West With the Night
Beryl Markham’s West with the Night (1942) is an beautifully written memoir that paints a series of powerful portraits of 20th-century Africa. Markham was a woman who boldly worked in male fields—race horse training and aviation—during the early- to mid-1900s. Unlike some memoir, Markham’s prose is eloquent, her imagery rich. West with the Night describes in vivid, suspenseful detail her experiences in eastern Africa, even after she left it. Among other things, this memoir reflects Markham’s love affair with Africa and the many ways that the continent formed her as a child and young adult.
While she was born in England, Beryl Clutterbuck (Markham) lived most of her childhood in British Kenya, the daughter of a colonial landowner. West with the Night reveals her deep love of Africa and its native people, beginning in childhood. She relays foundational memories—childhood hunts alongside Masai Murani, encounters with lions, solo flights over desolate stretches of unmapped eastern Africa, her time working as a race horse trainer—that also provide snapshots of the Africa she knew. This Africa is wild and untamed, even as it is punctuated by British colonialism. Published in the 1940s, it is not surprising that the language and perspectives of colonialism infuse Markham’s memoir, in ways that may be particularly noticeable and even troubling to modern readers. Be that as it may, her writing is excellent and the Africa she describes is one she honors for its natural, even ancient uniqueness.
As her memoir progresses, the world of aviation calls her out of Africa and toward the audacious goal of flying west over the Atlantic. That act, flying west with the night, as the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone, is indeed the inspiration for Markham’s memoir; it also gives the book its title. As such, the reader becomes aware that Markham opts to focus on Africa in this memoir because she deems it essential in understanding how and why she determined to take up such a challenge. Her African childhood included no shortage of wild experiences and a deeply sown independence of spirit. Her young adulthood training horses, and later flying planes in eastern African, cemented her unflinching independence. Without these experiences, the memoir suggests, Markham would never have attempted a solo flight across the Atlantic.
West with the Night is exceptionally readable and provides readers with ample opportunity for armchair adventure and travel. If you wish to fly along scouting African elephants or on rescue missions across desolate stretches of eastern Africa, this book will certainly delight. West with the Night is a powerful articulation of one woman’s calling to do something outrageous. It does not dabble into Markham’s personal life beyond the moments that led her to that solo flight. (For that, and there is plenty of it, look to Paula McLain’s fictional Circling the Sun, published in 2015, or Errol Trzebinski’s biography The Lives of Beryl Markham, published in 1993.) West with the Night is, rather, an ode, of sorts, to the places and people, the experiences and challenges, that prepared her to be the first woman to fly solo west across the Atlantic. Thus, it is fascinating and inspiring in subject. It is also beautiful written. In fact, Hemingway famously said of this book (as quoted on the cover of my edition): “Written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer . . . [Markham] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers . . . It is really a bloody wonderful book.” And it’s true; Markham’s writing stirs her reader’s spirit high above the lands of eastern Africa and the dark water of the Atlantic.
Bibliography:
Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. North Point Press: 2013.
A Few Great Quotes:
“Competitors in conquest have overlooked the vital soul of Africa herself, from which emanates the true resistance to conquest. The soul is not dead, but silent, the wisdom not lacking, but of such simplicity as to be counted non-existent in the tinker’s mind of modern civilization. Africa is of an ancient age and the blood of many of her peoples is as venerable and as chaste as truth” (7).
“Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it” (131).
“A life has to move or it stagnates” (238).
“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” (238).
