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Summary: Companion piece to Out of Africa. Should be read together
Review: From the age of 4, Beryl Markham lived in East Africa and spent her childhood with native Maruni children as her only playmates. She was there during the same era as Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), author of Out of Africa, and reading these two books together gives a lyrical, poetic, and heart-full-of-love picture of the Africa they both knew. But it wasn't only Africa they loved; they both shared a passion for the same men: Bror Blixen (Dinesen's husband) and Denys Finch-Hatton (Dinnesen's lover), so, inevitably their paths collided at times.
Although Dinesen is more well-known and respected as a writer compared to Markham, better known as an adventurer, Markham rises to heights of poetic imagery and her writing style was praised highly by many other writers of her era, including no less than Ernest Hemingway.
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Summary: The Wonders of the African Frontier
Review: Historic, personal, and romantic tales of a female pioneer in aviation fill the pages of West with the Night. It is beautifully written, poetry put into chapters to tell of the adventures of the developing African frontier. The book follows the life of the Beryl Markham, the author, giving the reader a view into the lives of her native friends, the small social world of the British settlers, and a young girl growing up as the result of the integrating cultures. She is, herself, both fresh and new, one of the first to develop a mindset of blended customs. Besides observing the profits of the British cultural invasion of East Africa, the reader is, all the while, taken on a non-stop ride of African adventures. Like a child, pulling anxiously at your hand, sprinting onward toward further exploration, Markham speeds us through dangers ranging from leopards to the risks of early flight in an unmapped land. It is a mind-boggling world of naturally flowing chaos, deep thought, admiral respect, and truly amazing people, entirly unimaginable to the modern American. Markham has seen it like no one before her and few after, and when she puts it to paper, the reader can see directly into her heart. A must read.
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Summary: Wonderful, wonderful use of language
Review: I am aghast that this book is available for under $1.00 here on Amazon. If you don't own this book, buy it! It is absolutely the best command of language that I've ever experienced - and you do EXPERIENCE it, rather than just read it. Markham's words will sweep you away and deposit you firmly in the midst of Africa during her lifetime, where you will hear the lions and the drone of the airplanes, and feel the heat and rain. This is one of only a handful of books that I have read more than twice in my lifetime. You will not regret owning this masterpiece.
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Summary: One of the very best
Review: I can't say enough good about this book. My parents had it for quite a while before I decided to read it, because I thought "I'm not interested in flying, in Africa, or what it was like back in the 20s & 30s." But Beryl Markham makes everything profoundly meaningful with her graceful prose and her gift for invoking places, people and situations. Alternately hilarious, poignant, gripping, poetic or tragic, it withstands countless re-readings. Here is a tiny sample, involving a young race-horse & a herd of zebra:
"I think Balmy was aware of the dictum "noblesse oblige," but, for all her mud-rolling, she never got very close to a zebra or even oxen without distending her nostrils in the manner of an eighteenth-century grande dame forced to wade throught the fringes of a Paris mob. As for the zebra, they replied in kind, moving out of her path with the ponderous dignity of righteous proletariat, fortified in their contempt by the weight of their number."
This one story alone is worth the price of admission.
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Summary: Wonderful Life, Well Told
Review: I read this book when it first came out in the early 80s and have never forgotten it. I love Beryl Markham's language; and the story she has to tell is better than any fiction. She was an independent spirit, living an amazing life in an immense and beautiful land.
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Summary: Not this production!
Review: I've been listening to this audio recording on CD, read by Julie Harris, of "West with the Night" and I have to warn you that it is not to the standard I would willingly pay. I checked this item out from our library and I must tell you there are definite problems with this production.
I am in total agreement with other reviewers concerning the book. I have read the book and Beryl's (or whomever's) words can take your mind to East Africa - the smells, the sounds, the people! The problem is that this production has too many flaws.
First, the reader often magnifies her voice at inappropriate times, causing the listener to wince in pain. Most of the time, she reads at an acceptable volume and so you adjust your controls to listen, then, all of a sudden, she will raise her voice, as at the beginning of a sentence, and nearly split your ear drums. Then, she settles back into her normal volume.
That said, I could live with that one flaw...
However, another problem is that she often breaks off in mid-sentence or thought, pausing the recorder and then starting back up. Consequently, there is a noticeable gap in the reading. It virtually ruins the effect on many occasions.
Finally, in this production, you can hear the reader turning the pages and she often hesitates as she does so, so that you can't help but notice!!
All of these simply add up to a poor production of an excellent book. My recommendation is to try a different audio product (which I will do next).
