O’Dell claims that Raoul’s illness, which involved other unpleasant symptoms as well as weight loss, was psychosomatic, although this was not immediately recognized. It took three complete changes of blood before there were any signs of recovery. It was only after Raoul told him how his relationship with Beryl had deteriorated that O’Dell realized the reason for his friend’s illness. Raoul claimed that after they moved to Montecito he had told Beryl that since she called herself a writer she had better start writing. Beryl had flown into a rage, he said, and had locked herself away for a month working on a book about Tod Sloane which she then sent to Houghton Mifflin. Schumacher claimed that Houghton Mifflin had returned it with the comment, ‘This story doesn’t sound remotely like West with the Night, as if it had been written by a different person.’
This damaging claim is not substantiated by archive records. Houghton Mifflin’s indexes show no evidence that Beryl had ever been commissioned to write the supposed book on Tod Sloane (though they do show another commission at that time to Raoul and Beryl as co-writers), and there is no record of any such correspondence. Allowing for the passage of time since his conversation with Raoul, Mr O’Dell might have been recalling a similar incident which occurred at a later date.
O’Dell states that Raoul then told him how Beryl had ‘worked on him…subtly and unsubtly, until [O’Dell] picked him off the street’. She locked herself away at nights. At parties she would introduce him as a ‘beginner’ writer, ‘Raoul writes for the pulps, he’s quite successful, you know.’ It is difficult to know why this remark could cause offence for that was surely exactly what he did, but Raoul claimed that Beryl’s constant, vengeful domination was responsible for his illness. In view of this it is somewhat surprising that immediately he was able, he returned to Montecito, despite Mr O’Dell’s pleas to him not to do so.24
Raoul had two further stories published under his own name: ‘Peaceable and Easy’ and ‘Sucker for a Trade’, both Westerns in the style of ‘The Whip Hand’. Another story was published under Beryl’s name entitled ‘The Transformation’, but the style betrays the fact that it was ghosted for her by Raoul. Although the Schumachers paid no rent for the ranch, their income from writing during 1945 and 1946 must have been minimal. Only five stories in total were published and when she was unable to goad Raoul into work Beryl tried seriously to write a short fictional story herself. It was returned.
‘At one point Beryl was particularly concerned because after a quarrel Raoul refused to help her by editing her writing,’ Warren Austin confirmed. ‘The story she had written had been rejected but she got her writer friend Stuart [Cloete] to help her, and then it was published.’25 This editorial assistance by Cloete enabled Beryl to produce a story called ‘The Quitter’, written in 1946, which provided the only income earned by the couple for nearly twelve months. Without doubt this is the incident to which O’Dell referred. ‘The Quitter’ does have horse-racing as a background, but there is no mention of Tod Sloane.
[Kent] remembered the long ago days when Sheila had been trapped in a loose-box by an angry stallion. It was a stallion the tawny haired girl had loved with courageous passion – but not with understanding.
She had loved his smooth and massive beauty, but all the while there was fear in her, and this she fought because of him, but she did not know how to keep evenly burning the flame of his spirit. In those young days she thought that love and admiration were enough, and she offered both. She went boldly one morning into the stallion’s loose-box and closed the door behind her.
It was not a new thing; she had done it before – timidly, at first, and then with greater ease. But on this morning the stallion was at his feed, and she entered too quietly. Startled, he turned on her and his fright blazed into fury. He whirled and tried to reach her with his teeth and hoofs. For long and terrifying minutes, she cringed under the feedbox, beating him off with her tiny riding hat, weeping – for fear, and for his faithlessness.26
‘The Quitter’ is important for several reasons. It was the last story known to be written by Beryl that was published and it indicates that she was personally able to produce fictional work even though it was not, in itself, of a finished quality. The editorial changes made by Cloete to this story provide yet another writing style; less informal than Raoul’s, but more prosaic than Beryl’s early autobiographical writing. It is reasonable to assume that Beryl produced this story out of financial desperation rather than an urge to write and Cloete helped further by personally submitting the story to the editor of Cosmopolitan. He was a regular contributor to this magazine and his own story ‘The Son of the Condor’ appeared in the same issue as ‘The Quitter’.27
The claims and counterclaims concerning Beryl’s authorship only received public attention after West with the Night was republished in 1983 and belong later in her story but there is a further piece of evidence which is worth mentioning at this point. In Houghton Mifflin’s contracts file is a copy of an agreement for ‘An African novel by Beryl Markham and Raoul Schumacher’, for which an advance of $2,500 was paid. This is clearly the book to which Scott O’Dell referred in his report of the conversation he had with Raoul in Pasadena, when Raoul told him he was working on a book about Africa, for the date on the contract was January 1944. No chapters were ever submitted to Houghton Mifflin in respect of this advance. Journalists Barry Schlachter and James Fox saw pages of an incomplete manuscript when they visited Beryl in Nairobi in 1984; the subject was Somalia, and Schlachter now believes that the pages they saw were written for this commissioned novel.28
If Barry Schlachter’s theory is correct then some work was done on this novel, but it was never finished. Despite their financial problems Beryl somehow raised enough money to visit Kenya in 1947 to gather material for it and during an interview in Mombasa she told a reporter that she had given up flying totally and was now a full-time writer.
