Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  When West with the Night was released at the end of May 1942 it was acclaimed by the critics. Not renowned for generosity, they were almost effusive in their praise, and in literary circles at least Beryl was lionized for a time. A selection of reviews is printed below:

  When a book like Beryl Markham’s West with the Night comes along it leaves a reviewer very humble. Words of praise used for other works seem trite and thin. For West with the Night is more than an autobiography; it is a poet’s feeling for her land; an adventurer’s response to life; a philosopher’s evaluation of human beings and human destinies. To say that Beryl Markham captures the spirit of Africa would be presumptuous and ridiculous; Africa has captured hers, and she speaks with eloquence close to enchantment of the things it has meant to her.

  Rose Field, Books, 5 July 1942

  [Miss] Markham has made a real contribution to the literature of flight. Her background is more romantic than Ann Lindbergh’s, her perception as delicate. Here are the jungles and excitements of Osa Johnson…At a moment when our constant thought is of danger and destruction in the heavens it is good to read some of the poetry of flight, to experience secondhand the wide solitude of the sky.

  E. M., Boston Globe, 17 June 1942

  Here is more than a mere autobiographical work. Here is an interpretation of Africa – A scrutiny into its age-old secrets and a glance into its future. As for the stylist, he will find Miss Markham’s writing distinguished. It has strength, it has the precious quality of unexpectedness; it is unfailingly intelligent, like the mind of the woman who shaped it. For her thinking is bold, original and challenging as her life has been.

  M.W., Christian Science Monitor, 8 August 1942

  A book quite unlike anything that has been written by any other woman or about Africa, its natives, its hunting and its future by anybody. It is written as a book on such a subject should be, straight out of experienced knowledge. Its thought was born in the long, wide-spaced African silences. Its opinions are those of a woman who has always from childhood been very much a person in her own right, and by reason of a country where cut-to-pattern people do not belong. And it is written with exceptional simple beauty in a style that, without aiming at distinction achieves it unquestionably.

  J.S. Southron, New York Times, 21 June 1942

  The Chapters on flying over Africa are unusually thrilling…Her descriptions of the strange country over which she travelled are sensitive…and a little rapturous about the ‘feel’ of Africa.

  Clifton Fadiman, New Yorker, 20 June 1942

  Beryl Markham does more than tell of Africa. With admirable modesty, she offers us a thrilling as well as appealing saga of a very valiant and very human woman, philosophically pitting her skill, bolstered by limitless faith in herself, against relentless Nature in all her multifarious disguises, in the dank jungles, the desert wastes, and the boundless skies.

  Linton Wells, Saturday Review of Literature, 27 June 1942

  One of Houghton Mifflin’s most popular and productive authors of the period was Stuart Cloete, a South African who from time to time reviewed the work of other authors. He and his writer/illustrator wife Tiny were to become friends of Beryl and Raoul, who moved in the same literary circles in New York. At the time Beryl’s book was published Cloete had not met her, but he was sent the book to review by Dale Warren – Houghton Mifflin’s publicity agent.30 Cloete liked it very much and Houghton Mifflin used his neatly written praise in their own publicity releases.31

  The book should have been a great success. It was not. Timing is everything in publishing. With the United States firmly committed to the war effort the public taste for works of a poetic nature seems to have waned. The royalties provided Beryl with a modest income for a year or so and then the book vanished.32 No reprints were ordered. An edition was published in England by Harrap & Company, on the very poor quality paper allowed to publishers at the time, but sales were limited and before long that version too, faded from sight.

  However, encouraged by the book’s initial success Beryl had moved to New York. Later Raoul joined her. By now their relationship had deepened and they decided to marry. Beryl contacted Mansfield, at last agreeing to the divorce which he had sought for the past decade. It is difficult to understand her previous reluctance to formalize her separation from Mansfield. Perhaps it was pique at his refusal to support her, or perhaps she felt a measure of security in technically remaining a member of the aristocratic Markham family. In August she moved to Wyoming where she rented a house in order to establish a ten-week residency, which would enable her to obtain a fast severance of her existing matrimonial ties.33

  On 5 October she filed her plaint, charging that Mansfield had subjected her to ‘intolerable indignities’. Her case was accepted and the divorce was granted on 14 October. Raoul and Beryl were married in Laramie on the following Saturday and left Wyoming immediately for a month’s honeymoon in Virginia at the home of friends.

