On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  Early in 1840, during the British Antarctic Expedition, the first accurate abysmal soundings were made using a specially designed line attached to a seventy-six-pound weight. By observing the rate of the line’s descent, it was possible to determine when the free-falling weight reached the bottom, even though the line then continued paying out on its own at a slower rate. The first of a series of measurements in the South Atlantic indicated a depth of 2,425 fathoms, or 14,550 feet—more than a third of a mile deeper than the 12,500 feet that was later found to be the mean depth of the ocean.

  With advanced soundings came attempts to pick up samples of the ocean bottom. Nets and dredges were also used to collect sea life from various depths. In the mid-1800s it was proposed that, owing to the enormous pressure and absence of light, life could not exist at depths greater than 300 fathoms. But this was soon disproven—spectacularly in 1860 when a telegraph cable lying on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea broke at a depth of 1,200 fathoms, or 7,200 feet down. When the cable was brought to the surface for repair live corals were found growing on it where it had parted, and a great assortment of other sea creatures clung to the cable along sections that had been in shallower water.

  The picture of the world’s oceans as deep and teeming with life was brought into clearer focus in the 1870s during one of the greatest scientific ventures ever undertaken: the four-year, around-the-world exploration cruise of the HMS Challenger. Sponsored by the Royal Society and the British Admiralty, the Challenger expedition was the first-ever true “oceanographic” voyage, a term that was actually invented for the enterprise. Challenger, a two-hundred-foot naval corvette powered by both sail and steam, with most of her guns removed and replaced by laboratories and storage areas, sailed from Portsmouth in December 1872. She carried a crew of 264 officers and men, plus six scientists. By the time she returned to England in the spring of 1876, Challenger had traveled nearly seventy thousand miles across the world’s oceans, made hundreds of deep soundings, taken countless readings of currents, temperatures, and water chemistry, and amassed an extensive collection of bottom samples from the oozes and clays of the abyss.

  Along the way, Challenger biologists discovered close to five thousand new species of marine life. The full published account of the Challenger expedition eventually ran to fifty volumes, a work that would remain a standard oceanographic reference. On March 23, 1875, as she rode the Pacific swell near Guam in the Mariana Islands, Challenger recorded the deepest sounding in the course of her voyage—almost 4,500 fathoms, about 27,000 feet. The “Challenger Deep,” as this place was named, was later learned to be a section of the sea floor within the frigid darkness of the Mariana Trench, not far from its deepest point of more than 35,000 feet—the deepest place in all of the world’s oceans.

  By the time Rachel Carson endeavored to describe the world beneath the waves to the readers of the Atlantic Monthly, the topography of the ocean bottom was being mapped using an innovation called sonar, an echo-sounding device that was initially developed to help ships detect icebergs after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Sonar further revealed the vast plains and spectacular deeps, the jagged mountains and sheer valleys of the sea floor. Much of the bottom in the deep ocean is covered by a thick biologic ooze made up of the remains of trillions upon trillions of dead planktonic organisms.

  Here, as Carson described it, is a place that is forever changing, renewed in perpetuity by the endless cycling of life and death and rebirth—and yet at the same time a region that is in a sense changeless: “In the silent deeps a glacial cold prevails, a bleak iciness which never varies, summer or winter, years melting into centuries, and centuries into ages of geologic time. There, too, darkness reigns—the blackness of primeval night in which the ocean came into being, unbroken, through aeons of succeeding time, by the gray light of dawn.”

  Carson closed the essay on a thought she’d had back in her lab at Johns Hopkins about the eternal nature of living matter—the blending and polymerization of atoms into the macromolecules that are exchanged and reused from one generation to the next in a majestic symphony of synthesis and decomposition and resynthesis:

  Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality. Kindred forces to those which, in some period inconceivably remote, gave birth to that primeval bit of protoplasm tossing on the ancient seas continue their mighty and incomprehensible work. Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears, not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.