She is a short story writer of some standing in America and is about to start on her first novel. Her visit to Kenya will not be a prolonged one, as she has to be back in the United States by mid-March or she will need a re-entry permit. ‘Of course I have come back to see my mother and brother mainly, but I am anxious to collect local “colour” for my book at the same time. I have been away so long and I feel it is essential to return to get the atmosphere back in my mind again.’ Her mother who lives at Limuru is Mrs [Clara] Kirkpatrick, and her brother who is in Nairobi is Sir James Alexander Kirkpatrick, baronet, squadron leader in the RAFVR.29
The reporter obligingly added the information that Beryl had been brought up in Kenya and educated mainly by governesses, but had spent three years at a Nairobi school. Asked if there was any chance of her returning to Kenya Beryl replied that America was very much her home now as she had so many friends there and couldn’t stay away for long. In the event Beryl saw very little of Clara or her half-brother Alex, for most of the three months was spent in Somalia. She found Kenya hauntingly beautiful and full of ghosts, for many of her closest friends were dead (she had only recently learned of the death of Bror Blixen in a car accident in Sweden in 1946), or had left the country.
Unfortunately, the manuscript Messrs Fox and Schlachter saw was subsequently mislaid and could not, after Beryl’s death, be traced. Nor was it among her papers when I was allowed access to them in the spring of 1986. The reasons for the trip to East Africa had been two-fold. Research was one, but both Beryl and Raoul hoped that the separation might provide a breathing space and ultimately enable some form of reconciliation. During Beryl’s absence Raoul promised to work on short stories, but when she returned to California she found no improvement in the situation. Raoul’s heavy drinking had not decreased and the work he had promised to do in her absence had not materialized. He became particularly annoyed when, in an attempt to help him to lose weight, Beryl worked out a course of exercises. ‘She wanted me to jump [a skipping] rope,’ he told a friend indignantly.30
It was only a matter of time before he moved out of t
he house and their separation was irrevocable. Beryl told Doreen Bathurst Norman that Raoul had cut her out of his life completely, and ignored all her letters to him in later years. Beryl stayed on alone at Toro Canyon for a short time before she too, moved out. Warren Austin had left the ranch some time previously, and was deeply involved in setting up his medical practice, but sometimes he saw Beryl socially.
She was very glad of invitations towards the end for she really hadn’t enough money to live on and welcomed being fed. But she was still the same imperious Beryl. I remember once taking her to a dinner party. The hosts were very nice – what you might call nouveau riche, but very nice. In the centre of the table was an enormous flower arrangement and in the centre of this was a sort of fountain. A bit showy but quite attractive. After the meal one of the guests felt obliged to comment on the centrepiece, and the host, who had obviously been waiting for just such a prompt, proudly announced that he had made the table himself incorporating the mechanism from a barber’s chair into the centre of the table.
He pressed a button and the centrepiece slowly ascended, the fountain playing and flowers turning on the revolving pedestal. Beryl took one look at this apparition, said, ‘Oh my God. I can’t stand any more of this! I’m going…’ and got up and left.
Dr Austin could do nothing but mutter his apologies and follow her.
As on previous occasions of emotional stress, during this time when her marriage had broken up and her future was uncertain, she was very depressed and confused and seemed totally unable to cope. There were other problems too. Dr Austin recalls that the last time he saw Beryl in Santa Barbara she was worried whether, in view of the impending divorce, her United States resident’s visa would be renewed in the following year. In addition there was the question of money. Deeply affected by the intense emotional stress, she was apparently unable to write and therefore had no income other than her annuity. Neither Beryl nor Raoul had any work published after their separation, but for Beryl the almost surgical incision terminating her career as a writer was typical. In 1931 when she had decided to take up flying she gave up her successful racing career with scarcely a backward glance. When her writing overtook her interest in flying, she gave up flying as though it had never been of any real significance. And after 1941 her writing too was consigned to her previous life. ‘Never look back!’ Beryl told me. It was a precept by which she herself lived.
After she left Santa Barbara she went to stay for a while with an old friend, Sir Charles Mendl, who was then living in Beverly Hills. Beryl probably first met Sir Charles in 1928, when Mansfield took her to Paris during their honeymoon. Sir Charles had been press attaché at the embassy since 1926, and was a friend and colleague of Mansfield’s. On his retirement in 1939 he moved to California, and was known to be very kind to Beryl especially when she was in financial difficulties towards the end of her marriage with Raoul. The break-up of her marriage coincided with Sir Charles’s own marital problems. His first wife (Elsie de Wolfe) renounced her title and regained US citizenship in 1946, and the couple were living apart when Beryl stayed at the Mendl house in Benedict Canyon. She seems to have regarded him very much as a father figure and kept his signed photograph to the end of her life.
