Carson, it seemed, was the sort of writer who would sooner put herself through hell several times over than take the path of least resistance. The more dissatisfied she was with The Edge of the Sea, the less she tried to fix it by tinkering. Now, determined to more or less start over, Carson found that the “freedom” to do nothing but write that she had so coveted for so long was, in reality, a prison. How was it, she wondered, that she’d written The Sea Around Us in her spare hours late at night while still holding down a full-time government job—but now, with nothing to interfere with her travel or her thoughts, no claim on her time and concentration other than whatever she decided to do, she had gotten so lost? Carson’s brave assertion to Brooks that she had finally figured out how to do the book was meant to settle her own thoughts as much as to reassure him.
In July, Bob Hines was finishing up the illustrations for The Edge of the Sea—late, but still far ahead of Carson, who promised to deliver a “substantial chunk” of manuscript in September. She told Brooks that she was “really terribly upset over being so far behind.” She also provided her unlisted number at the cottage in Maine and gave him the news that because it was so well concealed it had “defied the efforts of the curious” to discover her whereabouts.
But September also found Carson more honestly confessing to Dorothy that she really hadn’t gotten anywhere on the book that summer. Brooks, as usual, remained calm. He even visited Carson at the cottage for a couple of days. In October, Carson told him she now believed the final text for The Edge of the Sea was likely to run to about ninety-five thousand words—or nearly double what Brooks had proposed at the outset. She said the revisions she was now making were a great improvement, but that it remained slow going. Carson and Brooks agreed to set the end of March 1954 as the new deadline for delivery of the finished manuscript—a date that would have made the book two years late had Carson met this objective, which she did not.
March came. Carson wrote to Brooks to say that, although she had tried mightily, there was no way the book would be done that month. She said she thought it was “realistic” to think she’d instead finish by the end of May. “The book and the writer being what they are,” Carson said, “the ‘real thing’ doesn’t simply flow on schedule so many words per day—as I know you understand.”
Carson probably did believe she’d be done in May, because she told Dorothy she absolutely had to finish before June so she could arrive in Maine free from book worries—and she asked Dorothy to make sure she didn’t weaken in her resolve. One day she spoke to Dorothy on the phone, and when she got down to work afterward the words came to her in a flood. She told Dorothy that it was fun to pretend, whether it was true or not, that the sound of her voice was an inspiration. “When things go reasonably well, as they did then,” Carson said, “I feel hopeful that maybe it can be finished, and maybe it is not too bad.” But just two weeks after telling Brooks to look for the manuscript at the end of May she wrote to him again and said it was hopeless and that Houghton Mifflin should give up on its planned fall publication. She didn’t make a new promise of delivery by a certain date—saying only that she’d continue “working right along.”
This time, Brooks pushed back. In April he had a long heart-to-heart with Carson and reported to Lovell Thompson that he believed a fall publication would be possible after all—Carson’s protest notwithstanding. He also told Thompson that they had decided not to use any color illustrations, except on the cover, and that Bob Hines had done such fine work that they should probably offer him another $250 advance. Brooks said it could even be $500, as he was sure they would sell more than enough books to cover it, but that he’d wait to see if Hines asked for more money. Brooks then wrote to Carson telling her how well he thought the book was coming along. “But the main thing is you have written a text which is meant to be read, not just consulted,” he said. “It leaves one with a vivid mental picture and a sense of the relationship between these infinitely various forms of life. Among your wealthier readers it should start a run on microscopes. Before next fall I think I shall buy stock in an optical company.”
Not everyone at Houghton Mifflin was so sanguine. One editor told Brooks that the manuscript wasn’t on a level with The Sea Around Us and, in fact, “reeked of a guide,” which was not surprising as that is what it started off to be. Brooks took this criticism to heart and started editing the manuscript in a way he hoped Carson would agree brought cohesion to the factual and literary sides of the story—and avoided any mention of its guidelike qualities. To Brooks’s relief, Carson was appreciative of his suggestions—accepting many of the changes and ignoring others. She started making yet another round of revisions she thought would take the book in the direction Brooks wanted it to go, but she also reminded him that she wasn’t writing the book in order, and that when he read the opening chapters many of the questions he was raising now would answer themselves. Of course, she also told him she would need more time.
