When Hemingway read this book, he said: “She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer . . . [Markham] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers . . . It is really a bloody wonderful book.”
If the first responsibility of a memoirist is to lead a life worth writing about, Markham succeeded beyond all measure. Born Beryl Clutterbuck in the middle of England, she and her father moved to Kenya when she was a girl, and she grew up with a zebra for a pet; horses for friends; baboons, lions, and gazelles for neighbors. She made money by scouting elephants from a tiny plane. And she would spend most of the rest of her life in East Africa as an adventurer, a racehorse trainer, and an aviatrix―she became the first person to fly nonstop from Europe to America, the first woman to fly solo east to west across the Atlantic. Hers was indisputably a life full of adventure and beauty.
Astonishingly its due to Hemingway’s praise that we even know Markham’s name at all. Poring through 900 pages of Ernest Hemingway’s letters one day in the early 1980s, a California resident named George Gutekunst came across a note about Markham’s book West With the Night that called it “a bloody wonderful book.” Amazed that Hemingway could be so struck by the work of an unknown writer, Gutekunst tracked down a copy of West with the Night. He was likewise swept away and convinced a publisher to reissue the book. The successful reprint rescued Markham from poverty and allowed her to live out her last years in comfort.
Beryl Markham’s West with the Night is a true classic, a book that deserves the same acclaim and readership as the work of her contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Isak Dinesen. With a new introduction by Sara Wheeler―one of Markham’s few legitimate literary heirs―West with the Night is one of the world’s great adventure stories, a true classic of twentieth-century literature.
Hemingway’s thoughts on West with the Night quickly moves beyond mere “this is good, you should buy it” into genuine awe.
“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 as writers.” -Hemingway
