For Carson, one of Dorothy’s most endearing traits was her love of literature. Carson was eager to share the work of her favorite writers with Dorothy, and one of the first she brought up was Richard Jefferies. Carson admitted that Jefferies was an “uneven” writer and said that because he was also prolific it would be easy to go astray by picking up the “wrong” volume of his work. She said she had always loved the essay collection Jefferies’ England and suggested Dorothy try to find it at the library. If it wasn’t there, Dorothy could borrow her copy.
Carson wanted Dorothy to like Jefferies because she considered him her “literary grandfather,” and she outlined for Dorothy his place on the family tree of her work. “I am sure that my own style and thought were deeply influenced, in certain critical years, by Henry Williamson, whose Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are, I’m convinced, nature writing of the highest order. And Williamson has said that he owes the same sort of debt to Jefferies.”
Cryptically, Carson added that Dorothy could expect another letter soon, as there was something Carson just had to tell her.
By their own estimate, Carson and Dorothy had been in each other’s company for a little over six hours that first summer at Southport Island. Now, after exchanging letters for a few months, the two women felt themselves in the grip of a mutual attraction that was thrilling and utterly surprising. In early December, Carson wrote to iron out the details of the Boston trip and to tell Dorothy how wonderful her latest letter had been. Carson had mentioned that she sometimes wrote to Dorothy long after midnight, and this had made Dorothy again feel she was imposing. Carson told her not to worry, as she was a “nocturnal creature” by nature. Dorothy had also wondered in her letter how different their lives might be had they not met as they did the preceding summer. Carson airily dismissed this question—it only reminded her that they did meet. She said she felt sure they would have done so one way or another, no matter what. And then she told Dorothy something that she had never told anybody else:
And, as you must know in your heart, there is such a simple answer for all the “whys” that are sprinkled through your letters: As why do I keep your letters? Why did I come to the Head that last night? Why? Because I love you! Now I could go on and tell you some of the reasons why I do, but that would take quite a while, and I think the simple fact covers everything.
Carson’s AAAS talk, at the grand old Mechanics Hall in Boston, went well. Having received a couple of honorary degrees after The Sea Around Us, Carson was listed on the program as “Dr. Rachel L. Carson.” To meet her audience on its own terms, Carson made a presentation that was more technical, more grounded in emerging science than in her popular writing. She discussed changes in the biotic populations of the seashore environment that were caused by a warm shift in the climate and perhaps subtler alterations in oceanic plant communities and the chemical composition of seawater. And she alluded to a novel concept that would gain traction in the coming years—the idea that life on earth is a continuing biological experiment in which we are both observers and participants:
The edge of the sea is a laboratory in which Nature itself is conducting experiments in the evolution of life and in the delicate balancing of the living creature within a complex system of forces, living and non-living. We have come a long way from the early days of the biology of the shore, when it was enough to find, to describe, and to name the plants and animals found there. We have progressed, also, beyond the next period, the dawn age of the science of ecology, when it was realized that certain kinds of animals are typical of certain kinds of habitats. Now our minds are occupied with tantalizing questions. “Why does an animal live where it does?” “What is the nature of the ties that bind it to its world?”
As Carson was leaving the hall after she finished, she was startled to find Dorothy waiting for her. Carson impulsively kissed her and whispered, “We didn’t plan it this way did we?” They went back to Carson’s room at the Sheraton Hotel and sat on the bed for a languorous hour smiling at each other, unsure what came next. On the way south from the city they stopped to watch some ducks swimming on a pond. As they sat in the car both women had the urge to say something that neither could bring herself to say. They did not know what was happening, but they did not resist. When Dorothy later took Carson upstairs for a short rest at their home in West Bridgewater, Carson called after her “Hurry back.”
Carson slept fitfully on the train later that night. She told Dorothy in a letter written on New Year’s Day 1954 that every time she had woken up on the way home she could feel the “sweet tenderness” of Dorothy’s presence. She said she felt sure Dorothy had sensed the same thing about her after she was gone. The two women would later remember this time together as the Thirteen Hours, when a “little oasis of peace” entered both their hearts. Carson said it had been “truly perfect.” So often, she said, reality was a disappointment when expectations were high—but it had not turned out to be so for the two of them. Carson told Dorothy there was not a single thing she would change about her, even if she could. She thought these lines from Keats—dear to so many romantics—described the way she felt:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams.
Now everything between Carson and Dorothy was understood. Although Carson would always address her envelopes to “Mrs. Stanley Freeman,” they began to call each other “Darling,” and professions of love filled their letters. Carson was already imagining their time together at West Southport come summer—and was unhappy whenever she remembered that Dorothy would have less time there than she would. Both women soon realized that the things they said to each other in their letters might meet disapproval from Stan or Carson’s mother, Maria—the “craziness” between them was something other people could only misunderstand. Given the endless stream of mail going back and forth, Carson thought it was going to be difficult to hide their correspondence or to somehow manage to occasionally share only a paragraph or two from a much longer letter. Carson said the subject didn’t require any further elaboration—she was sure that Dorothy knew what she meant.
