Circling the Sun (38 page)

I was off.

4 September
1936

T
here is no way of knowing how close I have come to the clawing reach of the Atlantic when my engine finally kicks and thrashes to life again. The sound of it is jarring. It startles me as if I’ve been asleep for years and years—and it’s possible I have been. I push the throttle forward to full power and ease back on the stick, away from the icy waves. The Gull’s nose tips upwards again, finally responsive. She climbs, scrabbling her way up, tooth and claw, scaling the face of the storm. I am climbing with her, out of an inner fog. A tangling blindness.

It’s only when I’m level again and my hands have stopped trembling that I let myself think about how long my engine might have been silent, and how ready I was to give in to the stall, to plummet when I felt the bottom go. I’ve always had that in me, but also a sound inner compass. There are things we find only at our lowest depths. The idea of wings and then wings themselves. An ocean worth crossing one dark mile at a time. The whole of the sky. And whatever suffering has come is the necessary cost of such wonders, as Karen once said, the beautiful thrashing we do when we live.

For several more hours the black rain doesn’t give way. I follow the rim of the long night, almost delirious with exhaustion, and also more awake than I have ever been. Finally, I spot the ghostly beginnings of daybreak—or are those hints of land? The window glass has a mantle of ice, and fog shifts in front of my eyes, but soon I know I’m not imagining it. The grey-black canvas becomes water, and then clear waves, and then the growing form of a cliff’s edge like swept-up cloud ledges. I have reached North America, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland. Flickering smudges becoming more real by the minute. This is the place I’m meant to go.

My plan is to stop in Sydney, near Cape Breton, and refuel, then go on from there—straight south over land this time, New Brunswick and the tip of Maine, and finally to New York. But I am still fifty miles from land when my engine begins to sputter in a sick way, a hiccuping, lurching stall. My final fuel tank is three-quarters full, so it can only be an airlock. As before, I flip the toggle to the petcock on and off, and the engine answers with wheezing. I’m dropping now, and my hopes are crashing, too. Three thousand miles and darkness and near death to fail now, when I’m so close? It’s a terrible thought, a dimming one. Again and again, I flip the sharp petcock switch, my fingers bleeding. The Gull coughs to life, climbing, only to falter once more, my propeller windmilling, my window glazed, glinting back the sun in a pitiless mirror.

For ten or fifteen minutes, I limp this way, in the wounded glide of fuel starvation, nearing the rough lip of landfall. Soon I can see muddy-looking boulders and a bog that’s like black pudding. When I try to bank one final time, my wheels catch and sink, the nose sticking fast, throwing me forward. I smack the glass hard, wetting my forehead with blood. I am only three hundred yards from the water’s edge, nowhere near New York. And yet I have done it.

I am so tired and can barely move, but I do move. I push open the heavy door, and force my feet to the ground. The bog tugs hard at my boots and I sink, blood streaming into my eyes. I drop lower and am half crawling soon, as if after so many hours in the clouds, I have to remember all over again how to walk. As if I must relearn just where I am going, and where—impossibly—I have been.

A
fter her first solo, in June of 1931, Beryl Markham quickly went on to become one of the first women ever granted a professional B licence. Though she never fully stopped training racehorses, or winning derbies, she also became a bush pilot, working for Bror Blixen on numerous safaris, and pioneered the practice of scouting elephants from the air, fulfilling Denys’s vision.

When in 1936, after twenty-one hours of flying, she succeeded in her record-breaking voyage across the Atlantic, she made every significant headline in the States. A crowd of five thousand cheered her arrival in New York, at Floyd Bennett Field. When she returned to England, however, she got no formal reception. Instead, she was greeted by the terrible news that her friend and flying mentor, Tom Campbell Black, had been killed in a plane crash while she was away.

