603DX wrote:Fascinating though "West with the Night" undoubtedly is, even in the light of its long-suspected joint authorship with Raoul Schumacher, there is much to be learned from "The Lives of Beryl Markham" by the meticulous biographer Errol Trzebinski. This provides extensive background to all of Beryl's aviation and amatory activities. I have both books, and the two volumes are a revelation when read in association!
Thank you very much for the reference to Errol Trzebinski. I shall purchase the 'The Lives of Beryl Markham'. I had read a little about the questions surrounding the provenance of the book. It is exceptionally well written and if Schumacher ghost wrote it, it is an excellent job he made of it. Markham' seems to have been a pretty uninhibited kind of soul and her amatory exploits (as you so delicately put it) and personality were not to everybody's taste. Whatever the case, her last years which had seen her descend into penury, were made more tolerable by the receipts from the book which found a new set of readers late in her life.
From Wikipedia
Critics raised questions as to whether Markham was the true, or sole author of West with the Night, not least because she never repeated her accomplishment with a second book of similar length, scope or beauty. The writing style has been linked with various writings by Thomas Baker, a contemporary writer also rumored to be her lover. During the rest of her life, she completed only a handful of short stories, collected and published posthumously.
According to Errol Trzebinski in her biography, The Lives of Beryl Markham (1993), her memoir was written by her third husband Raoul Schumacher, a ghost writer and journalist. Trzebinski said that Markham later had an advance from Houghton Mifflin to write a biography about the famous international jockey Tod Sloan, which she and Schumacher intended that he would write. Apparently Schumacher never did, and she was forced to go it alone. The publisher purportedly rejected her manuscript, saying that it was not from the same person who had written West with the Night.[10] But, when interviewed by Shlachter for the 1986 PBS documentary about Markham, Trzebinski had insisted on camera that only a woman could have written her memoir.
Author Mary S. Lovell visited Markham in Nairobi and interviewed her extensively shortly before Markham's death, in preparation for her biography, Straight On Till Morning (1987). She disputes the claim that Schumacher made substantive contributions to West with the Night. From her research, Lovell concluded that Markham was the sole author, although Schumacher edited the manuscript. Instead, Lovell credits Antoine de Saint Exupéry, another of Markham's lovers, with having inspired Markham's clear, elegant language and storytelling style.
Caco
