Her writing immerses you in Africa through characterization of place, which is always central and integral to Markham’s story, and as real as any person. Then she proceeds to ground us with the details of date, time, type of plane, and length of flight. “One is as good as the other,” she says, so let’s start here, where the log book is open. Right away, after posing the question, Markham hints at the device she will use to order her memory and what follows - by place.
So her memoir begins with the question that nags at every memoirist as she sits to write her story. But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names…” I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start there can be no other.’ …So the name shall be Nungwe -as good as any other -entered like this in the log, lending reality, if not order, to memory. “HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I am prevented from that irresponsible reaction only by a stronger desire to take apart her writing and learn how she makes her life and characters so vivid to the reader. Markham’s writing is so artful - every sentence, every verb choice, every word so crisp and necessary, it feels as though nothing could be added or removed without altering some fundamental structure - that I am strongly tempted to toss all my writing in the trash in abject despair of ever writing that well.
Instead, she trained race horses, became a free-lance pilot, and then proceeded to become the first person - man or woman - to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, east to west. I was immediately intrigued by the idea of a woman who, raised in Kenya during the early 1900s, refused to live the “normal” and expected life of most women of her time (of any time, really). Though this memoir is considered a classic, I had never heard of it or of Beryl Markham before a Writing Through Life survey respondent suggested it. FIRST IMPRESSIONS – * West With the Night, by Beryl Markham
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