Beryl Markham lived such a life. Along with such colorful figures as T. E. Lawrence or Sir Richard Burton, Markham was one of the most extraordinary of explorers. But she was also an emotionally deprived child and, as an adult, a serious outlaw of love. She died in 1986 at the age of eighty-three; that year was the fiftieth anniversary of her historic solo flight across the Atlantic. Not much remains to shed light on her. There is her beautifully imagined memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942, when she was forty years old, a triumph of adventure writing, set largely in Africa, which Hemingway called “bloody wonderful,” and praised at great length, conceding “this girl can write rings around all of us.” He also called her a “high-grade bitch” because she wouldn’t sleep with him when he was on safari in Africa. She had been hired to spot elephants from the air for him, and she was just the sort of woman who would rattle his heart. Markham wasn’t too choosy about the men she slept with; rejecting Hemingway’s advances must have given her a certain kick, and it clearly insulted him. But he was right about her being able to capture the effect of Africa on the senses, and write about it in voluptuous detail, in a way he never could.
The best evidence suggests that Markham had help on West with the Night from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was her lover in Hollywood for a time. So Hemingway really hadn’t a competitor’s chance. Markham later also had help on her book from Raoul Schumacher. A charming, handsome man with an encyclopedic mind, Schumacher did writerly odd jobs around Hollywood, but was not having much success as a fiction writer himself. They met at a party in 1941, and married about a year later. Markham’s modest royalties from West with the Night, along with what her short stories brought in, augmented their income. Her name was marketable, so Schumacher wrote some stories based on her experiences, and published them under her name. Throughout her life, Markham advanced herself by becoming the paramour of talented, wealthy, or powerful men. Their secret help launched her career and kept her reputation alive. Denys Finch-Hatton, Isak Dinesen’s lover, who appears in Out of Africa, was also Markham’s lover, and he taught her about music and literature. Not surprisingly, some people question the extent to which her lovers’ polishing and editing of her manuscripts became more than that: her astounding experiences retold in their better-groomed words. When words failed, she was supported by tycoons and British royalty.
One recent memoir of Markham opens with a scene of heart-sinking poignancy: a frail, elderly woman sits in a small bungalow on the grounds of the Kenya Jockey Club. She is chair-ridden, poor, and spends her days drinking vodka and orange squash, which, unbeknownst to her, her servant has been watering down. She has an open wound on her arm where a flap of skin has been torn away, exposing nerve and muscle, but she’s not much aware of it. Occasionally her mind wanders and, groping for a word in English, she finds it in Swahili instead. Cataracts prevent her from reading. And, when she manages to rise from her chair and walk a few exhausting steps, it becomes an act of courage as great as any in her past. A woman comes to interview her each day, and she insists that the woman act as a lady’s maid, applying makeup and doing her hair as they talk. Markham also asks for a hairdresser from the city to tint her gray hair blond again. Much of her past seems lost to her. She is quarantined in the present, old age, poverty, photographs of past loves, and her trunk of mementos.
That scene of frailty is the tail end of a roller-coaster life charged with action and intensity, and the contrast is unnerving.
She had grown up wild in Africa, living close to the land and animals, and spent most of her childhood in the constant company and under the tutelage of local tribes. She was the only white woman permitted to hunt with them, and could handle a spear as well as a rifle. She may have looked like Alice in Wonderland, with her smocked European-style dress and long, beribboned yellow hair, but she spoke a number of African dialects and sat around tribal fires listening to the tales of the elders, while learning the survival skills of a young male warrior. Abandoned by her mother before she was five, she made a childhood career of being “best lad” in her father’s racing stable, subduing savage and unruly thoroughbreds. At sixteen, she married a local farmer twice her age. At eighteen, when her bankrupted father fled to South America, she took his remaining racehorses, applied for a license, and began training them herself. In her twenties, her passion swerved from horses to horsepower, and she became smitten with flying. Aviation was a thrilling new marvel; it was as young and high-spirited as she was; and she had romances with some of the early flying aces, despite having divorced her first husband and remarried a wealthy aristocrat. She partied in England and Africa with the moneyed, the glamorous, the titled, and the brave. It was the heyday of record setting, and she longed for a chance to prove herself, and to skyrocket from notoriety to fame.
