On a Farther Shore (19 page)

Heyerdahl, civil but again testy, reminded Carson that his book about the voyage—titled simply
Kon-Tiki
—was already out in six languages and was being translated into seven more. All of his important observations, he said, were in the book. In the meantime, he faced another deadline for a second book about his ethnographic theory of Polynesian settlement and was too busy to give her a detailed answer. He said, however, that he felt pretty sure that the deep scattering layer was not squid, or certainly not mainly so. It was true that shoals of squid sometimes launched themselves out of the ocean like flying fish, and had on occasion “bombarded” the raft. But this happened both at night and in the daytime. At night, they had observed a diverse assortment of marine life around
Kon-Tiki
, including luminous plankton and tiny copepods—but also larger fish. One night, they saw the phosphorescent trails of three large bodies passing below them that appeared to be longer than the raft. Heyerdahl said he didn’t think of himself as an expert, but he was inclined to believe that the scattering layer was mostly plankton. In the end Carson decided to leave the exact composition of the deep scattering layer an open question.

Carson had meanwhile signed on with an agent. She talked with several before settling on Marie Rodell, an editor and mystery writer who was just launching a literary agency in New York. Carson sent Rodell a chapter about the formation of an island that she’d already written for “Return to the Sea,” as she was calling the new book. Rodell sent it around to several magazine editors, hoping to sell parts of the book as Carson completed them. Rodell also shopped
Under the Sea-Wind
to book publishers for a possible reissue. But nothing happened on either front.

Undaunted, Carson sent Rodell several copies of
Under the Sea-Wind
, along with a note wondering if she should personally inscribe one for Rodell. “When you have made me rich and famous,” Carson joked, “it might be nice to have.”

B
y February 1949, Carson had finished two more chapters of “Return to the Sea” and told Rodell she had another two “reasonably well in mind.” It’s hard to know if this was true—Carson tended to exaggerate her progress and underestimate the time she’d need to complete new material. But she was immersed in work on the book.
A month later she told Rodell that she’d written less than she’d hoped to, though in revising one of the completed chapters she had so enlarged it that it could now be split in two.

In April, Rodell—working hard for one of her first clients—discussed the book with the editor in chief of Oxford University Press in New York, who expressed interest.
By May she was in serious discussions with Oxford. Carson wanted an advance of $1,000 on signing a contract. Oxford preferred to split that into two payments of $500, one at signing and the other later.
On June 3, 1949, Oxford sent Rodell the contract for “Return to the Sea,” along with a request that they be allowed to read each chapter as it was finished.
Carson resisted this, telling Rodell she wanted to revise the chapters with her
alone and show them to Oxford only after a final polishing.
Meanwhile, Carson made plans for a helmet-diving trip in Florida in July.

Shirley Briggs accompanied Carson on this adventure, which could only be described as a failure, though it would be transformed into a mythological feature of Carson’s biography. Carson and Briggs arrived in Miami at the same time as a stretch of bad weather. They went out several times, only to be turned back by rough seas and murky water. Carson thought the storm clouds made the many small barrier islands look “lonely and melancholy.” Between these unsuccessful excursions, Carson and Briggs amused themselves by wading in the surf and enjoying dinner at Howard Johnson’s.

Carson finally got to climb into the water in a protected area of Biscayne Bay that was about eight feet deep. She was surprised by the sudden lightness of the eighty-four-pound helmet once she went under the surface. Carson descended on a ladder that nearly touched the bottom and spent a few minutes gazing out of her rapidly fogging faceplate. This surely took a large measure of courage for the swimming-challenged Carson, who said her anxiety was increased by the disconcerting whooshing sounds of the pump as it sent air down the line and into her helmet. A strong current was running and Carson had been warned not to stray from the boat. So she clung to the ladder, feet firmly planted in a bed of seaweed. She saw a few brightly colored fish and climbed back up.

Carson carefully recorded her impressions of being underwater in a small, blue Collegiate notebook.
She also unself-consciously wrote to William Beebe—a man who’d walked over miles of ocean reef and ridden the bathysphere a half mile down into the abyss—with a full accounting of what she referred to as her “diving experiences.” She said that the difference between having dived and not having dived was “tremendous.” In fact, she said, the whole world now seemed different to her.

A couple of weeks later Carson was off again, this time with Marie Rodell to join another collecting cruise aboard the
Albatross
III
. On July 27, 1949, the two women boarded the ship at Woods Hole, bound for a two-week fish-census trip to the Georges Bank. Carson later remarked that few women had been out on such a vessel and that probably fewer still had ever visited the Georges Bank fishing grounds.

It was a hot morning. Rodell thought the
Albatross III
looked “small and uninviting” as it lay alongside the wharf. The crew warned them—in Carson’s case unnecessarily, as this was her second time aboard—that the narrow ship was notorious for its heavy roll in any kind of sea. Rodell said the ship’s sideways heaving through the waves was hard to describe, but it seemed they corkscrewed along in a “figure eight,” with a pause midway around. On the second day the weather turned cold and windy. Rodell and Carson sat in the wheelhouse and watched the sonar tracing the ocean bottom. Carson found this thrilling, especially when the
Albatross III
, after traveling for hours above areas of level sea floor, at last passed over the sheer canyon walls that outline the Georges Bank, and the bottom fell away sharply into the abyss. The dredging hauls—a deafening clank and grind of winches and cables—were mostly disappointing, with only a few unremarkable fish coming up in the nets. The crew tagged some flounder and haddock. One day they saw a couple of sharks and a school of dolphins. They had several days of fog.

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: