West with the Night

West with the Night - Beryl Markham

Markham, a pioneer aviatrix, was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from London (not Ireland) to North America. The flight ended not at its destination of New York City but tail up in a Nova Scotian peat bog. Publishers made her an offer and this book was released in 1942.

In clear graceful language that’s only sometimes portentous, she tells of growing up in Kenya, training horses, becoming a bush pilot, and making the trans-Atlantic flight. The story of a truly brave and remarkable woman received courteous reviews but after modest sales it sunk without a trace, considering 1942 also saw the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Second Battle of El Alamein, Operation Torch, and the Guadalcanal campaign.

Revived in 1983, the book has been a critical success and ordinary readers praise it with comments like “If you loved Out of Africa, you will love this beautifully written book!”  Some critics, however, point out Markham’s ethnocentrism and portrayal of locals as noble savages. She never deals with the justice and benevolence of waltzing into somebody else’s ancestral lands and turning pastoralists into plantation workers, servants, stable boys, and washerwomen.

A controversy, moreover, rages as to how much editorial guidance Markham received to write the memoir. I don’t doubt that a great book can come out of an author that writes scarcely anything else – Harper Lee. But there’re grounds for suspecting Markham didn’t write this book, her only book. She never talks about her schooling or about books she’s liked. She never mentions writing except in a stud book or flight log. The book has a style that was fashionable and so fit for sale at the time: elegant, snooty, Hemingwayesque.

It’s understandable that readers may be uncomfortable with whether a memoir is ghostwritten (John Dean’s Blind Ambition was written by historian Taylor Branch) or smothered by its author’s fishy claims (The Education of Little Tree, or A Million Little Pieces). But if a reader skipped West with the Night because of its unclear authorship, she’d be skipping some beautiful writing.