Add me to the fascinated to know the real Beryl group. After finishing Circling the Sun, I felt like I had read Beryl’s true story. When I started reading her memoir, I kind of felt like Beryl didn’t know herself.
I googled everyone as soon as I finished Circling the Sun. I thought McLain did a good job painting a visual picture of the different characters. Their actual pictures looked very similar to the pictures in my head. I’m glad I forgot that Robert Redford played Denys in Out of Africa. If I had remembered, he would have been the Denys In my head.
Hello everyone,
I’m pleased that I am able to join you this month.
I read West With the Night first and completely fell in love with young Beru. I was fascinated by her relationships with the Africans. I could picture this little girl, alone in the country with her hard working father, learning the culture of the tribesmen. African culture was all that she knew and so it made sense that she would want to be a warrior one day. The imagery in the book was beautiful. The hunting scenes and the scene with Paddy were especially engrossing. Circling the Sun was difficult for me to read. I didn’t enjoy the writing style and I found most of the characters unlikable. Beryl seemed weaker, more of an opportunist and less of an adventurer.
I agree with both of these criticisms, yet I would still recommend the book—urging it to be read in conjunction with West with the Night. We’ve admired the writing in West with the Night and it’s true, it’s great–but Circling the Sun makes it evident how much Markham left out of her story. Writing skills aside, they really do complement each other in terms of content.
One thing I appreciated about Paula McLain is that she was able to describe Beryl Markham’s multiple torrid love affairs without getting too graphic. A lot of modern novels tend to offer TMI in that regard, which rarely adds to the quality of the writing.
Re those love affairs: For those who read the biographies, is the Boy Long affair accurate? And how about the affair with the Henry, Duke of Gloucester? Beryl strongly denies the latter in Circling the Sun, but the Wikipedia entry gives it credence.
Just stumbled across this little gem from Mark Twain: “An autobiography is the truest of all books, for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly any instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines.”
I was definitely glad to get more of Beryl’s story via the novel, but in its own way I think the novel left as much out and in some ways in a more duplicitous way. (For example Beryl’s relationship with Tom.) It’s clear from the memoir that she’s just not telling you about whole swathes of her life - like the three marriages.
My first thought when I read Circling the Sun was why in the world are we reading this in first person? We have Beryl’s voice already (or pseudo-voice) and anything else is bound to be a disappointment. I know historical fiction often plays fast and loose with the facts, but I felt more disappointed here than I usually am.
The only mention of Lord Delamere’s manager, Long, in the Lovell book has to do with Beryl’s husband Jock Purves beating up Delamere because he believed that Beryl had had sex with Long and with Delamere’s son,Tom.
Lovell also says that on her first visit to London in 1924, Beryl “stayed with a friend, the wife of Lord Delamere’s manager, ‘Boy’ Long.”
Beryl definitely had an affair with Henry, Duke of Gloucester. She was not in love with him, but found him fun, enjoyed riding with him on hunts in England, and really liked the gifts he lavished upon her!
After Mansfield Markham threatened to have Henry named as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings, the Queen summoned Mansfield to the palace in 1929, with the following result:
[quote]
…Mansfield was understandably reluctant to maintain his wife when she was seen everywhere with the duke, and the pair provoked almost constant gossip in society. His response therefore was that unless some satisfactory settlement could be reached, and quickly, he was going ahead with the divorce proceedings with the implication that the prince would be charged with enticement and Mansfield would sue for appropriate damages.
(…)
Divorce still carried the stigma of social disgrace in England and it was inconceivable that the action should be allowed to continue. And of course it did not.
(…)
The conjectures about the actual amount settled on Beryl by the palace, so that she would no longer represent a financial burden on Mansfield, have been many and various. That such a settlement was made has never been in doubt. Beryl received an annuity from 1929 until her death, and this annuity is traceable to a single source.
(…)
After Beryl’s death in 1986, through the kindness of Beryl’s executor, I was privileged to have sight of the contract…The capital sum involved was £15,000 – a generous sum in those days…The capital sum was used to create a trust based on bonds with a fixed-rate return, providing an annuity which was paid into Beryl’s account each year from December 1929 until her death in 1929.
^Beryl apparently dallied briefly with both the Duke and the Prince when they were on safari, but her actual affair was with the Duke.