Markham was a woman of diabolical beauty, with china-blue eyes, symmetrical features, a long, leggy figure, and absolutely no inhibitions. A lonely, love-starved child, she grew up mastering the arts of survival, and sometimes that meant dealing with people in ways cold-blooded and amoral. She used her beauty as a lure and as a weapon, bartered with it, flaunted it, was always aware of the hypnotic effect it had on people, and played it for all it was worth. She stole from friends, ran up huge accounts on their credit, married for money and power while telling everyone outright that she wasn’t in love, and poached husbands and lovers from women friends. All her life she was penniless, but it never kept her from wearing chic gowns, dining in the poshest restaurants, traveling first class, and moving in the highest strata of high society. A “blonde bombshell” was the way many referred to her. Isak Dinesen described her as “pantherine.”
Despite eventually being married three times, Markham had no real gift for marriage. Her infidelities were legendary, unrepentant, and extremely public. She never understood or forgave her mother for deserting her. She lacked a role model and female confidante; she had no one with whom she could discuss her budding femininity. There were few white women in Africa, and no African women she felt close to. Without a mother figure, she simply had to invent herself as a woman. This was especially confusing, since she socialized with, and acted like, the African men. Her father had raised her in a laissez-faire sort of way, and she idolized him so fervently that no man could live up to his example.
Imperious, ravishingly beautiful, and fluorescent with life, she charmed her way from one continent to another. Though men balked at her flagrant promiscuity, it didn’t stop them from being drawn to her. Her lovers included some of the most famous artists, adventurers, and scoundrels of her day. But then, she herself was a scoundrel. She never let a lie stand in the way of what she desired. She envied lives of fame and adventure; the irony is that she couldn’t see how packed with color, adventure, and accomplishment her own life was.
A pioneer of aviation, she was the first person to fly solo from west to east across the Atlantic, in September 1936, and the details of the flight are hair-raising. It was the only way she could think of to impress a pilot who had jilted her. An older man who reminded her of her father, he was the one serious love of her life, she said, but he married someone else; and to the end of her days she never stopped reliving that heartache. But on her transatlantic flight, bound for fame and glory, she was sailing on pure exhilaration. Not one man at a time but the whole world would have to worship her. When her engine quit, she made an emergency landing in a rock-strewn peat bog in Nova Scotia which, from the air, had looked like a safe green field. Amazingly, she walked away from the nose-in crash with only a small head injury, though the plane was destroyed. New York City, her original goal, gave her a ticker-tape parade, and she was lionized for her daring and skill. It seemed impossible that so beautiful a woman could be so masterful. What they didn’t realize is that she had had a lot of practice flying around Africa, often at night, always with no radio or air-speed indicator and very few instruments. Bush flying at that time, over such wilderness, in such primitive planes, was unthinkably dangerous. A forc
ed landing often meant death from the crash or from starvation, thirst, or wild-animal attack. At the age of thirty-one, she was the first woman to hold a commercial license in East Africa, and that required her to be able to strip down and repair an airplane engine. She ferried people to distant farms, acted as a game spotter for some of the great hunters, and ran an informal aerial-ambulance service. She carried mail to the gold miners in Tanganyika. She often rescued pilots who had crashed. Thinking they were doomed, they would see a plane land brilliantly in the bad terrain, then a willowy figure climb out, dressed like a Vogue model in the white silk blouse that was her trademark, pale trousers, a silk scarf at the neck, her hair coiffed and her fingernails carefully painted, handing them a flask of brandy and grinning.
