West with the Night

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

The author of this memoir is best known for her daring journey by plane from England to North

America in 1936. She was the first person to cross the Atlantic in a plane going from east to west. But that feat is almost an afterthought in this book. It is the story of her finding a place and passion in the world, as well as of the setting -- colonial Africa -- in which she did it. She began as a horse trainer, a skill she picked up on her father's farm, and then graduated to bush pilot, almost on a whim. After a successful career spotting elephant for hunting guides, she traveled back to her birthplace of England, from which she launched her most famous flight.

This book has many strengths. The first is its prose. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that Markhams' writing made it "completely ashamed of myself as a writer." She certainly does have a way with words, using them to both help the reader enter into a story and to muse about the larger significance the story might have for her -- and for the reader. Here's one passage that struck me, in which Markham describes a plane, abandoned in a grassland, that once held a pilot she had been searching: "There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with the morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of sleeping in a city There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak...With the water bottle swinging from my hand on its long leather strap, like an erratic pendulum, I walked around Woody's plane...The silence that belonged to the slender little craft was, I thought, filled with malice -- a silence holding the spirit of wanton mischief, like the quiet smile of a vain woman exultant over a petty and vicious triumph" (49). There is also plenty of adventure and suspense in this story, and of inspiration, too.

Missing from the book is any real awareness of the harm inflicted upon Africa by the very colonialism that afforded Markham the opportunity to achieve what she did. Perhaps this is to be expected, and forgiven, given that it was written in the 1940s. Or maybe it is enough that Markham took on the patriarchal system that accompanied paternalistic colonialism. Either way, the book is as good as Hemingway said is is.