In a long-running exchange that eventually took a personal turn, Carson wrote regularly to Malcolm Hargraves—the Mayo Clinic cancer expert from the Long Island lawsuit—who maintained his belief that he routinely saw patients with leukemia and lymphoma that were the result of exposure to pesticides. Hargraves conceded that he hadn’t done the rigorous research needed to verify this—and in the book’s discussion of pesticides and cancer Carson took care not to overstate Hargraves’s anecdotal evidence. This may have been partly due to a warning she’d gotten from her own doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, Barney Crile. After reading drafts of several chapters, Crile cautioned Carson against making too firm an argument that pesticides were carcinogenic. Although he thought she offered an “impressive thesis,” Crile thought her reading of the evidence was selective. He said anyone could as easily mine the scientific literature and reach the opposite conclusion.
In the spring of 1961, Carson broke her vow of silence about her own condition and asked Hargraves about a course of treatment involving gold injections that had been suggested to treat her arthritis. Carson thought gold therapy, which helped only some patients and often produced unpleasant side effects, would be dangerous to try while she was undergoing radiation therapy and prone to anemia because of its effects on her bone marrow—an astute conclusion by a patient who seemed to know more than her doctors. Hargraves concurred with Carson’s assessment, telling her that gold injections were always chancy and would surely be more so in her case.
In October, Carson wrote to Brooks wondering when she would be given other illustrators’ work to look at. Brooks patiently asked her to reconsider the Darlings and sent her still more examples of their drawings. The supposed delivery date for the manuscript had again passed without the book being finished, but Marie Rodell’s assurances that Carson would soon wrap it up were evidently enough to keep Houghton Mifflin satisfied. In late October, Rodell told Brooks he could expect to have everything but the final chapter by Thanksgiving. A few days later, Brooks and Carson agreed to ask the Darlings to do the illustrations—to which they eagerly said yes. Brooks privately told Rodell how relieved he was that “the end is in sight.”
In early January 1962, Carson was still hard at work on the book. With only one chapter to go and the rest of the manuscript already submitted to Paul Brooks and to the New Yorker, she pressed on as fast as she could. One evening toward the end of the month Carson’s phone rang. When she answered, the soft voice on the other end of the line said, “This is William Shawn.”
ELEVEN
High Tides and Low
Shawn told Carson she had turned the issue of pesticide use into “literature.” It was, he said, a “brilliant achievement” that was both beautiful and profound. Carson, who told Dorothy Freeman that she valued Shawn’s opinion above all others, listened quietly. For the first time, Carson allowed herself to believe that she’d gotten her message across, that she’d done what she could as well as she could, and that now the story would soon be on its own. After she finished talking with Shawn she got Roger tucked in for the night and then went into her study, where she put on a Beethoven violin concerto and had a long, happy cry.
Carson and Brooks had agreed at last on a title—Silent Spring. But Carson had come down with iritis, a painful eye inflammation that again limited her to a few hours of work a day. Carson told Brooks this felt almost unbearably cruel, to be so near the end and now have the added worry about whether her eyesight would hold up during the editing process. She said that when ill health impeded her progress—as it had at almost every step of the way on this book—it was like being caught in one of those dreams in which you try to run but cannot. Carson continued working and reworking on the manuscript through February and March 1962. On April 3, Brooks wrote her a letter that read simply: “Good girl!”
Everyone involved now started thinking about what would happen when—after years of work—Silent Spring finally came out. Brooks thought it would take heavy promotion to get people to read something that was so different from and far more pessimistic than anything Carson had written before—and which contained off-putting technical material. He had heavily edited Carson’s chapter on the properties of synthetic pesticides, which included chemical diagrams, to make it more accessible, cutting it nearly in half.
Carson, meanwhile, inquired whether Houghton Mifflin’s attorneys were going to review the book prior to publication in anticipation of potential lawsuits from the pesticide industry. Marie Rodell asked Brooks flatly whether Carson could get libel insurance. Everybody agreed that advance copies should be distributed to well-placed readers and critics who were likely to be friendly to the book—though how far to take this was a tricky question. One person they wondered about was Carson’s former collaborator Edwin Diamond, who was the science editor at Newsweek. In a rare moment of cluelessness, Brooks told the publicity department there was no reason not to send Diamond an advance copy, as he didn’t recall anybody having hard feelings over Diamond’s exit from the project.
In early April, Carson outlined for Brooks some of the concerns she had about what was sure to be a storm of protest over the book—especially from pesticide makers, but also from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She wondered if the USDA might even sue her, as there were many things in the book that were sure to make people in the agency “distinctly unhappy.” Among these were Carson’s indictment of the fire ant program, in which she argued that the fire ant became a pest in need of eradication only once government officials had chemical pesticides with “broad lethal powers” at their disposal.
