West With The Night (VMC) (Virago Modern Classics)

£4.995
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West With The Night (VMC) (Virago Modern Classics)

West With The Night (VMC) (Virago Modern Classics)

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Beryl Markham’s personal life grew ever more interesting. With her white-blonde hair, lithe build, and cover-girl good looks, paramours were easy to come by. She had an affair with Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester (the Prince of Wales brother); it was rumored that he was the father of her son, Gervase. Markham was taken to Kenya at the age of four. As an adult she was befriended by Denys Finch-Hatton, the big-game hunter of Out of Africa fame, who took her flying in his airplane. Thrilled by the experience, Markham went on to become the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot's license. Wheeler, Sara. Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton. New York: Random House. 2006. ISBN 978-1-4000-6069-6.

Later, Beryl was sent to boarding school in Nairobi. After three years, she was expelled for being unruly and fomenting revolt among her fellow pupils. Her father read her the classics as she grew up, and she continued this habit into adulthood. This pastime would eventually serve her writing well. She was her own employer,pilot and sometimes engineer as well.Her flying instructor and friend was killed in a collision with another plane.She also talks about the death of Hatton Finch (who appears in Isak Denison's Out of Africa) in an air crash.But despite all the risks,she continued to fly.Hemingway almost NEVER sang the praises of other writers, especially not his contemporaries. As result, his acclaim for Markham's work can be seen as high praise indeed. For the most part, people have such interesting lives. I mean, even a person who lives the most normal, or the most domestic, life ever has some kind of story, something to say about life, something about betrayal or compassion or just what it means to be a human. And then there are people like Beryl Markham, who are like, Oh hai, did I ever tell you about the time I almost got eaten by a lion? !!! ???? Whaaa? That is very exotic to me. And then there was that time where she went hunting boar with her buddies, who were Maasai warriors. Oh, and that other time where she saved everybody from floods and killer ants and killer elephants using just her wits and tiny airplanes. So, despite the general absence of human relationships in this book, it’s just an inherently interesting story. But before there were airplanes in Markham's life, there were horses. Beryl, like her father, raised and trained race horses. Beryl Markham wrote her autobiography in four sections she called books, which she subdivided into twenty-four chapters. Of those chapters, twenty take place in East Africa. Yet the title of the book, West with the Night, refers to her record solo flight across the Atlantic in September, 1936. She flew from Gravesend, England, to Cape Breton Island, Newfoundland. Other pilots had flown solo from West to East, most notably Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, but Markham was the first pilot, male or female, to fly solo across the Atlantic against the prevailing winds. When the book was originally published in 1942, her international fame and reputation was built on that flight. Markham was a woman who went after what she wanted and gave it her all. Her horses won races, and she parlayed the aviation skills she learned as a bush pilot into a dark flight across the Atlantic. And when she sat down to write her memoirs, she produced a dazzling book.

West with the Night isn’t a book on hunting, fishing, survival, Africa, or aviation, but one that encompasses all of these things in chronicling an adventurous life dreamed of by so many, but only lived by so few. Markham smartly leaves out the dramas of life—husbands, affairs, and so on—that draw the modern-day reader like a bug to light (except for a run-in with a near-tame lion and a baboon that lived on her father’s farm). It is without question that Africa created the foundation for her launch pad of a life full of fire and spirit and determination.To his credit, Schumacher was an excellent editor. He and Beryl began collaborating on short stories, published under her name in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. Eventually, Lovell compiled the stories in the collection The Splendid Outcast. Even Isak Dinesen didn’t write about an elephant as descriptively, “His gargantuan ears began to spread as if to capture even the sound of our heartbeats.” Some reviewers saw in her lyrical writing the influence of her friend Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry, another writer and aviator. Indeed, isolated passages bear a resemblance to his published works. Nevertheless, the consensus seems to be that he helped her to discover her literary style. Beryl was indeed a lousy mother — her son Gervase was raised by her mother-in-law for the most part — and she had many liaisons. She also blurred her vignettes sometimes and may have exaggerated— though this is poetic license most writers take advantage of to craft a compelling narrative.

A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ... The episodes in this unusual life are recalled in a manner that is by turns gripping and brutal, transporting and descriptive, moving and amusing. Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind — such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.’It is clear that Markham respects the wisdom and integrity she found in native peoples whom she befriended and learned from. At one rare point she touches eloquently on the social issues of race relations and colonialism: A map says to you. Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not... I am the earth in the palm of your hand." It was during a long, grueling two-year stint working as a banker in Huntsville, Alabama, I finally realized I needed to follow my dreams. After sojourning several places across the country, I now call Asheville, North Carolina, home, where I am the co-founder, publisher and editor of The Golf Sport ( www.golfsportmag.com) magazine and editor of Sporting Classics Daily ( www.sportingclassicsdaily.com). I am also a contributor to OutdoorHub and Global Outfitters, and hope to really inflate that balloon over the next couple years. A significant controversy surrounding the original publication was based on rumors that Markham’s third husband, Raoul Schumacher, had ghostwritten the book. The history of events surrounding the book’s publication, however, seems to belie this theory. In March of 1941, Markham met with representatives of Houghton Mifflin. On the basis of four sets of typewritten manuscripts submitted by June 26, 1941, the company accepted her book, and she signed a contract in mid-July of 1941. Markham was introduced to Schumacher in California in August of 1941. It is true that the last six chapters of the book were written after she began living with Schumacher, but her biographer sees no change in writing style. Schumacher at various times made claims that he had been the writer, but chronology and style are cited as the salient arguments against him. He is credited with some editing. Contrary to this absurd claim, anyone who is illiterate couldn’t possibly earn a commercial pilot’s license, nor speak five languages. Markham had many mentors, including her father as well as Denys Finch Hatton, who encouraged her to educate herself.

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home. Mary Lovells’ biographies are objective, though she set out to destroy her subjects. After all, they’re usually no longer alive to defend themselves. Lovell sets out to tell a tale based on fact, not smash our idols forevermore; the reader has at least a modicum of respect for the subject. I read this because my boss and I were talking about the Swahili coast, and how beautiful it is. Markham grew up there and learned to fly planes there. What a beautiful and rough and interesting place to live. You can be assured that this review will in no way be as well written as Beryl Markham's "West with the Night."

Being alone in an aeroplane for even a short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind---such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.” Beryl Markham (October 26, 1902 – August 3, 1986) is best remembered as a pioneering aviatrix, becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic nonstop from Britain to North America. Finch Hatton helped Markham in many ways; he inspired her to read the classics, learn how to educate herself, and generally, enjoy life. He also helped her with her flying. The affair ended when he invited her to fly to the coast and visit his house. Her aviation teacher had a premonition and asked her not to make that trip, confident that she was close to being able to go solo. Divorce Court File: 7428. Appellant: Mansfield Markham. Respondent: Beryl Markham..." nationalarchives.gov.uk . Retrieved 11 March 2016.



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