West with the Night: A Memoir

This is a stunning book, with gorgeous sentences enough to stop you so you can catch your breath, only to read them over again and highlight them so you can go back and read them again once more. The remains doubt whether Beryl Markham wrote them, or if they were written by her screenwriter third husband Raoul Schumacher. Out of Africa, written by Karen Blixen under the pen name Isak Dinesen, had always been my favorite memoir. West with the Night, is equal in its beauty, and I hesitate to say, maybe more so. The romance with which we become infatuated, is Africa as well as hunting, horse training, and flying. In a sentence such as this one, how can it not: “It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.” And in reading this passage, I can only weep. This is the writing Hemingway praised in his review, “she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer…she can write rings around us all…” “There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.” In understanding how Beryl Markham lived her life, this quote reminds me to aspire to the same. “It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.” And when she wrote about time and change, it grips my heart for its beauty is transcendent: “Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead. It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow. Things had passed, new things had come.” Even Isak Dinesen didn’t write about an elephant as descriptively, “His gargantuan ears began to spread as if to capture even the sound of our heartbeats.” Or the way she describes her aeroplane in the cross-Atlantic flight. “She found a sky so blue and so still that it seemed the impact of a wing might splinter it, and we slid across a surface of white clouds as if the plane were a sleigh running on fresh-fallen snow. The light was blinding — like light that in summer fills an Arctic scene and is in fact its major element.” And her exquisite description of a brothel keeper, in a dirty cockroach infested, windowless building is a passage of stunning prose that is painfully beautiful. It must be one of the passages that Hemingway envied, and if I can dare include myself, that I can only aspire to write a character with such eloquence. “She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. Like the smile of a badly controlled puppet, hers was overdone, and after she had disappeared, and the pad of her slippers was swallowed somewhere in the corridors of the dark house, the fixed, fragile grin still hung in front of my eyes — detached and almost tangible. It floated in the room; it had the same sad quality as the painted trinkets children win at circus booths and cherish until they are broken. I felt that the grin of the brothel keeper would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces.” We can never go back again, begins one of the best lines from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, but this one about Africa is close, “Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best you can do then is to say, ‘Ah, yes, I know this turning!’ — or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.” I know I have written a long tribute to this exceptional memoir. Whether written by Markham, co-written, or ghost written, it is most certainly brilliant, and if you aspire to write, it is in my humble opinion a requirement. I will include one more, if only because its intrinsic truth has gripped my heart. “You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness.”

"She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer . . . [She] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers . . . It is really a bloody wonderful book." Ernest Hemingway. When I read that, I thought, Well, a typical over the top writer's blurb. The first page I read showed that if anything Hemingway understated her gift. That Mrs. Markham never wrote anything other than this memoir is our great loss. The title and her history as a pioneering pilot would lead you to believe this book is primarily concerned with her effort to be the first to fly solo across the Atlantic east to west. It is not. This is a book about Africa, specifically Kenya, and the effect it had on a 4 year old child raised in its environs. Her love of Kenya comes through strongly. She will make you nostalgic for a place you've never been and a time long ago. Beryl (Clutterbuck) Markham was born in England but went to Kenya at the age of four. Her Mother soon returned to England, leaving Beryl to be largely raised by Kikuyu and Masai natives. She learns the ways of the warriors she hunts with and admires. They have dignity, honor and respect for Africa. She becomes fiercely independent. When drought causes her Father to lose his farm, she becomes a horse trainer at 17, a young, female, winning trainer. A few years later she goes for a ride with her friend Tom Campbell Black in his airplane and a deep love of flying is born in her. She is Kenya's youngest and only female bush pilot. Not one to become set in her ways, she leaves Africa for England and in 1936 makes a deal with her friend J. C. Carberry; he will supply the plane and the financial backing if she will undertake to fly solo from England to America, a feat no one has accomplished. The flight gave her a brief burst of fame, but the sponsorships and opportunities to build on her success were not forthcoming and soon World War 2 ends the quest for new records. After living in America for many years she returns to Kenya and resumes her career as a trainer. It is a shame she is not more widely known. She was a top pilot, a great adventurer, an entrepreneur and a truly liberated woman at a time when that was all too rare. I thoroughly and highly recommend this book not only for the marvelous story it tells, but for the beauty and depth of the prose she creates in telling it.

