On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  Like all writers trying to make a living, Carson was always thinking about her next project even while in the middle of the current one. Not long after returning from the Albatross III cruise, Carson told Rodell about a collection of Mexican bird paintings by the artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes that had been found in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife archives, and which the Fuertes family was now interested in publishing. Carson wanted to write an introduction for the book, and for a while it seemed the Fuertes family was all for it. But when Rodell brought the idea to Oxford they declined on account of the expense involved in color reproduction. Rodell then approached Paul Brooks, the editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin, with the project. Brooks quickly read Under the Sea-Wind and was impressed. He agreed to consider the Fuertes book, though he actually had something else in mind.

  In the summer of 1950, Brooks and Carson exchanged letters about an idea circulating at Houghton Mifflin for a guide book to the seashore. Carson, who as usual sensed possibilities in what sounded like a dull topic, expressed interest. She told Brooks that she thought what was wrong generally with guidebooks is that they too often merely cataloged “creatures” without giving the reader a complete picture of where they lived and how they might be observed. The problem of what to put in and what to leave out—the book could be only so long, after all—was secondary to how the writer approached the material. Carson thought this should involve giving the reader an idea of what life was like for the plants and animals described, and that this would entail an “unobtrusive” discussion of various seashore environments and what someone could expect to find in them. This was obviously what Brooks wanted to hear, because he took a few weeks to get everyone at Houghton Mifflin on board and then wrote back and asked Carson if she’d be willing to do it. He said he completely agreed with her that the “environmental point of view” was essential to the book. “I imagine you have plenty of demands on your time,” Brooks said, “but I hope that you will consider this seriously.”

  Carson told Marie Rodell she was keen to do the book, and as it eventually worked out she could not settle on terms with the Fuertes family and nothing more came of that project. Had Carson, Rodell, or Brooks known what they were getting into, this discussion might have gone differently. Rachel Carson was about to become the most famous writer in America.

  In the fall of 1948, Carson decided to seek financial assistance to help support the research she planned for “Return to the Sea.” She applied for a grant of $2,250 from the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust, run by the publishing firm of Harper and Brothers. Carson provided a detailed preliminary outline of “Return to the Sea” and an itemized list of expenses she expected to incur—the main one being a four-month leave without pay from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Carson explained that she would need the money she was applying for regardless of any offer a publisher might make for the book, as the fellowship was meant solely to defray expenses whereas a publisher’s advance would be much-needed income from the project.

  In July 1949, the Saxton Trust informed Carson that she had won the fellowship. To help them with the public announcement of the award, they asked Carson to submit a brief biography. Elated, Carson dashed off a four-paragraph bio and sent it in with a cover letter saying that the prospect of being able to take time off to work on the book without interruption was “incredible good fortune” and that she would be “eternally grateful to the Trustees for making it possible.” Thinking the Saxton people would be happy to know how the book was coming, Carson also mentioned that her agent had recently agreed to terms with Oxford University Press. Carson got a letter back from the trust a few weeks later with the surprising news that they wanted some of their money back. Specifically, they wanted to deduct the amount of Oxford’s advance from Carson’s grant.

  Furious, Carson pointed out that she had explained in her application that she needed the fellowship money irrespective of any publisher’s advance and reminded them that their own rules provided for such “exceptional” funding of established authors. The trust disagreed. They wrote to her again, accusing Carson of taking advantage of the trust’s limited resources and in effect denying funding to other deserving applicants. To make the point more firmly, they informed Carson that the people who worked for the Saxton Trust did so without compensation and, in fact, even paid the cost of the postage on the letter telling her so.

  The Saxton episode turned out to be one of many such instances in Carson’s life that showed how fiercely she defended her finances and her writing. Quick to anger at any perceived injustice, Carson loathed compromise. Eventually, Marie Rodell stepped in between Carson and the Saxton Trust, working out a deal in which Carson would receive her quarterly installments of the fellowship until she turned in the manuscript to Oxford in the spring—a deal that amounted to about three-quarters of the original grant and that was better than what the trust had proposed. Carson wrote to the trust to grudgingly accept these terms, though she warned them that her publishing contract provided for an extension of the deadline and she might not deliver it on time. In that event, she said, she assumed she’d get her final installment of the grant. In the meantime, Carson concluded, would they please send her two copies of the official news release announcing her fellowship?

  Carson got the second $500 installment of her advance from Oxford in the fall of 1949. She also received a courtesy copy of a new book from Oxford—Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, which she said she looked forward to reading, though for the time being she was preoccupied with selling parts of her own book. As Carson finished more chapters of “Return to the Sea,” Rodell dutifully circulated them to one magazine after another. She sent seven chapters to the Atlantic, which turned them down after thinking it over for three months, saying that while they liked the material, the magazine had recently acquired a multipart story with a “sea theme” and that another article in a similar vein would be too much of a good thing. This was an echo of what had happened with Under the Sea-Wind, which the magazine had initially expressed interest in serializing but never did, citing conflicts with other nature pieces. More rejections stacked up: Holiday, National Geographic, Coronet, Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and on and on. Although most of the rejections were polite, one editor at Town & Country complained, “I don’t like Miss Carson’s writing at all.” In her correspondence with Rodell, Carson remained upbeat and didn’t dwell on the steady refrains of no. In any event, she was still writing, and now she had something else to contemplate.