In the 1940s, bored in London, she sailed to the United States, and was immediately invited to work in Hollywood at Paramount Studios, as a consultant on a film called Safari. Columbia Pictures planned to make her a movie star, since they said she was “pretty enough to be in the talkies.” By then, her own adventures were widely known and she became a regular at Hollywood parties, where she attracted attractive men nonstop. For a while she lived in a Malibu beach house with the world-famous folksinger Burl Ives. One of her divorces even named a member of the British royal family as corespondent. Her love life was notorious. But the most interesting period of her life was far behind her, in Africa in the 1920s, when a web of tempestuous and eccentric relationships arose.
Theirs was a time and place of great youth and innocence, and they were intense young dreamers drawn to Africa’s wilderness. Cut off from the stultifying urbanity of Edwardian England, they kept some of its moral codes but ignored many others. The women were unusually independent and concerned with personal freedom. Finch-Hatton was an adventurer, but he was also an aesthete. And Bror Blixen was a dashing and impetuous white hunter. In these sometimes sad and decadent days, our sense of ourselves as innocent pioneers, brave and young and full of adventure, in a land defined by its promise, seems remote. We may be spiritual beings, but what greater rapture is there than living a life hot on the senses, one augustly physical? With vicarious longing, we search their lives for the outlines of what we have lost: risk, passion, curiosity, exuberance.
Bror Blixen, whom Markham described as “the toughest most durable white hunter ever to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whiskey,” was her occasional bedmate and good friend, although she was never in love with him. They often worked safaris together—Markham flying in supplies and spotting game from the air, Blixen doing the brilliant hunting, feats of heroism, tireless partying, and indiscriminate womanizing he was known for. Married to Isak Dinesen for a while, he lived a wild, colorful life, and taught many people the details of hunting technique, such as how to tell the distance of a fleeing elephant by reading its dung (stick your finger in and judge the heat). Together, they blazed a trail of broken hearts through the wilderness. But when all was said and done, it was Markham who seemed to have lost her way. A woman of finely tuned observation, as well as courage, cunning, and vulnerability, she never trusted those strengths. Instead, she merchandised herself until her youth and beauty ran out. A bartered heart may be the currency and trade of Casanovas, but in the end she became a lonely and tragic figure who lived more and more in the grand ballroom of her memory. Despite her solo flight from lover to lover, love itself had somehow eluded her.
MEN AND MERMAIDS
One tranquil afternoon on French Frigate Shoals, a wildlife refuge in the Hawaiian archipelago, I sat at the dining-room table with my traveling companion, underwater photographer Bill Curtsinger. He pulled out a folder containing photographs of a nude woman, swimming underwater in caramelized light. A gallery in Portland, Maine, soon would be showing this “mermaid” series, and he had brought them along for a final once-over. Her face obscured, the mermaid swam with full breasts spilling above a belly rise, and a pubic delta edged by shadowy vines. Her curly hair rose like smoke through the water, and in some frames she floated below a reflection of herself, embattled by light. All sway and undulation in an aqua lagoon, her solidness made the water more transparent, her nakedness shone from the dim rooms of her past, as she became the sprawling sand and gushing waves. For some time, I sat searching these images for the lure they held—not just to Curtsinger, a fortyish man, his skin salt-cured from all the years he has spent underwater—but to men everywhere.
For the remarkable thing about mermaids is that seafaring men all over the world have invented them. They are not the mythic handiwork of one culture, exported like a religion, tantalizing cuisine, or new fashion. Men in Norway, Newfoundland, New Guinea, the South Seas, Mexico, Africa, Haiti, and other lands all have ancient mermaid myths. In these fantasies, women with long hair, large breasts, small waists, graceful arms—but fish scales from the hips down—enchant men out of their wealth, sanity, heartbeat, and soul. Yet they generally aren’t regarded as evil, witchlike, or savage. Quite the opposite. They are innocent assassins, feminine and alluring. Drugged by their dangerous sensuality, men long for them as a sort of sexual heroin, even though they know the romance will end badly. At best, they will be oddities in each other’s world and produce children fit for neither land nor sea. At worst, the men will drown erotically in the mermaid’s arms.
