West With The Night [Paperback]

"West With the Night" is a memoir of Markham's life in Kenya until her mid-1930s departure to England. In language rivaling Blixen's in poetry and Hemingway's in power and skill, it chronicles her unconventional upbringing, early 20th century colonial society, a racehorse trainer's anxieties and ambitions, a flyer's freedom and solitude, and those people who meant most to her: her father, her Nandi friends, Tom Black, and some persons also known to readers of Blixen's memoirs: Lord and Lady Delamere, Baron Blixen, and Denys Finch-Hatton, for whose attentions she competed with Blixen (who herself isn't mentioned at all, as Markham isn't mentioned, either, in "Out of Africa").

"There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa," we are introduced to the continent she considered "home:" "Being ... all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers. ... It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations." And the people Markham most respected matched this environment in hardiness as much as in diversity and depth: Baron Blixen, "six feet of amiable Swede," whose "appreciation of the melodramatic [was] non-existent," and who was "never significantly silent" and "the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever ... to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky." Denys Finch-Hatton, "a great man who never achieved arrogance," whose charm was "of intellect and strength," who would've "greeted doomsday with a wink," could "tread upon inferior men with his tongue," and was "a keystone" in an arch of lives which fell at his premature death, "leaving its lesser stones heaped [and] for a while without design." And Tom Black, Beryl's messenger from Destiny, who taught her that "when you fly ... you feel that everything you see belongs to you [and you're] closer to ... something you've sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to imagine," but who summed up the effect of Kenya's growing attraction to amateur hunters (aided not least by his own services) with the simple words "lion, rifles - and stupidity."

Perhaps Markham's most poignant accounts are those of her interactions with the Nandi. For unlike Karen Blixen, who came to Africa as an adult and never entirely abandoned a white colonialist's attitude, Markham's upbringing enabled her to innately understand their world: "He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all," we learn about young warrior Arab Maina: "But [in World War I] they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind and took the courage, and went where they sent him. [When he was killed,] some said it was because he had forsaken his spear." And when her childhood friend Kibii returns to become her servant, now a warrior himself and renamed Arab Ruta, she realizes that what a child doesn't know "of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove," and while Ruta will still be her friend, "the handclasp will be shorter ... and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together."

Like most memoirs - most notably Hemingway's "Moveable Feast" and Blixen"s "Out of Africa" - "West With the Night" is a selective account; and as in those works, the omissions only enhance its power. Hemingway's much-quoted lavish praise is both deserved and all the more notable as "Papa," otherwise so thrifty in lauding contemporaries, intensely disliked Markham as a person. - Authorship of the book has been called into question by the claims of Markham's ex-husband Raoul Schumacher, and by Errol Trzebinski's biography (which relies substantially on third-party accounts and merely proves that Schumacher had time and opportunity to write the book). It's a great shame that writing as lasting and beautiful as this should be marred by such a controversy. But there is no mistaking that this is, at heart, Beryl Markham's account. And therefore, ultimately ... "What matter who's speaking?" (Michel Focault, "What is an Author?")

In the first half of the book she tells about her experiences growing up on a farm in Njaro, Kenya. From the adventures of her dog Buller, who fought boars and leopards, to her own experiences hunting with Nandi tribesmen, on to encounters with mad horses & not quite domesticated lions, this section is the equal of, if not superior to, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. (In fact, in it's elegiac evocation of a way of life disappearing before the author's eyes, it reminded me of nothing so much as the wonderful How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.)

Then there's a brief interlude while she trains race horses after her father's farm fails & he leaves the country. Here she relates the thrilling tale of a race between a horse, Wild Child, with bad legs and another horse that she had trained, Wrack, but that was taken away from her because of her lack of experience. The description of the race is as good as anything I've ever read.

Finally, Tom Black teaches her to fly & she befriends men like Bror Blixen & Dennis Finch-Hatton (Dinesen's husband and her lover respectively). The deft & understated comedic touch that is displayed throughout the book is evident in this passage about a Kenyan landing strip:

A high wire fence surrounds the aerodrome-a wire fence and then a deep ditch. Where is there another aerodrome fenced against wild animals? Zebra, wildebeest, giraffe, eland--at night they lurk about the tall barrier staring with curious wild eyes into that flat field, feeling cheated.

They are well out of it, for themselves and for me. It would be a hard fate to go down in the memory of one's friends as having been tripped up by a wandering zebra. 'Tried to take off and hit a zebra!' It lacks even the dignity of crashing into an anthill

After several years scouting for elephants by air & flying medical supplies around, she heads to England and a friend stakes her in a 1936 effort to be the first pilot to fly solo from England to New York non-stop. Though she crash landed in Nova Scotia & couldn't make it to New York, she was still the first person to make the solo flight from England to North America non-stop.

Each of the three sections is united by one unique thread, Markham's love : of Africa; horses; & flying. Her passion shines through regardless of who the actual author may have been.

GRADE: A+