Carson proposed that they start writing letters in two parts, one that was general and newsy and could be shared with family and friends, and a private one that would be for them alone. Eventually they began referring to these private inclusions—they usually came folded inside the general letter—as “apples.” Whenever there might be any doubt as to whether something should be kept between just the two of them, they indicated that it should be “put in the strongbox.” Onward went the correspondence, which became even more frequent and at greater length to accommodate their letter-within-a-letter strategy. Sometimes they would stop off and resume writing later the same day or even the next, so that the letters often became a diarylike compendium of events and reflections. They also began to telephone each other from time to time, thrilled at the sound of each other’s voices. Just when it was hard to imagine their feelings could deepen, Carson sent Dorothy a long, revelatory “apple” that was unlike any she had sent before or ever would again. Dorothy had proposed that they stop writing to each other—the letters now came and went daily—until Carson was done with the seashore book. Carson would not consider it.
She told Dorothy that she wanted to forever banish any doubts Dorothy might have about her love, and confessed that she’d been in love with Dorothy even before she and Stan had left West Southport the previous summer. Dorothy, she said, had a “particular combination of qualities” that were hers alone, and that Carson needed to have in her life. Their love reminded her of the parable in which a man said that if he had only two pennies he would spend one on bread and the other to buy a “white hyacinth for his soul.” Without Dorothy, nothing else Carson could do—no book she could write—would be worthwhile. Dorothy was her “white hyacinth,” words th
at soon came to mean much more than a passing allusion. The two women would forever after remember Carson’s momentous declaration as the “Hyacinth Letter,” and the flower itself became a permanent symbol of their devotion to each other. Eventually, they would think of February 6, 1954, the date of the white hyacinth letter, as a momentous anniversary.
From the beginning, however, there was a third party in their relationship: Carson’s work. As she wrote to Dorothy:
I don’t suppose anyone really knows how a creative writer works (he or she least of all, perhaps!) or what sort of nourishment his spirit must have. All I am certain of is this; that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort, recognizing the heartache, the great weariness of mind and body, the occasional black despair it may involve—someone who cherishes me and what I am trying to create.
Carson probably didn’t intend to confess as much self-involvement as came across in this letter—though there was no getting around how much the success of The Sea Around Us had changed her. Or at least had brought to the surface an ego that had been waiting years to appear. Even now—after all the awards and the bestseller lists, the mountains of fan mail and the approving audiences—there still lived inside Carson the young girl from Springdale who thought there could never be a higher, more exalted calling than to be a writer. And yet in Dorothy Carson had found someone who loved her even though she also understood what it meant to be Rachel Carson. As for Carson, she said she had no idea what she could offer Dorothy in return, but was willing to accept without question that she “filled some need” in Dorothy’s life.
The seashore book for Houghton Mifflin had outgrown Paul Brooks’s original idea and was taking Carson much longer to complete than anyone had imagined when the project was first discussed back in 1950. Brooks envisioned something practical that would capitalize on Carson’s writing ability without depending entirely on it. He thought the book would be a pocket-size field guide with a concise text and perhaps fifty pages of illustrations. When Carson asked how soon it was needed, Brooks said he didn’t have any “special deadline” in mind, but hoped to have a completed manuscript in hand by late in the summer of 1951—shortly after the publication of The Sea Around Us—as this would give Houghton Mifflin enough time to bring it out the following spring.
Carson, unwilling to be rushed, asked Marie Rodell to tell Brooks she could turn in a manuscript sometime in the spring of 1952. Carson and Brooks decided on an illustrator for the book, a former colleague of Carson’s at U.S. Fish and Wildlife named Bob Hines, who went to work making drawings of marine life. Everyone liked Hines, who was young and handsome and made lovely pictures. Carson, not oblivious to the promised delivery date but suddenly swamped by everything that happened following the publication of The Sea Around Us, traveled up and down the East Coast, sometimes accompanied by Hines. She made notes and wondered how she’d ever get the book done. Paul Brooks, well aware of his tremendous luck in having landed Carson before the world knew who she was, realized he would now have to give her as much time as it took. He told Carson her reports about new demands on her time were a “masterpiece of understatement,” as he knew what was required of a bestselling author. Besides, he said, all of this attention would be a “long-range gain for the seashore book.”
But still.
As Carson’s proposed delivery time for the book came and went in the spring of 1952 it became clear the book was evolving and she had begun to think of it less as a “field guide” than as something different and still undefined that was going to be longer and more labor intensive than they had planned. Lovell Thompson, Houghton Mifflin’s publisher, pressed for Carson to send them a “dummy,” a mock-up layout of the book into which text and illustrations could be inserted as they arrived. Carson had herself proposed doing this earlier in the project—she thought Bob Hines could design the book around his drawings. But now she refused, reminding Brooks that they had agreed she was to be “free to develop the book in what seems to be my own peculiar style.” Having got started, Carson insisted that her “taste and judgment” alone should dictate what she wrote about and in what detail. A predetermined format would, she said, “put me in a straightjacket [sic].” Summing up the situation in a way that must have made Brooks a little queasy, Carson said that she and Hines had completed their field work and made enough “preliminary” progress on the text and illustrations that they could now really get started.
