On a Farther Shore (22 page)

Proving that everyone seemed to have fallen in love with Rachel Carson, Oliver Deane Hormel, the book editor for the
Christian Science Monitor
, offered a physical description of the suddenly prominent author, calling her “slight of figure, modest, unassuming.” Hormel said Carson had an “elfin quality about her” that contrasted with the “serenity of her serious, wide-set, intelligent eyes.”
Society columnist Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer, careening wider of the mark than she could have imagined, referred to Carson as Washington’s “newest glamour gal.”

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 question 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.