With serialization of the book in the New Yorker set for June 1962, Carson and Marie Rodell continued their back-and-forth with the Houghton Mifflin publicity department on how best to get out the advance word on Silent Spring. It was clear that everyone expected the book would force readers to take sides. Houghton Mifflin was nervous about sending out large numbers of advance copies and about a proposal—which they ultimately abandoned—to hold a luncheon for prominent people who shared Carson’s commitment to the “cause.” Their concern was that it might be unwise to risk stirring up a negative reaction to the book before it was even serialized in the New Yorker. If Carson was perceived as launching a crusade at odds with the interests of pesticide manufacturers and the policy makers who supported them, Silent Spring would face strong headwinds before the public even had a chance to read it. Marie Rodell pooh-poohed these worries—whatever storm was coming would come sooner or later, and it really didn’t matter when. Plus, Rodell thought that the many influential people who already knew about Silent Spring and were likely to be supportive—people such as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas—might feel slighted if they didn’t get to read it before it came out in the New Yorker.
But as the spring progressed, this internal debate seemed less relevant, as word about a controversial new book from Rachel Carson began to spread. As Marie Rodell reminded the publicity department at Houghton Mifflin when they were updating Carson’s biographical profile, The Sea Around Us had sold nearly two million copies. Whatever Carson did next was not likely to go unnoticed in the run up to publication day. In late April 1962, Paul Brooks asked around the office if anybody had ever heard of a man named Fred Friendly, who was evidently a producer for the CBS television network. Friendly had phoned Brooks to express an interest in doing some kind of news program about Silent Spring, and Brooks had sent over galley proofs to CBS.
As Silent Spring headed into production, Carson relaxed her usual close attention to every detail surrounding the preparation and publication of her work. She was still undergoing radiation treatments. Carson thought these might end soon, but she told Dorothy that she couldn’t count on it and had no choice but to continue subjecting herself to a therapy intended to kill her cancer but that posed a hazard to her general health as well. She said she could still work on most mornings, but on treatment days a heavy nausea overtook her by midday and made it impossible to go on with the revisi
ons to Silent Spring. Carson admitted she wished she could go back to the previous April when she’d been operated on. “How differently I would handle it now,” she told Dorothy. Carson said she was appalled at how little thought she’d given to choosing her doctors and at how easily she’d taken their word that no further treatment was needed after the mastectomy. She knew there was no use in thinking like this. But she did anyway.
In mid-April, Carson became concerned about pain and what felt like a new mass in her armpit, near the border of her original surgery but outside the area that had been receiving radiation. An examination left Carson feeling her future lay somewhere between her worst fears and her fragile hopes of recovery. The pain near her armpit was, in fact, from the spread of her cancer. But other discomfort she’d recently experienced in her neck appeared to be a side effect of the radiation treatment—not more cancer—while pain she’d felt in her back was probably due to ordinary age-related arthritis, as X-rays did not show any malignancy in her spine. Carson told Dorothy the real torture that cancer inflicts on its victims is the loss of security in one’s own body. “The trouble with this business,” Carson wrote, “is that every perfectly ordinary little ailment looks like a hobgoblin, and one lives in a little private hell until the thing is examined and found to be nothing much.”
In May 1962, Carson had a rare evening out that left her grappling with contradictory feelings. She’d been invited to a dinner for the trustees of the National Parks Association. Among the attendees was Justice Douglas, who cornered Carson to tell her Silent Spring was “tremendous” and that he’d been busily “selling it” wherever he went. During a speech he gave later that night, Douglas strayed from his written remarks to tell everyone to read Rachel Carson’s forthcoming book, as it gave a clear-eyed and alarming look at what the “chemical engineers are doing to our world.” Carson wrote about the evening to Dorothy, telling her what an odd feeling it was to hear people discussing her “fourth brainchild.”
Carson was, of course, pleased by Douglas’s enthusiastic support. But something else she’d heard at the dinner distressed her. A number of people had been gossiping about Senator Maurine Neuberger of Oregon, who’d recently undergone cancer surgery and looked frail. Carson overheard someone saying “she can’t last.” Carson found the idea of people talking about her in the same way more upsetting than she could bear. She told Dorothy that was the reason she’d been so careful not to discuss her health with anybody she didn’t have to.
Carson said she knew it would have been natural for Dorothy to have mentioned something about her writer friend being sick—but that she shouldn’t say any more about it going forward. If anybody asked about her, Dorothy should say only that she had had a bout of iritis that had cleared up completely and that Carson had lately never looked better. Carson said she knew that Dorothy already understood all this—but that she probably hadn’t realized how strongly Carson felt about keeping her illness private, or the depth of her fears about what would happen if word of it got out. “Whispers about a private individual might not go far,” Carson wrote. “About an author-in-the-news they go like wildfire. So let people think I am as well as I look.”
How well Carson looked was debatable. Never the picture of health or vigor, she aged dramatically during her cancer treatment. Carson was fifty-five when Silent Spring was published at the end of September 1962—but appeared to be about twenty years older.