West with the Night sprang from the journals and recollections of Beryl Markham, a woman who, in any era, stands apart. Markham was born in England in 1902. Four years later her father took her to live with him in Kenya, and her love affair with that country began. With Africa as her surrogate mother, and Nandi tribesmen as her childhood companions, she grew confident and self-sufficient. She went on to make her mark as an accomplished racehorse trainer, aviatrix, and author. Another child might have chosen a more traditional way of life within the confines of her father’s farm; but Markham gravitated to the native people, whose wisdom she respected and who taught her about the land, the wildlife, and tribal legends. Her affinity with untamed Africa grew more poignant with time. “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.” After an impressive stint as a race horse trainer, Markham shifted her focus to aviation. “I yielded to curiosity; I asked questions. Something about that irreverent contrivance of fabric and wires and noise, blustering through the chaste arena of the night, had stirred the course of my thoughts to restless eddies.” She made a respectable living as a bush pilot, scouting elephants from the sky for the legendary “white hunters” of that era: Denis Fynch-Hatton and Baron von Blixen. Her vocation, especially for a woman on her own in the wilds of Africa, was a rarity in the early 1930’s. It was her love of flying, with its adrenaline promise of escape, that led her to chart new territory in 1936. She would be the first to fly solo from England to America. With a fellow pilot's encouragement, and a custom-made plane, she spent months preparing for the flight. Hours before her scheduled departure, the weather reports were troubling. Despite the risks, she had made the commitment and captured the world’s attention. Determined to see things through, she reasoned that, “…by his nature a flyer must fly. I could compute that I had flown a quarter of a million miles; and I could foresee that, so long as I had a plane and the sky was there, I should go on flying more miles.” We share in her once-in-a-lifetime moment at lift off: “…there had been a moment when Time stopped—and Distance too. It was the moment I lifted the blue-and-silver Gull from the aerodrome, the moment the photographers aimed their cameras, the moment I felt the craft refuse its burden and strain toward the earth in sullen rebellion, only to listen at last to the persuasion of stick and elevators, the dogmatic argument of blueprints that said she had to fly because the figures proved it.” As she reached her target altitude and leveled out, the plane required her response: “where are we bound?” The question frightened her as she was struck by the reality of flying through the darkness across 2,000 miles of ocean. “We are flying west with the night.” Markham brings readers along for the 20-hour flight of their lives, creating space for us inside the Gull’s tiny cabin where Petrol tanks surround her. There was no radio, no life preserver. Essentials were sacrificed in favor of fuel. She had to subvert her natural instincts to her pilot’s training in order to complete her run across the Atlantic. Had she failed, she would have crashed into the sea, and her journey might never have been ours to share. While some readers may be left wanting personal details about Markham's mother and the men in her life, I think many others will share my opinion that the recollections she chose to share are not only deftly, poetically written, but also a deeply personal reflection of her soul. I wouldn't be surprised if this book inspires more films, and continues to rise like a phoenix from dusty book shelves and archived e-files every so many years.

One of the best books I’ve ever read! I had never heard of Beryl Markham and decided to read it after a good friend wrote a review. The fact that the central character was a female aviator who went on to complete an East-west Atlantic flight caught my attention. But that flight is not described until the end of the book. What awaits the reader is an exceptional description of life in Africa by the author and how that played a huge role in her developing the skills to learn everything from hunting game with the natives, training race horses and then learning to fly. Her writing skills are hypnotizing in a sense - the words flow seamlessly in her descriptions of everything: animals, people, terrain, weather, the sky, etc. It was the type of writing that is so rich that it almost leaves the reader breathless. I do not do well with audio books but I’m pretty sure I would enjoy this book in audio just to hear a good reader (preferably with an English accent) read all the beautiful sections of prose contained therein. Another interesting aspect of the author’s life is the fact that this is not written from a feminist point of view which I really appreciated. It is written from the point of view that someone who happens to be female was exposed to many opportunities to learn many different things that was usually only available to men. Her mother had left her father when they came to Africa but the author stayed with her father. So, having an eager and curious disposition, Markham learned under her father’s instruction but also learned much from her father’s associates and the native Africans. I can’t recommend this book enough!