  A writer cannot have better luck than to publish something both good and unexpected. “Undersea” was unlike anything Carson had previously written, and different from what the readers of the Atlantic were used to seeing in its pages. The piece caught the attention of an author named Hendrik van Loon. Van Loon, whose book The Story of Mankind had won the first Newbery Medal in 1922, was a Dutch-born writer of literature and history for children and young adults. He’d immigrated to the United States during World War I and, after working with several publishers, settled with Simon and Schuster. Van Loon conveyed his enthusiasm for “Undersea” to Simon and Schuster editor Quincy Howe. Howe wrote to Carson asking if she had ever considered writing a book. Carson, elated but unsure of herself, replied that she had no concrete plans at the moment—though she apparently offered some general thoughts about a book that Howe described to van Loon as “nebulous.” Carson also indicated she’d be eager to consider any ideas that Howe and van Loon might have for her. Howe replied that he’d discuss this with van Loon.

  While the September issue of the Atlantic was still on newsstands, van Loon wrote to Carson. His letter, posted from Grand Central Station in New York, arrived in an envelope on which van Loon—who illustrated his own books—had drawn a spouting whale cruising on a placid sea that appeared to be alive with sharks. Van Loon proved to be a quirky, jovial correspondent. He wrote out dates in Roman numerals, decorated his letters with small sketches, and composed his thoughts in a private syntax that was hilarious when he used a typewriter and that bordered on incomprehensible when he wrote in longhand. In his first letter to Carson, van Loon—who was in his midfifties—said he’d been curious about the sea since reading Jules Verne “sixty years ago,” and that it was apparent to him that she was “the woman … or words to that effect” who could answer his questions.

  Van Loon confessed that he was responsible for bringing her to the attention of Simon and Schuster and hoped she’d deliver them a fine book, as “the better they do with other people’s books, the more they can afford to lose on mine.” He proposed that Carson should take the train up to Connecticut to visit him at his home in Old Greenwich, where he would introduce her to Quincy Howe. He said he was sure the Bureau of Fisheries would give her time off for such a meeting, as the prospect of a book deal would “bring glory” to the department. Van Loon ended this generous note saying he was at Carson’s service and that “Undersea” was a “swell article.”

  Through the fall, van Loon continued to press Carson to come to Connecticut. Carson, feeling unprepared, demurred, saying she was still engaged in a “preliminary browsing in the literature” to come up with ideas. In December 1937, van Loon told her the tides were such that she could go clamming three times daily—as long as she wouldn’t expect him to eat any of them. Carson, furiously working to make her vague notion of a book coalesce into something definite, waited until after the holidays and finally went north in mid-January—where the full meaning of having been discovered settled on her. Van Loon—a great man, she realized—had opened a door into the refined and wonderful world of publishing, an exclusive club she longed to join. The author, as she now could not help but think of herself, walked boldly in. From that moment on, Carson belonged to something “exciting and fabulous.”

  By February 1938, Carson and Howe were in general agreement about a book that would describe life in the
sea from the viewpoint of the creatures of the ocean. Explaining her plan to van Loon, Carson said she didn’t want any human voice or insight in the narrative and that if any people appeared in the story they would be shown as a fish would perceive them—as predators and threats. Nor would she invent a plot as such. The story would emerge from the everyday lives and natural histories of her sea-dwelling protagonists, which she described as “always strange and sometimes incredible.” These she would choose and divide into groups so as to capture the different habitats of the living ocean, from shoreline to the abyss. Carson said she now felt sure this was the right plan for the book and that she, in fact, had a specific narrative model in mind. Having thought long and hard, she said, she was convinced that the right thing to do would be something “in the manner of Henry Williamson’s salmon book.”

  A delighted van Loon wrote back to say that he could not have come up with a better concept himself. Sensing that Carson was embarked on a special journey and yet in need of reassurance, he told her to seize her destiny confidently, as there were great things in her future.

  “You have the ability,” van Loon wrote. “You have started. And you are going to go to those places you want to go.”

