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(Copied from an old review orignally posted elsewhere.)
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
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