West With the Night

Beryl Markham wrote (we think) West With The Night, a memoir of her life growing up in Africa, training horses and flying planes.  According to her book, she grew up in Africa with her father and raised by native people.  When Beryl was 17,  he moved to Peru leaving her alone to get a job raising race horses.  When she saw a plane for the first time she exchanged planes for race horses.  She helped hunters by scouting elephant location by plane and passing on the information to the hunters.  She flew throughout Africa, often in the dark without radio contact.  In her thirties she was the first woman to fly solo west across the Atlantic.  She left from London but her fuel lines froze up over Nova Scotia and she dumped the plane nose first in a swamp, disappointed that she never made it to her destination of New York City.  Her story was marvelous and the high quality of the writing was remarkable.  I really enjoyed reading her story.  Some literature teachers suggest you read a book, enjoy it or not enjoy it, and leave it be.  Others suggest you do more research about the author, about other books they have written, and about the history of the time.  My opinion is more knowledge is better.  The more I know about an author or a book, the more I enjoy it.  In this case it didn't turn out that way.  Beryl leaves out a lot of facts in her memoir that could be considered important.  She doesn't tell us about her three marriages and many romantic liaisons.  Her first marriage was at age 16 which makes her father leaving the country when she was 17 years old less of a desertion.  She also doesn't mention her third husband, Raoul Schumacher who was a script-fixer in Hollywood and also a ghost writer.  Based on the fact none of her other writing was successful, some people believe Schumacher was her ghost writer on this book.  She doesn't mention her maiden name, Beryl Clutterbuck, and we can guess why.  Her book was on the best selling list in 1942 and then became obscure until it was republished in the 1980's.  The reemerging popularity of the book made the last three years of her life (83 to 86 years old) more comfortable because at that age she was impoverished and training horses in Nairobi again.  No matter how much was true, it is evident that Beryl Markham was a beautiful, non-comformist, adventurous, eccentric.  She lived her life not following the rules, not doing what people expected and not caring what people thought.  Beryl may not have been loyal, faithful or honest but she was interesting.