I went back and looked and here’s the passage – it even contains a reference to the Icarus myth, which I missed the first time around, but must have entered my subconscious:
And all I can say to that is ugh. Beryl’s cliché-ridden hero worship of Denys was my least favorite part of the story. Sentences like this made me groan: “I had always known I couldn’t have Denys—he wasn’t for having. His spirit was too free for that” (p. 274).
Exactly!
I have to digress here to say that when the recent news report came out that there is water flowing on Mars, the first thought that popped into my head was, “Maybe the Mars expedition survived after all!” There are days when the line between reality and book club is seriously blurred. 
I’ve been reading so much about Markham that it’s hard to remember who said what, and where. However, I have seen it pointed out (probably in the Lovell biography) that the Africans with whom Beryl associated were more or less employees who were charged with looking after her. They didn’t have much choice in the matter. She was a wild little thing, motherless (who hated her governess and tried to avoid her, something her father didn’t really object to too much), and she venerated her busy father. She was much more drawn to emulating the lives of the African men than the African women.
What did you read in the Trzebinski book that made you say, “Whoa,” PlantMom? That is one source I haven’t really pursued. I somehow got the impression that the Trzebinski book is a bit more sensationalistic than the Lovell book, but I could be wrong.
Wasn’t this combo just perfect! The books, bookends in style and content complimented each other. The “whole” of them read together, is much better and "greater " than the parts alone.
@mary13 I love the mythological explanation, and interesting it was mentioned in the book.
@mathmom you are our Beryl, well, a better Berly because she was such an " unmoored" person
@Ignatius I, also, thought circling around Fitch, but as PLANTMOM and others, circling the gravitational pull of africa, the hole her mother left in her, all the men in her life, “life itself”, happiness, circling, endless circling not getting anywhere.
I compare the titles " circling" the sun- endless no end, as McLain portrayed beryl- in her own orbit
To " west" with the night- a direction, an objective and goal- as Schumacher ( clearly the author or one of them) portrayed Beryl, an accomplished, achievement, goal oriented succesful woman.
Here’s a few from a Book Rags sample (a subscription site, so I could only see “teasers”). The questions aren’t particularly incisive, but they at least provide a starting point:
I thought it a little odd that * Circling the Sun* made it all about Denys when in fact there were apparently a lot of love affairs including St. Exupery (!!!). * West with the Night* skips love affairs all together, but she has much more to say about Tom Black (with whom she also apparently had an affair)than Denys.
Speaking of Denys, this is what the real Beryl had to say I think quite movingly):
And since I’ve been reading * Out of Africa* here’s what Isak Dinesen had to say about Denys (at the funeral for him):
Neither woman seems to be seeing him as merely a hunk.
Beryl did indeed have an affair with Black. According to biographer Lovell, Black – not Denys – was the love of Beryl’s life. When Lovell spent weeks interviewing Markham in her home a few years before her death, she noticed that a photo of Black was the only photograph of any man in Beryl’s house.
In West With the Night, Beryl writes of Black with such veneration that I was really curious to delve into the biography in order to find out more about the relationship.
Unfortunately for Beryl, Black fell in love with and married an actress in England. A big reason for Beryl’s wanting to fly the Atlantic was to impress Black. Flying the Atlantic was something she could do that that actress could not!
^ Black died tragically (in a runway collision) only two weeks after Beryl’s famous flight.
NJTM, many whoas while perusing the Trzebinski bio (Warning.: I’m officially deviating already from the CC conversation since this material is outside of our pairing of books…). The author is quite opinionated herself, for one. Her Markham biography was in the works, apparently when the other (Lovell) biography was published, and after she had worked on a Finch Hatton biography. It’s all so convoluted! She seems to be not nearly as enamored of, and consequently kind to Beryl as Lovell was. Was there a Lovell/Trzebinski fight over this? It seems very possible.
With regard to whoa; First, after reading anything other than West with the Night, about Markham’s life, it became apparent to me that Beryl had an appetite for intimacy, especially in the form of sexual relationships. Fact: She had many partners. The Trzebinski biography addresses this and attributes her lack of inhibition to her coming of age in an African male culture. It’s hard to separate the sources’ facts from old “talk”, however, some of the musings do make sense. For example
I hadn’t really thought of Kibii in childhood as anything than a brotherly friend. 
I also can’t get a handle on what she was really like? Mysterious, quiet, but confident woman, or icy, unfeeling, manipulative man hunter? Certainly not the somewhat drab person uttering foolishness (^^see above comments). She wore a poker face. From the Trzebinski bio
. This makes sense, but how accurate of an observation is it really?
Another thing I’ve been curious about is who actually wrote West with the Night. After I finished reading it, thinking it really excellent, I did the first google search and ran smack into the authorship controversy. This biography clearly comes down on the side of another author ghost writing Beryl’s memoir. Trzebinski highlights how nasty Beryl became, how so much was wrapped up in Markham’s mixed feelings about the memoir, once it had been reissued in the 1980’s.
