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Biography & Autobiography.
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This beautifully written autobiography brings us the remarkable life story of Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Brought up on a farm in Kenya, Markham chose to stay in Africa when, at seventeen, her father lost their farm and went to Peru. She began an apprenticeship as a racehorse trainer which turned into a highly successful career. In her twenties, Markham gave up horses for airplanes and became the first woman in East Africa to be granted a commercial pilot's license, piloting passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa. As rich and inspiring as when it was first written, West with the Night captures the spirit of a true pioneer woman.
Too many shiny books on my shelf that keep pulling me away from this. But I did read enough to note that if I ever need to meet a challenge for auto-biography, East Africa, colonization, airplane, early 20th century history... this will be a great choice.
After a bit of a slow start, I ended up really enjoying this love letter to Africa and episodic account of parts of Markham's remarkable life. The writing is gorgeous.
This memoir of Beryl Markham's is a selective collection of memories that outline her life. Mostly adventures and incidents that give highlights, often condensing a life in horse training into a single race or working with a certain horse to represent all of the type of thing she experienced. The stories from her childhood, running with the boys and young men of the Nandi tribe that worked on her father's farm were some of the best. The stories are hair-raising. Fearless and independent, she was often out to prove herself in a man's world, getting her trainer's license at 18 and learning to fly in her early twenties. This book gives the impression of a loner, living life as she chose. It gives no indication of her loves, her marriages, or her son though they existed. Her relationship with her father was no close; neither seemed to know how to connect. A great read but left you wanting more. ( )
Fascinating autobiographical account of the early life of Beryl Markham, nee Clutterbuck, growing up in Kenya during the period 1905-1935 - playing with the local children, training horses, and subsequently flying as a bush pilot and maid of all work. The writing is lyrical, poetic, eloquently descriptive - including a tremendous passage recounting the emotions of flying at night, by dead reckoning on a simple compass bearing, without radio or other navigational aids. Not included are any mention of husbands (she was thrice married) and a son - so to try and understand this enigma I have bought a biography - 'Straight on till morning' by Mary Lovell. ( )
“To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”
You can be assured that this review will in no way be as well written as Beryl Markham's "West with the Night."
Markham was one hell of a woman, yet her story seems to have been lost to history. Born in England, but raised by her father in Africa, she never stepped back from a challenge and relished opportunities to look fear in the eye and have fear blink first. She was one of the first African bush pilots, the first racehorse trainer in the continent, and later the first person to fly non-stop east to west from England to North America. And yet, I'd never heard of her until I read Paula McClain's excellent [b:Circling the Sun|23995231|Circling the Sun|Paula McLain|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1426531608s/23995231.jpg|43446210] last year.
In addition to her many other talents, the woman can write. Hemingway famously praised this book by writing to a friend: "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, 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."
In this memoir, Markham invites us to experience certain episodes of her life (note, it's not a chronological or complete memoir by any stretch). The writing is so evocative we are there with her in the air gripping the controls as her plane shakes back and forth in stormy turbulence; our hearts race with hers as she and her childhood companions move past a lion that has crossed their path; and we are jumping up and down in the stands in the final lap of a horse race.
Markham's writing is meant to be savored. "Slow reading" is a must for this book. Skimming will make your mind wander and leave you unsatisfied.
"I speak of Africa and golden joys." -- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act V, Sc. 3
Dedication
For my Father
"I wish to express my gratitude to Raoul Schumacher for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for this book."
First words
"How is it possible to bring order out of memory?"
