West with the Night: A Memoir Paperback – January 22, 2013

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.