Grove Koger

As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a memoir by Beryl Markham, who was born on October 26, 1902.

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West with the Night (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942)

Born in England but raised from the age of four in the colony (later nation) of Kenya, Beryl Markham grew up a member of the privileged British ruling class of East Africa. Like her father, who taught her to ride, she became a noted breeder and trainer of racehorses, but actually seems to have excelled at everything she turned her hand to. After being introduced to flying by big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton in 1931, she went on to become the first woman in Kenya to earn a commercial pilot’s license. Among her many other friends in Kenya were planter and writer Isak Dinesen and Dinesen’s husband, Bror Blixen.

Markham wrote West with the Night in California, where she had moved in 1939. A bestseller upon publication in 1942, it earned the rare praise of Ernest Hemingway, who had known Markham in Africa. “She has written so well, and marvelously well,” he admits, “that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.” The book was reprinted in 1983 to even greater acclaim, by which time Markham had returned to Kenya—to raise horses once again.

West with the Night opens with a series of chapters recalling Markham’s experiences as a bush pilot.  Others deal with her younger years, when, unlike the Masai girls she knew, she was allowed to take part in hunting warthogs. She writes of course with particular insight of horses, “as much a part of my life as past birthdays.” Soon after she began taking flying lessons, her lover Finch Hatton was killed in a crash—a wrenching event that Isak Dinesen, similarly involved with the man, would also describe in Out of Africa. Yet Markham was undeterred, and went on to become first to cross the Atlantic nonstop from east to west, the accomplishment that gives her graceful, effortlessly evocative memoir its title.

In light of her many experiences, her philosophy is particularly apt: “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember 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. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”

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The Virago edition (London, 1984) includes an introduction by Martha Gellhorn. A later Virago edition (London, 1989) published as The Illustrated West with the Night is abridged and contains an introduction by Elizabeth Claridge, but the Welcome Enterprises edition (New York, 1994) published as The Illustrated West with the Night contains the complete text.

If you’d like to know more about Markahm, see Ulf Aschan, The Man Whom Women Loved: The Life of Bror Blixen (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Mary S. Lovell, Straight on till Morning: The Biography of Beryl Markham (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); and The Lives of Beryl Markham: Out of Africa’s Free Spirit and Denys Finch Hatton’s Last Great Love (New York: Norton, 1993).