  Carson hoped to replace the income she would at least temporarily forgo from writing newspaper pieces by selling chapters from her book in progress to the Atlantic, whose editors were initially receptive to the idea of a serialization. But when she sent a sample, the magazine’s editors changed their mind, telling Carson that they were publishing a series of articles by the nature writer Donald Culross Peattie and that his work and hers were too similar for the Atlantic to do both. Carson and the editors discussed the possibility of using excerpts from her book at a later time, but this never came to pass.

  Meanwhile, she wrote some book reviews for the Atlantic, earning fifteen dollars that spring for a piece on Maritime Fishes of the Pacific Coast. In April 1938, Carson implored the Atlantic to let her review Goodbye, West Country, the latest book by Henry Williamson. The magazine declined. Williamson’s American publisher was the Atlantic Press, and the magazine tried to avoid the appearance of promoting its own authors. Plus, the book had been out for several months and sales were disappointing. But a month later they relented, and Carson was offered a short double review of Goodbye, West Country and Llewelyn Powys’s tubercular memoir of life in Dorset, Earth Memories. Carson’s letter to the magazine about the Williamson book was nearly as long as the review that eventually ran the following December and revealed the depth of her admiration for the English writer:

  I have been more impressed with Mr. Williamson’s Tarka and Salar than any other pieces of nature writing that I can recall. The keen beauty of his prose is something anyone might envy. The first pages of Salar give me the feeling of the strange ocean world better than all 800 pages of that oceanographer’s bible, The Depths of the Ocean—rank heresy on my part! But I can think of no one who has comparable powers of recreating the atmosphere of the aquatic world that moves through his books. I also admire his powers of observation, his sympathetic but never sentimental understanding of the creatures of which he writes, and his generally sound interpretation of what he sees. Goodbye, West Country is full of charming pages in itself and has made the otter and salmon books take on new meaning for me through its revelation of so much of their background.

  In 1936, feeling dispirited with his life in Devonshire, Williamson had bought a farm on the other side of England, near the Norfolk coast on the North Sea. He spent the year improving the property and readying himself to become a farmer. Goodbye, West Country was a diarylike record of his final months in Devonshire and, as Carson said in her letter offering to review it, Williamson’s daily comings and goings made pleasant reading. One day, not feeling like working, he’d gone down to the Bray with his fly rod and, after creeping to river’s edge on hands and knees, hooked a magnificent nine-pound salmon. The great fish led him on a struggle upstream and down that produced a thrilling interlude over several pages in Goodbye, West Country:

  When most of the line was out, I knew I’d have to go into the water, else the trees and bushes on the bank below would make it a tug of war, when the weight of the fish with the current would break the gut immediately. I went into the river, hoping I wouldn’t slip over in my nailed shoes as I waded downstream, water to my armpits. The bottom was uneven, sometimes gravel and then abruptly a pit through which I floundered half swimming, feeling this was the life.

  A photograph of Williamson’s eventual triumph over the fish was taken against the wall of Shallowford cottage. In it Williamson stands erect and sober, dressed in a coat and tie with woolen knickers, a fly rod in his right hand. His left, balled into a fist and held near his waist, hoists the giant fish by the tail, its nose nearly touching Williamson’s shoe.

  Carson’s review of Goodbye, West Country, just three paragraphs long, took notice only of Williamson’s close observations of nature, and she found in these a kindred spirit. As he had done in Tarka and Salar, books that Carson declared were at the “front rank of nature literature,” Williamson showed his keen appreciation for the endless cycle of life and death and rebirth that animates the natural world. Carson felt that Williamson perceived the “whole life” of a creature he beheld even for a moment. She wrote that he was the sort of “sensitive person” who is simultaneously saddened by the mortality of all living things and yet keenly aware that this is nature’s way.