I happened on Outside Magazines 25 Best Adventure Stories of the Last 100 Years the other day. I can't resist a real-life adventure story so was interested on their take. A few I had already read but there was also plenty that I hadn't so I paid a visit to Amazon.com. In a very short time I had three of the books in my possession, including West with the Night by Beryl Markham. I had never heard of her but the magazine's description of her writing enticed me to take the plunge. And what a plunge it was. Beryl Markham was born Beryl Clutterbuck in England in 1902 and when she was four years old her father moved the family to British ruled Kenya where he started a mill and raised thoroughbreds for racing. Her mother apparently hated it and moved quickly back to England. Beryl never mentions her once in this book although her father plays a big part in her story. Just before she is 18 years old a three year drought forces her father to sell the farm and move to Peru. Beryl opts to stay in Africa where she becomes a fledgling race horse trainer. She achieves success on the track but her imagination is soon captured by the airplane and very likely the pilot, Tom Black. He teaches her to fly and soon she becomes one of the most respected pilots in Africa. She branches out her business from delivering packages and people to reconnoitering game animals for safaris. The adventures she recounts are just mind boggling and it is difficult to imagine the dangers she regularly encountered. Especially in the 1920's and 1930's when women hadn't even come close to social equality with men. You will find as you read that she is acquainted with an amazing assortment of famous people. They keep popping up in her story and you won't be able to resist Googling them to find out who they are. On the back cover of the book is a letter from Ernest Hemingway to his friend Maxwell Perkins recommending the book and saying "she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers." He also says in the letter that he knew her fairly well while he was in Africa and the great writer doesn't even get a mention in her book. Interestingly it was the letter that got the book republished in 1983 when a California restaurateur was reading a collection of Hemingway's letters and discovered the one with the book recommendation. Ms. Markham, now elderly and living in poverty in Africa, was rediscovered after the book became a surprising best-seller and her last three years were improved a great deal. The book is wonderful and has piqued my interest in this most interesting woman. I've already sought out some other biographies on Beryl Markham so that I can fill in some of the blanks in her own book. Her love life is completely left out although I hear it was quite "varied." Can't wait to read more.

A lovely, lyrical book that doesn’t have much plot. West With the Night by Beryl Markham is a different book. It’s different in that the book is a memoir, but it isn’t told in a linear way. Chapters bounce around to different time periods, and different times in Beryl’s life, and there isn’t any plot that connects all of these chapters together. It almost reads like short stories. You can pick the book up, read a chapter, any chapter, and then set the book down and not pick it up for months and just fall right back in. The prose is absolutely gorgeous. The descriptive passages transport the reader to British East Africa, and to the world of elephants, horses, siafu ants, hunting, and flying planes. There are several passages about hunting, and gruesome injuries, so do keep that in mind before picking up this book if you’re sensitive to that. This is a difficult book to review in that there isn’t really any plot to the book. It’s more of a meandering journey through Beryl’s life, through Africa, and this is not a book to “race” through. You’ll miss so much of the beautiful writing if you try to read this quickly. There is somewhat of a “controversy” regarding the authorship and authenticity of the book. In some copies of the book (my copy did not include it) there is a foreword that indicates that perhaps not everything is true, or at least to not believe everything you read. I have not read this foreword, and I am honestly a bit confused, as I didn’t find anything in the book to be so sensational as to be unbelievable. In regards to the authorship, some say that Beryl’s ex-husband wrote some of the book. This was a book club read for me, and most of my book club felt that the descriptive passages felt like a different author than the passages that were more “action oriented”. I honestly didn’t find this to be the case, and I have no reason to think that she didn’t write the book, or most of the book, and have no trouble believing what was written. I think I was the lone member of my book club to have this opinion however. Several famous people at the time make appearances here, from big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, to Blix, Baron von Blixen Finecke, the ex-husband of Karen Blixen (author of Out of Africa). West With the Night was a different read. I can’t say that I truly liked it, as it was a bit too disjointed and all over the place in how it was told, but I really did love all of the descriptive passages about Africa. Some of this writing was just absolutely beautiful, and while there really wasn’t much plot here to make one feel any sense of urgency to read it, there is something here for readers who enjoy reading books about the beauty of Africa and the outdoors. ***This review first posted on my blog, luvtoread.***

