On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  Carson said she also wanted to consider including drawings or photographs—maybe both—to help illustrate some of the more technical concepts in the book. She ended this letter with a gloomy note about her impending surgery, telling Brooks her trip to the hospital was now set for the following Sunday. She said that “with luck” she would be home by Wednesday, but added ominously “otherwise at the end of the week.”

  The operation had been delayed a week while Carson’s sinus infection cleared up. In a letter she wrote to Marjorie Spock on April 1, 1960, Carson mentioned that she would shortly be entering the hospital “for a few days.” A couple of weeks later Carson wrote again, telling Spock that her “hospital adventure” had turned into a “setback of some magnitude” that had dashed her hopes of sticking to a “tight work schedule” that spring. Carson explained that two tumors had been found in her left breast, one that was benign and the other “suspicious enough” that a radical mastectomy had been performed.

  Carson, worried about Roger, “talked her way out” of the hospital after only a week and went home to recuperate. Her surgeon had given her the impression that the mastectomy had been precautionary and told her no additional treatment was warranted at the time. In her letter to Marjorie Spock, Carson made it clear that she believed she had been cured. Thankfully the cancer had been caught early and there “need be no apprehension for the future.”

  Carson’s usual desire for privacy was now heightened. She could imagine what a cancer diagnosis might suggest to critics about her motivation in writing a book that would implicate pesticides as cancer-causing agents. She told Spock she planned to provide details about her illness to only a few special friends like her—though she admitted it might be hard to prevent the world from learning of it. “I suppose it’s a futile effort to keep one’s private affairs private,” Carson said. “Somehow I have no wish to read of my ailments in literary gossip columns. Too much comfort to the chemical companies!”

  Spock, desperate to help and captivated by alternative ideas, urged Carson to see a “Dr. Pfeiffer,” who according to Spock had discovered an unusual treatment using mistletoe to counteract a “gravitational drag” that he believed caused cancer. Carson tactfully avoided a direct response and later suggested that Pfeiffer might do some assays on pesticides for her, but nothing came of it and Carson let the matter drop.

  Paul Brooks, who apparently did not know the exact nature of Carson’s surgery or its result, wrote to say that he liked the cancer chapters. He added that the similarities between radiation and pesticides deserved the emphasis she had given them, and that current events were in their favor on this matter. “In a sense, all this publicity about fallout gives you a head start in awakening people to the dangers of chemicals,” he said. He agreed they should keep thinking about the title, and hoped Carson’s hospital stay had been brief.

  Weak and in pain, Carson had gone up to Southport Island with Roger in June 1960. She hoped to make headway on the book while Roger was occupied at a day camp. But it was hard going. She and Brooks arranged for him to visit her in Maine toward the end of August, and as the time for their meeting approached it was clear that Carson considered it more of an editorial consultation than a casual visit. She sent Brooks more pages through the summer—along with her overall outline for the book so he could see how everything fit together—but admitted more than once to needing his help.

  She had decided to combine the two chapters on cancer into one and had finished what she called the “bird chapter” on the effects of pesticide spraying observed by George Wallace at Michigan State and other researchers. This was progress, but Carson seemed to be in a kind of fog. In September she offered a surprisingly clumsy suggestion for a new title: “Dissent in Favor of Man.” Carson said it was inspired by a magazine account of Justice William O. Douglas’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear an appeal of the Long Island spraying case. Brooks wrote back and told Carson he could see what she was getting at, but that he didn’t think “Dissent in Favor of Man” was right. Almost as an afterthought, Brooks mentioned an idea he had for a title for the bird chapter, which he thought might be called “Silent Spring.” Carson said it was an excellent suggestion. When Marie Rodell heard about it, she said Silent Spring would make a good title for the book itself.

  Carson considered the effects of pesticides on birds one of the most arresting aspects of the use of chemical poisons, and this had registered strongly with Justice Douglas in his dissenting opinion—in which he quoted from an article Carson had written for the Washington Post in the spring of 1959. Douglas’s opinion—it never once mentioned a constitutional issue—emphasized that the risks of the spraying program to wildlife and to human health raised by the plaintiffs at trial hadn’t been adequately evaluated by the original judge. Douglas wrote that, while he himself did not take any position as to the merits of these arguments, he thought the questions about the wide use of chemical pesticides warranted review by the Supreme Court. In a long footnote, Douglas cited Carson’s Post article, in which Paul Brooks might have discovered that Carson herself was on the track of the right title for the book:

  During the past 15 years, the use of highly poisonous hydrocarbons and of organic phosphates allied to the nerve gasses of chemical warfare has built up from small beginnings to what a noted British ecologist recently called “an amazing rain of death upon the surface of the earth.” Most of these chemicals leave long-persisting residues on vegetation, in soils, and even in the bodies of earthworms and other organisms on which birds depend for food.…

  To many of us this sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest of bird life, is sufficient cause for sharp regret. To those who have never known such rewarding enjoyment of nature, there should yet remain a nagging and insistent question: If this “rain of death” has produced so disastrous an effect on birds, what of other lives, including our own?

