Force Of Nature STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING: THE BIOGRAPHY OF BERYL MARKHAM by Mary S. Lovell St. Martin's; 408 pages; $16.95

By John Skow

Among the details of her astonishing life that Beryl Markham did not bother to mention in her vivid and quirky autobiographical memoir West with the Night were her three marriages, the existence of a son and her married name. In her recollections, which were republished four years ago and became a best seller after a PBS documentary last year on her life, she left out her volcanic love affairs, which seem to have numbered in the dozens and included alliances with such notable gents as Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Conductor Leopold Stokowski.

She successfully discarded the supporting cast and stage settings that are the furniture of ordinary narration, and what remained was an incandescent concentration on her strange, enchanted childhood among the Murani tribesmen who hunted near her father's East African farm, and then, later, on her two adult passions, horses and aviation. The result is more than an occasional "Yes, but . . ." murmured by the bewitched reader. Did she really kill a warthog with a spear as a young teenager? And just how did Tom Campbell Black, the great flyer who was her teacher, fit into the story?

Given the cloud of highly charged gossip that surrounded Markham from adolescence on (she was expelled from school in Nairobi for trying perhaps "to organize a revolt," and then married at 16), it is surprising that until the present volume, no one had answered such questions in a full-length biography. But although West with the Night was praised when it was first published in 1942, sales were not high, and after a few short stories based on her experiences, Markham gave up writing. Author Mary S. Lovell hotfooted it to Nairobi after reading the republished memoir and found a tall, striking and still outrageous old woman. Markham (who died last year at 83) waved away questions she thought unimportant, but her conversations gave Lovell the basis for an extraordinary story.

Markham, reports Lovell, was a high-fashion beauty who strode about three continents in slacks. She was tough and unusually strong and could ride anything. More practically, she understood horses. In the '20s and again in the '50s and '60s, she was the pre-eminent race trainer in East Africa. She flew her own bush-taxi service for only a few years, in the '30s, but was a & fearless pilot who was the first to scout elephants commercially from the air, over country where a forced landing generally meant death. In 1936 she became the first person to fly solo from England to North America. Over Nova Scotia, a fuel line iced up, the engine died, caught, then ran out of fuel, and she nosed her plane at a picturesque angle into a bog. She climbed out unaided and beguiled photographers with a single scratch on her highly scenic forehead.

Beryl, as everyone called her, spent money when she had it and ran up bills when she did not. In important matters, which meant clothes and horses, she went first-class. She had women friends -- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) was an early protector -- but she liked men better. Her maternal instinct was fitful at best, and her appetite for casual sex made uproarious disarray of her marriages. Blixen once wrote of her own husband Bror (who became Beryl's occasional bedmate) that "he looked down benevolently and lasciviously upon womankind and had been raised to believe that the entire world existed, as did the fish in his streams and the game in his woods, for his pleasure." Shift the pronouns to feminine, and the description would have fit Markham.

Lovell speculates reasonably, though conventionally, that much of Markham's adult adventuring was an attempt to find a man as admirable as her father. He was an English ex-army officer named Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, who, separated from his wife, reared Beryl in Kenya when she was a child. It was from him that she learned horses and an extreme form of self-reliance.

The question has been raised whether Markham's memoir could have been her own work, given her lack of formal schooling. Biographer Lovell's convincing answer is yes. The scholar and legendary white hunter Denys Finch Hatton, Blixen's great love and one of Beryl's many, had helped Markham make up much of the education she had missed. Though her good friend, the aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, strongly influenced her writing, chronology shows that the work could not have been his. Her third husband, a failed writer named Raoul Schumacher, did some useful editing, but despite embittered statements he made after their breakup, most of her book was written before they met. She was her own writer, her own woman and a force of nature still remembered with awe in East Africa. "I don't think Beryl ever thought how her behavior must have appeared to the people of the real world," a friend once said, "and if she had thought, she would have said it was stupid and would certainly never have let it worry her for a minute."