West with the Night (Questions)
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West with the Night (Questions) 1. If this book could be said to articulate a feminist vision of some sort, what are the main features of this vision? How compelling is it? 2. How is Africa presented in this book? 3. How does this book present the British presence in Africa? 4. There is an unresolved controversy about the authorship of this book, and some believe it was not written by Markham, but by her third husband. Does it matter who wrote the book? Some literary scholars believe that issues of authorship and the author’s intentions are entirely irrelevant to one’s critical assessment of a book. Do you agree? 5. Does Markham’s book “lack the pull of human relationships that usually carries one through a book,” as one reader has claimed? https://swarthmorebookgroup.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/discussion-questions-for-west-with-the-night/ West with the Night (About the Author) Author: Beryl Markham Born: October 26, 1902 Where: Leicester, England Died: August 3, 1986 Where: Nairobi, Kenya, Africa Beryl (Clutterbuck) Markham was born in England. Her parents belonged to the gentry, raised horses and were active in fox hunting competitions. When she was four her father bought property and developed it into a horse racing farm in Njoro near the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. She only had a spotty education as a child. Her life was full of adventures with local African Masai children and she learned to hunt and speak Swahili. But her first love was horses and she became a proficient licensed horse trainer at age seventeen. She was considered beautiful but very independent and she married three times. Beryl married her second husband, wealthy Mansfield Markham, in 1927 and had a son, Gervase. She had several well-known affairs which ended her marriage to Markham, but she kept his name. During her late 20’s she learned how to fly and became a commercial pilot. She transported goods, people and mail and made a living as a bush pilot. Beryl Markham decided to take the challenge of flying from England to America, flying east to west against prevailing winds. Other pilots died trying to make the trip. On September 4, 1936 she took off from Abingdon, Southern England. After 20 hours in the air the plane developed ice in the fuel line and she crash landed in Bleine Cove, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. She was hailed as a pioneer pilot for completing the flight. The trip was documented in her memoir West with the Night published in 1942. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_Markham https://www.britannica.com/biography/Beryl-Markham West with the Night (Book Reviews) Jim Reviews: West With The Night – Beryl Markham Jim Riordan / July 3, 2015 By Jim I first read Beryl Markham’s West with the Night when I was 15 or 16. I had an obsession with bush pilots and read anything I could find about them. West with the Night caught my attention because it was the autobiography of a bush pilot in Africa. Picking it up again after many years I was struck by all the subtleties of the book that I missed as a teenager. Markham’s book was first published in 1942 and focuses on her life growing up in British East Africa (which will become Kenya). One of the things I was struck by is that although I read it originally for the flying parts there is actually not as much about flying in Africa as one might expect. The focus is on her growing up which was still pretty amazing. The book is replete with stories of her as a child hunting warthogs with members of the Nandi tribe with spears or of her dog being snatched from her bedroom by a leopard. When her fathers farm fails after a severe drought he leaves for Peru and Beryl goes on to become a racehorse trainer. After meeting Denys Finch Hatton, the pilot and big game hunter, (who’s name might sound familiar to anyone who has read Karen Blixen aka Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa) Markham was inspired to learn how to fly and eventually set up her own bush pilot business. In 1936 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic east to west (although she crash landed short of her goal of reaching New York City). The tone of the book is very lyrical on the verge of poetic. This lends itself to the almost mystical sense of place she gives British East Africa. It also makes it a pleasure to read simply for the text. The book is also a window on life in the colony of British East Africa between the World Wars. Although she never confronts it specifically in the book there is a constant undercurrent of the effects of colonialism on the black population and the sexism she faced in her efforts as both a racehorse trainer and later a pilot. That said her presentations of native Africans are sometimes paternalistic and lean heavily towards the “noble savage.” However, for their time her views were probably quite liberal. One controversy that has come up is that West with the Night was actually ghost written by her third husband Raoul Schumacher. However just as many have come forward to defend Markham’s authorship. The evidence pro or con is pretty circumstantial so I’ll leave that controversy to those who like literary who-wrote-its and go on enjoying the book. And I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in African history, English colonial history, and lovers of beautifully written prose in general. Also, as you might guess it’s a good read alike for Out of Africa. https://www.danverslibrary.org/readthis/?p=137121 West with the Night (Enhancement) Published in 1942, West with the Night is Markham's own account of her Kenyan childhood, her equine career, and her aviation achievements. But even though it was a literary success upon its release, it was soon dwarfed by the chaos of World War II. The book remained out of print until the early 1980s—by which point Markham had returned to Africa and racehorse training, but was living in poverty—when a series of rediscovered letters brought it back into the spotlight. The person behind the correspondence? Ernest Hemingway, whom Markham had met while scouting game in 1934. "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...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 nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen," Hemingway famously wrote. "But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade b*****, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book." The ensuing publicity led to the memoir's republication and, today, it's considered a classic book on adventure and the outdoors. But as with so much of Markham's life—from her potentially illegitimate son with a Windsor royal to her love triangle involving the author of Out of Africa—her memoir is also shrouded in rumor. Some claim her journalist third husband wrote it; others insist every word is hers. Either way, West with the Night is a gripping, beautifully written book that gives us insight into historical Kenya, aviation, and a truly remarkable woman of the early 20th century. When she was 17 her father left for Peru, but Markham stayed in Kenya on her own to raise and race thoroughbred horses. Later she obtained a pilot’s license and flew mail, supplies and passengers to the Sudan, Tanganyika and Rhodesia. She took up the dangerous art of elephant tracking by air—in an area subject to sudden storms and containing few safe landing places—and thereby met such people as Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, the Danish big-game writer. (His author wife, Karen, better known as Isak Dinesen, was another fiercely independent woman who settled in Africa. Judith Thurman’s splendid biography of her was a 1983 American Book Award winner.) In 1936 Markham flew from England to Nova Scotia, becoming the second person and first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, though she crash-landed. Her description of the trip is as chilling as it is beautiful. After this book first appeared, Markham became a technical adviser for Hollywood flying films. (She has stayed busy, having been married four times; she only recently gave up horse training.) She includes more incidental dialogue than is necessary in this memoir, but it is, nonetheless, amazingly rich and satisfying. https://explorethearchive.com/beryl-markham-flies-west-with-the-night .