Born Beryl Clutterbuck in 1902, she moved from England to Kenya with her father when she was just a girl of five. She went on a hunt for warthogs when she was a young girl and her faithful dog Buller was gored by the hog but survived to live several more years. Beryl was rather fearless and the Kenyan natives called her “Beru” because it was easier to pronounce. As a teen, she was fascinated with horses. Along with two native helpers, she delivered a colt from a pregnant mare. She named him Pegasus and her father told her the horse was now her own. Later, as a young woman, she became a trainer of horses. How does she become an aviatrix? She’s riding her horse one day and spots a man whose car has broken down. The man is Tom Campbell Black, an RAF captain during WWI, and she believes that he figures into her “Destiny” to become a pilot. In a later chapter, when Beryl is on the Athi Plains next to Nairobi, an airplane lands at night and it’s Tom Black, bringing an injured man and the ashes of another man. She writes about the look in his eyes that was disturbing in its clarity: eyes that might have followed the trajectory of a dead cat through a chapel window with more amusement than horror but might at the same time have expressed sympathy for the cat’s fate. Tom tells Beryl that he’s had a vision—she must learn to fly. So she decides that she must learn to fly. Tom becomes both her flight instructor and lover, a relationship that will cover the span of many years. Because of her position in society and membership in the local Muthaiga Club, Beryl has occasion to meet Karen Blixen (author of Out of Africa), Bror Von Blixen-Finecke (Karen’s husband also known as Blix), and Denys Finch Hatton (Karen’s lover first and later Beryl’s lover). Beryl was supposed to fly with Finch Hatton on the morning of May 13, 1931 but Tom Black, having had one of his frequent premonitions, advised her not to fly that day so she didn’t. Finch Hatton was killed the next day just after takeoff from the Voi airport, crashing to the ground when the plane burst into flames. Beryl has a one-plane business and is hired by Blix to scout elephant herds by air. While on the ground, they have a close encounter with a group of elephants and are almost trampled by a ferocious bull. Markham’s singular accomplishment, one for which she is famous, was flying west from England hoping to land in New York. She almost made it but crashed on an island in Nova Scotia because of ice in the plane’s fuel line. Curiously, her triumph merits only a single chapter and the book’s end. About Markham’s writing style; she says so much in so few words. The reader would be best advised to read her sentences slowly and enjoy them fully, pondering the detail offered and her beautiful use of the English language. I read only a chapter or two at a time; it’s like eating a gourmet meal and shouldn’t be rushed. Hemingway praised her writing ability and I think he was jealous of her work. Her writing is similar to Papa’s but she doesn’t seem as narcissistic or self-centered as him. This book is not a complete memoir. She omits mentioning any of her three husbands and her son. Her last name, Markham, comes from one of the husbands. Nor is there any mention of the numerous affairs she had in her life, one of which was with a member of the British royal family. Nevertheless, it’s a splendid read and one of the best books I’ve read in quite a long time.

I loved this book! It's an interesting biographical story of a really interesting woman who lived life on her own terms at a time when very few women did that. I knew it was going to be good when I saw a quote on the jacket from Ernest Hemingway saying that after reading her prose, he felt ashamed of his own. And her prose is excellent, so evocative you could just feel everything as she described it, such a pleasure to read. There are only a couple of minor criticisms I would have, that keep it from being one of the truely celebrated pieces of literature (in my mind). The ending of the book is pretty far removed from the scene of the climax (both literally and figuratively), it kind of felt like a jump cut... You wondered what happened after the climax, and how did she get to where she resumes the narrative. The second thing was that while she mentions several memorable male characters, she never discusses her personal romantic life at all in the book. I had to look her up on Wikipedia to learn that she had been married for a while, and which of the male characters she had had affairs with, and which ones she carried a love for, for the rest of her life. If that was in the book, this would have been a literary treasure. As it was, it was just a really great book. I also learned that several of the characters in the book were part of something in their East African area known as the Happy Valley Set which appears to have been a hedonistic free-for-all. I could see an entire book devoted to those scandals alone.

La calidad de este libro es abominable. Ni es libro, son como foto copias. No lo compres! !! Hasta pena ajena me dio.

A beautifully written book with only the last few chapters about her Atlantic voyage, mostly it is a stunning depiction of Africa as was, big game hunters, safaris and race horses, if you had told me that beforehand I probably wouldn't have bought it but very glad I did. A truly remarkable, brilliant, intelligent and capable woman who deserves to be better known. Edit - I did wonder when reading it why there was no mention of men or relationships, but since found out why , too chequered.

It's an autobiography of a life lived well n full of adventure

wild and crazy - best of the old-time barnstormers, you-know-what disturbers, and could party with the best of the best aviators our there at the time. I first learned about Beryl while listening to some audio book, and wrote down her name and titles. Now I have the first book (West With the Night) and am looking forward to receiving 'Straight On Till Morning: The Life Of Beryl Markham' which is en route as I type. As someone with a life-long appreciation of all things aviation and aerospace, I'm looking forward to reading about Beryl. I also have books about the one and only Pancho Barnes - of whom Chuck Yeager mentioned in several of his books - very complimentary of her aviation skills, and Amy Johnson who was immortalized in Al Stewart's Flying Sorcery. All accomplished aviatrixes...and not forgetting Patty Wagstaff whom I was fortunate enough to catch at two airshows. Fabulous! Anyway, if you're interested in in aviation, you'll be intrigued with Beryl Markham. (PS I have no use for that idiot who managed to ground loop one aircraft and crash land some place in the Pacific with her Navigator Fred Noonan.

Why this book hasn’t been a long term best seller is a real mystery. Great read for anyone interested in capable females making records while breaking through barriers. Should be on the feminist best seller list. Amazed it is so little known.