Subject: Review of Beryl Markham's West with the Night

Beryl Markham was the first pilot to fly the North Atlantic west
to east, starting from England.  "I arrived in British East
Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the
barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi,
later training race-horses for a living, and still later
scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between
the Tana and Athi rivers, by aeroplane".  She hung about at
places like the East African Jockey Club, and the Muthaiga
Club, Kenya.  In this book, which Ernest Hemingway apparently
called "bloody wonderful", she gives us various pieces of her
life, before and after she took to the air, and various pieces
of the Africa of that time, seen through her eyes.  "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
too bored with the importunity of it all."

Her style is plain but thoughtful, her descriptions rich but
without frills.  Anyone who enjoyed the old Banana Republic
catalogs, and enjoys the new J. Peterman catalogs, will
recognize her world; she *is* the spirit that they are looking
to merchandise.  Her descriptions of Africa in the twenties
and thirties are authentic and unique; the chapters describing
her return to England from Africa (and the various national
boundaries and customs officials met on the way), and then her
record flight to North America, are delightful and not soon
forgotten.  I recommend the book to anyone interested in the
period, the places, or adventure writing in general.

But.  I suppose it's all too postmodern of me, and perhaps
even Politically Correct, but shortly after finishing the
book, while allowing it to roll around in my mind with an
eye towards doing this review, I discovered some odd little
qualms, and some bits of unpleasant aftertaste.  One
relatively minor qualm has to do with just how authentic
and unselfconsciously honest the writing really is.  In
retrospect, everyone is just *so* noble, and all the events
*so* fraught with adventure and portent, that I was reminded
of a fact that remained submerged while I was actually
reading: Markham was writing for an audience, and was certainly
bright enough not to have been anything like unselfconscious.
She has certainly chosen the most memorable moments from her
life, and I would not be surprised if some of the events, and
certainly her own recounted reactions to them, had been
dressed up just a bit for public display.  It would be
naive to think otherwise, of course, and normally I would
assume it from page one; but the style and spirit of the
book are such that I had forgotten it until after the end,
when it came back to me as a bit of a shock.

The unpleasant aftertaste has to do with the concrete things
that Markham was actually *doing* while having her most
memorable life.  She seems clearly to have been a smart,
honest, and reasonably sensitive woman, aware of what she
was about, and leading an examined life.  But some, perhaps
even most, of the things she was actually doing are not things
I'd encourage any of my children to do: colonizing an
already-inhabited continent ("in retaliation against the
refusal of the Masai warriors to join the King's African
Rifles, the British marched upon the Native villages"),
breeding animals for the rather bizarre purpose of running
faster than each other, and helping bored rich Americans
and Europeans find elephant to kill for their tusks.  She
was no doubt not vicious at any of these things: she speaks
of the marching upon the Masai with a hint of disapproval,
she was (by her own account) good to her horses, and she
justified her elephant-scouting to herself, rather apologetically,
as no worse than killing steers for beef.  But still, she
was doing these things, and somehow I find that for me it
detracts from the nobility and admirableness of the life and
times she is describing.  And since the book is written *as*
adventure writing, as an account of noble and interesting
and admirable things, this detracts from the book as a whole.

And perhaps further, it leads me unwillingly to wonder which
of the things that *I* (also a smart, honest, reasonably
sensitve person leading an examined life) am doing might leave
the same bad taste in the mouth of some great-grandchild.
We all rationalize some of what we do, and none of us can
accurately anticipate what future moralities might retroactively
ding us for.  Eating meat?  Working outside the home?  Paying
taxes without protest?  Using metal currency?  It's an
unsettling thought...

%A Markham, Beryl
%T West with the Night
%I North Point Press
%C San Francisco
%D 1983 (copyright 1942, 1983)
%G ISBN 0-86547-118-5
%P 294 pp.
%O trade paperback, US$12.50

- -- -
David M. Chess                |           That is how all
High Integrity Computing Lab  |      bi-coloured python rock-snakes
IBM Watson Research           |            always talk