“Tania” (Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dineson) wrote lots of letters to her mother, and these are quoted extensively in the Lovell biography. Based on the book Out of Africa, and even the movie based on the book, you get the idea that Karen Blixen’s farm was a considerable distance from Nairobi, and that she was somewhat isolated from society – but apparently not!
One of the many little things that bothered me in Circling the Sun was that people were always jumping into cars and driving off to see one another. In reality, the roads were very bad in that part of Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, and there were not very many cars.
It’s a three hour drive from where Beryl grew up to Nairobi now. It must have been much longer then. OTOH Karen Blixen’s house is only a 1/2 hour from downtown.
Thanks for all the historical info! Considering Beryl Markham’s many affairs, it’s amazing that Gervase was the only baby that resulted. Any truth to the story in Circling the Sun that Beryl became pregnant with Denys’ baby?
Even taking into consideration the “anything goes” attitude of the Happy Valley set, Beryl’s dogged pursuit of Denys does not suggest a genuine friendship with Karen, no matter the status of Karen and Denys’ relationship.
Also, isn’t it telling that neither woman names the other in her memoir? (“One day she was going to write about him—write him in such a way that would seal the two of them together forever. And from those pages, I would be absent” [p. 347].)
On the other hand, who can say for sure? Apparently, the men were able to pull off such complicated friendships, so why not the women? Per a review of the Finch-Hatton biography, Too Close to the Sun, “Bror Blixen soon started introducing Finch Hatton as ‘my good friend and wife’s lover.’” http://www.ondaatje.com/reviews/tooclosesun.html
McClain invented Gervase’s having had a serious birth defect that required surgery and hospitalization. I feel certain that he did not have a birth defect, because the Lovell biography never mentioned such a thing.
Gervase himself is no longer alive (he died in 1970), but his daughter Fleur who was born in 1953 is still around, I believe. I can’t imagine what Fleur would have thought if/when she discovered what McClain wrote.
I find the invention of the birth defect to be shocking. The only reason I can imagine for McClain’s doing it is maybe trying to provide a rationale for Beryl having abandoned Gervase to the care of his grandparents at a very young age. Ick!
Another example of invented content in the McClain book also involved a birth. McClain’s fictionalized Beryl endured a traumatic childhood experience in which a newborn (stillborn?) foal was devoured by voracious African ants. No such incident is chronicled in the Lovell book.
I was able to access some of the Trzebinski biography on Google Books and found the passage below. I don’t know why Lovell left out the information–unless she considered it hearsay and could not confirm the facts:
This is why the two biographies, presenting such different information, have confused me even more. Hearsay or fact or old gossip regurgitated? So hard to tell!
PlantMom, would you be interested enough to look through the two biographies (the Lovell one has a good index) to answer Mary’s question about whether Beryl was ever pregnant with Denys’ baby? I honestly don’t recall at this point, and I don’t feel like looking it up!
I do remember that Lovell said that late in life Beryl had some physical problems that were likely due to her having had repeated abortions.
^ Oh that’s okay – it was just idle curiosity; I don’t need it answered. I’m just sort of floating back and forth between the real and the unreal in our accounts of Beryl’s life.
I really liked NJTheatreMOM’s earlier description (in post 21) of historical fiction, that it is comprised of “some things that really did happen, some things that might have happened, and a few things that never happened at all.”
I think the freedom to make things up within a historical context appeals to many writers (and readers–hence why we have so much historical fiction on the market). The foal-eating ant story may be in the “never happened at all” category, but if it could have happened, then McLain should have no qualms about putting it in. That’s the whole point of historical fiction, right?
The inclusion of such a tale would be unconscionable in a biography, but I see it as an acceptable flight of fancy in a fictionalized account. My guess is McLain let her imagination loose after reading this description of Siafu ants in West with the Night:
I have a hard time with this one, but here’s the gist of it:
[quote]
In April 1924, Beryl’s apprehension was confirmed when she went to London again. Cockie saw that Beryl’s health was unimproved and forced her to go back to the GP who now admitted that he had made a mistake in his diagnosis: Beryl was nearly five months pregnant. So she had conceived at Christmas. At that time she had had several lovers, so it would have been very difficult to establish who the father was, but Beryl wanted to believe that the baby was Denys’s and told Cockie so. /quote.
I don’t see anything immediately in the Lovell index, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
That she had two terminations of pregnancies, possibly by Denys, is footnoted as rumor/private communications in Too Close to the Sun, the Denys Finch Hatton biography by Sarah Wheeler.