On a Farther Shore (11 page)

In 1936, feeling dispirited with his life in Devonshire, Williamson had bought a farm on the other side of England, near the Norfolk
coast on the North Sea. He spent the year improving the property and readying himself to become a farmer.
Goodbye, West Country
was a diarylike record of his final months in Devonshire and, as Carson said in her letter offering to review it, Williamson’s daily comings and goings made pleasant reading. One day, not feeling like working, he’d gone down to the Bray with his fly rod and, after creeping to river’s edge on hands and knees, hooked a magnificent nine-pound salmon. The great fish led him on a struggle upstream and down that produced a thrilling interlude over several pages in
Goodbye, West Country:

A photograph of Williamson’s eventual triumph over the fish was taken against the wall of Shallowford cottage. In it Williamson stands erect and sober, dressed in a coat and tie with woolen knickers, a fly rod in his right hand. His left, balled into a fist and held near his waist, hoists the giant fish by the tail, its nose nearly touching Williamson’s shoe.

Carson’s review of
Goodbye, West Country
, just three paragraphs long, took notice only of Williamson’s close observations of nature, and she found in these a kindred spirit. As he had done in
Tarka
and
Salar
, books that Carson declared were at the “front rank of nature literature,” Williamson showed his keen appreciation for the endless cycle of life and death and rebirth that animates the natural world. Carson felt that Williamson perceived the “whole life” of a creature he beheld even for a moment. She wrote that he was the sort of “sensitive
person” who is simultaneously saddened by the mortality of all living things and yet keenly aware that this is nature’s way.

These were themes that resonated with Carson and that she may have been alone in detecting as an essential feature of Williamson’s journal of a country year. Whether
Goodbye, West Country
was a book mainly about nature was debatable. In fairness, the space for her review was so short that the list of things she had to leave out would have been long. And, just as the
Atlantic
did not want to be in the business of hyping one of its authors, neither would the magazine have likely run a thoroughly critical review. Short and favorable were the requirements, and Carson’s desire to emphasize what she liked best about the book was understandable. But as anyone who read
Goodbye, West Country
would have noticed, Carson’s review omitted even a mention of a long, detailed, and important section of the book—Williamson’s enthusiastic recollection of his visit to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1935, a revealing account that unfolded over the course of some thirty pages and that emphasized Williamson’s admiration for Hitler.

There are friendly allusions to Hitler and Germany elsewhere in
Goodbye, West Country
, and in one of these passages Williamson recalls with annoyance the response he’d gotten from the editor of an American literary journal after Williamson had written him a letter suggesting that people fearful of Germany had it all wrong: “ ‘
I am all with you when it comes to salmon and otter,’ the editor wrote back, ‘but violently opposed to your ideas of the great Mr. Hitler. He seems to me a disease of the times.’ ”

Why Carson didn’t say something along those lines in her review is puzzling. Perhaps she read
Goodbye, West Country
as she had Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” back at PCW—blind to its darker meanings. Maybe she was simply uninterested in Williamson’s thoughts about Europe and whether it was to be peace or war with Germany. Although she was happy enough working inside Roosevelt’s New Deal administration and later in life hinted that she was a Democrat, Carson seems to have been at heart apolitical.

But evidence of Hitler’s menace had been accruing for years, and while Americans were slow to realize what was happening in Germany under the Nazis, by 1938 when she reviewed
Goodbye, West Country
, Carson could not have been unaware that Williamson’s politics were extreme.
As early as 1933, in a review of Houghton Mifflin’s American edition of
Mein Kampf—
a book everyone was curious about—the
New York Times
had suggested that the “Aryan” leader of Germany was a menace to other states in Europe and that fascism had evil “implications for the Jewish race.” Throughout the 1930s, the news from Germany had grown steadily more alarming. In the summer of 1935, as Henry Williamson was finishing
Salar the Salmon
at Shallowford cottage, Jews were being harassed by Nazi storm troopers in Berlin, and at the Nuremberg rally Williamson attended that fall Hitler had announced new laws rescinding German citizenship for Jews, placing restrictions on where Jews could live and work, and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and gentiles.