This set off alarms at Houghton Mifflin, as Brooks hurried to reassure Lovell Thompson that all was well and that Carson was only taking advantage of the latitude he had given her. Brooks said he had encouraged Carson “all along” to let the book develop as she saw fit. It was now obvious that whatever that meant, the result was going to be “more important” and also “more literary” than the original concept. Brooks acknowledged that working with a writer and an illustrator could be complicated, but he told Thompson that Carson and Hines knew each other so well that he felt they could be trusted to work everything out as if they were a single author. He said he thought it would be a mistake to make them conform to the usual conventions of a guidebook. Stating what was by then obvious to everyone involved, Brooks said he also doubted that “Seashore Guide” was going to be an adequate title. Thompson, not entirely satisfied, told Brooks he was worried that Hines might be “illustrating one kind of book while Rachel is writing another.”
Around Christmas 1952, Carson visited the west coast of Florida and its shell-covered barrier islands. At New Year’s, she got off a portion of manuscript to Brooks, warning him that it was still rough and would need much further revision. She also proposed a title for the book: “The Edge of the Sea.” Brooks was pleased with the copy and with the new title—he told Carson that some of the writing was equal to her best work and that she should put aside worries that this book would be a weak follow-up to The Sea Around Us. Carson and Rodell, who had begun discussing how best to spread out Carson’s income across different years for tax purposes, now sensed a potential windfall and took steps to deal with another bestseller. Rodell asked Houghton Mifflin to change Carson’s contract to ensure that she would not receive income in excess of $7,500 in any one year, with earnings above that amount to be deferred until later.
But all was not well. In March, Carson and Brooks privately discussed options for dealing with Bob Hines, who had fallen far behind on the drawings. Carson admitted that she had little room to complain, being woefully late herself with the text, but she thought things were really getting so far out of hand that they might have to give Hines an ultimatum that he finish or leave the project. Carson said she understood that Hines, who still worked at Fish and Wildlife, had other freelance work and needed the income it produced. But she thought maybe they’d made a mistake in paying him up front for the illustrations for The Edge of the Sea. Perhaps, she suggested, Brooks could dangle an additional advance payment to Hines that would be paid on receipt of all the completed drawings as an inducement for him to finish by the middle of the summer.
As for the writing—Carson still labored. She said she was “suffering tortures” over the manuscript, though she added hopefully that this seemed normal for her. Brooks, hoping to ease Carson’s worries and maybe motivate her in the process, immediately offered to double Hines’s $1,000 advance, with the additional amount to be paid in installments as the drawings were finished. Relieved, Carson thanked Brooks for stepping in and gave him an enthusiastic update on the material she was working on from her visit to the Florida Keys. Although the heat was oppressive—Carson said she could never live in such a climate—she thought the geology of this southern archipelago and all its islands and reefs and mangrove bays was fascinating, though she admitted that it was easy to talk about it and “agony to put on paper.”
Not long after the Hines discussions, Marie Rodell
wrote to Brooks claiming that Carson had come “unstuck” in her writing and that it was now proceeding more easily. Carson may have communicated something like this to Rodell, but it wasn’t true. Only a few days later, Carson told Brooks that she was heading down to Myrtle Beach to get away from the book, on which she had been “overconcentrating” so much that she was now in a state of nervous exhaustion. She said she was heeding “medical advice” that she take a vacation—and that she thought this would in the long run actually speed up final delivery of the book.
Brooks, diplomatically changing the subject, alerted Carson that Houghton Mifflin was having second thoughts about using color in any of the illustrations, as this could become “brutally expensive” and they were determined to keep the cover price of the book from getting too high. He said the plan for now was to wait until the finished manuscript and illustrations were in hand and then make a precise cost estimate on which a final decision could be made. Carson responded that this seemed only reasonable.
Carson was ill in May 1953 with a respiratory infection. Then her mother suffered a bout of elevated blood pressure that required attention before they could travel to Maine and the new cottage. In late June—only days before she went to West Southport to meet the Freemans for the first time—she was still in Silver Spring, still struggling with the manuscript. She told Brooks that as she worked on the section about the Florida Keys and their varied habitats, something clicked. For the first time, she said she had a clear idea of how the whole book should be written. The problem, she said, had been thinking about each chapter as a freestanding “biography” of one group of marine organisms—and the book as simply a series of such smaller pieces. Now it was clear to her that a greater unity was needed, an overarching narrative that would make the book more like a companion to The Sea Around Us. Naturally, this would mean rewriting much of what she’d already done. Carson did not speculate on how long that might take.
On a Farther Shore Page 19