  The “sudden silencing” of the birds was to become the central motif of Carson’s book—but getting close to a title when the book was no closer to completion frustrated everyone. By the middle of November, Brooks seemed—for him—impatient with Carson. Based on her latest guidance, he said he was not going to announce a publication date for the book in the first half of 1961. But he said he could still change that decision if she could assure him it was almost finished. He wanted a progress report and said he would be eager to see and work on additional chapters as she completed them. He offered to meet her in New York or Washington if it would help. Carson said she would come up to New York, and they planned to talk over the book at Marie Rodell’s apartment, which Carson said would make the trip easier to manage. But at the last minute she canceled, telling Brooks that she had been sick again.

  Carson had found a swelling near her sternum. After taking X-rays, her doctors decided the best thing would be to start a course of radiation therapy, to which Carson agreed. She told Dorothy Freeman there was some comfort in knowing her situation more clearly and that she had decided to believe the radiation treatments would work. But she admitted it was hard to face all of this after being so sure the previous spring that her surgery had fixed everything. Now it seemed she couldn’t count on ever being completely well again. Carson said it was bitterly disappointing to be laid up again when she was so pressed for time with the book, but that there was nothing to be done about it.

  She hinted to Paul Brooks that she was, in fact, more angry about her care than she’d let on to Dorothy. She told him that the description of her primary tumor as “suspicious” simply hadn’t been true. It was malignant and there was evidence it had metastasized. Carson had been allowed to believe otherwise “even though I asked directly,” she told Brooks.

  Carson was short of her fifty-third birthday when she had her mastectomy—young enough, certainly, to have a fighting chance against cancer if that’s what it was. Had she been fully informed of the pathology of her disease she almost certainly woul
d have embarked on an immediate course of follow-up treatments—radiation or chemotherapy—and might well have had a different outcome. What must have particularly distressed Carson was that she was more than capable of understanding her diagnosis and treatment options—yet was denied the chance to be fully engaged in her own case.

  Once she guessed the truth, Carson consulted with Dr. George “Barney” Crile, Jr., a cancer expert at the Cleveland Clinic with whom she was already acquainted. Carson saw Crile in Cleveland in December. She wrote a letter to Dorothy while on the plane to Cleveland, feigning a casual tone and telling her a long, funny story about the difficulties she had getting to the airport that morning. At the clinic, Crile confirmed that Carson had cancer, and he designed a program of radiation treatments for her to follow back in Silver Spring. Carson relayed this news to Dorothy, who was overwhelmed but chose to adopt Carson’s stoicism. Stan Freeman had had health issues for several years now—chest pains and a frightening episode of internal bleeding—and Dorothy found herself the primary moral support for both Stan and Carson. She told Carson it would be so easy to give in, to think only of the “dark side of all of this,” but that if Carson wouldn’t go there then neither would she.

  In January 1961, the radiation treatments caused Carson’s ulcer to flare up again—a not uncommon side effect, she told Dorothy. The mass in her chest seemed to be shrinking, which was good news. Carson’s illness stirred Dorothy’s memories of their time together over the past seven years. On a cold late afternoon at the end of January, while Stan was writing in his study, Dorothy sat on the bed where Carson had napped on her first visit to West Bridgewater and wrote her a long letter, rehearsing their relationship from the beginning. Dorothy said she remembered her initial feelings of awe at becoming friendly with a famous author. She said it had taken her a long time to “destroy the pedestal.” That had come, Dorothy said, in learning that Carson shared the same cares and heartaches as anyone—and the amazing thing was that once she had brought Carson down to eye level she found herself worshipping her even more. Dorothy said she had read the “Hyacinth Letter” every night for months after receiving it, and was still inspired by it whenever she read it again. She told Carson they were “kindred spirits” in too many ways to count, and that above all, Carson had enriched her appreciation of literature and music and nature more than she could ever say. Dorothy said Carson’s love was like an embrace that was always there, soothing her in good times and bad.

  Dorothy’s loving summary of their experiences marked the beginning of a long goodbye, without, of course, acknowledging as much. From this time forward, Carson’s declining health would move between the foreground and the background of the thoughts she and Dorothy shared with each other—but it would always be there, a deepening shadow.

  As Dorothy composed this long letter, Carson had again fallen seriously ill with something new. In mid-January 1961, Carson developed a staph infection that progressed to septic arthritis, settling in her knees and ankles. By the end of the month she was unable to walk and could barely stand. She told Brooks she would again enter the hospital to see what could be done. Carson said she had never been sicker in her life—which must have worried Brooks immensely given her history. She kept up a brave mood when she was hospitalized in February—she joked with Dorothy about substandard “bedpan service”—but admitted she had been devastated seeing Roger slumped and sobbing as she was put into an ambulance for the trip.