  In April 1950, Carson and Rodell started talking about changing the book’s title to “The Sea Around Us.” Apparently, neither of them was familiar with a poem by T. S. Eliot called “Dry Salvages,” though Carson would later discover it on her own. “Dry Salvages” is one of the poems in Eliot’s Four Quartets. The Dry Salvages is a real place, a group of rocks on which a lighthouse stands off the coast of Cape Ann in Massachusetts. Part of the poem goes like this:

  The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

  The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite

  Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses

  Its hints of earlier and other creation:

  The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;

  The pools where it offers to our curiosity

  The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

  Eerily, the poem touched on more than just Carson’s new working title. In the line that includes “hints of earlier and other creation,” Eliot raises the theme on which Carson planned to open her story of the sea. Carson wanted her readers to understand that the sea was the earth’s incubator and that we are all descendants of the life forms that first arose and evolved in the sea. Evolution changed but did not end our relationship with the sea, and that is why men are drawn to the ocean and fascinated by its secrets. In one of several little brown notebooks in which Carson jotted chapter outlines, sources, and even early fragmentary bits of narrative, she tried out several possible beginn
ings for The Sea Around Us. One of them was “So long ago that we do not know when it happened—and certainly we do not know how—living creatures developed in the sea. Developed and evolved until all the major groups of animals and many of the plants had arisen.”

  Carson didn’t keep those words in the book, but she stuck with the new title, and in June 1950, Oxford said they liked it, too. June was proving to be an exhilarating month, as Rodell had gotten her first nibble. Science Digest offered fifty dollars for a condensed version of one chapter. Rodell was just about to say yes to this when something surprising happened. She heard from Edith Oliver, a young part-time editor at the New Yorker magazine. Oliver was a lively character. She’d studied acting and had appeared on several radio dramas, including The Philip Morris Playhouse. For four years in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Oliver had written the radio quiz show True or False? and later wrote and produced another game program, Take It or Leave It: The $64 Question. She started contributing to the New Yorker in 1947, writing short pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” She would eventually spend more than thirty years as the New Yorker’s influential drama critic. But in 1950 her job apparently included reading manuscripts that arrived at the magazine’s offices. One that she read and fell in love with was Carson’s chapter on waves from The Sea Around Us. Oliver told Rodell how much she liked the excerpt and asked if she could see more. Rodell abruptly told Science Digest to wait.

  It would be hard to overstate the importance of the New Yorker’s interest in The Sea Around Us. The magazine—literate, revered, slightly snooty and widely read because it was—had the power to make an author’s reputation and send book sales soaring. Carson, however, remained calm while Rodell continued her efforts at placing chapters of the book with other magazines. But the New Yorker kept asking to see more. By midsummer Oliver had carefully read five chapters and had gotten eight more to look at. She’d also begun sending the material, with her enthusiastic endorsement, to the magazine’s editor in chief, William Shawn.

  Carson thought the magazine was only trying to decide which chapter to publish and hoped they’d make up their minds on one soon. “Darn the New Yorker,” she told Rodell. “I wish they’d get busy with waves and get it in print by September some time. It just might mean a thousand bucks, plus some nice advertising.” Oliver promised Rodell they’d make a final decision on the material by the middle of August. Rodell, meanwhile, sold the Yale Review a chapter on the volcanic origins of Bermuda called “The Birth of an Island” for seventy-five dollars. She sold another on ocean salt to the patiently waiting Science Digest, explaining that it had been “too technical” for the New Yorker. But the rejections continued as well. Reader’s Digest turned down a chapter on the connection between ocean currents and climate, telling Rodell, “The piece isn’t quite right for a large measure of popular impact,” a statement that proved as ironic as it was clumsy.

  Sometime around the middle of August 1950, Rodell learned that the New Yorker was not interested in publishing a chapter of The Sea Around Us—they wanted to publish ten chapters. William Shawn himself would do the editing, and while it was understood the chapters would have be condensed they would still represent a large portion of the book. Carson told Rodell she was “in a daze.” A month later, Carson wrote to Rodell that she was going into the hospital for a few days.

  Despite her eager participation in intramural field hockey during her college days, as an adult Carson always struck people as slight, bordering on frail. She suffered occasional illnesses, but this sounded more ominous. Carson was going to have a “small cyst or tumor” removed from her left breast. She tried to reassure Rodell—not entirely convincingly—that the surgery was minor. But the chance that it could turn out otherwise caused Carson to deliberate carefully on a surgeon:

  “The operation will probably turn out to be so trivial that any dope could do it,” she told Rodell, “but of course there is, in such cases, always the possibility that a much more drastic procedure will prove necessary. They tell me the present method is to section the tissue while the patient is still under anesthesia, and if there is reason to do so, they go right ahead with a much more extensive operation. Hence the need for a surgeon with some judgment. In any event, I’ll be at Doctor’s Hospital, where a very dear friend is a nurse, and will be in excellent hands in that respect. I’m going to try to get it over with next week.”