Scandal and speculation followed Beryl for much of her life. In 1942, she published a memoir,
West with the Night.
It sold only modestly, though many believed it deserved greater accolades, including Ernest Hemingway, who said, in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book…she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was simply ashamed of myself as a writer…it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

Hemingway met Beryl on safari in Kenya, in 1934, when he was traveling with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. Reportedly, Hemingway made a pass at Beryl and was rebuffed. Nearly fifty years later, his eldest son, Jack, showed some of his father’s published letters to a friend, the restaurateur George Gutekunst, including the description of
West with the Night.
Gutekunst was driven to search out Markham’s book and then convinced a small California press to reissue it. It became a surprise bestseller and allowed Beryl, who was then eighty and living in poverty in Africa, to spend the remainder of her days in relative comfort and even some notoriety.

Since then, the book’s reputation—like its author’s—has been marred by gossip and speculation. It’s been suggested that she didn’t write it at all, but instead that her third husband, Raoul Schumacher, a Hollywood ghostwriter, did. I can’t say I’m surprised by the public’s doubt in her. Beryl was so reluctant to talk about herself, even people who believed they knew her quite well in later life were often surprised to learn she knew anything about flying or horse racing or could write more than a postcard. But the overwhelming evidence attests that Beryl had shown her publisher a large portion of the book (eighteen chapters out of twenty-four) before she ever met Raoul.

Though they depict the same place and time, and house many of the same characters, Beryl’s book hasn’t found as wide an audience or had the same impact as Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa,
but I believe it has the potential to. From the moment I read even a few sentences,
West with the Night
took powerful hold of my imagination. Beryl’s descriptions of her African childhood, colonial Kenya in all its seasons, and her extraordinary adventures fairly leap off the page—but more striking to me is the spirit behind the words. She had so much nerve and pluck, plunging fearlessly into vast gaps between the sexes, and at a time when such feats were nearly unthinkable. I hadn’t ever encountered anyone quite like her—a woman who lived by her own code instead of society’s, though that cost her much. Who would have fit perfectly into Hemingway’s muscular fiction, but she actually lived!

Beryl was undoubtedly complicated—a riddle, a libertine, a maverick. A sphinx. But strangely, as I was writing her character and pitching myself deeply into her world, she became more knowable and familiar to me in some ways than Hadley Hemingway in my novel
The Paris Wife.
Beryl and I share at least one profound piece of emotional genealogy: My mother also vanished from my life when I was four and returned when I was twenty. I felt a bone-deep jolt when I discovered that link—and it became one reliable way to get close to Beryl, and gain important insight into some of her more difficult choices. The loss of her son, for instance, is utterly heartbreaking to me. Though she would never be very close to Gervase, who remained in England with Mansfield’s mother, apparently he inherited Beryl’s willfulness and her stoicism. He was proud of his mother’s adventurous spirit and accomplishments, and felt more fondness for her than for his father, it appears, who was even more distant and unavailable.

Beryl’s relationship with Ruta spanned her lifetime, as their shared childhood experiences grew into mutual respect and unshakable trust. Though they were separated for a time in the 1930s when she moved to England, after the Second World War, she was able to track him down, and they were never again out of touch. Though Beryl kept her heart closed to most, and her secrets locked up tightly, her friends and confidants agree that, after Ruta and her father, Denys Finch Hatton was very probably the only man she ever truly loved. She died in Nairobi, in 1986, at the age of eighty-three, near the fiftieth anniversary of her record-breaking flight, and perhaps thinking of the moment she climbed into her Gull, tucking a hip flask of brandy into her flight jumpsuit.

“Twende tu,”
she called out in Swahili as she buckled her helmet.

I am going.

Paula McLain—Cleveland, Ohio

For my family—with love and thanks unending—and for Letti Ann Christoffersen, who was my Lady D

B
ooks are intricately collaborative efforts. I might slave away at my desk in isolation, but I’m hardly alone. Many, many amazing folks have had a hand in the making of
Circling the Sun,
and though I hope I’ve expressed my gratitude to them individually at many points along the way, they certainly deserve formal props and my humble thanks here. My agent, Julie Barer, is quite simply the best there is. With heart and grit and wonderful instincts to spare, she’s become my first and most important reader, and also a dear friend. I wouldn’t want to do any of this without her. Susanna Porter is the kind of editor other writers rightfully covet. She read (and read!) innumerable drafts—but never stopped believing in what this book could be. Her sharp eye and insight and unshakable commitment live on every page.