When Brooks got Carson’s latest changes it was as if a fog had lifted. He told her she’d managed a “miracle of creative revision,” and everyone at Houghton Mifflin was “immensely pleased.” This was an understatement. Memos went around the Houghton Mifflin office calling Carson’s latest efforts “wonderful” and packed with “atmosphere and poetry.” The editor who had initially complained to Brooks now marveled at the “dexterity and grace” with which she had taken their editing suggestions and improved on them, and said that the manuscript was now much better than it would have been had Carson merely said yes to all of their ideas. Carson was happy to hear this, but she urged Brooks to hold back on doing more of this detailed editing as the material he had in hand still needed further revising, and it would be a wasted effort to fine-tune it at this point. With things seemingly getting on track, everyone involved was overjoyed when Marie Rodell learned that the New Yorker wanted to serialize The Edge of the Sea.
In August 1954, Brooks again visited Carson at West Southport. She took him exploring in the tide pools below the cottage and showed him some new manuscript pages, which he said he liked. But back in Maryland in November she wrote to say her writing schedule for the fall in Maine had been ruined by too many visitors to the cottage, by her mother’s weeklong hospitalization for bursitis, and by not one but two hurricanes that had come through. At one point the wind roaring across the bay had been so strong that they had packed up the book manuscript and made ready to leave in case the cottage was blown apart. More pleasant news was that Carson had sighted a whale and found moose tracks near the cottage, though they never caught a glimpse of the moose. She admitted that none of this was what Brooks really cared about. She said she was determined to finish the manuscript by the end of January, and that this time she believed she could do it. Any earlier, Carson said, was not realistic. She also asked Brooks to indulge her decision not to send him any more installments of the manuscript until the whole thing was done. Brooks wrote back to say that the end of January would be okay with him—but that anything later than that would be “bad.” Carson, perhaps hoping to ease the annoyance with her at Houghton Mifflin, ordered two copies of a book by Lovell Thompson to give out as Christmas presents.
But in early January—it was now 1955—Carson told Brooks she hoped to have a “fairly complete” manuscript to him “around the first of the month”—meaning February. This would of course depend, she said, on many things, including her mental and physical condition. At the end of January she told Brooks she might take a couple of weeks longer. A month later she said it would be a few more days. Then, on March 15, it was done—three years behind schedule.
Brooks wrote to tell Carson what a “wonderful woman” she was. “This is indeed a momentous occasion and a happy day for us as well as for you,” he said. “As I read this once again, I am convinced that it contains some of the best writing you have ever done and that there are passages here that are superior to anything in The Sea Around Us.”
Nowhere in Carson’s long, difficu
lt correspondence with Paul Brooks on the progress of The Edge of the Sea had she mentioned her friends Stan and Dorothy Freeman. Possibly he met them on one of his visits to West Southport, though there is nothing to suggest he understood how important they had become in Carson’s life—and certainly no evidence that anyone other than Carson and Dorothy knew the full extent of their intimate relationship.
In February 1954 the two women continued to explore the depths of their feelings for each other—which Dorothy described as “The Revelation.” Carson’s only regret was having taken so long to put into words what she felt for Dorothy. Dorothy said they were caught up in an “overpowering emotional experience.” Carson said it was a process of “discovery” in which each progressive stage of getting to know each other led to still more urgent feelings. She constantly fought a desire to stop working and visit Dorothy, but she knew she could not give in to this as she wanted to “earn” their time together when it came. “But, oh darling, I want to be with you so terribly that it hurts!” Carson told Dorothy. Sometimes they were surprised by uncanny parallels between the lives they lived away from each other—a thought or experience that occurred to them both at the same time even when they were apart. They called these coincidental connections “stardust.”
