Figuring, page 46
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
How could she have lived without ever laying eyes on this supreme evocation of nature’s might and splendor? Carson would later recount the intense emotional stir of reading that final line, pointing to the moment as a revelation that unlatched the unsuspected chamber of her being from which her life’s work would spring:
That line spoke to something within me, seeming to tell me that my own path led to the sea—which then I had never seen—and that my own destiny was somehow linked with the sea.
But as she turned toward marine biology, she never turned away from writing, nor from her greatest literary love: poetry. In fact, her first serious attempts at publication as an adult were with verse. Among her papers is a vast collection of rejection slips—The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Saturday Evening Post, Century Magazine, Good Housekeeping—dated from her senior year of college onward. Somewhere along the way, Carson must have arrived at the same conclusion as Aurora Leigh—that “no one lives by verse that lives,” and that if she were to survive as a writer, she must write prose. But unlike Barrett Browning’s Aurora, Carson realized that poetry lives in innumerable guises beyond standard verse and made the radical decision to graft the poetic onto the scientific.
Over the next few years, Carson immersed herself in the science of the seas. For her thesis on the fish kidney, the function of which was then poorly understood and subject to controversial theories, she made painstaking camera lucida drawings under the microscope as she peered at specimens she had dissected and stained. To pay her way through the master’s program, she took jobs as lab assistant and biology instructor—the only female one in the department—before graduating with a degree in zoology in 1932 and entering a Ph.D. program, also at Johns Hopkins.
But midway through Carson’s doctoral studies, tragedy piled atop tribulation. First, the financial strain of keeping up with the tuition became too severe, and she had to leave the program. Then, one summer morning in her twenty-eighth year, her father died suddenly in the backyard of the family home. With her mother disabled by severe arthritis, Rachel was rendered head of household. Her brother and sister, neither of whom had finished high school, had left the nest long ago. After two divorces, her sister had eventually returned to live under Mrs. Carson’s roof with two young daughters. Not yet thirty, Rachel had four dependents and a mass of student loans.
She applied for a low-level position at the United States Bureau of Fisheries and was hired as a field aide for $6.50 a day. When her supervisor noticed her literary gift, he tasked her with writing short scripts for the government agency’s program Romance Under the Waters airing on CBS Radio. Meanwhile, she began submitting longer pieces about marine life to the Baltimore Sun, which, arrested by so uncommon a fusion of science and lyrical prose, made her a regular contributor to their Sunday Magazine. On the first day of March 1936, one hundred years after Maria Mitchell received her first paid job at the Nantucket Atheneum, Rachel Carson received the first check of her adult life for a piece of writing: $20.
Thanks to a series of civil service exams in parasitology, wildlife biology, and aquatic biology that Skinker, then employed by the government herself, had encouraged her to take, Carson qualified for a full-time position as a junior aquatic biologist. She scored above all other applicants and was hired at $2,000 per year, assigned to a dark ground-level Washington, D.C., office that felt “like working in the bottom of a well.” There, Carson first became aware of and alarmed about the rapid decline in fish populations after the surge of industry in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Impressed with her work on the radio scripts, Carson’s boss tasked her with writing “something of a general sort about the sea” to introduce the bureau’s work to the popular reader, expecting that she would summarize the agency’s scientific research and annual reports. Instead, she transmuted the facts of science into a kind of poetry, something so lyrical that her chief told her—“with a twinkle in his eye,” she would later recount—that it didn’t work as a government report. But he encouraged her to submit it to The Atlantic Monthly as an essay.
Before she had a chance to do that, tragedy struck again—her sister died of pneumonia at forty, leaving her two young daughters in Carson’s care.
I have often wondered how a writer whose published prose radiates such exuberant emotional richness could remain so intently stoic in her personal writings, her letters never dwelling on the inordinate share of misfortune life had dealt her and would continue to deal. Writing couldn’t have been a mere “passion”—it must have been for her, as it is for many of us who write, redemption, self-salvation, a lifeline. In science she must have found the consolation of the wider lens that humbles the temporal turmoils of any single life against the eternal cosmic backdrop of all life—the “grandeur” of view that had solaced Darwin in the wake of loss.
Shortly after her sister’s death, Carson submitted her essay to the Atlantic, where it was accepted and published in the September 1937 issue as “Undersea”—a lyrical journey to what Walt Whitman had called, in one of his least known poems, “the world below the brine,” a world more mysterious in 1937 than the Moon. The byline read R. L. Carson—a century after S. M. Fuller, Carson, too, worried that her gender would undermine the authority of her prose. Of the twenty-one contributors to the issue, Carson is the only one whose name would be widely recognized in the following century.
In this unprecedented masterpiece, she invited the reader to explore the most enigmatic recesses of Earth from the perspective of nonhuman creatures—Whitman’s “beings who walk other spheres.” Carson wrote:
Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting, bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night.
