West with the Night

She was not, it must be said, an easy person to be close to, but then the great ones rarely are.

in 1942 she published west with the night if you have not read west with the night let me tell you what it is it is not an aviation memoir in the conventional sense it is a book about what it means to be formed by a landscape about the relationship between a human being and the sky and the earth underneath about what kenya looks like from 500 feet at dawn when the elephants are moving toward the water and the light is coming up pink over the ungong hills It is also incidentally one of the finest descriptions ever written of what it feels like to be alone in an airplane over terrain where no one is coming to find you if you go down.

Ernest Hemingway read it and wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins that it was a bloody wonderful book and that Beryl Markham had written so well it made him ashamed of himself that she could write rings around him and all of them and it was a great book.

Ernest Hemingway, not known for his generosity toward other writers, he said that about her work.

For Beryl Markham, it held.

It held for 21 hours over the Atlantic, and it held right up until the moment the wheels went into the bog, and even then, she walked away.

My sources today include Mary S. Lovell's biography, Straight Until Morning, Beryl Markham's own memoir, West with the Night, and records from the Royal Arrow Club of the United Kingdom.

Find more at RadioHanger.com. I'm Tail Dragger.