Straight on Till Morning (36 page)

Gervase never appeared to resent the lack of maternal demonstration by his mother, and when in subsequent years he spoke of her to his wife Viviane it was only in the most affectionate terms. To his children he never spoke of Beryl at all.
²⁰

Stokowski was very attracted to Beryl, whose looks have often been described as Garboesque, so her physical appearance was probably to his taste. The two enjoyed a brief flickering love affair which mellowed into a mutually rewarding friendship, though it flamed occasionally over the following years.

Dr Austin soon discovered that all was not as it appeared on the surface. ‘I hadn't been at the ranch for long when I realized that things were very wrong between Beryl and Raoul. It was difficult for me because I liked them both. It was all rather unhappy and they had lots of personal problems which they didn't seem able to resolve.'
²¹

Raoul's drinking was initially the chief cause of their arguments, but Beryl's promiscuity also became an item of contention after Raoul returned home unexpectedly one day and discovered her in
flagrante delicto
with a close friend of the couple.
²²
Violent conflict ensued. Beryl had now discovered that Raoul's own sexual preferences were bi-sexual and had been prepared to ignore this foible only whilst her own extra-marital activities were not questioned. Indeed their large circle of friends included many from Santa Barbara's gay community and Beryl had none of the contemporary aversion for what was still considered to be sexual deviation. Dr Austin thought that whilst Beryl may not have been happy about Raoul's occasional homosexual activities it did not initially constitute a fundamental factor in their conflict. She was far more concerned that Raoul's excessive drinking was causing him to become seriously overweight, and – perhaps more relevant – unable to produce stories that were acceptable to publishers. The couple's relationship deteriorated into bitter, bickering recriminations on both sides.

Scott O'Dell told me about an incident which he also wrote about in his letter to
Vanity Fair
in March 1987. He had only seen the couple once since they moved to Montecito and on that occasion Beryl was very rude to him. He did not elaborate, and was probably unaware of the reason, but it was at a time when Beryl was suspicious of all Raoul's male friends. Some months after his visit, O'Dell told me, he received a telephone call from Beryl to say she thought that Raoul was dying. ‘Come and get him!' she demanded. Why she should have contacted O'Dell in this way is something of a mystery for he had only seen the couple four or five times in as many years. He lived a three-hour drive away from Montecito and there were – and still are – many people in Santa Barbara who claim to have been extremely fond of Raoul. O'Dell arranged to meet Beryl at a convenient half-way location on the three-hour drive between his home at Pomona and Santa Barbara. ‘She drove up and stopped outside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. She just looked at me and never said a word. She got out of her car and opened the back door and what was left of Raoul fell out onto the pavement. She got into her car and drove off without saying a word to me and left Raoul lying there with all the cars going by. When I had last seen him he had been about my height and conformation, I suppose about one hundred and ninety pounds, but the hospital said he weighed under a hundred pounds.'
²³
In her book Beryl admits to being ‘pathologically' afraid of sickness. Her treatment of her son's minor ill-health, which she wrote off as a weakness in his character, further supports this. It is no excuse for her callous behaviour on this occasion but together with the background of open conflict between the couple it does, perhaps, provide an explanation.

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.

‘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.

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 the 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.

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.