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Summary: The Great American Novel - Only Its A True Story From Africa
Review: Life and love, hardship and adventure, romance and history - all beautifully woven into a delightful autobiography of an unlikely heroine. The daughter of a poor white farmer trying to eke out a living in untamed and uncharted Africa, Beryl Markham rose from very humble beginnings to become a successful horse trainer, bush pilot, and the first person to fly east-to-west across the Atlantic from England. Her fantastic life seems to be one adventure after another, coincidentally commingled with the lives of Isak Dinesen (the author and heroine of "Out of Africa") and Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford in the movie, OOA). On this level alone, that of an adventure-packed historical tale, this book is compelling. But the absolute poetry of the narrative makes it inescapable.Ms. Markham's inimitable flair for description and metaphor are enchantingly powerful. One could truly open the book to any random page and find a treasure. No previous knowledge of plot or precedence would be vital to the enjoyment. That such extraordinary prose also reveals an incredible life provides a rich dividend. Savor the following corsage randomly plucked from the bouquet: "Arab Ruta... is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower, the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living. He is not black. His skin holds the sheen and warmth of used copper. His eyes are dark and wide-spaced, his nose is full-boned and capable of arrogance. "He is arrogant now, swinging the propeller, laying his lean hands on the curved wood, feeling an exultant kinship in the coiled resistance to his thrust. "He swings hard. A splutter, a strangled cough from the engine like the premature stirring of a sleep-slugged labourer. In the cockpit I push gently on the throttle, easing it forward, rousing the motor, feeding it, soothing it." My first encounter with this charming book was accidental but fortuitous. I found the paperback in an airport bookstore, and stayed engrossed and enchanted by the lyrical meanderings for the entirety of my three-hour flight. A few years later I discovered the audio version which springs to an even greater life in the voice of Julie Harris. Her reading of the horse race that proved to be a watershed moment for Ms. Markham, still has the capacity to choke me to tears, though I have listened to it many times. A few reviewers here have given less than laudatory reviews. This book is absolutely among the top five I have ever read, and I must pity those unfortunate souls who are tone-deaf to the rhapsodic music playing among its pages. Never mind my glowing endorsement. Never mind that Ernest Hemmingway said that Beryl Markham "has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer." Just find this book and open it randomly to any page. You will quickly discover that this book is an extraordinary encounter. Don't miss it!
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Summary: Touching, humorous, and an excellent adventure.
Review: Markham's stories of hunting warthogs, stalking elephants, and being "moderately eaten by a lion" are some of the funniest and most vivid stories I have read. I put this book down with a profound regret for having lost so much of the world which she speaks of. My vocabulary is not adequate to describe the humanity and wit with which she has infused this book. So let me quote a few of the passages from this wonderful book so you may decide if you will enjoy her style of prose.
"I know animals more gallant thant the African warthog, but none more courageous...His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one exression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights."
While visiting a dying man in a remote african outpost, she describes the conversation. "His voice was soft and controlled, and very tired. 'It's been four years since I left Nairobi, and there haven't been many letters.' He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and attempted a smile. 'People forget,' he added. 'It's easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you're very long in a place like this you remember everybody you ever met. You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies. It's all something to think about and it all helps.'"
And she goes on to describe his agony. "He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying."
And here is her description of the hut the dying man lay in. "Here was poverty - poverty of women to help, poverty of hope, and even of life. For all I knew there might have been handfuls of gold buried in that hut, but if there was, it was the poorest comfort of all."
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Summary: A British African Amazon.
Review: 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?")
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Summary: First Aviatrix in Africa
Review: The rule is, I found, that females can't write. I am staying away from what my own gender writes. Beryl Markham is a wonderful exception to my rule. Ernest Hemingway felt dwarfed by the authoress.
Beryl wrote in 1936, and Africa were she grew up was obviously different than now. She describes first hand encounters with lions and elephants, very interesting observations on animal behavior. She also describes the natives, and I wished she would have even gotten more into them. I love her philosophy on life and often I got the feeling she is writing right now, not 70 years ago. A great book for people curious about Africa! Put it into your collection, because you want to read it again!
Addendum April 30, 2004: After writing the above review I have learned from the biography "The Lives of Beryl Markham" by Errol Trzebinski that Beryl did not write "West with the Night", but her third husband Raoul Schumacher, a Hollywood ghostwriter.
Addendum June 15, 2004: I read "The Splendid Outcast" and in the Introduction, Mary S. Lovell, who wrote another biography on Beryl and knew her personally, does not doubt the authorship is genuine Beryl Markham.
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