  In a letter to Dale Warren in November, shortly after the couple’s return to New York, Stuart Cloete reveals, ‘I saw Beryl and Raoul yesterday. Funny they should [have been] staying with a cousin of mine in Virginia – the grand-daughter of Lady Northey who was Evangeline Cloete and one of the most beautiful women I ever saw…’34 Beryl had previously written to say she had ‘more or less been brought up by [Cloete’s] cousin Lady Northey in Kenya when Major General Sir Edward Northey was Governor there’.35 This is an obvious overstatement of the facts. Beryl did know Lady Northey well at a social level, but she was already married to Jock during the Northeys’ years in Kenya (1919–22). If Lady Northey helped the young bride on matters of social etiquette this was probably the sum total of her influence.

  Back in London, Mansfield was experiencing difficulties with the validity of Beryl’s divorce papers. He eventually had to go through the English courts since they would not accept the American judgement. It took him a year to obtain a Decree Absolute which was granted only after he was able to produce ‘proof of adultery’ which consisted of a letter from Raoul admitting that he regularly slept with his own wife.36 Mansfield was at last free to remarry and his second wife Mary took over as stepmother to Gervase who was then at Eton.

  Through the winter of 1942–43 Beryl lived alone in New York and the Cloetes ‘saw a lot of her’.37 ‘What happened to the cowboy she married?’ Cloete scribbled at the foot of a letter to Dale Warren. Raoul returned in January 1943 and shortly afterwards the couple departed for a small ranch in New Mexico.38 It was no more than a piece of arid land with a small wooden shack, but they made it their base for about six months. Beryl hated the cold and bleakness of winter in New York and had gone with alacrity towards the sun. Her friend Stuart Cloete wrote sadly to Dale Warren at Houghton Mifflin:

  Dear Dale,

  …I have no favourite blond now that Beryl has gone with the wind and the shoemaker West into the snowy night…about the silliest thing I ever heard of as there is no food, no servants and damn few houses from what I hear…

  Yours Stuart

  (Cloete)39

  Despite Cloete’s condemnation the move was not merely whimsical. The Schumachers were already experiencing the first of their persistent financial problems and could no longer afford to live in New York in the style which Beryl had adopted on the expectations of her book’s success. The royalties from rapidly diminishing sales of West with the Night and the rent she received from her Kenyan farm Melela would hardly have covered the couple’s drinks bill. In addition there was her annuity from Prince Henry, but she continued to experience great difficulty in having this paid to her in the USA during the war years, due to sterling transfer restrictions. Raoul’s contribution to the couple’s budget is hazy but this does not necessarily mean that it was non-existent.

  Melela had been leased since Beryl left in 1936 and she now wrote to her agents in Nairobi asking for advice about whether or not to sell the property. It seemed highly unlikely, then, that she would ever return to Kenya permanently and
at the time she wrote it was far from clear who would win the war. The agents’ advice was to sell while she could. Beryl took the advice and subsequently received the sum of £400. Ten years later when Beryl was in Kenya and virtually destitute, Melela was sold again for £40,000.40

  Beryl spent most of the summer of 1943 running the ranch and raising turkey poults. Her remarkable affinity with all animals enabled her to keep the chicks alive through a long spell of wet weather to which they are particularly susceptible.41 When I interviewed her in 1986 she repeated claims previously made to others that Raoul was often absent and that she did a little writing, mainly to help overcome boredom and loneliness.42 It is difficult to explain these regular absences of Raoul’s. Despite almost a year’s research with the assistance of the US Military Personnel Records Office I was unable to locate any record of service for him during this period, although he did serve with the US Coast Guards for while, later on. Scott O’Dell too was puzzled. ‘I never heard of Raoul serving in the Navy.’43

  Beryl’s first short story, ‘The Captain and his Horse’, appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal in August 1943. This magazine had previously published a chapter from West with the Night under the title ‘Wise Child’ which had proved popular, and Beryl had no difficulty in placing another story with them. Interestingly the basis for the story was several discarded paragraphs from the manuscript for West with the Night, but she appears to have borrowed the idea from her friend Stuart Cloete according to the following letter:

  September 7th 1943

  To Dale Warren

  Houghton Mifflin

  Dear Dale,

  Many thanks for your note. I’m glad you find the [cough mixture] good for a hangover. I had never heard of it being drunk for pleasure before but you are a great innovator.