In the earliest religions, the world was divided into fire and water, with phallic lightning representing masculinity and the womblike sea representing femininity. Often the male gods held lightning bolts or scepters. Some of the oldest mermaid lust springs from tales of fish deities, such as the Semitic moon goddess Atergatis, whose very name steals one’s breath and sends one’s tongue to the front of the mouth. She had human arms and breasts and a beautiful human head; but, from the thighs down, a shimmering, golden fish’s tail. Though gifted with supernatural powers, she ruled by using so-called feminine wiles. She was beautiful, vain, proud, cruel, seductive, and yet utterly unavailable to the human men who fell in love with her. Some while later, Aphrodite—a goddess who also rose from the sea—became popular, and she had mermaid minions to serve her. The Greek Sirens were at times pictured as mermaids, too, and they added much to the notion that mermaids were a fatal attraction. Supernatural lovers who lured mariners to their deaths, they sang songs so eerie and rapturous—melodic waves upon sea waves—that sailors leapt overboard and swam toward the music. Or they hypnotized captains with their charms and sent ships crashing on the rocky shore. The Germans call a mermaid tneerfrau; the Danish call her mar emitid. The Irish merrow have small webs between their fingers. (What are we to make of otherwise normal women afflicted with webbed fingers?) The Finnish nakinneito have big breasts and long curly hair.
Breasts are a key element in all mermaid tales, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus, a physician with a devastatingly tidy mind and a passion for labeling, decided to name our class of animal “mammal,” which means “of the breast.” Not just any breasts, mind you, but the breasts of a mature woman who can suckle her young. This was understandably on Linnaeus’s mind, since he had watched his own wife suckle seven children and was privy to this most natural of acts for over a decade. There was a big to-do in his day about the developmental evils of wet-nursing. But by choosing a woman’s breasts as the official symbol of the highest and most noble class of animal, he wasn’t thought to be doing anything shocking. Breasts have always fascinated and obsessed men. (Freud says it’s because their earliest pleasure was sucking at their mothers’ breasts). However odd a sea creature might look—and some, such as the cleft-faced dugong, look powerfully nonhuman—it’s the womanly breasts that tip men off to their status as mermaids. “Look, she has breasts!” the sailors cry, and somehow ignore the flat, walruslike face of the sea cow.
Why do fish gods appeal to us as fantasy lovers? Look at Earth from space and we see that it’s mainly water, with small wafers of land floating here and there. Our planet is poorly
named. We should call it Ocean. We ourselves are little lagoons in which fluids and jellies pour over a reef of bones. Our veins contain salt water, a hand-me-down from the primordial seas; our blood ebbs and flows; women have monthly tides. A fetus floats for nine months in a snug watery womb. We are born water creatures, true amphibians, mermaids and mermen, our bodies 97 percent salt water. That’s why we must drink water to survive. Water also flowed through our ancestors, and they sailed the arteries of the land. People navigated on water, raised crops with water, baptized in water. We slosh when we walk. Sometimes we can hear the fluids in our ears or stomachs. We are water sculptures, vessels of water. If you removed the water from a 150-pound human being, only about four and a half pounds of matter would remain. In that sense, the “essence” of a person is not so different from the essence of a flower, and personality is the perfume of being human. Small wonder that fishermen looked at the mysterious, unpredictable ocean, which nonetheless held their food, escape, and destiny, and assumed that deities ruled the waves.
Lapping at their lives, the ocean reaches a hundred tongues into the rocky mouths and harbors where men gather and drink. But I don’t think it’s just coastal men who have created mermaids as a sexy version of the earth mother. Mermaids seem, in part, to echo the conflict men feel about women in general. They are beautiful, mysterious, idealized creatures whom men long to possess. But they also arouse feelings that make men vulnerable, irrational, and crazed. They can enslave the most powerful men. And they don’t fight fair. The more beautiful they are, the more power they have, and when they know it, and act remote and unconquerable, they can be truly frightening. However weak of limb, they’re strong enough to send a man to his doom. That age-old idea of the gorgeous and deadly woman has powered much myth and art. Mermaids crystallize the fear.