Beryl Markham took up flying on the other side of the world in Africa. Her maiden name had been Clutterbuck. She was born in England in 1902, and her father took her to Africa when she was four. The name Markham was that of her second husband.
She grew up on a Keyna farm where she learned to hunt with African boys and was once mauled by a lion. Her schooling was minimal. She took up horse-training in her late teens and flying in her late twenties. By then the beautiful Markham had married twice, mothered a son (whose father may have been the Duke of Gloucester), and was woven into the decadent, upper-class expatriate English life of pre-war Africa.
She was a friend of Isak Dinesen (played by Meryl Streep in the movie Out of Africa). But that friendship suffered when Markham took up with Dinesen's friend (played in the movie by Robert Redford). Markham flew airmail in Africa, rescued wounded miners and hunters in the bush, and spotted bull elephants for rich hunters. She was honing the use of the airplane as a functional tool but was nevertheless a very serious an adventure-junkie.
Her fame as a flier was established when, in 1936, she made the first East-to-West flight from England to the North American mainland: She wrote about her fears before that flight.
We fly but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us [to use her forces]. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles ...
Her flight came late in the string of early transatlantic crossings that tested and probed Nature -- each as dangerous as the last, and each still dependent on specially built airplanes. Markham's east-to-west crossing was the last ad hoc challenge to Nature that had to be made before commercial transatlantic traffic could begin three years later.
Nature rapped Markham's knuckles right smartly. She ran out of fuel over open sea before she got to Cape Breton. Her Percival Vega Gull airplane sputtered and died just as land came into view. The plane upended in a peat bog, a few miles short of her intended landfall, and she stumbled out with a badly cut head.
But Markham's more remarkable feat was not in the air; it was in literature. Her one book, West With the Night, is a tour de force arriving out of some unexpected aether. She wrote the book about her life in Africa and her life in the air, soon after she’d made the Atlantic crossing.
The book is extraordinary writing by any measure. Hemingway said it made him ashamed of everything he’d ever written. No doubt she had help from her third husband, writer Raoul Schumacher; but how much help? Rough drafts show editorial markings in both their hands. The problem is, Schumacher never wrote anything else to approach it, while Markham never wrote anything else at all.
So where did this masterpiece come from? I suspect that one huge factor was that Markham was a creative coiled spring, wound tight by life on the edge -- a spring that uncoiled only once, leaving us all the richer for that one great whirl of expression. If it was ghost-written by Schumacher, he had to be unbelievably deep into her pilot’s head to do so.
Listen as she tells about the first of two engine failures before Newfoundland finally came into sight:
I realize that the heavy drone of the plane has been, until this moment, complete and comforting silence. It is the actual silence following the last splutter of the engine that stuns me. I can’t feel any fear, I can’t feel anything. I can only observe with a kind of stupid disinterest that my hands are violently active and know that, while they move, I am being hypnotized by the needle of my altimeter.
She recounts the actions of her seemingly detached hands. She dives toward the waiting waves, hoping the whirling propeller will re-ignite the motor. And I doubt that what comes next was ghost written. She says,
I do not know how close to the waves I am when the motor explodes to life again. ... The storm is strong. It is comforting. It is like a friend shaking me and saying, “Wake up! You were only Dreaming.” ... I ought to thank God -- and I do, though indirectly. I thank Geoffrey de Havilland who designed the indomitable Gipsy [engine], and who after all, must have been designed by God in the first place.
Markham life, like that of so many other early fliers, was complex and riddled with ambiguities. That was also true of the most famous woman flier of them all -- the attractive Amelia Earhart. And she too wrote. So let us visit her next.
Sources:
B. Markham, West with the Night. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983 -- 1st ed., 1942).
M. S. Lovell, Straight on Till Morning. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).
D. Boyles, African Lives: White Lies, Tropical Truth, Darkest Gossip, and Rumblings of Rumor -- from Chinese Gordon to Beryl Markham, and Beyond. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989): Chapter 3.
Isak Dinesen was the pen name of the Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Her husband was the prototype of the "Great White Hunter" -- someone Beryl Markham affectionately called Blix and often worked with. The mutual friend, played by Redford in the movie, was another flier named Denys Finch Hatton.