West With the Night by Beryl Markham

West With the Night is quite an exciting tale or really series of tales made up of Beryl Markham's reminiscences of her life in Africa as a young girl, a pilot, and a horse trainer. 

She came to Kenya from England with her family when she was four. Her mother left soon after their arrival, but Beryl stayed on with her father where she grew up as wild as the country in which she was living. 

According to her story, as a child she hunted with the natives, was attacked by a lion and a baboon (which she killed), learned about horse training from her father, and when he left for Peru when she was just 17, Beryl made the trip from their farm near Nakuru to Molo on horseback alone to work for a stable there.

She learned to fly and used her airplane to scout elephant herds for hunters. Oddly enough, the one safari leader that she writes about is Blix, or Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who was married to Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) who wrote Out of Africa about her experiences working a coffee plantation in Kenya. Blix is never mentioned in Out of Africa, but Ms. Markham writes about him affectionately. I am not sure if their relationship was ever more than professional (and it doesn't matter). 

Out of Africa captures the atmosphere of the author's experiences and is written with just a bit of distance between the author and reader. I felt as if the Blixen was telling her story from behind a protective scrim. 

West With the Night, however, certainly puts the reader in the middle of the action. There is a heart-stopping horse race, an escape from sure death by a charging bull elephant, a record of the author's tribulations on a 6000-plus mile flight with Blix from Kenya to London, and the story of her feat of being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from East to West.

Ms. Markham's style of writing is very vivid and, although apparently there was some question at the time as to the authorship of the book, it doesn't matter who wrote it as the prose is beautiful and clear.

It was a good idea to read these two books one right after the other as the tribal names and strange place names stayed in my mind. Although both women knew each other, I found it intriguing that neither one mentions the other one.

Both books offer a fascinating look at a life that would not appeal to most women. I for one would be out of there at the first sighting of a spider as big as my fist or the first roar of a hungry lion in the night. And let's don't even talk about the dirt.

But bless both of these women for having the guts to see things through and then to share their experiences so beautifully with those of us who prefer to experience dangerous adventures from the comfort and safety of an armchair.

Africa: The Silent, Brooding Sister

Illustration credit: Marina Zlochin

Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradled not only cities, but civilizations -- and seen them die, and seen new ones born again -- Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

Today Africa may seem to be that ever-promised land, almost achieved; but tomorrow it may be a dark land again, drawn into itself, contemptuous, and impatient with the futility of eager men who have scrambled over it since the experiment of Eden. In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires -- rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

                                                     ----Beryl Markham
                                                          West With the Night (1942)

Wild Kingdom

When I finished reading Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) written about her twelve years as a young woman in Kenya trying to make a success of her coffee plantation,  I moved right on to West With the Night by aviator Beryl Markham. 

Ms. Markham's experiences with Africa were quite different. She moved to Kenya from England with her parents when she was four. Her mother moved back home almost immediately and Beryl stayed with her father who turned his purchased land near Nairobi into a successful enterprise of grain mills and saw mills.

Ms. Markham's style is very matter-of-fact. She recounts flying trips, surviving a lion attack, and hunting wild boar with two Masai in a clean, although at times lyrical, prose.

I am glad I am reading the books back to back as they both share a geography and time frame that helps keep strange tribal and place names familiar.

Like Ms. Blixen, Ms. Markham has a quiet respect for the wild beasts with which she shares the land. Here, in comparison to a passage from Out of Africa, is Ms. Markham's take on the wild kingdom. She is flying her plane back to Nairobi from delivering an oxygen tank to a doctor in an isolated mining camp:

Between Magadi and Narok I watched a yellow cloud take shape beneath me and just ahead. The cloud clung close to the earth and grew as I approached it into a swaying billow that blunted the sunlight and obscured the grass and mimosa trees in its path.

Out of its farthest edge the forerunners of a huge herd of impala, wildebeest, and zebra plunged in flight before the shadow of my wings. I circled, throttled down and lost height until my propeller cut into the fringe of the dust, and particles of it burned in my nostrils.

As the herd moved it became a carpet of rust-brown and grey and dull red. It was not like a herd of cattle or of sheep, because it was wild, and it carried with it the stamp of wilderness and the freedom of a land still more a possession of Nature than of men. 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.

Out of Africa and West With the Night

Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen

I now find myself in possession of two books with African ties:  a hardcover edition of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and a Kindle edition of West With the Night by Beryl Markham. 

Karen Blixen was born in Denmark in 1885. She wrote under the name of Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa (1937) is a memoir of her years in Kenya where she moved in 1913 with her husband. They established a coffee plantation near Nairobi. They divorced in 1925 and after selling the plantation in 1931, Blixen returned to Denmark where she lived until her death in 1962.

It was during her latter years in Denmark that she wrote Out of Africa and her famous short story Babette's Feast, both of which were made into movies.

Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 but moved to a farm in Kenya with her family when she was four years old. On the farm she developed a love of horses and became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. That wasn't her only first. She is credited with being the first woman to fly solo west-to-east across the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to fly non-stop from England to North America.

Her memoir of that flight in 1936 and her experiences growing up in Kenya was published as West With the Night (1942). She lived in the United States for a while then moved back to Kenya where she became a successful horse trainer. She died in Nairobi in 1986.

Both women knew each other and both had affairs with big-game hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton. The ever-handsome Robert Redford portrayed him in the 1985 film version Out of Africa opposite Meryl Streep's Blixen.

I recently purchased the Modern Library Edition of Ms. Blixen's memoir at a thrift shop for $1. The Markham memoir just happened to be the $1.99 Kindle Deal this morning. (Those deals are becoming dangerous to my pocketbook!) I am looking forward to reading both.