In late March 1954, Carson caught an Eastern Airlines flight to Boston. She told Dorothy how much she liked flying, although she thought that might be because she was always “very lucky about the weather.” Carson met with Paul Brooks and spent three days with the Freemans down in West Bridgewater. Dorothy had promised to bring Carson breakfast in bed, which Carson coyly wrote would depend on a “consideration” that she didn’t specify. The visit was wonderful, Carson said, though it was clear that much of the upcoming season in Maine would be spent working on The Edge of the Sea. This would make the summer “less peaceful” than she hoped, with fewer hours to spend with Dorothy. But, Carson told Dorothy, the book was near enough to being finished that most of what she’d have to do over the summer would be routine, as the “creative” work would be done by then. It’s hard to say what this meant or whether, against all odds, Carson actually believed it was true. She also admitted to Dorothy that the book was like a “dragon” that held her in its clutches.
In April, Carson delivered two speeches, one at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Detroit and the other before an audience nearly a thousand strong sponsored by the Theta Sigma Phi association of women in communications in Columbus, Ohio. A few weeks later, Carson went to New York to accept an award from the Limited Editions Club, as one of ten American writers who had produced books likely to be regarded as classics. Carson thought it odd that Pearl Buck, who’d won the Nobel Prize for literature, was not among the honorees. The ceremony was at the Pierre Hotel and began with champagne at seven thirty followed by a dinner and several wine courses. Carson told Dorothy she didn’t like champagne, proof that she wasn’t “meant for literary life”—an odd remark, as Carson relished the many aspects of literary life that didn’t involve lavish dinners and speechmaking. She also downplayed the award itself, telling Dorothy that it was merely the fleeting “judgment of a committee of my contemporaries,” adding grandiosely that only posterity could decide if The Sea Around Us was a classic.
Then, for five days in May 1954, Carson put away all thoughts of work. Stan Freeman was traveling on business, and Carson and Dorothy went up to West Southport together from Boston. They’d planned this for months, and when it came it was hard to believe they had the world to themselves. They stayed mostly at Carson’s cottage, where they fell out of time for a while, dining late and then staying up by the fire far into each night—one time straight through to dawn—talking and talking and talking, lost in their feelings, watching the full moon shining through the trees, never wanting to sleep, not wanting a moment less of each other’s company.
They had lazy, laughter-filled breakfasts and tramped the woods, reading aloud to one another from E. B. White and H. M. Tomlinson. Carson, who was happy that Dorothy liked Tomlinson seemingly as much as she did, thought his writing was “magical” and said it affected her in a “peculiar way” that she couldn’t “quite define.” One day they heard the hermit thrushes singing gloriously. Another time Dorothy surprised Carson when she used a term—“rote”—that Carson claimed never to have heard and doubted was a proper English word. She was later amused to discover that it was, but insisted that it was unlikely either of them would ever see it in print. Dorothy said their visit had been like a symphony. Carson called it “the Hundred Hours.” Later on, both would refer to this as their “Maytime.”
Carson briefly returned to Silver Spring, where she started making a list of books to take back up to Maine, including Edwin Way Teale’s Circle of the Seasons, Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds, and Darwin’s journal from the Beagle voyage. She told Dorothy there were so many more books she wanted them to share that there would never be enough time to read them all. The summer, she said, already felt short and crowded. To hurry herself back to Maine—and giving in to the means now at her disposal—Carson bought a “terribly sporty looking” Oldsmobile. It was light green, with a white top, wide white sidewall tires, and “automatic and power” everything. Carson said the car was so advanced that all she had to do to drive it was “sit there.”
