Novel charts the resurrection of a sinner
Novelist Paula McLain loves bringing forgotten women in history back to life.
But this passion can trigger backlash from some readers.
“I’m attracted by women who have somehow been forgotten by history,” says McLain, whose new novel, Circling the Sun, recreates the early life of Beryl Markham, who achieved fame during the 1930s by being the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic while also brooking notoriety in her private life.
“I get to shine a light on their lives and their accomplishments — to reintroduce them to the world in a way, and reinsert them in what I see as their rightful place in history.”
However, McLain has also learned that her books can trigger controversy.
With her 2011 novel, The Paris Wife, she made the bestseller lists by writing about a woman that virtually nobody remembered — Hadley Richardson, the first of novelist Ernest Hemingway’s wives.
The Paris Wife was assailed by feminists who simply couldn’t stand Hemingway and the macho image he cultivated. They were angered by Hadley for not standing up to her egotistical, self-absorbed husband.
“Somebody called her a bath mat,” McLain, 50, is laughing over the phone from her home in Cleveland. “But you certainly wouldn’t call Beryl Markham a bath mat!”
Born in England and raised in what is now Kenya, Markham was very much a free spirit — and often a reckless one whose freewheeling sexuality reputedly led to a fling with the present Queen’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester.
Markham’s moment in history came in 1936 with her historic solo flight. She resurfaced in the public consciousness in 1942 when she published a poetic memoir, West With The Night. She then returned to the shadows and died in poverty.
McLain aims to rescue this unusual woman from what she sees as an undeserved obscurity. “The few negative reviews that have come in focus on the unlikeable parts of Beryl’s personality, that she was a notorious woman with a lot of scandal in her life, that she was selfish. But you can’t please everyone — right?”
However, for some readers, Circling the Sun may commit a bigger offence by casting a harsh light on one of the 20th century’s mythic romances as enshrined in the Oscar-winning Hollywood film, Out of Africa, and the book of the same name that inspired it.
The 1985 movie, shot in Kenya, starred Meryl Streep as married Danish baroness Karen Blixen (who wrote under the pen name of Isak Dineson) and Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hutton, the big game hunter who was Karen’s lover.
“All we know from Out of Africa, and particularly the movie, is that this was one of the greatest love stories of all time,” McLain says. Her book suggests that Out of Africa is a rather sanitized version of what actually happened.
That’s because Beryl Markham and Denys Finch Hutton were also lovers. This strong-willed young woman, driven by passion, became a participant in a doomed love triangle while sustaining a friendship with the older women she was betraying — Karen Blixen.
McLain manages to sound tactful about the shortcomings of Out of Africa.
“It glossed over the more complex details of Denys and Karen’s relationship,” she notes. “There were tensions, there were obstacles. And Beryl, intimately involved with both of them, has sort of been written out.”
That Beryl was very much her own person from childhood is evident from the early pages of this novel. In this first-person narrative, we are introduced to a freespirited tomboy who hates wearing dresses, sees her father’s 1,500-acre horse farm as her personal universe and revels in her friendship with Kibi, a boy from the Kipsigi tribe.
There’s a harrowing scene early in the novel when the young Beryl is mauled by a lion.
“I like that moment,” McLain says. “She in a way identifies with the lion and sympathizes with him because he has a wild nature and is simply being himself by attacking her.”
As a wild spirit herself, Beryl was under pressure to conform — which is why she was pulled into a disastrous first marriage at the age of 16. She knew nothing about sex back then, but she learned quickly and after the collapse of that marriage, embarked on a series of affairs. In the novel, she says she’s taking a cue from her African friends: “For them, sex doesn’t get tangled up with guilt or expectations. It’s something you do with your body.”
The novel offers an in-depth look at the culture of a privileged white society in colonial East Africa — a society in which indolence could be a lifestyle, marital vows were disregarded and “pounds of opium were smoked.”
“This was between the wars when the world had upended. People were trying to reinvent themselves with a wildness which some see as recklessness. People were pushing back against — forces.”
She considers Beryl Markham a striking representative of this age, but there were times when she became exasperated as she sought to bring this often maddening but mercurial woman to life in her novel.
“But I did have sympathy for her while writing this book, and I did have a lot of psychological curiosity about her. My job is less to judge my characters than to try to understand them.”