As a writer, I advise newbies to read, read, read, and I find myself laboring to abide by what I'm telling others to do. My excuse is that I sit at the laptop all day, writing and editing, and in spare moments, it's too easy to zone out watching YouTube or Netflix. Reading for the sake of losing myself in a good story has become a challenge. I fondly remember my years in high school when I could spend the better part of evenings and weekends devouring the works of Leon Uris, James Clavell, John D MacDonald, Harold Robbins, and Arthur C Clarke. Feeling the need for such literary stimulation (okay, Harold Robbins would've chafed at being labeled "literary" but he did make bank with his writing), I decided to return to an old favorite, West With The Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham. In her day she was a renowned horse trainer and an accomplished pilot, being the first aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic, east to west. Interestingly, I found out that two friends were also reading this same title.
Markham starts by describing her experience as an African bush pilot, then shifts into her backstory as a young girl living on a farm hacked out of the Kenyan bush, chronicling a life that seems more fantastic than any CGI adventure offered by Hollywood. In one episode, she skips school, and accompanied by her dog, joins a hunt with the local Masai. When they fell a reed-buck, it's up to Markham and one of the boys to skin and butcher the animal, which they feed to the hunting dogs. Later, the hunting party confronts a lion, and thankfully, after the lion and the Masai leader, Arab Maini, signal that they won't back down from a fight, the two sides retreat and go about their business. Markham fantasizes about saving the day with her trusty spear. She then sets her dog loose to chase warthogs, an exceptionally dangerous and cunning adversary. Not wanting to lose her faithful dog, she searches and discovers him, gravely wounded and next to a warthog vanquished after a ferocious battle. She won't abandon her dog and decides to spend the night alone with him in the jungle. She wears shorts and describes how her legs bleed from cuts inflicted by thorns and elephant grass. Arab Maini finds Markham. He is naked, having wrapped his simple robe about his arm to free his movements. The images overwhelmed me. Markham, an adolescent white girl in the African wilderness, with no water and no food, tending to her dog, so badly injured that his ribs are showing, spending the night with an unclothed man and and yet there's an innocent Eden-esque naturalism about it.
As a teenage horse trainer, Markham relates treading barefoot through stables that need mucking and shares her trials of being bitten and thrown, even knocked unconscious against a tree, and having to convalesce for several days before returning to work. Throughout the memoir, she describes the environment with keen reverence and others with a profound understanding, always with empathy and without rancor. What a difference to today's verbal barf-fest on social media. However, Markham's no pollyanna about life's difficulties, showing her father worrying and toiling to save his farm as drought ravaged about them, only to lose everything. As marvelous as her anecdotes are, what makes her narrative sparkle is her extraordinary prose. Of the effect of World War One upon her community, she writes:
"The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time."
To say that she was a superb writer would be too flimsy of an accolade. Ernest Hemingway, who seldom expressed praise of any writer, wrote this about Markham:
"I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and some times making an okay pig pen...(she) can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers."