During her remaining time in the United States, Beryl enjoyed a romance with a well-known folk singer. She left Santa Barbara and went to live in one of the small villages which dotted the Southern California coast. There in a timber cottage, she told a friend,31 she spent her days beachcombing while her lover produced a chain of hit songs which are world famous. It was a lazy, languorous period, unreal in many ways for it was a ‘between times’ interlude. She still maintained contact with her many friends and among her papers some years ago were many letters dating from this period, including a friendly letter of encouragement from Frank Sinatra. It is the letter of a considerate friend to someone who is having a rough time. There was a friendly letter too from Joseph Kennedy, confirming a conversation in which he advised Beryl on her financial affairs.32
Raoul returned to the Toro Canyon ranch after Beryl had left it. A friend who accompanied him on the day he moved in recalled that despite her own personal fastidiousness Beryl had ‘lived like a little animal. The floor in her bedroom was thick with dust with sort of game-tracks leading from her bed to the bathroom and to her dressing table. No housework had been done for a long time and there was a lot of clearing up to do. Her typewriter was thick with dust and had obviously not been used for months.’33
Raoul continued to make a show of being a writer. For a while he made a determined effort to succeed. The actor Joseph Cotton and his wife Lenore had been friends of both Beryl and Raoul for some years, and now in an effort to help Raoul, Mr Cotton secured a contract for twelve radio ‘playlets’ which Raoul was to write for him. Only two were ever finished. Raoul lapsed good-naturedly back into bouts of heavy drinking and though he sat each day at his typewriter he never again produced anything that was published.34 He spent some time helping a young writer friend by editing his work and generally providing encouragement, but was not himself able to write. A likeable man, he was very popular in Santa Barbara and everybody felt a great deal of sympathy for him. There was general relief when in 1952 he seemed to gain a new lease of life. With the help of a woman friend, Mary Lou Culley, he reduced his drinking and founded a company to make food-vending machines which enjoyed a brief success, but he lacked the application to maintain its progress.35
He divorced Beryl in 196036 and married Gertrude Chase Greene in July of the same year at her family home, Hope Ranch, Santa Barbara. Scott O’Dell, himself newly married, saw Raoul again for the last time. ‘I was there to autograph copies of my latest book and Raoul came into the bookshop. He had recently married and was looking good and had put on all his weight again. He told me he had run a bar in Mexico for a while but nothing else as I recall. He was a listener more than a talker.’37 Raoul’s stepson, John B. Greene Jr, who lived with the newly married couple, recalled him with affection. ‘He was a smiley sort of guy. He used to sit and pound away at the typewriter for hours.38 But Mr Greene’s sister, the elder of the former Mrs Greene’s children said, ‘I didn’t like him. I don’t think he ever wrote anything that was published after he married my mother – he didn’t have to.’39 Gertrude was independently wealthy and seems to have cared a great deal for Raoul.
John Yabsley, an Englishman who worked first as major-domo for Mrs Greene’s family and then for the newly married Schumachers, said, ‘Schumacher had the right sort of air about him, he could go anywhere in any company and be accepted. He never had any money and I don’t think he owned any property, but people were glad to loan him places to live. He was liked by everybody in Santa Barbara. Until he married Gertrude Chase he had nothing, but he was very good for her and they were happy together.’40
Raoul was very overweight and in poor health when the marriage took place, and within two years, at the age of fifty-five, he died of a heart attack.41 All his papers are believed to have been destroyed when his widow died a few years later.42
Long before the divorce, Beryl had informally reverted to the surname Markham. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, this caused a howl of protest from the Markham family. However Beryl reasoned that her main claims to fame – her transatlantic flight, and her writing – had been done under that name, and her son’s name was Markham. It seemed a logical and perfectly moral choice to her.
Spring 1949 found her in England to watch Gervase’s passing-out parade from the Life Guards during his two-year period of compulsory National Service. She never returned to the United States although she always, for the remainder of her life, talked of doing so.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1949–1960
Beryl gave as her reason for her visit to England the fact that she wished to attend the regimental ceremonials for Gervase’s passing-out parade, but there was more to it than that. She could see no future for herself in California. She was forty-seven and her
health was – unusually for her – not good; she was apparently unable to write and had long since given up flying. She had therefore metaphorically kicked the dust of California from her feet, and what she wanted to do more than anything else was to return to Africa, her spiritual home. She had no money as usual, but rescue came in the form of an old friend, Tom, Lord Delamere, who provided her fare to South Africa.1
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