I have found the best possible home at Ballantine Books and Penguin Random House, and have come to rely on many crucial, crucial players there who do their jobs so well. Bottomless thanks to the completely lovely and brilliant Libby McGuire; also Kim Hovey, Jennifer Hershey, Susan Corcoran, Jennifer Garza, Theresa Zoro, Quinne Rogers, Deborah Foley, Paolo Pepe, Benjamin Dreyer, Steve Messina, Kristin Fassler, Kate Childs, Toby Ernst, Anna Bauer, Mark Maguire, Carolyn Meers, Lisa Barnes, and, of course, the indispensable Priyanka Krishnan. Thanks to Sue Betz, who was so thoughtful and thorough in her copyediting; to Dana Blanchette for her beautiful design of the interior elements; and to Robbin Schiff for the absolutely stunning cover. I’m grateful to the amazing Gina Centrello, who weighed in with an essential read when the stakes were high, and also have to thank the incredible sales force for their passionate commitment to books, for knowing their accounts so thoroughly, for getting my work into the hands of booksellers and readers, and for doing their jobs so tirelessly and well.

The home team at Barer Literary is incomparable and I owe them much: Gemma Purdy, Anna Geller, and William Boggess. Many thanks as well to Ursula Doyle, Susan de Soissons, and David Bamford at Virago; Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein; and Lynn Henry, Kristin Cochrane, and Sharon Klein at Doubleday Canada and Penguin Random House Canada.

The MacDowell Colony supported me with a generous writing residency, where I had the impossible gift of uninterrupted time and space, and was able to work on a critical draft of this book. Steve Reed provided helpful notes on piloting and flight, and also was the person who first put
West with the Night
into my hands. Though he would most assuredly rather have cash or a vintage biplane, he’ll have to accept my eternal gratitude! Stacey Giere of Maple Crest Farm was key in helping me flesh out the world of horses and horse training. I owe her much for her time and expertise.

My heartfelt thanks goes to the amazing team at Micato Safaris for making my trip to Kenya so memorable and magical: Felix, Jane, and Dennis Pinto; Melissa Hordych; Marty Von Neudegg; Liz Wheeler; Philip Rono, Wesley Korir, and Jessica Brida. Mark Ross was wonderfully helpful, as was Cheryl de Souza of Airkenya. Thanks also to Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, particularly Mike Taylor, Alka Winter, and Mary Wanjohi, and to all of my gracious hosts and contacts in Kenya: The Norfolk Hotel; Segera Retreat; Jens Kozany and the Zeitz Foundation; the Craig family and Lewa Wilderness; Andrew, Zoe, and Bruce Nightingale of Kembu Cottages in Njoro; and Jacqueline Damon and Sleeping Warrior Eco Lodge at Soysambu Conservancy.

Brian Groh was the frontman in researching my trip to Africa to follow in the footsteps of Beryl Markham. He also gave early feedback on the manuscript, and has been a lionhearted friend for many years. Other key early reads and crucial support came from Lori Keene, David French, Jim Harms, Malena Morling, and Greg D’Alessio. Other dear friends have given me unflagging support and love for many years and must be thanked: Sharon Day and Mr. Chuck, Brad Bedortha, the phenomenal O’Hara family, Becky Gaylord, Lynda Montgomery, Denise Machado and John Sargent, Heather Greene, and Karen Rosenberg. Chris Pavone talked me down from a ledge or two. Big thanks to the East Side Writers—Terry Dubow, Sarah Willis, Toni Thayer, Charlie Oberndorf, Karen Sandstrom, Neal Chandler, and Justin Glanville—who are always on my side.

Special appreciation and a big kiss goes to Terry Sullivan for his boundless confidence in this book and me, for the phenomenal dinners, and for making my life a lot more fun! And finally, I have to thank my mother, Rita Hinken; my incredible children, Beckett, Fiona, and Connor, for sharing me (sort of!) with my work; and my sisters, who are everything.