Quotations
Namen sind die Schlüssel für Türen, hinter denen Halbverschüttetes liegt, verschwommen für den Verstand, vertraut jedoch im Herzen. - S.14
Niemals zögern oder zaudern, niemals sich umdrehen und niemals glauben, dass eine Stunde, an die man sich erinnert, eine bessere Stunde ist, weil sie tot ist. Vergangene Jahre scheinen sichere Jahre zu sein, eine entschwundene, gefahrlose Zeit, während die Zukunft, wie in einer konturlosen Wolke, aus der Ferne bedrohlich wirkt. Dringt man in die Wolke ein, so klart sie auf. - S. 144
Ich lernte, was jedes träumende Kind wissen muss - dass kein Horizont zu weit ist, um bis zu ihm und über ihn hinaus vorzustoßen. - S. 198
Was immer der Mensch unternimmt, Würde erlangt sein Bemühen erst, wenn echte Arbeit dahintersteckt, und fühlt man dann das Bedürfnis, sein - im Wortsinn - Handwerk auszuüben, so begreift man, dass die anderen Dinge - all die Experimente, die Eitel- und Nichtigkeiten, denen man nachjagte - ganz einfach unsinnig waren. - S. 298
...every farmer is a midwife. There is no time for mystery. There is only time for patience and care, and hope that what is born is worthy and good. p. 121
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things--the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold--were false to you. p. 278
Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. p. 218
I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.
They were dark days heavy-scented with gloom. All the petty joys of early youth, the games, the friendships with the Nandi totos lost their lustre. Time became a weight that would not be moved until the bodies themselves had been moved and grass roots had found the new earth of the graves, and the women had cleaned the vacant huts of the dead and you could see the sun again.
Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what had lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard—curiosity unsatisfied.
I wanted to call out for Ebert, for anyone. But I couldn't say anything and no one would have heard, so I stood there with my hands on Bergner's shoulders feeling the tremor of his muscles pass through my fingertips and hearing the rest of his life run out in a stream of little words carrying no meaning, bearing no secrets—or perhaps he had none.
The farm at Njoro was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it. He made it out of nothing and out of everything—the things of which all farms are made.
They wore hats, bandannas, jackets of home-cured hide, shukas, shorts, boots or no boots, and it didn't matter. Altogether it made a uniform—not for a man, but for a body of men. Each contributed to the distinguished style and colour of a regiment that had had its predecessors once in America, but had not, in this war, a counterpart.¶ They had come to fight, and they stayed and fought—some because they could read and understand what they read, some because they had listened to other men, and some because they were told that this, in the name of civilization—a White Man's God more tangible than most—was their new duty.
The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time.
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, 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.¶ No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.
In any country almost empty of men, 'love thy neighbor' is less a pious injunction than a rule of survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop—another time he may stop for you.
there was nothing but rolling downs that went on and on in easy waves until they broke against the wall of the sky.
If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.
But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.
You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.¶ In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being.
I wonder if I should have a change—a year in Europe this time—something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think.¶ 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.
Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.
Last words
She was old and weather-weary, and she had learned to let the world come round to her."
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
Nonfiction.
HTML:
This beautifully written autobiography brings us the remarkable life story of Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Brought up on a farm in Kenya, Markham chose to stay in Africa when, at seventeen, her father lost their farm and went to Peru. She began an apprenticeship as a racehorse trainer which turned into a highly successful career. In her twenties, Markham gave up horses for airplanes and became the first woman in East Africa to be granted a commercial pilot's license, piloting passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa. As rich and inspiring as when it was first written, West with the Night captures the spirit of a true pioneer woman.
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From book cover: 'More than a biography; a poet's feeling for her land; an adventurer's response to life; a philosopher's evaluation of human beings and human destinies'. This unusual and beautifully written memoir was first published in 1942 to huge critical acclaim. Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 and has lived in Africa since the age of four. Her father, a horse-breeder, scholar and adventureer, chose East Africa because 'it was new and you could feel the futuer of it under your feet'. She spent her childhood playing with Murani children, hunting with the Murani cheiftan and witnessing her father's patience and labour as he transformed a stretch of wilderness into a working farm. She learnt to speak Swahili, Nandi, Masai. In adolescence she was apprenticed to her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses, and at eighteen became the first woman in Africa to be granted a racehorse trainer's license.
IN 1931, Beryl Markham turned to flying. She carried mail, passengers and supplies to the remote corners of Kenya, the Sudan and was was then Tanganyika and Rhodesia. In September1936 she made worl headlines by becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west - taking off from England and crash landing in Nova Scotia twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes later. This evocative book is rare and remarkable testimony to an Africa that no longer exists.
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