To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water.
* * *
—
Writing in his journal a century earlier, in the year Maria Mitchell discovered her comet and taught him to use a telescope, Emerson lamented that there had yet to be invented a way of transmuting the facts of the natural world into beautiful literature:
Literature should be the counterpart of nature & equally rich. I find her not in our books. I know nature, & figure her to myself as exuberant, tranquil, magnificent in her fertility,—coherent, so that every thing is an omen of every other. She is not proud of the sea or of the stars, of space or time; for all her kinds share the attributes of the selectest extremes.
Carson eulogized this notion of an ecology of being, beckoning the reader to appreciate the intricate interconnectedness of all life to which Mary Scott Skinker had awakened her a decade earlier:
Every marine animal, from the smallest to the sharks and whales, is ultimately dependent for its food upon these microscopic entities of the vegetable life of the ocean. Within their fragile walls, the sea performs a vital alchemy that utilizes the sterile chemical elements dissolved in the water and welds them with the torch of sunlight into the stuff of life.
It was a revelation that science could be a literary subject, that it could speak—nay, sing—to the common reader with melodic might, so gracefully and graciously rejecting the false trade-off between the authority of science and the splendor of literary art. Rachel Carson would model for generations of writers the dignified refusal to give up either in the service of the other.
24
WHERE SPLENDOR DWELLS
Within a week, an envelope from the editor in chief of Simon and Schuster arrived at Carson’s desk, inviting her to expand the essay into a book. Under the Sea-Wind was published four years later—a series of lyrical narratives about the life of the shore, the open sea, and the deep oceanic abyss. Determined to avoid the human bias of popular books about the ocean, which had always been written from the perspective of a human observer—a fisherman, a deep sea diver, a shore wanderer—Carson explored each of the three areas of marine life through the perspective of a particular, personified creature, christened by the scientific name of its genus. Three decades before the primatologist Jane Goodall was ridiculed for giving chimps names during her pioneering studies of primates in Gombe—work that later humbled our anthropoarrogance by revolutionizing our understanding of nonhuman consciousness—Carson writes of Silverbar, the sanderling soaring in migration from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia; Scomber, the Atlantic mackerel journeying from New England to the Continental Shelf; and Anguilla, the eel on a voyage to spawn with millions of his kin in the abysses of the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda. Out of this rich personified narrative emerges the book’s central hero: the ocean itself.
Carson wrote in a memo to her publisher:
Each of these stories seems to me not only to challenge the imagination, but also to give us a little better perspective on human problems. They are stories of things that have been going on for countless thousands of years. They are as ageless as sun and rain, or as the sea itself. The relentless struggle for survival in the sea epitomizes the struggle of all earthly life, human and nonhuman.
But chance interceded once again. Just as effusive reviews began flooding in for Under the Sea-Wind—“a beautiful and unusual book,” The New York Times enthused—Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor claimed the nation’s mind. Just before the bombing, one reviewer had written:
Our own battles for existence seem less a matter for dismay and more a simple reason for fortitude when compared in the mind with the ceaseless ebb and flow of life and death that are under all the sea winds.
The paradox of terror is that it contracts our scope into a smallness of attention that frantically filters in only confirmation of our grounds for fear and filters out our grounds for hope. The beauty of the natural world, the ancient kinship with our fellow beings, and the reassurance of cosmic timescales that dwarf any momentary crisis may have been exactly what a terrified nation needed, but Under the Sea-Wind was filtered out of the nation’s attention. Carson saw her three years’ labor as a casualty of the war. Her only solace was the book’s ardent reception by the scientific community. Prominent biologists and naturalists wrote to commend her on the uncommon feat of popularizing without diluting science.
And yet the broader indifference stung. After seven years of discontent at the publisher’s growing carelessness with the book’s life in the world, Carson broke free of her contract. But she was too destitute to afford to buy back the publishing rights for $150. The disappointment, she wrote to Simon and Schuster, had almost broken her spirit and discouraged her from ever writing another book. But some deeper fidelity to the beauty and significance of her subject buoyed her as she began thinking about a far more ambitious book.
Meanwhile, Carson—one of only two women scientists employed by the government agency—had been steadily ascending the ranks, rising from her original appointment as junior aquatic biologist to senior biologist at the bureau, now reconfigured as the United States Fish and Wildlife Services. She trawled the technical journals and saved newspaper clippings about breakthroughs in the science of ocean currents and waves, about advances in sonar, radar, and other wartime technology that could be enlisted in the richer understanding of nature.
In the autumn of 1944, Carson submitted to Collier’s a fifteen-hundred-word piece bridging evolution and modern technology by drawing a sixty-million-year connection between the bat’s sonic navigation system for nocturnal flight and the novelty of radar. The essay was a triumph. Several other magazines republished it. The Navy used it in their internal materials as “one of the clearest expositions of radar yet made available for public consumption.” It unbolted the gates to the magazine world for Carson.
