On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  In a short essay she wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, Carson tried to give her swelling legion of fans a more down-to-earth picture of herself. This time avoiding any claims for her ocean adventures, Carson explained that she was really just a dogged researcher who consumed so many technical reports and scientific articles that she sometimes questioned why she had tackled such a large and difficult subject. People are often curious about how writers work, and so Carson revealed a few things about the lonely, quiet hours that are an author’s lot.

  Admitting she was a slow writer who revised her work over and over, she said that she worked best late at night, and that when she’d had stretches of uninterrupted time to devote to the book she often wrote through the night nearly until dawn—and then slept during the day. It had taken her many years to learn to compose on the typewriter, and she still relied on longhand for difficult passages or when, for some reason, the words came more slowly than usual. Reading was a source of both inspiration and escape, she said, and some of her favorite sea stories included Melville’s Moby-Dick, Beston’s Outermost House, and a book about a voyage up the Amazon called The Sea and the Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson. Carson added that she always kept a copy of Thoreau’s Journal and a volume of Richard Jefferies’s nature essays by her bedside, reading a few pages from one or the other being a pleasant ritual before she went to sleep each day.

  She wanted everyone to know that she was, in the end, an ordinary person: “In minor ways I am a disappointment to my friends, who expect me to be completely nautical. I swim indifferently well, am only mildly enthusiastic about seafoods, and do not keep tropical fish as pets. Speaking of pets—my very closest non-human friends have been cats.”

  To be fair, Rachel Carson wasn’t the first writer to let the press make more of her than she was. And she also had to endure the opposite. Many reviewers expressed surprise that a woman had written a book like The Sea Around Us—the implication being that the rigors of science and the forbidding aspect of the ocean deeps should have made these subjects off limits to her. The Cleveland Plain Dealer referred to Carson as a “government girl,” calling to mind a woman in makeup and heels parked behind a typewriter in Washington. The Boston Post described her as both bold and feminine, as if these should be mutually exclusive. Perhaps, the Post speculated, she was a mermaid: “Apparently there are few photographs of Miss Carson anywhere on view, but we have worked this out. Rachel is probably no lady scientist at all, but an enchantress who lives in a cave under the sea, and there the light is awfully bad for pictures of authors.”

  It’s doubtful that many of these reviewers read the acknowledgments in The Sea Around Us, an extended thank-you note to the many experts and archivists who had helped her, revealing an author whose work was mostly carried out in libraries and by way of the U.S. Postal Service.

  Carson also heard from friends, colleagues, and an avalanche of readers. Among Carson’s fans were Alben Barkley, the vice president of the United States; Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; and one Thor Heyerdahl. Carson had been sure to see that Heyerdahl received a copy of The Sea Around Us, as she had managed to include what little information he’d given her in the book. Heyerdahl sent a postcard from London—there was a picture of Kon-Tiki on the front—telling Carson her book was wonderful. “I am in the midst of writing an ethnographic work,” Heyerdahl said, “but could not drop your book when I picked it up.” Carson also got a generous note from her former editor Quincy Howe, who’d left Simon and Schuster to teach at the University of Illinois. Howe said how delighted he was with the success of The Sea Around Us and that he was sure Hendrik van Loon, who’d died in 1944, would have felt the same. She was, Howe told Carson, their greatest discovery.

  A few letter writers offered gentle corrections to a handful of mistakes in The Sea Around Us. Carson had gotten the term “lee shore” wrong, confusing it with a windward shore that is sheltered from the weather. A number of people—perhaps wondering just how much seagoing experience Carson really had—wrote to point this out. Carson had also been unaware of the peculiar geography of Panama by which the Pacific end of the Panama Canal actually lies east of the Atlantic end. Someone caught that, too. One letter that probably impressed itself on Carson’s memory came from a man named R. M. Much, who informed her that salmon no longer migrated into either the Androscoggin or Kennebec rivers. Anybody dining in a restaurant on what the menu claimed to be “Kennebec salmon” was being cheated, he said. Much speculated on what might be a contributing cause of this disappearance. “May I also point out,” Much wrote, “that the Androscoggin is lined with mills which pour their chemicals profusely … and have for almost a hundred years. Salmon cannot take that kind of diet.”

  Mostly, though, people wrote to say how much they enjoyed The Sea Around Us and how they shared Carson’s affection for the ocean. Some sent her poems they’d written about the sea. Others invited her to stay with them at their beach homes. A number of them asked for her autograph and a photo. A man named Alfred Glassel of Houston, Texas, wrote to tell Carson that while fishing off of South America he’d recently caught “the first legal 1,000 lb. game fish.” Apparently, he just thought she’d want to know. Glassel enclosed an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of the huge black marlin hung up on the dock at Cabo Blanco, Peru, as he stood alongside his catch looking jaunty.

