On a Farther Shore (20 page)

Eerily, the poem touched on more than just Carson’s new working title. In the line that includes “hints of earlier and other creation,” Eliot raises the theme on which Carson planned to open her story of the sea. Carson wanted her readers to understand that the sea was the earth’s incubator and that we are all descendants of the life forms that first arose and evolved in the sea. Evolution changed but did not end our relationship with the sea, and that is why men are drawn to the ocean and fascinated by its secrets. In one of several little brown notebooks in which Carson jotted chapter outlines, sources, and even early fragmentary bits of narrative, she tried out several possible beginnings for
The Sea Around Us
. One of them was “
So long ago that we do not know when it happened—and certainly we do not know how—living creatures developed in the sea. Developed and evolved until all the major groups of animals and many of the plants had arisen.”

Carson didn’t keep those words in the book, but she stuck with the new title,
and in June 1950, Oxford said they liked it, too. June was proving to be an exhilarating month, as Rodell had gotten her first nibble.
Science Digest
offered fifty dollars for a condensed version of one chapter. Rodell was just about to say yes to this when something
surprising happened.
She heard from Edith Oliver, a young part-time editor at the
New Yorker
magazine. Oliver was a lively character. She’d studied acting and had appeared on several radio dramas, including
The Philip Morris Playhouse
. For four years in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Oliver had written the radio quiz show
True or False?
and later wrote and produced another game program,
Take It or Leave It: The $64 Question
. She started contributing to the
New Yorker
in 1947, writing short pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” She would eventually spend more than thirty years as the
New Yorker
’s influential drama critic. But in 1950 her job apparently included reading manuscripts that arrived at the magazine’s offices. One that she read and fell in love with was Carson’s chapter on waves from
The Sea Around Us
. Oliver told Rodell how much she liked the excerpt and asked if she could see more. Rodell abruptly told
Science Digest
to wait.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the
New Yorker
’s interest in
The Sea Around Us
. The magazine—literate, revered, slightly snooty and widely read because it was—had the power to make an author’s reputation and send book sales soaring. Carson, however, remained calm while Rodell continued her efforts at placing chapters of the book with other magazines. But the
New Yorker
kept asking to see more.
By midsummer Oliver had carefully read five chapters and had gotten eight more to look at.
She’d also begun sending the material, with her enthusiastic endorsement, to the magazine’s editor in chief, William Shawn.

Carson thought the magazine was only trying to decide which chapter to publish and hoped they’d make up their minds on one soon. “
Darn the
New Yorker
,” she told Rodell. “I wish they’d get busy with waves and get it in print by September some time. It just might mean a thousand bucks, plus some nice advertising.”
Oliver promised Rodell they’d make a final decision on the material by the middle of August.
Rodell, meanwhile, sold the
Yale Review
a chapter on the volcanic origins of Bermuda called “The Birth of an Island” for seventy-five dollars.
She sold another on ocean salt to the patiently waiting
Science Digest
, explaining that it had been “too technical” for the
New Yorker
. But the rejections continued as well.
Reader’s Digest
turned down a chapter on the connection between ocean currents and climate, telling Rodell, “The piece isn’t quite right for a large measure of popular impact,” a statement that proved as ironic as it was clumsy.

Sometime around the middle of August 1950, Rodell learned that the
New Yorker
was not interested in publishing a chapter of
The Sea Around Us
—they wanted to publish ten chapters. William Shawn himself would do the editing, and while it was understood the chapters would have be condensed they would still represent a large portion of the book. Carson told Rodell she was “in a daze.”
A month later, Carson wrote to Rodell that she was going into the hospital for a few days.

Despite her eager participation in intramural field hockey during her college days, as an adult Carson always struck people as slight, bordering on frail. She suffered occasional illnesses, but this sounded more ominous.
Carson was going to have a “small cyst or tumor” removed from her left breast. She tried to reassure Rodell—not entirely convincingly—that the surgery was minor. But the chance that it could turn out otherwise caused Carson to deliberate carefully on a surgeon:

“
The operation will probably turn out to be so trivial that any dope could do it,” she told Rodell, “but of course there is, in such cases, always the possibility that a much more drastic procedure will prove necessary. They tell me the present method is to section the tissue while the patient is still under anesthesia, and if there is reason to do so, they go right ahead with a much more extensive operation. Hence the need for a surgeon with some judgment. In any event, I’ll be at Doctor’s Hospital, where a very dear friend is a nurse, and will be in excellent hands in that respect. I’m going to try to get it over with next week.”

The surgery came off uneventfully and the mass removed from Carson’s breast was benign.
Carson dashed off to the North Carolina
shore for a short and needed vacation. The ocean was wild, as it was “blowing a gale,” she told Rodell.

Carson’s correspondence from this time shows a subtle change coming over her. She still signed her letters “Ray,” but there was a new insistence in them. Carson was determined that her second book would not end up like the first, and despite the waves of good news enveloping
The Sea Around Us
, she continued to micromanage every phase of its prepublication life—while worrying endlessly about future projects and income.
Carson was impatient with Oxford for not yet having the book in galleys so it could be considered by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Rodell reminded her that Oxford had accommodated a delay in the book’s publication schedule in order to let the
New Yorker
bring out its excerpts. In addition to the Fuertes book, which was, for the time being, still on the table, Carson was planning the seashore guide for Houghton Mifflin, plus a book of essays for Oxford.
She recklessly told Rodell she thought she could work on all three projects at the same time.
In October 1950, Carson—who’d gotten
a $900 advance from Houghton Mifflin—applied for a $3,000 Guggenheim Fellowship to help finance the travel she’d need to undertake for the seashore book, enlisting support from her ever-widening network of expert mentors.

Carson was never shy about mentioning awards she received, and she put in for them and collected them avidly. One of the references she listed on her Guggenheim application was William Beebe.
Beebe told her he couldn’t understand why she needed a fellowship, given that she enjoyed so much success selling chapters of
The Sea Around Us
, but said he was flattered that she thought his name would help her chances.
Then in early December 1950, Carson learned that “The Birth of an Island” in the
Yale Review
had won the AAAS–George Westinghouse award for science writing. Established in 1946 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with funding from the Westinghouse Educational Foundation, the award carried a prize of $1,000. Riding this whirlwind of attention,
Carson mentioned
to Rodell that she was thinking of turning
The Sea Around Us
into a documentary film—admitting that Rodell would probably think her “utterly mad” for having such an idea.

There were strains at the FWS.
Carson had been promoted to editor in chief of the Division of Information and now earned $6,400 a year. Her colleague Kay Howe had been chosen to do the illustrations for
The Sea Around Us
, but now it seemed they might be on the move. Rumors were circulating that FWS was going to be relocated. Cities on the list as potential destinations included Kansas City, Denver, and Albuquerque.
Carson hated this prospect and warned Rodell that such a move could make it nearly impossible to carry on her work on the seashore book, as any of those places were far away from the ocean and from her publishers and agent. She said she’d fight to keep “her unit” in Washington so as not to risk a dislocation that would be “utterly destructive of everything worthwhile I might be doing.”

March 1951 brought mixed news. Staples Press, a London publishing house, was going to bring out a British edition of
The Sea Around Us
. Carson also learned she’d received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship,
a happy development that was partially offset when the Book-of-the-Month Club chose General Omar Bradley’s
Soldier’s Story
over
The Sea Around Us
as a main selection. Carson’s book would be an alternate.
Astonishingly,
Vogue
magazine bought the chapter on ocean currents that
Reader’s Digest
had turned down.

