Today, a daring flight and an unlikely book. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Beryl Markham writes about
her fears as she sets out on the first east-to-west
flight across the Atlantic from England in 1936:
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 dangerous as the last, each still
dependent on specially built airplanes. Markham's
east-west crossing was one of the last ad hoc
challenges to Nature before commercial
transatlantic traffic could begin three years
later.
Nature rapped Markham's knuckles right smartly. her
fuel supply system failed over open sea before she got to
Cape Breton. Her Percival Vega Gull aeroplane
sputtered its last just as land came into view. She
upended in a peat bog a few miles short of her
intended landfall, and stumbled out with a badly
cut head.
But Markham's more remarkable feat wasn't in the
air. It was in literature. Her one book, West
With the Night, is a tour de force that
arrives out of some unexpected ether. How did it
come about? We need to know a little about Markham
herself.
She grew up on a Keyna farm, 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 20s. By
then the beautiful Markham had married twice,
mothered a son (whose father may've 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 the friendship suffered when
Markham took up with the real-life Robert Redford
character.
Until she went to England for the transatlantic
flight, she flew air mail in Africa, rescued
wounded miners and hunters in the bush, and spotted
bull elephants for rich hunters. She was a serious
adventure-junkie.
After the Atlantic flight (and a few years in
Hollywood) she wrote her book about life in Africa
and life in the air. The book is astonishing --
extraordinary writing by any measure. Hemingway
said it made him ashamed of everything he'd ever
written.
No doubt she had some help from her third husband,
writer Raoul Schumacher. But how heavily was he
involved? Rough drafts show editorial markings in
both their hands. The problem is, Schumacher never
wrote anything else to approach it, and this was
Markham's only book.
So where did this masterpiece come from? I suspect
Beryl Markham was simply a creative coiled spring,
wound tight by a life lived on the edge -- a spring
that uncoiled only once, leaving us all the richer
for that one great whirl of expression.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Markham, B., West with the Night. San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1983 (1st ed., 1942).
Lovell, M. S., Straight on Till
Morning. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.
Boyles, D., 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 Robert Redford
in the movie, was another flier named Denys Finch
Hatton. Beryl's maiden name was 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.
For more on Beryl Markham, see the following
website:
http://www.karenblixen.com/beryl.html.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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