West with the Night

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.

The story opens with the author being called in the middle of the night to deliver a tank of oxygen to a dying man. The reason she has been called is because her business is flying a small bi-plane through the wilds of Africa on delivery errands such as these. The flight and subsequent visit with the dying man and his doctor are used to introduce us to Africa - the rich black nights, the stories of her native peoples, the harsh reminder with the appearance of a jackal that "...in Africa there is never any waste."

In this first section we also begin to know and wonder about the author, a native of Britain who was transplanted to African soil at the age of 2 and raised by her father on his farm at Njoro. There her primary playmates were the children of the Nandi Murani tribe and her principle schoolroom the African landscape itself. As Markham puts it, "Africa was the breath and life of my childhood. 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 favors. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races."

It is Markham's misfortune, but also her gift, that she could never be fully assimilated by the native people and the landscape. Her father insisted on sending her to school, relatives and friends did their best to expose her to European culture, and in the end Africa itself conspired to force her out of the fold and into the larger world. The end result is a woman who walks a fine and complex line within herself between two radically different perceptions of the world.

Although Markham's story is remarkable based on facts alone - taking us from her childhood haunts to her historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean - it is the elegance and depth of the writing that sets this book apart. When she talks about the horses she and her father bred and raised, for example, it's as if she is stepping into the animals' skins. When she discusses her hunt for a fellow pilot, lost in the bush, it is with total absorption in the moment. This is the kind of book that can make you forget you are reading a book, drawing you into the subtleties of life as Markham knew it - engaging all the senses and ultimately your heart as well.


A beautiful book...   May 23, 2000
Dianne Foster (USA)
29 out of 34 found this review helpful

I was talking about Africa one day, and one of my younger friends who had just completed college, recommended this book. I looked for the book because my friend is not given to reading, and the fact that she was impressed told me it might be an interesting book. I liked the book so much, I bought a "talking" version for my older aunt who has lost much of her vision and cannot read. She loved the book too. From this sample of three women, I can tell you this book will appeal to all ages.

Beryl Markham neglects many aspects of her colorful life, the story briefly covers her child hood in Africa and then mostly focuses on her wonderful flight, actually harder than Lindbergh's flight since she flew East to West, Europe to North America, against the jet stream. The description of the flight is thrilling up til the last when she crash lands--in North America.

If you want to know more about Beryl and her escapades, read "Out of Isak Dinesen, Karn Blixon's Untold Story" by Linda Donelson. Beryl knew Blixon (17 years her senior, and a mentor at some points) and Denis Finch Hatton. Also, the wonderful BBC film "Heat of the Sun" contains a character played by Susannah Harker (an avatrix) loosely based on Beryl Markham.


Absolutly spellbinding--it is a plane ride to another world   August 31, 1998
27 out of 27 found this review helpful

I visited Kenya last year and saw this book all over the shelves, and I picked it up. Little did I know, I was picking up one of the best written and most evocative books of all time. I was swept away immediatly by her involving narrative and descriptions. And let me tell you, the descriptions capture the Kenyan landscape and people remarkably well. It is just as wonderful and mysterious as Markham writes. This book transported me to the dazzling age of the 1920's and 30's in Kenya--which is full of fascinating trailblazers. I read a lot of the novel outloud, and her thoughts seemed to become my thoughts. Her anecdotes and experiences are so poignant that they seem to shoot me right through the heart. I want to reread this novel again and again, it is wonderous. Hemingway was right when he said " it is a bloody wonderful book." If you like Markham, you should read Isak Dineson's classic Out of Africa. However, Markham does more soul-searching and delving into herself than Dineson does. You'll recognize some familiar charactars as well. Both are true stories!


Wow...a beautiful heck of a book!   September 30, 2002
Elisabeth W. Movius (Shanghai China)
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

Mere moments have passed since I closed the back cover on "West with the Night", and already I am missing its world and its voice. It is one of those rare books that can, with the simple fluidity of its narrative, pull you in and engulf you entirely.

I am not a big fan of the memoir, but Markham's (or whoever wrote it) voice is neither bombastic nor humble; she feels less a narrator or subject than a fellow traveller, along with you for the ride. Although the life she lived was extraordinary and compelling, she refreshingly views it in clipped, casual, careful terms, as unimpressed with herself as if she'd been a midwestern housewife, not a pilot and horse trainer in Colonial Africa.

Many readers will approach "West with the Night" out of a pre-existing interest in and knowledge of its era and characters, and will no doubt experience it entirely differently than I did. While a few names rang vague bells, for the most it was an engaging introduction. But I read it as literature, not as history, and enjoyed it immensely as such. I found her small personal anecdotes far more interesting than the accounts of her grand feats. The Atlantic flight that made her famous rounds out the end of the book, but is rather dry and dull compared to her African tales. Stories such as her father's pompous parrot had me in spasms of public giggles.

It is little wonder that Hemmingway praised this book, as the sparse directness of its utilitarian prose makes even the Old Man of the Sea seem a flowery romantic. Its structure can be rather meandering, but in that regard it resembles the contours of memory, which makes me believe Markham did indeed write her own book.


A British African Amazon.   November 9, 2004
Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany)
17 out of 21 found this review helpful

Taken to Kenya at age three, in 1905, Beryl Markham was raised on a farm by her father and a much-hated governess - her mother soon re-abandoned pioneer life for England. And while other girls were groomed to be ladies of society, she learned to ride and train horses, played with the Nandi boys living on her father's land and went hunting with their fathers. Barely 19, she became a professional racehorse trainer; at age 24 (1926) her mare Wise Child won the prestigious St. Leger, beating the odds and the favorite, Wrack, likewise initially trained by Beryl but taken from her weeks earlier by an owner distrusting her experience. After marrying and divorcing again wealthy Mansfield Markham, whose last name she kept, she met pioneer aviator Tom Black (later pilot to the Prince of Wales), who awakened her interest in flying and soon became her instructor. Having obtained her B license - "a flyer's Magna Carta" - Markham operated a taxi and cargo service out of Nairobi and worked as a scout for professional hunters like author Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen's) (ex-)husband Baron Bror Blixen. After her return to England, in 1936 she became the first pilot to successfully cross the Atlantic from east to west, against the headwinds. (She didn't reach New York, as planned - technical difficulties forced her plane into a Nova Scotia bog - but her achievement created substantial headlines regardless.) After being lured to Hollywood by a film project involving her flight, and marrying and divorcing again the man who later claimed this book's authorship, writer Raoul Schumacher, Markham ultimately returned to Kenya and to racehorse training. No less than six of her horses won Kenya's East African Derby, making her a local celebrity of considerable note. She died in 1986.

"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?")

Also recommended:
Splendid Outcast: Beryl Markham's African Stories
Straight on Till Morning: A Biography of Beryl Markham
Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
Out of Africa
Green Hills of Africa
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Flame Trees of Thika
Petals of Blood
Things Fall Apart: A Novel
Wind, Sand and Stars