West with the Night

Ernest Hemingway read West with the Night in 1942 and wrote to a friend: “She has written so well, and marvellously 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 she had turned the whole trade into something better.” The assessment is not false modesty. Beryl Markham’s prose has a quality of inevitability — sentences that seem to have been discovered rather than composed — that distinguishes genuinely great writing from excellent writing, and it is present throughout a book that was dictated by an aviator and horse trainer with no formal education past the age of ten.

Markham was born in England in 1902 and brought to Kenya at age four when her father took a farm in the highlands near Nairobi. Her mother returned to England shortly after; her father stayed and raised Beryl unconventionally, allowing her to roam the African savannah with the Nandi and Murani boys of the neighbouring tribe, from whom she learned to hunt and to speak Nandi before she spoke English with any fluency. She became a horse trainer in her teens, the first licensed female trainer in Kenya, and established a reputation for finding talent in horses that seemed unmanageable. The Kenya she describes — the farms, the settlers, the Africans, the wildlife, the quality of the light and the air — is rendered with the specificity of someone who grew up there and loved it without quite understanding it.

The aviation passages are the book’s most celebrated sections. Markham became a bush pilot in the 1930s, flying cargo and mail across East Africa in aircraft with no instruments worth trusting, navigating by landscape and dead reckoning, regularly landing in places where no aircraft had been before. In 1936 she flew solo from England to North America, west to east against the prevailing winds — a journey that had been attempted several times without success — landing in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, after twenty-one hours and some minutes in the air, slightly off target but alive. The chapter she devotes to that flight — the long approach over the Atlantic in darkness, the fuel gauges unreliable, the coast of North America somewhere ahead — is among the finest aviation writing in English.

The question of authorship — whether the prose was written in collaboration with, or primarily by, her companion Raoul Schumacher — remains unresolved and does not diminish the book. Whatever its origin, West with the Night exists as a complete and extraordinary work, and Markham’s voice — direct, unsentimental, alive to the physical world with an animal attentiveness — is consistent throughout. It is a book about Africa, about aviation, and about a woman who lived outside every category that her era provided for women, and who described doing so in prose that Hemingway, justifiably, envied.

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