  The surgery came off uneventfully and the mass removed from Carson’s breast was benign. Carson dashed off to the North Carolina shore for a short and needed vacation. The ocean was wild, as it was “blowing a gale,” she told Rodell.

  Carson’s correspondence from this time shows a subtle change coming over her. She still signed her letters “Ray,” but there was a new insistence in them. Carson was determined that her second book would not end up like the first, and despite the waves of good news enveloping The Sea Around Us, she continued to micromanage every phase of its prepublication life—while worrying endlessly about future projects and income. Carson was impatient with Oxford for not yet having the book in galleys so it could be considered by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Rodell reminded her that Oxford had accommodated a delay in the book’s publication schedule in order to let the New Yorker bring out its excerpts. In addition to the Fuertes book, which was, for the time being, still on the table, Carson was planning the seashore guide for Houghton Mifflin, plus a book of essays for Oxford. She recklessly told Rodell she thought she could work on all three projects at the same time. In October 1950, Carson—who’d gotten a $900 advance from Houghton Mifflin—applied for a $3,000 Guggenheim Fellowship to help finance the travel she’d need to undertake for the seashore book, enlisting support from her ever-widening network of expert mentors.

  Carson was never shy about mentioning awards she received, and she put in for them and collected them avidly. One of the references she listed on her Guggenheim application was William Beebe. Beebe told her he couldn’t understand why she needed a fellowship, given that she enjoyed so much success selling chapters of The Sea Around Us, but said he was flattered that she thought his name would help her chances. Then in early December 1950, Carson learned that “The Birth of an Island” in the Yale Review had won the AAAS–George Westinghouse award for science writing. Established in 1946 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with funding from the Westinghouse Educational Foundation, the award carried a prize of $1,000. Riding this whirlwind of attention, Carson mentioned to Rodell that she was thinking of turning The Sea Around Us into a documentary film—admitting that Rodell would probably think her “utterly mad” for having such an idea.

  There were strains at the FWS. Carson had been promoted to editor in chief of the Division of Information and now earned $6,400 a year. Her colleague Kay Howe had been chosen to do the illustrations for The Sea Around Us, but now it seemed they might be on the move. Rumors were circulating that FWS was going to be relocated. Cities on the list as potential destinations included Kansas City, Denver, and Albuquerque. Carson hated this prospect and warned Rodell that such a move could make it nearly impossible to carry on her work on the seashore book, as any of those places were far away from the ocean and from her publishers and agent. She said she’d fight to keep “her unit” in Washington so as not to risk a dislocation that would be “utterly destructive of everything worthwhile I might be doing.”

  March 1951 brought mixed news. Staples Press, a London publishing house, was going to bring out a British edition of The Sea Around Us. Carson also learned she’d received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, a happy development that was partially offset when the Book-of-the-Month Club chose General Omar Bradley’s Soldier’s Story over The Sea Around Us as a main selection. Carson’s book would be an alternate. Astonishingly, Vogue magazine bought the chapter on ocean currents that Reader’s Digest had turned down.

  In April, Carson got her first advance copies of The Sea Around Us. She and Rodell were disappointed in the binding, which was
so flimsy that the books began falling apart with the slightest handling. While the first printing was under way, Oxford agreed to rebind all the copies still on hand and to use the improved binding on all copies going forward. In May, William Shawn sent Rodell a check from the New Yorker for $5,200, along with a note: “We are delighted about publishing this. Thank you for sending us that original chapter, on Waves, and starting us off on the whole happy venture.” Rodell deducted her 10 percent and forwarded Carson the balance. The next month, Carson applied for a year’s leave without pay from the FWS. By midsummer she would be contemplating never returning to government work. She told Rodell she believed The Sea Around Us could do well enough to carry her for a few years. “If I’m not solidly established as a full time writer by that time I ought to be shot anyway,” Carson said.

  The ten chapters from The Sea Around Us appeared in consecutive issues of the New Yorker on June 2, 9, and 16, 1951, under the headline “The Sea: Unforgotten World.” Tantalizingly, the pieces ran as a “Profile.” New Yorker profiles were legendary but had never before been about something other than a person. The challenge to the magazine’s readers to think of the sea as a living entity matched the enticing New Yorker format, in which a long article began on a full page and then wended its way, never jumping to the back of the magazine but always just continuing on in long, single columns of type that ran through and alongside one captivating ad after another. The opening article came to an end midway down page 59, next to an ad for a product that you could evidently take anywhere and forever: Amelia Earhart luggage.