In Celebration of the “Nearly Eternal”

The Library of America is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to keeping in print the best works of America’s best writers. It recently published Rachel Carson’s first three books — Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955) —  in a single volume titled The Sea Trilogy.  

I have doubts about some of the writers that the Library of America has helped to literary apotheosis by publishing a volume or two of their work. H. P. Lovecraft? Are you kidding?

But the decision to print Carson’s first three books together in one volume was inspired. Despite their differences in subject matter, the books form a whole, united by their author’s reverence for and wonder at marine life in its immense complexity, extension, and interrelatedness.

Rachel Carson is remembered most of all for her book Silent Spring (1962), which called attention to the harm done to many forms of life by the overuse in agriculture of DDT and other pesticides.  But her earlier books, with their emphasis on the fragility as well as the resilience of marine life, are also basic texts of the environmental movement.

Rachel Carson wanted to be a marine biologist, not a writer of books.  Circumstances led her to become both.

In 1936, the division chief of the United States Bureau of Fisheries asked Rachel Carson, then a biologist on his staff, to write an introduction for a pamphlet that the bureau was about to publish.  Carson was not only an accomplished marine biologist but also a gifted writer who was often called upon to write pamphlets for the bureau.

The division chief, however, rejected the 11-page introduction that Carson submitted to him several days later.  “This is too literary for our publications,” he said. “I think you should submit it to The Atlantic.”

Carson needed to make some extra money so she followed her chief’s suggestion and submitted the introduction to The Atlantic, which published it next year, with the title “Undersea.”

The article so impressed an editor at Simon and Schuster that he offered Carson a contract to write a book about marine life.  He was certain that the beauty of Carson’s prose and her almost magical ability to enter into the lives of sea dwelling animals would be sure to find an audience.

The book that Carson’s wrote, titled Under the Sea Wind, focused on the lives of a sand piper, an eel, a mackerel, and other creatures. The critics loved it, but it didn’t sell. It was published just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which left few people in a book buying mood.

Her publishers retained their confidence in her, however, and offered her another contract.  Her second book, The Sea Around Us, was published in 1951. In this book, Carson drew on her mastery of a variety of scientific disciplines to create what one reviewer called “a biography of the sea”.  The book won the National Book Award for non-fiction, became an international best-seller, and created such a demand for Carson’s writings that Under the Sea Wind also became a best seller.

Carson’s third book, The Edge of the Sea, is about the marine life on beaches and in tidal pools.  It was published in 1955 and was both a critical and popular success.

These books are good reading not only for the grace of their prose, but also for Carson’s ability to enter into the lives of sea creatures.  Her procedure is the opposite of anthropomorphism. Her sand pipers do not become people. She becomes a sand piper, looking for things to eat and on the alert against predators.  

Her rich poetic imagination was both nourished and rigorously controlled by scientific knowledge.   

Under the Sea Wind begins with a description of the arrival, on a warm June evening, of migrating black terns, genus Rynchops, on a sandy island on the coast of North America. The terns had migrated to the island from Yucatan in order to lay and hatch their eggs. 

I cannot read this chapter without thinking of William Cullen Bryant’s poem To A Waterfowl, about a  seabird  reaching, at sundown, its a place of safety and rest after a long migratory  journey. In Bryant’s poem, the waterfowl is guided and protected by a benevolent deity. Carson shares Bryant’s wonder at and love for seabirds, but her black terns are not guided or protected by a benevolent deity.  They are on their own in a world that is as dangerous as it is beautiful. 

Rachel Carson died in 1964, at the age of 56.  When she wrote  the books now published as The Sea Trilogy, she was largely unconcerned about the threat posed to marine life by human activity.  Charles Keeling would not set up his laboratory for sampling and measuring the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere until 1958, and it would be years before his measurements showed evidence of increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

She wrote: “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

Had she lived to see that marine life, and indeed all life on Earth, is being imperiled by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, her loving heart would have grieved.  Her scientific mind, however, would have counted the cost of our heedlessness with damning precision, and her eloquent voice would have been raised in defense of all life on Earth. That voice is missed.