  Yes I have read Beryl’s magnificent horse story, and you will find my equally magnificent horse story in a forthcoming Colliers.44 I wrote mine some time before Beryl wrote hers and read it to her when she was in New York.

  Hon Y Soit Qui Mal Y Pense…

  Yours

  Stuart45

  By September when Houghton Mifflin wired her to ask if she would speak at a forthcoming book fair in ‘the East’ the Schumachers had left New Mexico for good and were living on a small ranch at Lake Elsinore in Southern California where she wrote ‘Something I Remember’, another short autobiographical story. Houghton Mifflin also wanted to discuss her future writing plans.

  ‘Something I Remember’ and ‘The Splendid Outcast’, both written in the winter of 1943–44, were written in the same style as West with the Night, and are based on actual incidents in Beryl’s early life. Her success in publishing these short stories provided the Schumachers with a potentially lucrative source of income and Raoul was not slow to recognize the marketability of Beryl’s name. However it was almost certainly Raoul who wrote the next two stories which appeared under the name Beryl Markham. Both ‘Your Heart Will Tell You’ and ‘Appointment in Khartoum46 rely heavily on Beryl’s flying experiences in Africa for the story-line, but they are purely romantic fiction and are written in a totally different style to that of Beryl’s book and her earlier stories. This style is clearly repeated in ‘The Whip Hand’, a short story published under the name of Raoul Schumacher which appeared in Collier’s Weekly Magazine in June 1944.

  Although in later years Raoul claimed to friends that he had been a writer during the early 1940s, ‘The Whip Hand’ was the first time his name had appeared in print. His writing style was smart and snappy, contemporarily popular with the readers of a whole range of periodicals who lapped up escapist fiction at an astonishing rate. It is unlike Beryl’s more poetic, sensitive style of writing though it is known that she co-wrote these stories to the extent that she told Raoul of her experiences and provided background information about Africa. It seems that she was not able, or was not prepared, to write popular fiction to order.

  Another story, ‘Brothers are the Same’, written in 1944 and published in Collier’s under Beryl’s name in February 1945, was almost certainly also Raoul’s work although, again, Beryl must have provided much of the detailed background information on the Maasai and Africa. Not enough it seems, for Raoul was driven to researching in a reference library for tribal customs of the Maasai which Beryl could not provide.47 Nevertheless there is more of Beryl in this story than in the previous two and the Schumachers obviously felt they had found a successful formula. Raoul, who had been a frustrated writer, could be relied upon to turn out fictional stories based on Beryl’s adventures and experiences whilst Beryl herself could occasionally write a short autobiographical episode. In this connection Raoul’s subsequent claims that he had been a ghost writer appear to be true, although these activities seem to have been mainly confined to those stories he wrote under Beryl’s name with story-line help from her.48

  Scott O’Dell visited the couple whilst they were at Elsinore and found them working in the basement, the coolest place in the house during a heatwave. In a letter to Vanity Fair in March 1987 he recalled: ‘Beryl [was] dictating, Raoul copying; [they were] writing a short story and stewing in the torrid heat. A New York editor sat on the doorstep.’ The New York editor was almost certainly Kyle Crighton of Collier’s Magazine, who was known to have been in regular contact with Beryl at the time. Interviewed for Collier’s, Beryl admitted to being unsure as to whether the adventurous life she had led was a hindrance or a help to her as a writer. ‘That old adage “Truth is stranger than fiction” is so correct for me,’ she told Crighton, ‘that any inventive power I might have is stifled.’49