In April, Carson got her first advance copies of
The Sea Around Us
. She and Rodell were disappointed in the binding, which was so flimsy that the books began falling apart with the slightest handling. While the first printing was under way, Oxford agreed to rebind all the copies still on hand and to use the improved binding on all copies going forward.
In May, William Shawn sent Rodell a check from the
New Yorker
for $5,200, along with a note: “We are delighted about publishing this. Thank you for sending us that original chapter, on Waves, and starting us off on the whole happy venture.”
Rodell deducted her 10 percent and forwarded Carson the balance.
The next month, Carson applied for a year’s leave without pay from
the FWS. By midsummer she would be contemplating never returning to government work.
She told Rodell she believed
The Sea Around Us
could do well enough to carry her for a few years. “If I’m not solidly established as a full time writer by that time I ought to be shot anyway,” Carson said.

The ten chapters from
The Sea Around Us
appeared in consecutive issues of the
New Yorker
on June 2, 9, and 16, 1951, under the headline “The Sea: Unforgotten World.” Tantalizingly, the pieces ran as a “Profile.”
New Yorker
profiles were legendary but had never before been about something other than a person. The challenge to the magazine’s readers to think of the sea as a living entity matched the enticing
New Yorker
format, in which a long article began on a full page and then wended its way, never jumping to the back of the magazine but always just continuing on in long, single columns of type that ran through and alongside one captivating ad after another. The opening article came to an end midway down page 59, next to an ad for a product that you could evidently take anywhere and forever: Amelia Earhart luggage.

The response to “The Sea” was overwhelming. The
New Yorker
reported that the series generated more letters to the editor than any profile in the magazine’s history and that they were, almost invariably, filled with praise for the author and for the
New Yorker
’s inspired decision to publish her.
Walter Winchell, the prominent newspaper and radio gossip reporter, read the first installment and reported that the series was a “cinch for reprint in anthologies,” apparently unaware that it would shortly come out as a book. Many readers wrote to the magazine wanting to know more about Carson. Form letters went out in response: “At one time aquatic biologist on the staff of the Bureau of Fisheries, Miss Carson is now Editor-in-Chief of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In working on the Profile of
the Sea, she took part in an oceanographic expedition in the North Atlantic and engaged in diving among the Florida coral reefs.” The
New Yorker
was still parked on nightstands around the country when Oxford published
The Sea Around Us
on July 2, 1951, and the buzz about Carson turned into a roar.

In the spring of 1950, Oxford had learned about a book called
The Sea and Its Mysteries
, by John S. Colman, that was being published in England. It soon developed that the book also had a U.S. publisher and would come out in America later that year, far ahead of
The Sea Around Us
. Colman was director of the Marine Biological Station at Port Erin on the Isle of Man, and Carson and Oxford were understandably concerned about this competition. But when Colman’s book came out it made little impact—which led to a different worry. Was the ocean a subject of only slight interest to readers?

Carson thought
The Sea and Its Mysteries
had been dismissed as “
an introduction to oceanography,” possibly because that’s essentially what it was. Evenly written but without the grace and awe Carson brought to the subject,
The Sea and Its Mysteries
was not at all the kind of book Carson had set out to write.

Carson’s particular genius was in making science come so alive that the reader did not think of it as science. Introductions, after all, are often soon forgotten. Instead, Carson distilled ocean science as if it were the most fascinating and comprehensible thing in the world, making a challenging subject plain to everyone. It would be hard to imagine a popular book more densely packed with scientific information than
The Sea Around Us
—or one that travels so entertainingly through the facts. The ocean was always a story to Carson, and she told it like one.
She began at the beginning, with a quote from Genesis—“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—perhaps seeing no contradiction between the biblical explanation of creation and the one she proceeded to offer, which was all about physics and geology and biochemistry on a roiling, evolving planet that had taken billions of years to become
itself. In Chapter 1, “The Gray Beginnings,” Carson explained the latest understanding of the origins of the earth, its ocean, and how life began—a majestic opening rendered in simple terms: