My Car Wash

In 1942, Ernest Hemingway wrote a private letter to his editor that he never expected the world to see. In it, he admitted that a woman had written a book so powerful it made him feel ashamed of his own work. He called her brilliant. Then, in the very same paragraph, he called her unpleasant. That woman was Beryl Markham.
That contradiction tells you everything about how the world treated Beryl Markham. She was too talented to ignore and too bold to accept.
Beryl was born in England in 1902, but she did not stay there long. When she was just four years old, her father moved the family to British East Africa, to a horse farm near Kenya's Great Rift Valley. Her mother could not handle the rugged life and returned to England with Beryl's older brother. Beryl stayed behind with her father.
While girls her age in England were learning etiquette and social graces, Beryl was running barefoot across the Kenyan plains. She grew up alongside children of the Kipsigis tribe. She spoke Swahili before she spoke proper English. She learned to track animals, ride horses, and hunt with a spear. Her best friend was a boy named Kibii, and together they trained like young warriors. The rules of polite European society meant nothing out there. She learned early that the only rules worth following were the ones that kept you alive.
By the time she was eighteen, Beryl had become the first woman in Africa to receive a professional racehorse trainer's license. She competed against men in a world that belonged entirely to men. She did not ask for permission. She did not wait for approval. She simply won races and let the results speak for themselves.
But horses were not enough.
In her late twenties, Beryl learned to fly. She became a bush pilot in East Africa, one of the first in the region. Her job was extraordinary and terrifying. She flew a single-engine plane across vast, untamed territory, delivering mail, supplies, and passengers to remote camps. She transported doctors to medical emergencies. She spotted elephants from the air and guided safari parties on the ground. There was no radar. No radio in her plane. No sophisticated instruments. She navigated using rivers, mountains, and memory. If her engine failed over the African wilderness, there would be no rescue. She would simply disappear.
She never disappeared.
Then, in 1936, Beryl decided to do something that no one had ever done. She would fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, from England to North America. Others had crossed the Atlantic before. Charles Lindbergh had done it in 1927. Amelia Earhart had flown solo from west to east in 1932. But no one had completed the far more dangerous eastbound-to-westbound crossing alone. Flying against the prevailing Atlantic winds required more fuel, more endurance, and more courage. Several pilots had died trying.
On September 4, 1936, Beryl Markham climbed into her Percival Vega Gull, a small monoplane made of wood and fabric, which she had named The Messenger. She took off from Abingdon Airfield in England with chicken sandwiches and a flask of brandy, and she headed west into the unknown.
For approximately twenty hours, she flew alone through fog, rain, sleet, and darkness. Ice formed on her wings. Ice blocked the fuel vents. At one point, her engine cut out for thirty agonizing seconds before roaring back to life. Below her stretched nothing but the black, endless Atlantic. Above her, only clouds and night.
She did not reach New York as planned. Fuel starvation caused by the icing forced her to crash-land at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Her plane skidded into a boulder and flipped nose-up. She walked away with a gash on her forehead and her place in history secured.
Beryl Markham had become the first person to fly solo and nonstop from England to North America, east to west across the Atlantic Ocean. She was thirty-three years old.
The next day, she was greeted by cheering crowds in New York. She made front-page headlines around the world. She was celebrated as one of the greatest aviators alive.
And then, slowly, the world forgot her.
In 1942, Beryl published her memoir, West with the Night. It was a beautiful, lyrical book that wove together her childhood in Africa, her life with horses, and her adventures in the sky. Critics praised it warmly. It even reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. But then World War II consumed the world's attention, and a book about African adventures and solo flights quietly went out of print.
For nearly four decades, it gathered dust.
Then something remarkable happened. A man named George Gutekunst, a restaurateur from California, went fishing with Ernest Hemingway's son Jack. Jack encouraged him to read his father's old letters. Among those letters, Gutekunst discovered a paragraph Hemingway had written to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1942.
In that letter, Hemingway admitted that Beryl Markham had written so well and so marvelously that he was completely ashamed of himself as a writer. He said he felt like a simple carpenter with words next to her. He said she could write rings around everyone who considered themselves a writer. He called her book bloody wonderful.
And in the very same paragraph, he called her very unpleasant.
That was Hemingway. Even in praise, he could not resist diminishing a woman who outshone him on the page.
Gutekunst was so moved that he tracked down a single copy of West with the Night in a public library. He read it in one sitting. He read it again. Then he helped convince a small California publisher, North Point Press, to reissue the book in 1983.
This time, the world was ready.
The republished memoir became a massive bestseller. It spent seventy-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold over half a million copies. National Geographic Adventure later ranked it number eight among the hundred greatest adventure books ever written. The woman the world had forgotten was suddenly recognized as one of the finest memoirists of the twentieth century.
But Beryl Markham was never a conventional heroine. She was married three times. She had affairs with royalty, including a prince who was the son of King George V. She had financial troubles throughout her life. She had a difficult personality and made no effort to soften it. She did not try to be likeable. She did not seek anyone's approval. She simply lived on her own terms, loudly and unapologetically.
When the book was republished in 1983, journalists found Beryl still living in Kenya. She was in her eighties, still training racehorses, and living in near poverty after being badly beaten during a burglary. The success of the reissued book gave her enough income to live her final years in comfort.
She died in Nairobi on August 3, 1986. She was eighty-three.
Her legacy is not just an impossible flight or a rediscovered masterpiece. It is a reminder.
History has a habit of remembering the men who conquered territories and forgetting the women who defied the very limits of what was considered possible. Beryl Markham did not ask permission to fly. She did not ask permission to write. She did not ask permission to live a life that made other people uncomfortable.
She proved that the extraordinary is rarely comfortable. That true brilliance does not always arrive wrapped in warmth and charm. That some people are not born to fit in. They are born to cross oceans that everyone else considers impossible.
And sometimes, decades later, the world finally catches up.

~Old Photo Club