West with the Night by Beryl Markham

First published: 1942

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1904-1936

Locale: Kenya

Principal Personages:

• Beryl Markham, a horsewoman and an aviator
• Tom Campbell Black, the aviator who taught Markham to fly
• Bror von Blixen-Finecke, an aristocratic Dane, the former husband of author Isak Dinesen, and a well-known hunter
• Charles Clutterbuck, Markham’s father, who loved racehorses and went bankrupt trying to farm in Africa
• Denys Finch-Hatton, an English aristocrat, the famous game hunter and lover of author Isak Dinesen who died in a plane crash
• Kibii, (later
• Arab Ruta, ), Markham’s childhood friend from the Murani tribe

Form and Content

West with the Night is the unconventional autobiography of an unconventional woman. British by birth, Beryl Markham grew up on a remote, colonial farm near Njoro, Kenya. Deserted by her mother and largely ignored by her father, she spent her childhood exploring the primitive African landscape with a dog named Buller and children from the Murani tribe. Markham’s formal education was limited, but her knowledge of African animals, customs, languages, and geography was extensive. She tracked game and used a spear like a native, she spoke fluent Swahili, and she possessed an almost uncanny understanding of horses. As a young woman, she opened her own stable, where she trained a number of prizewinning thoroughbreds. She also knew many of the important public figures of the day, including Edward, the Prince of Wales, and his brother Prince Henry, as well as local celebrities such as game hunters Bror von Blixen-Finecke and Denys Finch-Hatton. During the early 1930’s, Markham learned to fly and became a bush pilot. She delivered mail, passengers, and supplies to much of East Africa; she also scouted game for hunting safaris. In 1936, she became the first person to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic. These experiences provided the material for West with the Night, an account of her life up to age forty, which aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery encouraged her to write.

Despite good reviews, West with the Night did not become a popular success until Ernest Hemingway’s correspondence was published in 1981. Hemingway, who had known Markham in Africa, praised West with the Night:

She has written so well, and marvelously 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 [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves . . . writers.

As a result of Hemingway’s praise, West with the Night was republished in 1983. Critical acclaim followed and the book became a best-seller, forty-one years after it first appeared.

The book’s format and panache explain much of its appeal. It is divided into four books, each focusing on a particular period in Markham’s life. Chronology as such is relatively unimportant; Markham describes significant moments or memorable experiences rather than marching through her life year by year. Book 1 recounts some of her experiences as a bush pilot in 1935: the delivery of a bottle of oxygen to a mining-town doctor, the search for a colleague whose plane went down in the wilderness, a deathbed visit with a victim of blackwater fever. Interspersed among these episodes are meditations on the African landscape and animals as seen from the air as well as reflections about the joys and dangers of flying across uncharted territory. Book 2 flashes back to Markham’s childhood and adolescence; it includes descriptions of a mauling by a neighbor’s pet lion, an exciting boar hunt, a confrontation with an arrogant stallion, and the birth of the colt Pegasus. Book 3 traces Markham’s struggle to establish herself as a successful trainer of racehorses after she left her father’s farm at the age of seventeen. In book 4, Markham describes her flying lessons with Tom Campbell Black, the death of Finch-Hatton, and her elephant-hunting adventures with Blixen. Only in the last two chapters does she discuss the solo flight over the Atlantic which brought to her fame.

Although Markham’s experiences provide the framework for the narrative, West with the Night is as much a tribute to Africa as it is an account of a woman’s life. In fact, for an autobiography the book is remarkably short of routine biographical details. Markham, for example, never mentions her mother, her husbands, or her son. She has no thesis to advance or position to defend. Her thrust is descriptive; she wishes to re-create the Africa that she understood and loved. Her efforts result in a vivid, first-person account of the African landscape, its animals, and its people as it was experienced by a woman of courage, intelligence, and independence during the early part of the century.

Critical Context

West with the Night belongs to a small body of literature produced by writers who knew at first hand the rugged beauty, the solitude, the color, the challenges, and the dangers that East Africa offered to its settlers and visitors during the early part of the twentieth century. The most notable of these writers are Elspeth Huxley, the author of The Flame Trees of Thika (1974) and Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (1985); Isak Dinesen, who reminisced about her experiences on a coffee plantation in Den afrikanske farm (1937; Out of Africa, 1937) and Skygger p graesset (1960; Shadows on the Grass, 1960); and Ernest Hemingway, who used East Africa as the setting for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961) and Green Hills of Africa (1935) as well as for several of his short stories.

The Africa of Hemingway, Dinesen, and Markham no longer exists. The wild game that Hemingway’s characters hunted is now confined to preserves, white colonial settlers such as Dinesen are no longer welcome, and the magnificent forests that Markham remembers are now largely destroyed. All these writers were aware of the changes that were taking place, even as they were writing. In West with the Night, Markham notes, “Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again.”

Yet if the farmers, hunters, fliers, and opportunists who came to East Africa altered the landscape, the writers who recorded the process permanently fixed the public idea of what life was like in the Kenyan colony. Few of these writers equated life in Africa with a life of ease. They did, however, suggest that it was a life which offered adventure, glamour, and excitement in an exotic setting. The characters and authors who lived those lives, whether fictional or real, have now passed into the realm of myth and legend.

Markham herself wrote little else after the publication of West with the Night. Between 1943 and 1946, eight stories were published under her name in magazines such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Several of these were ghostwritten by Markham’s third husband, Raoul Schumacher; several others were undoubtedly collaborative efforts. Clearly, however, four of the stories were largely Markham’s: “The Captain and His Horse,” “The Splendid Outcast,” “Something I Remember,” and “The Quitter.” Set in East Africa and obviously autobiographical, these stories, anthologized in The Splendid Outcast: Beryl Markham’s African Stories (1987), should be read as charming supplements to West with the Night.

Bibliography

Bull, Bartle. Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure. New York: Viking Press, 1988. Bull chronicles the history of safaris in Africa from 1836. He provides detailed descriptions and photographs of Markham, her friends, and their lifestyles in the British colony of Kenya.

Lomax, Judy. Women of the Air. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987. Lomax examines women’s contributions in the field of aviation. The chapter on Markham contains anecdotes about her entire life and specific details about her transatlantic solo flight.

Lovell, Mary S. Straight On Till Morning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. This definitive biography was written after Lovell conducted extensive interviews with Markham. Included is information on her family’s English background and the controversial material that Markham kept out of her autobiography. Numerous pictures of Markham, her family, and friends are presented. Lovell uses for her title one of the titles originally considered by Markham for her autobiography.