The Art of Living is an occasional series about people who seemed to know something about living. The previous installment considered Robert Falcon Scott’s 1912 expedition to the South Pole.
Beryl Markham was a remarkable person. She lived from 1902 to 1986. Born in England, she was raised by her father in Kenya. She worked as a horse trainer from 17 and then became a pilot, flying across parts of Africa, scouting for hunting parties, and eventually became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. She also wrote a book, West With the Night, that Hemingway considered a “wonderful book” and a model of good writing. All of that you can learn from her Wikipedia page, but if you read West With the Night, you realize that Beryl Markham really knew something about living.
Beryl Markham’s biography is enough to make her interesting to most of us in the twenty-first century. As a small girl she hunted with spears alongside men her father employed on his farm. She was once attacked by a pet lion. When she was seventeen and a half, her father moved to Peru but gave her the option to stay in Kenya. She did, to become a horse trainer—not a typical profession for teenage girls, now or then, in Kenya or anywhere. She succeeded and loved horses her whole life, but fell in love with airplanes, as well. She became a pilot and a good one. She took real risks and had real adventures. She was friends with many of the people you come across in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. But someone can have grand adventures and still miss the big things.
One thing Markham realized, to some extent, were her own limitations. Reading West With the Night, you are sometimes disappointed by her observations about race and Africans. But at other times, you are quite surprised by her awareness of her context and its flaws. Midway through the book, she comes across a man that she knew as a boy and she realizes that everything is different now:
“What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. No, my friend, I have no learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.”
She even understood her own book to be limited. While so many people try to author a book that explains exactly “how it is” or “how it was” and believe they can convey the whole truth, Markham realized that was an impossibility.
She tells the reader: “So there are many Africas. There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa—and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in some other Africa.” West With the Night is the story of her Africa and we should take it as such.
Markham may have had complicated relationships in life, but West With the Night shows her ability to appreciate and celebrate the people around her. She is open with her praise. Writing about Tom Black, a fellow pilot whose name we may not know, she says “If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.” What a testimony. About the death of Denys Finch Hatton, she writes that “Denys’ death left some lives without design, but they were rebuilt again, as lives and stones are, into other patterns.” Markham excels at showing the value of good people and the importance of friends. She is not obsessed with records or reputations or seeking perfection in others.
Markham’s appreciation of her father is immense. No great financial success, he combined an elite education with a love of the practical and real. In particular, he passionately loved horses. She writes:
“He came out of Sandhurst with such a ponderous knowledge of Greek and Latin that it would have submerged a lesser man. He might have gone down like a swimmer in the sea struggling with an Alexandrian tablet under each arm, but he never let his education get the better of him. He won what prizes there were translating Ovid and Aeschylus, and then took up steeplechasing until he became one of the finest amateur riders in England. He took chances on horses and on Africa; he never regretted the losses, nor boasted about the wins.”
Markham recognized that education is something to be carried into all kinds of arenas, not something to be carried away by. Her father, like the Arctic explorers, could carry Greek and Latin and poetry into any environment and he did. No wonder that Markham—the horse trainer and pilot—could turn such a beautiful phrase and look at the world around her with such a vivid and expressive appreciation of its wondrous nature.
Markham was on the scene for the early days of flying, when it was something more than it is now. For one thing, it required tremendous bravery. In Africa, her doctor insisted she always carry a vial of morphine, in case she crashed and that was the best option. He would refresh it when he thought it had lost its potency. But these pilots were more than brave, they were dreamers.
“After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone—each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak—it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction. And the days of the clipper ships will be recalled again—and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air.”
Many of the pilots of that day were something more than most people today, too. Think of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who could also combine technical skill with artistic expression. These people were drawn in by the romanticism of the profession, not necessarily the opportunities. Tom Black told Markham that when you fly,
“you get a feeling of possession that you couldn’t have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you—all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you’re alone in a plane, there’s no one to share it. It’s there and it’s yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are—closer to being something you’ve sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.”
Along the way, Markham and her peers learned something about the nature of being human. She saw herself as blessed. She dodged boredom, which she considered “endemic” and compared to hookworm. Her time alone in airplanes gave her space for reflection, space in which she came to recognize how difficult it is to know oneself.
“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents—each man to see what the other looked like.
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.”
West With the Night shows the value in pursuing adventure and pursuing the edge. You do it to challenge yourself and to see something new and to experience up close more of the wonder of the world. As we learn from Markham, to be that person, you must be brave and interested and surround yourself with good people. And, ultimately, you must be doing it for yourself and not for the money. And it is anything but a hindrance to be able to write well or think about beauty or read Aeschylus. And a big part of what you will learn is who you are and that is a big part of why you venture out.