tea and G&T at the expat clubs in Nairobi, waited on by the natives, or living a life of boredom and hardship on isolated farms, Beryl Markham was making herself quite a different life. After a childhood in Africa in which she avoided schoolwork to sneak off with her local friends, learning to track and hunt with bow and arrows, she became a racehorse trainer for her father, then after meeting the love of her life, she took up aviation. As an adult, her social life was that of a man, and she defied convention, marrying several times and having many lovers and affairs. Just a few days ago, she was mentioned in the Daily Mail as the lover of King George VI's younger brother, and her son was apparently assumed to be his, so that Queen Mary paid her to stay away - even though Beryl knew that he was her own husband's son: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic....

In fact, it turns out that Beryl Markham was one of those people who attracts scandal and loyalty in equal measure, being friends and lovers with a number of prominent people in the East Africa of the time. Before her rumoured affair with Karen Blixen's husband (of 'Out of Africa' fame), the two women were good friends. The more one knows about her life, the more one realises she would probably have been on the front pages of today's tabloids as a celebrity, and her lifestory is truly amazing and almost unbelievable: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/66...

As for this book, I enjoyed the section about her childhood most. The descriptions of Africa are often beautiful, and the adventures are well-told, revealing a true love for Africa. Some of the tales could seem too incredible to be true, such as when she was attacked by a half-tame lion; the way she tells it, however, is to build it up gradually, so that when the attack finally occurs, it is not the pain or any heroism which is emphasised, but as a simple narrative where more is revealed about other people and the lion itself than about the victim. Later on, when telling the tale of her solo flight across the Atlantic from England to America - she was the first person to do so - it is again the plane, the sea and the sky which take the main role. In fact, despite recounting episodes from her life, the book does not paint a particularly clear picture of Beryl Markham herself, and it is certainly not an autobiography, as far too much is omitted. There is no mention of her marriages or affairs, although she does talk about her friendships with men, and she does not mention the fact that she had a son, whom she had left behind with her parents-in-law in England before she had returned to Africa and became an aviator.

It is not at all out of character that even the book itself has caused controversy, as it has since been claimed that not Beryl Markham herself but her then husband, Raoul Schumacher, a writer, actually wrote the book: http://www.unc.edu/~ottotwo/authorand.... Fascinating stuff, and it is Ernest Hemingway no less who was both responsible for reigniting interest in her book and leading to speculation about its authorship when he wrote:

Did you read Beryl Markham's book, "West with the Night"? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, 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 some times making an okay pig pen. But this girl who is, to my knowledge, very unpleasant,... can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true. So, you have to take as truth the early stuff about when she was a child which is absolutely superb. She omits some very fantastic stuff which I know about which would destroy much of the character of the heroine; but what is that anyhow in writing? I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody, wonderful book.

Whoever wrote the book, it is well worth reading for lovers of travel literature and anyone interested in colonial Africa.

www.bookcrossing.com/journal/6507896

Beryl Markham wrote so well she made Hemingway jealous, and in this immaculately wrought memoir, you can see why. Truly gorgeous writing, about the daily travails of a bush pilot in East Africa. I'm certainly no pilot, but this and Salter's "The Hunters" are probably two of the best books on aviation around. Top-notch, really. Markham deserves to be counted amount the best writers of her generation.

After reading Out of Africa by Karen Blixen, I was recommended this 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, a horse trainer and bush pilot of English descent who grew up in Kenya and at the age of 34, became the first human being to fly the North Atlantic Ocean from east to west solo. Markham traveled in the same social circles as Blixen and devotes much of her memoir to adventures with Blixen's lover Denys Finch Hatton, and Blixen's ex-husband Baron Bror Blixen, both big game hunters.

Ernest Hemingway, who also knew Markham socially and probably knew a stud when he saw one, writes effusively on the dust cover of her skill at the typewriter and the book lives up to that praise. Markham used all her nine lives.

In Book One, Markham writes of her experience airlifting mail, supplies and the occasional patient in and out of the often unsurveyed interior of East Africa. She recalls transporting an oxygen tank to a miner dying of blackwater and after doing all she can for him, resuming her desperate search for a fellow pilot who's disappeared.

Book Two is devoted to Markham' childhood on her father's horse farm in the Rongai Valley, where she was attacked by a lion so ferocious that it chased her rescuer up a tree (angry at having to share its meal). Markham learns to hunt with the Nandi Murani barefooted and develops a close relationship with her English sheep dog, Buller, who Hemingway would also approve of.

In Book Three, Markham leaves the farm to find work as a horse trainer and is on her way to a career training racehorses when she meets Tom Black, a mechanic who teaches Markham how to pilot an aeroplane. Markham's training is what you might call "hands on". Her mentor lets her experience what a fail feels like up in the air. This includes getting caught in a down draft and nearly hitting a hill.

Book Four recounts Markham's experiences with Blor Blixen scouting elephants for big game hunters, in which the two of them use up one of their nine lives when a bull elephant stalks them and gets within 10 feet. Markham makes a flight into Italian controlled Libya with Blixen, landing in Benghazi of all places, before leaving the continent for good and preparing for her historic flight.

The chief criticism anyone might level against these memoirs today is how colonists in Markham's time regarded the native Africans as child-like in certain respects, while also hunting or helping to hunt native wildlife. If you have a favorite animal that lives in Africa, Markham's peers probably shot it. Anyone upset by this should probably stick with Oprah's Book Club.

The author's relationship with Africa is explored and it is complicated. 21st century standards cannot be applied to someone who came of age 100 years ago, before Kenya was even self-governing and was divided into British East Africa and German East Africa. Markham helps white hunters track elephants, but deplores the act of killing one, observing the animal's intelligence and guile in great detail. She's hunted lions and wild boar, but been mauled by one and lost her dog to the other. The continent left a much deeper imprint on her than she ever did on it.

Markham was neither a hero or a villain. Her writing captures that she was ahead of her time. While it's incomprehensible that a woman would be seen piloting a commercial plane following World War II, many women broke aviation records in the 1920s and '30s. Her only option in life was success. Her account of carrying a biscuit tin in the cockpit -- so that if she crashed, rescuers would have something to rake her ashes into -- says everything about who this woman was and how she lived.