West with the Night

 

Michael - Alternate Thursdays

This story is really more up Annamaria’s street. It takes place at the time of her Africa novels - early twentieth century – and takes place where those novels are set – colonial Kenya. It’s the story of a truly remarkable contemporary of Karen Blixen – Beryl Markham. She was an aviator, a racehorse trainer, and a serial lover of such celebrities as Baron von Blixen himself, Denys Finch Hatton (of Out of Africa fame), and she added the Prince of Wales and his younger brother to her tally. She was married three times, but that certainly didn’t interfere with her affairs. Kenya was full of remarkable characters in the White Mischief era.

The main reason that Beryl Markham is remembered is not because of her sexual exploits, but because she wrote an extraordinary memoir titled West with the Night. The title comes from her feat of being the first person to fly solo from England to North America, flying west away from the sun into a long night. In fact, that adventure – during which she nearly died – occupies only the last chapter of her book. Most of it relates to her life growing up, training racehorses, and flying small planes in colonial Kenya.

The book didn’t attract much interest when it was first published. It did well enough while people remembered her record flight, but then sank into obscurity. Perhaps the fact that it mentions none of her husbands or her affairs disappointed the everyday reader who was looking for something more salacious. Ernest Hemingway, however, appreciated it. He wrote to a friend:

“Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ... She has written so well, and marvellously 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 this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

The friend was so taken with the book that he persuaded a US publisher to pick it up and republish it in 1983. The book became a best seller, and there was even some speculation and claims of (at least) co-authorship. None of those have ever been supported by the facts. The success of the book rescued Markham not only from obscurity but also from poverty in her old age. (She lived to 83.) It was a fitting ending to her story.

I reread the book recently and was again struck by the breadth of it, and by the almost cinemagraphic images. Here is a scene from her childhood that gives a flavour of both her writing and the Kenya of those days. It seems that people at the time seemed to think it a good idea to keep their own “tame” lions wandering around on their farms. Her father’s friend, Jim Elkington, had one.

“I was within twenty yards of the Elkington lion before I saw him. He lay sprawled in the morning sun, huge, black-maned, and gleaming with life. His tail moved slowly, stroking the rough grass like a knotted rope end. He was not asleep; he was only idle. He was rusty-red, and soft, like a strokable cat.

I stopped and he lifted his head with magnificent ease and stared at me out of yellow eyes.

I stood there staring back, scuffing my bare toes in the dust, pursing my lips to make a noiseless whistle – a very small girl who knew about lions.”

She holds her courage and walks past the lion, singing a defiant song.

“What lion would be unimpressed by the marching song of the King’s African Rifles?

Singing it still, I took up my trot towards the rim of the low hill which might, if I was lucky, have Cape gooseberry bushes on its slopes.

The country was grey-green and dry, and the sun lay on it closely, making the ground hot under my bare feet. There was no sound and no wind.

Even the lion made no sound, coming swiftly behind me.”

Obviously she lived to tell the tale, but not without scars to tell it for her.

“The lion had lived and died in ways not of his choosing. He was a good lion. He had done what he could about being a tame lion. Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?

I still have the scars of his teeth and claws, but they are very small now and almost forgotten, and I cannot begrudge him his moment.”

It’s a wonderful autobiography, whatever its biases or omissions.