  Her exact diagnosis wasn’t certain. There was a chance she was in the early stages of generalized rheumatoid arthritis. But only time would tell. When she came home a few days later, Carson could walk a short distance, but still needed a walker or a wheelchair most of the time. Gradually Carson got better—even though she had also started a second round of intensive radiation therapy. She told Paul Brooks she hated burdening him with news of her ailments, but that it seemed only fair to explain to him fully why work on the book had come to a standstill. Toward the end of March she reported she had started—ever so tentatively—writing again. Carson thought the only good that might come out of her many health complaints was a new perspective she’d gained on the book during the time she’d taken off. Now, she told Brooks, it seemed important to tighten and simplify everything—to free the story from the excessive detail she’d been trying to force into it.

  In May 1961, Marie Rodell visited Carson in Silver Spring and got a shock—Carson, though she now walked with a pronounced limp, could get around the house on her own and had resumed work on the book, albeit in the random, scattered way only she could understand. Parts of the manuscript were like a collage—cut apart and rearranged, and then stapled together again. As usual, Carson seemed to use whatever was handy to write on—she alternated between longhand and typing—sometimes resorting to ruled yellow legal paper. Unscrambling and making sense of all this was Carson’s special talent, and it slowed her down and forced her to think over many times what she was trying to say—a laborious process of searching within her own writing for the right words. Carson now planned a total of nine chapters. Three were done and several more were partly so. Rodell told Brooks that with luck and “no more catastrophes,” it was likely Carson would finish by the end of summer. Brooks, elated at this news, made plans to visit Carson himself. Carson said she was eager to meet with him, as they had much to discuss. She said she knew most of what she’d written was going to need revision, but that for the time being she was happier working on new material.

  In June 1961, after he had seen Carson, Brooks told his boss, Lovell Thompson, that it really did look as if she would finish in another couple of months. Brooks must have felt a new confidence in this, because he took the occasion to ask Thompson about hiring an illustrator for the book to help convey some of the more complex ideas Carson was dealing with. Louis and Lois Darling, a Connecticut-based husband-and-wife team who created illustrations, sometimes for their own books, were well thought of at Houghton Mifflin, and in July the publisher sent a sample of their work to Carson at her cottage on Southport Island. Louis Darling, perhaps best known for illustrating the Henry Huggins series of children’s books by Beverly Cleary, had also done line drawings for Roderick Haig-Brown’s classic fishing book, A River Never Sleeps, which in mood and scenery was not unlike parts of Henry Williamson’s Salar the Salmon—the wellspring of all of Carson’s work. But Carson was unsure. She thought the Darlings’ drawings were “beautiful and meticulous,” but said she wasn’t convinced those were the precise qualities needed for a book that was still being called “Man Against Nature.” Both Brooks and Lovell Thompson thought Carson was wrong about this—they were confident the Darlings would be perfect for Carson’s book, and neither of them could understand her mystifying objection on the grounds of overmeticulousness.

  Except for times when she was too sick to work, Carson kept up a heroic correspondence with the many experts she called on to help with technical issues, somehow managing waves of incoming and outgoing letters that would have staggered someone in far better health than she was—and that revealed the wide range of her concerns about pesticides and wildlife. Almost without exception, Carson made friends as she went.

  Carson had long and involved exchanges with several people on the use of herbicides. Olaus Murie, a prominent naturalist, author, and wildlife biologist who had worked for the U.S. Biological Survey before joining the Wilderness Society as one of its directors, reviewed Carson’s chapter on herbicides and helped her to understand the impact of their use in the West, where sagebrush was being converted to grasslands for cattle grazing by means of aerial spraying. The collateral damage—it could not be avoided—was the destruction of a naturally balanced ecosystem and the inevitable decline of species such as the sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, and mule deer.

  Another prolific correspondent whose contributions filled Carson’s swelling files was an herbicide expert named Frank Egler. An unusual sort—Carson seemed to attract them—Egler wrote long, intermittently neurot
ic letters about the ecological hazards of herbicide use, mainly in the control of roadside brush. Egler had been dismissed from the American Museum of Natural History in 1955 for making controversial public statements about roadside spraying and had retreated to manage a private forest reserve in Connecticut, where he got by on family money and an argumentative disposition.

  Carson initially thought they were of similar minds. But in the fall of 1961, she wrote him a pointed letter disagreeing with his contention—recently published in a pamphlet called Sixty Questions and Answers about roadside vegetation control—that herbicides were not toxic to humans or animals. She informed Egler that one widely used herbicide “belongs in the dangerous company of chemicals that imitate radiation, duplicating many of the effects of X-rays on cell division.” She told him the FWS had new, as-yet-unpublished data showing reproductive effects that might well be a “manifestation” of this attribute.

  Chastened, Egler wrote back saying this was news to him and complaining, not unreasonably, that he couldn’t very well have an opinion on research that had not been made public. “Am I supposed to know?” he asked. Still, Carson had enough confidence in Egler’s judgment that near the end of her research she sent him the herbicides chapter to review, begging him to do so as quickly as he could. Eight days later Carson was floored when Egler sent her back a lengthy line-by-line critique that reflected a careful reading beyond anything she could have expected. She told Egler she would make many of the changes and additions he suggested.