Carson pitched to Reader’s Digest—who had reprinted the bat piece—another story, this time exploring the darker side of the relationship between nature and modern technology. She had been following new research on the negative effects of DDT—the pesticide so widely and indiscriminately used that cities sprayed entire neighborhoods, the government hosed down acres of forests, and agricultural airplanes rained it down upon children lunching in the schoolyard amid cornfields. At the Patuxent Research Refuge in Prince George’s County, DDT doused the forest canopy and drifted toward the Patuxent River. Following the spraying, researchers monitored the wildlife in the area and watched birds, butterflies, fish, frogs, and foxes suffer and perish. After reading their cautionary report on the “two-edged sword” of industrial chemicals that were intended to eradicate so-called harmful species but ended up harming all of life, Carson offered Reader’s Digest a lucid look at the dangers of DDT: “what it will do to insects that are beneficial or even essential; how it may affect waterfowl, or birds that depend on insect food; whether it may upset the whole delicate balance of nature if unwisely used.”
Reader’s Digest was uninterested. Carson would incubate her growing concern for another decade and a half. For now, she reasoned that one attracts more flies with honey than with vinegar and proposed to her boss at the Fish and Wildlife Service a twelve-part series of brochures spotlighting and celebrating the national wildlife refuge system. Under the plain, purposeful title Conservation in Action, Carson strewed these government brochures with her surprising bursts of lyrical prose about the splendors of nature and the hard-earned glories of evolution. The series, unprecedented in government publication, earned Carson promotion to editor in chief for the agency.
Carson continued submitting essays to popular magazines. In what began as a government press release about the migration patterns of chimney swifts and ended up as a feature article in Collier’s, she envisioned what we now call biomimicry—the replication of nature’s processes and systems in technological solutions to human problems: “If aviation engineers would apply the wisdom of the chimney swift, several troublesome problems of aeronautics could be solved.” She was paid $55 for the piece—a sum so negligible as to be almost humiliating, but having just returned from the hospital after an appendectomy, Carson gratefully put the small amount toward her medical bills.
She kept thinking about her next book, until its subject coalesced from the particulate cloud of her lifelong inspirations and fascinations: the ocean as the seedbed of life and our profound dependence on it. A decade into her writing career, Carson began looking for a literary agent. In early 1948, after careful deliberation, she signed with Marie Rodell—a Vassar-educated novelist and editor who had just launched her own literary agency in New York and who would go on to procure the publication of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, first book. “I, as an agent, do not handle this thing by Rachel Carson, and that thing by Rachel Carson,” Rodell would soon write. “I handle Rachel Carson.” She would become not only Carson’s fiercest champion but one of her dearest friends. By summer’s end, “Sincerely, Rachel Carson” had melted into “Love, Ray.”
That year, Carson was elected to the board of the Audubon Society—an honor particularly gladdening, for birds had been her first love and would always remain the chief animating force of her love of all life. Among Carson’s colleagues on the board was Mabel Loomis Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, who after a four-year immersion in the science-heavy curriculum Maria Mitchell had established at Vassar had gone on to become the first woman to earn a doctorate in geography from Harvard.
But the year ended on a somber note. Just as Carson was gathering momentum on her new book, she received news that Mary Scott Skinker lay dying of cancer. Carson flew to Chicago to spend two sorrowful weeks at the bedside of the woman who had awakened her to herself. Skinker died a week before Christmas at the age of fifty-seven. Grief-stricken, Carson turned to the only medicine she had ever known—writing about the grandeur of life.
By early 1949, she had completed three sample chapters of the new book, which Rodell pitched to Oxford University Press. The editor in chief was taken with prose that embodied what Carson herself would later describe as “the magic combination of factual knowledge and deeply felt emotional response” in a letter of advice to a young woman who had asked her what it takes to become a writer.
On June 3, 1949, Carson signed a contract with Oxford for an advance of $1,000, to be paid in two installments. The following month, she set out from Woods Hole for “ten days of unusual adventure”—as part of her job at the Fish and Wildlife Service, she was to join a government research vessel for a fish census and then report on it. But the assignment was befogged when officials realized the marine biologist sent to observe the census was a woman—no woman had ever been allowed aboard the ship before. Eventually, some bureaucrat decided that while one woman aboard a vessel with fifty men was impermissible, two would be all right. Carson invited Marie Rodell along, who half-joked that she would write about her experience in a piece titled “I Was a Chaperone on a Fishing Boat.” (A decade and a half later, in the year of Carson’s death, the pioneering oceanographer Sylvia Earl—one of the first marine scientists to use scuba diving equipment and to this day the only human being to have walked the deepest ocean floor—joined a six-week expedition to the Indian Ocean, on which she was the sole woman. A newspaper headline proclaimed: “Sylvia Sails Away with 70 Men, But She Expects No Problem.”)