  These were themes that resonated with Carson and that she may have been alone in detecting as an essential feature of Williamson’s journal of a country year. Whether Goodbye, West Country was a book mainly about nature was debatable. In fairness, the space for her review was so short that the list of things she had to leave out would have been long. And, just as the Atlantic did not want to be in the business of hyping one of its authors, neither would the magazine have likely run a thoroughly critical review. Short and favorable were the requirements, and Carson’s desire to emphasize what she liked best about the book was understandable. But as anyone who read Goodbye, West Country would have noticed, Carson’s review omitted even a mention of a long, detailed, and important section of the book—Williamson’s enthusiastic recollection of his visit to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1935, a revealing account that unfolded over the course of some thirty pages and that emphasized Williamson’s admiration for Hitler.

  There are friendly allusions to Hitler and Germany elsewhere in Goodbye, West Country, and in one of these passages Williamson recalls with annoyance the response he’d gotten from the editor of an American literary journal after Williamson had written him a letter suggesting that people fearful of Germany had it all wrong: “ ‘I am all with you when it comes to salmon and otter,’ the editor wrote back, ‘but violently opposed to your ideas of the great Mr. Hitler. He seems to me a disease of the times.’ ”

  Why Carson didn’t say something along those lines in her review is puzzling. Perhaps she read Goodbye, West Country as she had Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” back at PCW—blind to its darker meanings. Maybe she was simply uninterested in Williamson’s thoughts about Europe and whether it was to be peace or war with Germany. Although she was happy enough working inside Roosevelt’s New Deal administration and later in life hinted that she was a Democrat, Carson seems to have been at heart apolitical.

  But evidence of Hitler’s menace had been accruing for years, and while Americans were slow to realize what was happening in Germany under the Nazis, by 1938 when she reviewed Goodbye, West Country, Carson could not have been unaware that Williamson’s politics were extreme. As early as 1933, in a review of Houghton Mifflin’s American edition of Mein Kampf—a book everyone was curious about—the New York Times had suggested that the “Aryan” leader of Germany was a menace to other states in Europe and that fascism had evil “implications for the Jewish race.” Throughout the 1930s, the news from Germany had grown steadily more alarming. In the summer of 1935, as Henry Williamson was finishing Sala
r the Salmon at Shallowford cottage, Jews were being harassed by Nazi storm troopers in Berlin, and at the Nuremberg rally Williamson attended that fall Hitler had announced new laws rescinding German citizenship for Jews, placing restrictions on where Jews could live and work, and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and gentiles.

  By 1938, Hitler had annexed Austria; within months he would invade Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Britain and France would declare war on Germany. In December 1938, the month Carson’s review appeared in the Atlantic, a sharp diplomatic dispute arose over Germany’s formal protest of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’s public criticism of Hitler’s regime in a speech he’d given in Cleveland. The papers in Germany spewed criticism of Ickes—they labeled him a gangster—and hinted at an imminent break in relations between the two countries. Two years later, Rachel Carson would be working for Ickes.

  Carson may or may not have been aware that Henry Williamson had joined the British Union of Fascists in the fall of 1937—though it seems likely that the Atlantic Press, his American publishers, would have known as much. It’s also unclear whether Carson understood how Williamson’s nature writing and his interest in farming and rural life fit into a mythical narrative embraced by the Nazis in Germany, where so-called blood-and-soil literature celebrated racial purity and a working life close to the land. Writers in Germany were required to be members of the Reich Chamber of Literature, which exercised broad censorship powers through various subagencies. The blacklisting of “modern” and Jewish authors, along with public book burnings, were among the first official acts of the Nazis after Hitler came into power in 1933. Under National Socialism, German literature was expected to emphasize—as propaganda minister Goebbels put it—a “steely romanticism.” This produced a steady supply of unimaginative novels portraying the sturdy rewards of rural life that were thought to be the pillars of Germany’s renewal under Hitler—and which matched the führer’s more general belief that all artistic endeavors should be aimed at the common man. In 1937, Hitler had decreed that German artists could paint only works that were comprehensible to the average German.