  The statement that Beryl was seen dictating to Raoul is an important one, though when I questioned Mr O’Dell later he revised this, saying that Beryl was merely ‘telling stories to Raoul and he was putting it into readable prose’. Unfortunately O’Dell could not recall the substance of the story on which they were working, but he did recall Beryl and Raoul’s relationship at this time, more than a year after their marriage: ‘They were deliriously happy and went about hand in hand, dressed in Levis, concha belts and matching calico shirts and hats. Modern lovers out of ancient times. Beryl had a horse, a cat and two Nubian goats to remind her of her African days. How I envied them and their Arcadian lives.’50

  Beryl too remembered this time for she had already told me that she and Raoul used to ride out ‘dressed as cowboys’, but she could provide no further details. She was promised a series of lecture tours and Raoul, having had ‘The Whip Hand’ published, now felt he could write under his own name. To all appearances the couple’s future as a writing team looked set to flourish and in the summer of 1944 Beryl and Raoul moved to a much larger, rented house in Pasadena, north-east of Los Angeles.

  That winter Scott O’Dell noticed the first snags in the fabric of the once idyllic relationship. The couple were known for throwing numerous parties. O’Dell attended one of these parties and was sitting on the sofa next to Beryl when Raoul carried in a tray of martinis. Somehow Raoul spilled a drink and Beryl meaningfully whispered to O’Dell that this clumsiness was becoming a habit. It was a clear hint about the heavy drinking that was later to become a real problem for Raoul, and O’Dell was startled by the glint in Beryl’s eyes as she spoke. Later he spent some time alone with Raoul and they talked about writing.

  I asked what they were working on…he said he was doing a novel about Africa. I said, ‘Why are you writing about Africa, you’ve never been there?’ He replied, ‘Are you kidding? I’ve lived there through Beryl and all her stories.’ He was quiet for a minute and then he said to me, ‘You are my best friend and I want to make a confession. I want you to know that Beryl did not write West with the Night, or any of the short stories. Not one damn word of anything.’

  But did Raoul actually claim to have written them all himself? ‘Yes I’m sure of that, Raoul wrote them all,’ O’Dell stated. ‘But anyway that was when everything started to go wrong for them, when they were in Pasadena.’51

  Some years la
ter Raoul was to make a similar statement about his authorship to another close male friend, but the evidence does not substantiate his claims. I have no doubts that Raoul wrote three – or perhaps four – of the fictional stories published in Beryl’s name. They were clearly based on Beryl’s own experiences and it is obvious that she must have provided the background, probably in just the manner that Scott O’Dell witnessed. But I believe Raoul’s claim to have written West with the Night was a weak attempt to bolster his own ego when he was feeling the first icy vibrations of Beryl’s disapproval.

  Certainly he had edited the manuscript, maybe he even became involved in the writing of the final six chapters, and this might well have led him to assume a closer identity with the work than was justified. He may have genuinely felt that his contribution entitled him to some claim to authorship. But there is nothing to corroborate his reported statement that Beryl wrote ‘not one damn word’. On the contrary, all the surviving documentary evidence points to Beryl having been the book’s author. According to the correspondence between Beryl and her publishers, Houghton Mifflin had already received one hundred and thirty-two pages of manuscript by July 1941, and a further sixty-seven pages had been sent to Ann Watkins before Beryl left Nassau for California. Yet although she wrote the final six chapters (of twenty-four) after she met Raoul, there is nothing in West with the Night which even hints at a change in writing style.

  Saint-Exupéry’s death had been announced only weeks before O’Dell’s visit to the couple in Pasadena.52 Could it be that in making his surprising ‘confession’ Raoul felt that there was no possible danger of it being refuted?

  These first signs of strain in the marriage that had at first been so happy also marked a new characteristic in Beryl. Where there had once been a childlike appeal, there now appeared a hardness in her manner bred out of a great disillusionment. There was a peremptory edge to her voice and the look in her eyes when she watched Raoul was now more often jaundiced than adoring. What had gone wrong for the couple in the months since O’Dell had last seen them? Was it only because of Raoul’s increasingly heavy drinking, or had she already discovered at this stage that he had male lovers?