West with the Night

What Pilots KnowBeryl Markham lent me her wings while I was laid up on a hospital bed, almost paralyzed, with surgeons recommending that, in order for me to walk again, they would have to carve me up. Once they would leave, taking their medical insights with them, the weight of their Cartesian scientific history and experience under their arms, I, undecided about the advantages of scalpels, would look at Beryl, black and white against the green cover, and think of Hemingway...That was not too long ago, although by the time I reach that submerged horizon it will have been a long time indeed. I had, therefore, best write about it now, lest I forget or surrender the matter to obliteration by events which will surely occur on this journey. Too many memories have gone the way of fire due to my procrastinations. Too many times I have hesitated to allow the flow of ink to run through my fingers and onto the page, mostly for fear of not finding a style. I am rather good at vocabulary, but style is an altogether different matter. And when it comes to writing about books, or more exactly, when it comes to writing about what others have written, the demands of literature to separate their words from mine requires an effort to which I am not equal. For their words have, in many cases, not only inspired my own - they have become my own. Why must I differentiate between them when, to me, they form the whole of who I am, and who I want to be, and who, perhaps, I once was? How awkward the insertion of apostrophes, inverted commas, quotation marks, quotes, and citations - they all seem like so many little interruptions that accumulate and exhaust, both, the reader and I. I have exhausted myself in searching for a style. Enough! I must write. Caveat lector.She can write rings around all of us, Hemingway once wrote. High praise indeed from a Nobel Laureate. Then again, Hemingway always seemed to me to be... well, somewhat too earnest, writing like a genius kid in junior high who never quite managed to graduate to university. If Beryl wrote rings around him, it was because she indeed wrote better. It was the same unelaborate, though not simplistic, style of Hemingway. But, unlike Hemingway, it was not journalism. Having said that, I like Hemingway. I do not like the image the media has built of him, and I do not like most of his work. But I like him all the same, for his Hills Like White Elephants - which took me years to understand, and, even then, only by aid of a critic's appreciation - and for his Death in the Afternoon, where he taught me that the great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand, and write when there is something that you know, and not before, and not too damned much after... But I digress, and Hemingway, too, will have his turn.I am there, with her, when she sits down and eyes around the room for a beginning. I am her hand which turns the pages of a flying log which just happens to be there on the desk, that particular log and not any one of those numerous other logs that lie scattered about the shelves like old airplanes parked in protective hangars, their wings full of past adventures, wishing they could now write since they fly no more. My eyes are hers as they fall upon an inconspicuous entry, almost too ordinary, brief and indifferent:DATE - 16 June 1935 TYPE AIRCRAFT - Avro Avian MARKINGS - VP-KAN JOURNEY - Nairobi to Nungwe TIME - 3 hrs. 40 mins. PILOT - Self REMARKS - -It concerns a routine flight, the transport of a canister of oxygen to a dying gold miner, dying of a lung disease; oxygen not as lifesaver but as final comfort, a final offering from the elements, from the very same elements which burnt his lungs as he sought his fortune. Her eyes, and mine, look upon this entry in this logbook, but she will not begin by telling this story. The facts can wait, as they always can. Instead, she dreams a little, and I begin to feel what Nungwe does to her and so to me. Where Sartre believed that anything which one names loses its innocence, Beryl proves him too completely wrong. For what are dreams but innocence, and dreams of places are but innocence located in names, names like Tsavo, Muthaiga, Mwanza, Nakuru, the Rongai Valley, the Mau Escarpment, Kabete Station, Voi - ah! Voi, which presumed itself a town back then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof! - and Mombasa. Mombasa! If only more places were named like that! The name itself ensures the place will never lose its dreamy innocence of times long gone, and of times that could have been, and of times yet to come. How alive Mombasa feels, even merely as a name, from a place like New York, or Vienna, or London. It is the gateway to that world of which you have always remained unsure: did it once exist, or is it somewhere still? That world which lives and grows without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks. That world where one is unable to discuss with any intelligence or reason the boredom of being alive. For such intellectual endeavors, London is the best place to be. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic indeed.I do not remember how, or when, I first looked upon a map and saw the world, how I first fused the idea of a flat cartographic drawing with the roundness of the globe, how I first pointed to a dot with a name and proclaimed `I am here' with the confidence that requires no courage. But ever since then, my confidence in maps has never left me, and nor has the assuredness they give me to proclaim my location. My upbringing always seemed to me as if I had been born into so many locations at once. My life began with maps, as I was hauled across continents, into new landscapes, peopled by all shades and humors, and into new languages that became my own. Maps were my first education, my first texts, my first entertainment, and my first love of symbols on paper. Maps were where life was reflected and, in being so, where life itself opened up to me. In adult years, I discovered the pleasures, and the challenges, of the cartographic science and the mapping art, and was thus happy to find the child in the man I am. One must never lose sight of childhood dreams. They still have the power to move us from place to place, and so progress, and lend some wisdom to our oh-so-adult ways.It was when I developed my mature, scholarly taste for maps that Beryl appeared, with Hemingway's echo that I should read her, not him. She flew me 245 pages over East Africa in her biplane, in darkness and in sunlight, from the stench of blackwater in Nungwe, to the bright green of her father's farm at Njoro, over the Kikuyu Reserve and into the Yatta in search of stranded Blix. Indeed, it was upon finding Blix and Winston that she told me something that has remained with me always, not for its allusions to practicality, but for its sheer poetic resonance. I had never realized before, she said, how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day's growth of beard makes a man look careless; two days', derelict; and four days', polluted. Blix and Winston had not shaved for three. Since then, on days when I decide not to shave, I cannot help but think of Beryl, and I picture Blix looking like an unkempt bear disturbed in hibernation.My dwelling on this incident is, in part, because it was the beginning of the end of Beryl's Africa, and mine, but mostly because of how she marked that end as a beginning. It came with no obvious reason, that goodbye. She simply looked up one evening and asked, `Want to fly to London, Blix?' He said yes, without as much as a consideration, always the adventurer, always the child. By then Karen had gone, and Blix and Beryl were all that remained. It seemed as natural as birds migrate that they too should finally return to their northern lands, or die along with the times that Africa was now devouring in its desire to change. And yet `return' would be the wrong term to use. Exile would be more accurate. For even if Africa was indifferent to them, even if they had learnt - like all those of us who have lived Africa and made it our home knowing that it can never be ours - that it would never succumb to some imposed domestication, return to Europe was exile in Europe away from Africa, and there is no truer way of describing it than that. This exile, for having haunted them all their lives, was a decision well-prepared, and thus needing no more than Blix's unreflective yes.It was this decision that brought maps and goodbyes and new beginnings all together suddenly one day, at a pilot's hour bundled in mist. By this time, Beryl was flying a Leopard Moth, a high-wing cabin monoplane. I gazed at it with so much nostalgia for the biplanes of old that... Plus ça change... en effet plus ça change. I do not know what she saw in my face. Maybe she saw a child on his first day of school, facing the world as it suddenly opens with all its terror and its overwhelming possibilities, and, knowing how children can love maps, maybe she wanted to reassure me that I could follow her, and so be with her, even if only cartographically. And so she gave me a green covered book, with a photograph of her, complete with flyer cap and goggles restless above her eyes. And as my fingers wrapped around it, she held it too and said:A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. A map says to you, `Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, `I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.' Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet. Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.She then let go of the book and turned toward the plane and an impatient Blix. But she stood a moment, taking in the humidity of the morning air. Perhaps she wanted to give the mist of cloud a little more time to rise. And so she looked at me again and said: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. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents, each man to see what the other looked like.And she flew away.Some time later I received a postcard from Libya. By then she was in England and already planning the Atlantic flight which would bring her fame. The postcard was of the corniche in Tripoli, draped in palm trees. On the back, in a quick hand, was written the following:Last night, Blix and I were taken in by a local woman. She showed us to two rooms, not even separated by a door. Everything lay under scales of filth. `All the diseases of the world live here,' I said to Blix. He was laconic. `So do we, until tomorrow,' he said. And so we did. And now we're off to cross the Med.Beryl and Blix left Africa exactly how she taught me to leave places that one has lived in and loved and where all one's yesterdays are buried deep: quickly. They did not turn back, and never believed that an hour one remembers is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. Pilots know that the cloud clears as you enter it.

