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.”

This is a great true story of a female aviation pioneer whose amazing life in East Africa and England was both extraordinary and extremely interesting. Ms. Markham is a wonderful author; this is a great read!

Very interesting autobiographical account of a remarkable woman growing up in East Africa at the dawn of the age of flight. The book is not a seemless narrative of her life, but almost a collection of the highlights of her life with a sometimes dry wit and very descriptive almost languid prose.

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 had never even heard of her, but this popped up while I was looking for Karen Blixen works. Little did I know that they knew one another, as well.This memoir is unforgettable. Powerful. Beautifully written.Even Hemingway extolled it.No wonder.I wish she had written more just like it.

What a read, what a writer! This book is much more than just a story about flying; it's simply a fantastic read, and it belongs on anybody's list of 'must read' titles.

Lo lei en version Kindle pero me gusto tanto que lo quiero tener en version fisica. Precioso y ameno de leer. Una inspiracion de mujer.

So well written , you feel you are there, with this person , living the adventures with her till the last page ! Excellent .

Béryl mériterait d’être mieux connue du grand public.Une femme libre et courageuse dont la vie est digne des plus grandes épopées

As a pilot myself, I found Beryl’s description of her achievements understated yet fascinating. There is so much detail unwritten about her pioneer flying in Africa and her Atlantic crossing, WOW! What a woman! What a pilot!