Three long excerpts from Silent Spring ran in consecutive weekly issues of the New Yorker beginning on June 16, 1962. Although abridged, Carson’s story began in the magazine almost word for word as it would in the book—with the short, foreboding fable that would become one of the great set pieces in American literature. In it, Carson imagined a nameless town “in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” This idyllic place, flanked in every direction by lush farm fields and cold, clear-running trout streams, was home to an abundance of wildlife—foxes and deer and especially birds, an aviary so rich during the migrations of spring and fall that people traveled great distances just to see it. So it had been, Carson wrote, since “the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.”
But then a “strange blight” invaded the area. It was like an “evil spell” that brought with it unexplainable sickness and death to livestock. Chickens laid eggs that did not hatch, cattle and sheep turned up dead, pigs gave birth to stunted litters that lived only days. The fish in the rivers died and the trout anglers stayed away. People, too, fell ill. Some died, leaving their families grieving and their doctors perplexed. The roadsides, formerly lush with bushes and wildflowers, were now brown and withered, “as though swept by fire.” Here and there, a mysterious white powder clung to the rooftops and lay in the gutters of the houses in the town, deadly traces of something that had “fallen like snow” from the skies only weeks before. And everywhere there was an ominous quiet, a silence that closed off the town and its surroundings from the living world as if the area had become entombed:
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
In the space of just ten paragraphs—the New Yorker combined them into three—Carson had written the story of the end of the world. What reader in 1962 could fail to see in this description all the bleak possibilities of the modern age? Carson’s subject was pesticides, but she began in a way that just as surely evoked the images of nuclear devastation and all its ensuing sickness and pallor, right down to the residue of poison from the sky.
This was a familiar tableau, as the Cold War had offered a running preview of such scenes of annihilation in the picture many Americans already had of the colorless, lifeless void that resided behind the “iron curtain,” where an oppressive society was understood to be functionally dead but at the same time a deadly threat. In September 1961, the Soviet Union had resumed atmospheric testing and by early December had detonated thirty-one nuclear devices, including one more than 3,300 times the size of “Little Boy,” the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Though not a practical bomb, this gargantuan device produced the largest nuclear explosion in history. The United States immediately embarked on a crash program to restart its own testing in the South Pacific—and did so in April 1962, just as Carson was finishing Silent Spring. The testing continued at a furious pace through the spring and into the summer and then fall. In the month of June alone, as readers were learning of the dark promise of pesticides from Rachel Carson in the New Yorker, the United States exploded ten nuclear devices in the atmosphere. That year a nuclear device exploded somewhere in the world every few days.
President Kennedy had been reluctant to start testing again but felt the Soviet resumption left him no option. Such was the morbid dance of mutually assured destruction. Humanity’s only hope was thought to be in the maintenance of equivalent nuclear arsenals by the Soviets and the Americans. When Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote to the president imploring him to stop the tests, an obviously conflicted Kennedy wrote back that he, too, hated the testing—which he called a “tragic choice,” but one that had to be made, as the only thing worse would have been the alternative: allowing the Soviet Union to gain a nuclear advantage that would destabilize the balance of power in the world. This, Kennedy insisted, might result in “fateful consequences for all our hopes for peace and freedom.”
The resumption of atmospheric testing—even though the American tests were on the far side of the world—brought on a renewed anxiety about exposure to radioactive fallout. People had reason to be concerned: The latest round of te
sts had, in the space of only months, doubled the amount of fallout dispersed around the planet. The U.S. tests in the South Pacific contributed only slightly to this new rain of radioactivity in the densely populated Northern Hemisphere. But fallout from Soviet testing drifted eastward over North America, where three cities—Minneapolis, Des Moines, and Kansas City—were rapidly approaching the federally established “safe” limits for radiation, as established by the government’s Radiation Protection Guides. Of special concern was the radionuclide iodine 131. Despite its short half-life of just eight days, iodine 131 was being detected in milk supplies at levels that might soon require restrictions on dairy operations in the affected areas. Government officials felt trapped by their own prior conservatism, as the radiation guides outlining safe levels had been set low based on what was expected from routine industrial operations during peacetime. The authorities felt sure that the guidelines were therefore well below what would constitute a risk of health effects—though in truth, nobody knew that to be the case.
The Federal Radiation Council, overlooking concerns such as those raised by Linus Pauling about the cumulative damage from even small health effects when they occur in large populations over long periods of time, tried to put a calming spin on the government’s lack of certainty over its own policies: “We cannot say with certainty what health hazards are caused by fallout from nuclear testing. We expect there will be some genetic effects; other effects such as leukemia and cancer are more speculative and may not occur at all.”
Although thyroid cancer had been induced in laboratory animals with radioactive iodine, no case of human thyroid cancer had ever been traced to such exposure. Officials in the U.S. Public Health Service agreed with everyone else in the government that the health risk from iodine 131 in fallout was probably nil—but they insisted that steps be taken to shut down dairy suppliers whose milk contamination exceeded the guidelines. President Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, told the president that was only one option. Another would be to raise the threshold level of concern for iodine 131—that is, to simply rewrite the guidelines.
On a Farther Shore Page 34
