West With The Night (VMC) (Virago Modern Classics)

Product Information

She grew up in Kenya and always wanted to do what the boys were doing. She had a native boy who was a close friend. This association allowed her to learn the ways of the tribe. She has to be one of the few white girls from that period of time or any period of time who was allowed to go on hunts with the men. Rumors that Markham hadn’t written West with the Night began to surface, and dogged her for decades. The gossip was brutal — particularly the claim was nearly illiterate and couldn’t have written such a book. It’s funny how books provide solace in the strangest places. I had opened it weeks prior, but had only given time to the first two chapters, which were good. When I must leave the solitude of southern Tennessee I seek in books the capability to transport my mind to majestic places even if the familiar theme isn’t within arm’s reach. I sat silently entertained, drops of rain incessantly streaking across my portal window, gathering more drops and thus more speed until the race was over and the populated runway the only prize. New York City sat behind me and around me in the dull gloom, and only West with the Night and the return home eased the hum of the engine and the previous night. I smiled, thinking that perhaps my soul was off in Africa while my body so dutifully endured its time in New York. In 1936, Markham became the first woman to travel across the Atlantic, east to west, and the first pilot to fly from England to North America. Her plane , The Messenger, was supposed to land in New York, but after 21 hours and 25 minutes, she crash-landed in Nova Scotia, miraculously surviving with only a gash to the forehead. What a wonderful and eventful life! Whether Beryl herself wrote the memoir or not, it hardly makes a dent in the kind of pride I have in her as a woman clearing the way for other women to come after her. Ernest Hemingway called her a 'high-grade bitch'. I wonder if he knew that a century later, this would reflect more on him than on her?

The chapters in West with the Night could each stand on their own as short stories. The prose is elegant (perhaps Saint Exupery’s influence) and lovingly detailed. Passages are infused with haunting phantasmagoric beauty, bringing to life a world that no longer exists. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it's coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there. A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ...

About the author

But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.” Markham was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a non-stop solo flight (a westbound flight requires more endurance, fuel, and time than the eastward journey, because the craft must travel against the prevailing Atlantic winds). When Markham decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had completed the westward flight solo, though several had died trying. Markham hoped to claim both records. Markham died in Nairobi in 1986. Her short stories were posthumously collected in The Splendid Outcast, with an introduction by Mary S. Lovell. A tale from West with the Night was excerpted and illustrated by Don Brown as a children's book, The Good Lion. In 1988, CBS aired the biographical miniseries, Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun, with Stefanie Powers in the title role. West with the Night is divided into four numbered “books,” each subdivided into chapters whose titles suggest their topics. Chapter 1, “Message from Nungwe,” for example, tells of Markham flying emergency medical supplies to Nungwe, a tiny mining camp southwest of Nairobi. The message had been relayed to her by native runners and by telegraph, and it took three days to reach her. The year was 1935, and Markham was the only professional woman pilot in Africa. Markham’s account of her rescue actions is characteristically modest, and, as with the other events she recounts throughout the work, she reveals a compassionate but unsentimental interest in the people and world around her. Her writing shows her keen sense of observation and her equally keen ability to select events and incidents that both entertain and inform.

Though Beryl died in Kenya in 1986, it’s likely that she saw the film because she cooperated with the material and got a lot of attention from reporters afterwards. Around the time of her death, there was an effort to make a movie version of West with the Night though that hadn’t come to fruition. In 1988 director Tony Richardson made a TV movie about her called “A Shadow on the Sun.” No map I have flown by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents.” The world was hers.Beryl Markham moved to Kenya with her father when she was very young. When she wasn't surrounded by an astonishing array of animals, she traveled to the air and scouted elephants for the locals. She was also an adventurer and a racehorse trainer, but she probably best known for being the first person to fly non-stop from Europe to America alone. Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind — such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.’ Her most famous achievement was being the first person to fly the atlantic non stop from east to west.Such a journey required travelling against the Atlantic winds.