  Even Marie Rodell was suddenly the object of public affection. “Why just the other night a man called me up at my apartment and asked me if it was true that I was Miss Carson’s agent,” Rodell said to a reporter at one of Carson’s book signings. “I said I was and he started talking about the book. He went on and on and at last I asked him exactly what he wanted. He said he just wanted me to tell Miss Carson her book was poetry. He was drunk I guess, but just the same I thought it was kind of sweet.”

  Carson’s attention to detail survived the crush of publicity. She had insisted that Oxford abandon its proposed use of a sans-serif typeface for chapter headings, as she thought this was too textbookish. Sensing that a large readership for The Sea Around Us was ahead, Carson and Rodell were angry with Oxford over the more serious matter of limited first printings that had caused shortages and out-of-stock periods at many bookstores. Not so believably, Oxford pleaded that although they always knew The Sea Around Us would be a bestseller, they’d been so overwhelmed with orders that it was as if they were “caught in an undertow.” The publisher said their main problem was just buying enough paper to meet the demand.

  The thought that anyone might want to buy her book and be unable to find a copy was vexing to Carson—though she complained even more bitterly to Oxford about what she considered its minimal advertising for The Sea Around Us. Carson kept a close count of ads that ran in papers such as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. She told Oxford if there was one thing she hated it was opening up a literary supplement and finding ads for competing books and none for her own. She also continued to harp on the binding, which even after being upgraded still tended to show wear with even light use.

  The Sea Around Us made the New York Times bestseller list on July 22, 1951—coming in at number five. It was still at number five a week later, trailing Omar Bradley’s Soldier’s Story and Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, which was a fixture at number one. It was a good time for books. On the fiction list were Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and a brisk, biting novel featuring a wise-cracking teenaged antihero named Holden Caulfield—J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. But as the summer moved on, The Sea Around Us began climbing. In mid-August it was at number two, right behind Kon-Tiki, and by early September the order was reversed. The Sea Around Us would remain at number one for the rest of the year and far into the next, setting new records for the most consecutive weeks atop the list.

  In November 1951, as sales of The Sea Around Us passed one hundred thousand, Oxford told Carson it was eager to reissue Under the Sea-Wind as a featured book the following spring. There was some qu
estion whether this would fulfill Carson’s contractual obligation concerning Oxford’s option on her next book. Oxford in the end decided that, rather than enforce its option with Carson, they would simply let Carson and Rodell decide whether to offer another book to them—and would trust that they would be so disposed. In December, Rodell sold Life magazine rights to a condensation of Under the Sea-Wind, which the magazine planned to illustrate with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White.

  On April 20, 1952, The Sea Around Us finally dropped back to number two on the New York Times bestseller list—and Under the Sea-Wind, which had gone into a second printing with Oxford even before publication, joined the list at number ten a week later. Sales of The Sea Around Us passed two hundred thousand. Carson now had two of the ten bestselling nonfiction books in America, and wild rumors surrounded her work. One was that more than a dozen publishing houses had turned down The Sea Around Us and that Oxford University Press had considered it a long shot when they took a chance on the book. Another was that the original manuscript had been a staggering two hundred thousand words long. In fact, Carson had cut only a single chapter—it was about commercial fishing—from the book. Still another claim, probably the only one that Carson might have wished were true, was that Simon and Schuster had discovered a third, previously unknown book by Carson in its warehouse. Rodell did her best to set the record straight.

  No matter how well either book did, Carson was always convinced it could have been better. Both she and Rodell thought that Oxford had again skimped on advertising—Rodell complained there was little or none through the summer following publication—and that this caused Under the Sea-Wind to slip on the bestseller lists prematurely. Oxford’s initial advertising schedule for the book had actually been generous, with buys in forty-five daily newspapers from one end of the country to the other, including full-page ads in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune. That winter, the Book-of-the-Month Club picked Under the Sea-Wind as an alternate selection for June.

  In letters to Rodell that were often whiny and interlaced with vague suspicions, Carson said she was skeptical of Oxford’s sales figures—which seemed too low for books that were bestsellers. Carson and Rodell also quarreled over what Rodell described as her client’s “constant refusal” to make public appearances at cocktail parties and book signings. Carson, writing back to Rodell from Maine in longhand while sitting under a hair dryer, said she understood why her publisher and her agent wanted her to do more of this but insisted it would be shortsighted, as her work could go forward only if she could maintain her life as it had been before The Sea Around Us.

  Carson was feeling the downside of the fame that she craved and now seemingly could not avoid. Oxford received a steady influx of requests for interviews with Carson, as well as invitations for her to speak. She so routinely said no to these inquiries that the publicity department got in the habit of turning them down for her. The previous October, Carson had spent a strange afternoon in New York, as one of the speakers at a Book and Author Luncheon at the Astor Hotel. The event was sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune and the American Booksellers Association. Also on the dais were James G. McDonald, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Jimmy Durante, who was the subject of a new biography, Schnozzola.

