Saturday, August 22, 2015

My hero / Beryl Markham by Paula McLain


Beryl Markham


My hero: Beryl Markham by Paula McLain

An aviator, author and racehorse trainer, Markham was too bold, ambitious and unwilling to be curbed by the constraints of her class or gender

 Saturday 22 August 2015



“W
ith enough courage,” Margaret Mitchell famously wrote, “you can do without a reputation.” Would it were so for record-breaking British aviator and author Beryl Markham. Brought up in colonial Kenya, Markham was the first woman to fly the Atlantic non-stop and solo, east to west, “the hard way”, in 1936. When she was just 18, she became the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Africa and quite probably the world. As a bush pilot, she pioneered the practice of spotting big game from the air for safari hunters – and wrote about all these adventures compellingly and with great style in the 1942 memoir West With the Night, a book Ernest Hemingway pronounced “bloody wonderful”. And yet if you read Markham’s Wikipedia page, her considerable achievements seem both footnote to and distraction from the cataloguing of famous men she was rumoured to have bedded.

Raised unconventionally, on a horse farm in the Rift Valley, 100 miles upcountry from Nairobi, Markham flung herself fearlessly into the forest and the bush, learned to hunt warthog with a spear, and to love the way physical challenge and risk made her feel more alive. She never quite fitted into her world. She was too bold, too ambitious and too unwilling to be curbed by the constraints of her class or gender. There is an oft-repeated speculation that West With the Night wasn’t written by Markham but by her third husband, Raoul Schumacher. In fact, she had already delivered the bulk of the manuscript before the two met. But a comment Schumacher made in anger to a friend when their relationship was on the skids, that Markham had written “not one damned word” of the book, has outlasted any refutations. West With the Night is a rare reading experience – a kind of magic carpet that bears you away to Africa. The prose is fresh and unrestricted, the adventures exciting, and the point of view original. That Markham would be stripped of authorship because the world didn’t quite know what to make of her seems unconscionable. She had more courage than reputation in the end, but the book deserves its place, and her life demands another look.
• Paula McLain’s novel Circling the Sun is published by Virago this month.
THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016





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