So many more questions about Ms. Beryl Markham, not the least of which is the Denys, Karen, Beryl triangle! Maybe reading biographies is not such a great idea.
My head was spinning just from reading all the Wikipedia entries of the various characters!
Hm, PlantMom, the Lovell biography does not make any kind of claims about Beryl having been introduced to sex by the Africans. However, this is not something that Beryl would have talked about to a biographer, even if true, I guess. I’d be inclined to regard it as rather prurient speculation.
There certainly seems to have been a lot of “moral laxness” among the European expats in East Africa. I had heard about the Happy Valley set even before I undertook this Markham reading, and I did find the sequence at the wild party that Beryl supposedly attended in Circling the Sun to be rather interesting!
The way that Lovell addresses the authorship question is that Markham was apparently helped at the onset of her writing by her friend Antoine de St-Exupéry, a noted writer, and she modeled her writing style on his. It seems fairly certain, because of the timeline, that Beryl she wrote big chunks of the book all by herself. Some editing was done later by another person, but this apparently mostly consisted of things like getting Beryl to excise a section about attending school in Nairobi, etc.
My impression is that she was shy but also full of herself. Hemingway, who famously praised her writing, said that she was, to his knowledge, “very unpleasant,” and he called her “a high-grade b***ch.”
She was chronically short on money but spent rather freely, running tabs or buying things on account, and sponging off people.
I have not read anything about her apparent expressionlessness.
@NJTheatreMOM interesting that Beryl would have been trying to impress Tom Black. West With the Night, certainly included more about Tom than Circling the Sun. She was devastated naturally when Tom died.
I’ve never felt more befuddled about a person after reading a memoir, and historical fiction.
mathmom I didn’t like Beryl, after reading Circling the Sun- she seemed damaged, vengeful, selfish and very manipulative, but overall, a survivor. A strong woman.
http://www.unc.edu/~ottotwo/authorandhero.html
Here is the rest of the Hemmingway quote -
From reading the Lovell biography (my sincere apologies for hogging the discussion with this!), I would not say that Beryl was a man hunter. She was very, very man-oriented and didn’t get along too well with woman. This apparently had something to do with her early estrangement from her mother and her great love for her father. In addition, she was not too good at relationships, which might explain the serial nature of her involvements.
When Beryl first met Denys and Karen, she was little more than a teenager. Karen and Denys were fifteen years older than she was (!!) and vastly better educated and more cultured. She was in awe of them.
Karen and Denys had a strong, apparently exclusive (?) relationship for a number of years. Then there was a period when things started falling apart (not because of Beryl!) and it was at that point that something happened between Beryl and Denys.
SJCM, the Beryl Markham Wikipedia page contains the unedited remark by Hemingway, which includes the word “b***ch.”
@njtheatermom - yes I read that, too. No Doubt about that adjective.
I’m fascinated by trying to figure out who the real Beryl is. So much is obviously left out of the memoirs. It’s very much like Out of Africa, more about Africa (and in her case flying) than about herself. Actually Dinesen gets pretty excited by flying too. Hard to remember, first how new flying was - a whole new view of the world, and second in the sorts of planes they were flying you were not separated from the view the way you are now. I hadn’t really considered the age difference between Denys and Beryl. I have a feeling most of the men she ended up with were older than her. Except that possible dalliance with the Prince.
I’m not overly concerned about who actually did the writing. It’s lovely whoever actually came up with the words and I assume Beryl approved it at the time.
I too am fascinated by who she is. And regardless of the author, her life was unique, fascinating, and her memoir beautifully written and edited. Reading the “extras” helps to answer the identity question a little, but certainly complicates my opinion of her!
From the Trzebinski biography, on Hemingway (source, Hemingway letter),
As much as I admire Hemingway, he certainly had faults with ego and machoism. And Blix, he too apparently. Beryl would be condemned, of course, for a less “ladylike” behavior :/).
Paula McLain treads carefully here, seemingly tryng to strike a compromise between the Trzebinski and Lovell perspectives. She portrays Beru as uninhibited, yet cognizant of cultural taboos (mostly thanks to Kibii’s restraint):
Ya think? After a while, I had trouble keeping all the infidelities straight! (“You’ve heard the joke, haven’t you? Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” [p. 129]).
I agree – and that’s the stance taken by the writer of the excellent “Author and Hero” essay that NJTM posted: “…however we answer the authorship question, the source of West with the Night’s aesthetic power remains the same.”
McLain’s writing in Circling the Sun is uneven. She is perfectly capable of writing beautiful descriptive passages, but often she doesn’t make the effort. When she described that Happy Valley party, she wrote that Denys was wearing “nice pants,” and a couple of paragraphs later, she wrote that the women were wearing “nice frocks.” Groan!
The dialogue in the book is boring too. Nobody says anything the least bit interesting. In real life, Karen Blixen was a gifted writer and storyteller; Denys was known for having been incredibly charming. You could never tell, from the way those characters spoke in the book.