  During her speech, Carson played audio recordings of shrimp and other marine life. When it was Durante’s turn, after hearing talks on international diplomacy and the wonders of oceanography, he pulled his prepared speech from his pocket, tore it up, and declared: “Watsa use?” After a couple of ad-libbed reminiscences, Durante played the piano a little and then demonstrated the art of “cake walking,” a prancing dance step that had origins on plantations in the American South.

  Carson had been involved in every aspect of the prepublication plans for The Sea Around Us, sending Oxford the names of institutions and important persons who were to get advance copies, and even longer lists of review media that needed to see the book. Early in the process—in fact, just about the time she was submitting the manuscript in the summer of 1950—Carson had campaigned to have Oxford submit The Sea Around Us for the John Burroughs Medal, an award given annually to the best book about natural history. In April 1952, Carson found out that she’d won the Burroughs Medal.

  As splendid as this news was, it came at the end of a season of accolades—the biggest of which was the National Book Award, which she learned she’d won in early January. Although she misplaced the original letter from Oxford informing her of the prize, a whirlwind of planning for the presentation took place over the next several weeks as there was a heavy schedule of interviews and receptions connected with Carson’s visit to New York. The award ceremony was held at the Hotel Commodore. At the head table with Carson were the poet Marianne Moore, who’d won for Collected Poems and who looked tiny under an enormous tricornered hat, and James Jones, who’d won the fiction award for From Here to Eternity. Jones was widely rumored to have been a compromise winner after the judges could not decide between The Caine Mutiny and The Catcher in the Rye. The women wore corsages. Jones, dressed in a light-colored suit that made him appear even larger than he was, looked like he wanted to slug somebody.

  In her acceptance speech, Carson said that an author’s “real education” begins on publication day, when you learn how people react to what you have to say. She said she had been struck by the number of readers who were surprised by the popular success of The Sea Around Us even though it had a lot of science in it. This didn’t seem right to her—Carson said science was not a realm unto itself, and anyway, science and literature had the same aim, which is to “discover and illuminate truth.”

  We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally.

  Carson added a cautionary note that seemed apt in a world inclined to war in a nuclear age. She said that by studying the natural world and seeing it in the context of a history billions of years long, human follies came into perspective. “Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas,” she said, “we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction.”

  It was a good time. RKO, the movie company, began work on a documentary based on The Sea Around Us—an unexpected fulfillment of Carson’s earlier speculation that such a film could be made. It was to be written and directed by Irwin Allen, who would one day become famous as the “Master of Disaster” for films such as The Towering Inferno. Carson tried to be helpful to the project, searching for existing film footage and correcting Allen’s script, which she disliked enough that she threatened to remove her name from the film. When Carson saw a first cut of the movie in January 1953, she was shocked that many of the factual errors she had pointed out in the script had nonetheless ended up in the movie. Oxford complained to RKO, and Marie Rodell complained to Oxford, mentioning the possibility of a lawsuit. In February, Allen and Carson met in New York to resolve their differences and, based on changes Allen agreed to make to the film, Carson withdrew her objections.

  The finished film—though wildly uneven—was a colorful and entertaining look at the marine environment. Allen got the story started off on an inept biblical note by commingling Carson’s explanation of the origins of the earth with her allusion to Genesis. Much of the movie appeared to have been filmed in the big aquarium at Marineland in Florida, though there were also pretty sequences shot underwater on coral reefs and others showing the surf crashing on spectacular coastlines. Some scenes—including a “fight” between a shark and an octopus and another in which a snorkel diver slashed open the belly of a small, harmless shark—
were staged and must have distressed Carson, as they suggested the ocean was a dark, menacing place. But Allen didn’t have to supply any artifice for the film’s most grisly segment, the bloody harpooning of a large baleen whale by a commercial whaling vessel. The movie ended scarily with scenes—some real and some fake—of icebergs calving off Arctic glaciers. The voice-over offered the disturbing thought, made to seem far more immediate than Carson had explained in the book, that the earth was warming and the seas were rising and perhaps would not stop before inundating much of human civilization.

  When Oxford proposed a new printing of The Sea Around Us with a dust jacket adapted from the film, Carson said absolutely not, as it would “cheapen and misrepresent” the book. Allen’s film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Carson always hated it, and she likely regretted a missed opportunity to have worked with someone else. In March 1952, Marie Rodell had met with a young French marine researcher named Jacques Cousteau, who expressed interest in collaborating with Carson on a movie about the sea. Cousteau said he was about to embark on a long ocean expedition aboard his ship Calypso. Rodell thought this sounded interesting, and she found Cousteau charming. But she declined on Carson’s behalf because she’d also heard that Cousteau’s recent invention—the Aqua-Lung—was “no good.”

  In the spring of 1952, Carson got away to Key West to work on the seashore book and to escape the unceasing requests for her time. She told Oxford that she’d have little room for promotional work in the coming months, as she was planning a research trip to Woods Hole and a vacation in Maine. Still on leave from U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Carson had decided she would not return. On her resignation, which took effect in June, Carson gave as her reason for quitting “to devote my time to writing.”