Beryl Markham's memoir. She was a Kenyan aviator born in England (one of the first bush pilots). She was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America.West with the Night was the perfect gift for my husband. He could not put the book down. He read it over a period of 2 days. He enjoyed the author's writing style, her incredible adventures at such a young age, and how she learned from each experience.

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.”

Betyl Markham was a force of nature for her time, born in southern Africa in the late 1800's and becoming a trainer of race horses shortly after the turn of the century, and then a bush pilot and the first person to fly across the Atlantic east to west are amazing accomplishments in themselves. But her literary style and the grace of her word craftmanship are truly astounding. This is a read, and reread book and the enjoyment only increases. Highly recommended.

My interest was piqued to look into this book by a quote on Facebook, and Hemingway's praises of the author on the cover won me over. You will not be disappointed. The stories Beryl Markham chooses to tell are not a complete autobiography, rather the most important highlights of her life. Her amazing use of words is striking. I can only wish I could come up with some of the descriptions Ms. Markham conjures. Sensitive, humorous, intelligent writing at its complete best.

Great book of adventure and a life with no apologies by a fearless woman. Sha dared to do things women did not do at the time- hunting with native Africans, trail ing horses, flying planes. Wonder what she would do if alive today

R.A.S.

Está muy bien escrito, con mucha ternura y cariño hacia esa parte de África y hacia sus habitantes. También con mucho sentido del humor.

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

Fantastic

This is an excellent book which brings Africa between the wars alive. The accounts of the early aviators and big game hunters are terrific.