Carson and Dorothy marked their time together, event by event, moment to moment. Like beads on a string, one by one the thoughts and feelings and times they wished never to let go of tethered them to each other in shared memory. There were momentous occasions between them—like the Thirteen Hours or Maytime—but also many small gestures and impressions that were the foundation of their affection, and to which they referred again and again. Carson told Dorothy she loved simply being at West Southport with “the rocks and the bay, the sunset and the clouds.” Nothing made her happier, she said, than that unmatched perfume of the Maine coast in summer, an intoxicating blend emanating from the exposed rockweed along the water’s edge and the sun-drenched spruces of the forest.
Dorothy enjoyed exploring the shoreline with Carson, then sitting with her at the microscope to see what they had found. One time Carson took Dorothy to a special place, a hole in the rock at Ocean Point that, beneath a low ceiling only inches above its floor, held a translucent pool of water. Carson called it her “Fairy Cave.” It was only accessible during the lowest tides of the year, and even then could be glimpsed but for short periods, as the ocean surge sometimes swept up and over the mossy rock from which the cave could be observed. In this hidden liminal world, Carson discovered a glittery, living universe:
Under water that was clear as glass the pool was carpeted with green sponge. Gray patches of sea squirts glistened on the ceiling and colonies of soft coral were a pale apricot color. In the moment when I looked into the cave a little elfin starfish hung down, suspended by the merest thread, perhaps by only a single tube foot. It reached down to touch its own reflection, so perfectly delineated that there might have been, not one starfish, but two. The beauty of the reflected images and of the limpid pool itself was the poignant beauty of things that are ephemeral, existing only until the sea should return to fill the little cave.
Dorothy seemed to remember everything—a day when the tide was high just at noon, another when Carson came to her with cakes and blueberries. Or a night when they sat on Dorothy’s porch watching the moonlit waters on the bay. On a nice day in July 1954, Stan and Dorothy took Carson sailing aboard Draftee, an outing Carson probably had not looked forward to. Months earlier the woman who in the minds of millions was an intrepid sailor and reef diver alerted Dorothy that she was a hopeless landlubber who knew nothing about boats. Carson confessed a reluctance to embrace the “amphibious life” at West Southport. Then, on the day of their cruise, Stan accidentally steered too near the shore in front of Carson’s cottage and the boat lurched as it scraped over some rocks. Carson told Dorothy she’d later had a good laugh about this and added—not all that convincingly—that
she hoped they’d take her out again. Dorothy remembered this adventure more pleasantly, telling Carson that it had given her a good excuse to “hold your hand.”
Carson and Dorothy agreed to think of Carson’s public persona as “the other woman.” Carson claimed that she could never fully believe that the famous Rachel Carson was actually her. More practically, Carson wanted Dorothy to know that while many people might idolize her, she understood that Dorothy was not among them and instead loved her for who she truly was.
Nothing was off-limits between Carson and Dorothy—their certainty that they could tell each other anything was as durable as the rocks at Southport Island. In a candid, almost elegiac letter to Carson, Dorothy once tried to explain the importance of her marriage. If at times it seemed there must be two Dorothys—one for Stan and one for Carson—in truth there was only a single Dorothy, one whose remarkable fortune was to be loved by two people at once. Dorothy knew Carson would understand.
It was a rainy late afternoon. Dusk had settled early and Dorothy was in a melancholy mood. She told Carson that she felt suspended in time. Earlier in the day she’d been cross with Stan, and although she apologized at once and hugged him, she knew he’d been hurt by what she’d said. Now he was having a nap and Dorothy retreated to an upstairs bedroom, telling Carson she found herself “in the corner that belongs in my heart only to you—you know where and why.” Dorothy turned on the radio—a Mahler symphony was playing—and began reading Laurens Van der Post’s Venture to the Interior, a gripping, sometimes harrowing account of a British exploratory expedition into an uncharted region of southern Africa. Dorothy was unable to explain how, but the final chapters of the book had been moving “beyond reason” to her:
On a Farther Shore Page 20
