Beryl Markham and The Right Stuff

"Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whiskey."

--West With The Night

Reading Ms. Markham, it is easy to forget she was more than a writer. She became famous, not for her writing, but for her flying. She was the first woman to fly against the wind, across the Northern Atlantic from Europe to America, more difficult trip than Lindberg's. And she didn't quite make it as planned, winding up, nose down, in a Newfoundland bog. but she got a ticker tape parade in New York City anyway.

Little did those throngs realize her most exceptional talent was not flying.

She was perhaps the best writer of her generation, and that generation included Hemingway, who had to write an entire short story--"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" to say what Markham conveyed in this single phrase--not even a sentence about the Swede.

I don't think Hemingway would have argued about who should win that particular gold medal.

But writing and art in general are not about competition, so the point is absurd--it's just meant to convey the eternal truth that quality is not about fame. Beryl Markham is little known. Hemingway the most famous person writing in English of his time, and they were both covering the same story.

Markham can also master the simple declarative sentence. Hemingway tended to convey his message by showing you rather than telling you, which can be an art in itself, but Markham can simply tell you and make it stick. She compares in this respect, to Thoreau. But what she has over Thoreau is her own boldness in life; her lessons were not learned sitting along in a hut by a quiet pond, but flying above a vast wilderness, her life suspended by two wings and a single engine, with the natural landscape not a homey pond but a vast savanna, so endless that to fall into it was to be lost forever. 

"To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told--that the world once  lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick walled streets and the tyranny of clocks."

So Thoreau could thrill to the sighting of a single warbler outside his hut on the pond, but Markham can give you untrammeled nature in thrilling panorama--she can show you the majesty.

Which is not to say she missed the detail on which Thoreau made his name: 

"It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science."

Now, this is a woman you could get to like.