By 1938, Hitler had annexed Austria; within months he would invade Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Britain and France would declare war on Germany. In December 1938, the month Carson’s review appeared in the
Atlantic
, a sharp diplomatic dispute arose over Germany’s formal protest of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’s public criticism of Hitler’s regime in a speech he’d given in Cleveland. The papers in Germany spewed criticism of Ickes—they labeled him a gangster—and hinted at an imminent break in relations between the two countries. Two years later, Rachel Carson would be working for Ickes.

Carson may or may not have been aware that Henry Williamson had joined the British Union of Fascists in the fall of 1937—though it seems likely that the Atlantic Press, his American publishers, would have known as much. It’s also unclear whether Carson understood how Williamson’s nature writing and his interest in farming and rural life fit into a mythical narrative embraced by the Nazis in Germany, where so-called blood-and-soil literature celebrated racial purity and a working life close to the land.
Writers in Germany were required
to be members of the Reich Chamber of Literature, which exercised broad censorship powers through various subagencies. The blacklisting of “modern” and Jewish authors, along with public book burnings, were among the first official acts of the Nazis after Hitler came into power in 1933.
Under National Socialism, German literature was expected to emphasize—as propaganda minister Goebbels put it—a “steely romanticism.” This produced a steady supply of unimaginative novels portraying the sturdy rewards of rural life that were thought to be the pillars of Germany’s renewal under Hitler—and which matched the führer’s more general belief that all artistic endeavors should be aimed at the common man.
In 1937, Hitler had decreed that German artists could paint only works that were comprehensible to the average German.

In
Goodbye, West Country
, Williamson—as steely a romantic as there could be—
observed that city-dwelling modernists “growing up on sidewalks” suffered from too much “mental living” and had far too little experience of “the natural world, the world of men working their minds in harmony with their bodies.” The by-products of the “nervous strain” of city life and of having “no roots in the soil,” Williamson wrote, were “mental confusions.” Carson, who had her own reservations about the implications of human progress, may well have agreed with Williamson on these points—without making the connection to fascist ideology. No doubt the evil that takes center stage for a big part of
Goodbye, West Country
is easier to see in hindsight, though this does not alter the fact that it was there.

What seems probable is that Carson dashed off a short review of
Goodbye, West Country
while she was thinking much more deeply about a different book by Henry Williamson
—Salar the Salmon
. Williamson’s bitter complaint in
Goodbye, West Country
about the difficulty he had writing the salmon book did not dissuade Carson in her plan to model her own first book on
Salar
.
Carson wrote to van Loon that she and Howe had agreed that the book should be about twelve chapters long, each one telling its own story of one group of sea dwellers, a mosaic that would ultimately yield a coherent picture
of the total ocean habitat. In this respect it would differ from
Salar
, which featured a single fish as a protagonist. But Carson also longed to achieve the same sense of immersion—of taking the reader under and into the water—that Williamson had managed.

With that in mind, Carson asked van Loon for a favor, one that marked the beginning of what was to become a permanent feature of her approach to research and writing:
She asked van Loon to introduce her to an expert, in this case a friend of his named William Beebe. Beebe, then in his early sixties, was the director of the Department of Tropical Research at the New York Zoological Society and one of the country’s leading naturalists. By chance, Beebe was tall and thin and bore an uncanny resemblance to Henry Williamson.

Largely self-taught—he’d spent a few semesters at Columbia—Beebe was famous as an ornithologist and, more recently, for his underwater exploits as a helmet diver. Beebe’s enthusiasm for the “sport” of helmet diving was boundless.
He believed that within a few years, people would routinely tend to underwater gardens in the near-shore ocean, planting and visiting them with guests on diving parties to which everyone traveled by boat before going overboard in a metal helmet attached to an air hose tethered to a pump that would keep each reveler merrily alive and breathing at the comfortable depth of five fathoms, or thirty feet. Beebe himself had extensive diving experience, and once, while wandering over the ocean bottom off the coast of Haiti in his glass-fronted copper helmet at a depth of about ten fathoms, had come to a steep precipice.
Staring down into the depths, Beebe had an urge to jump over the edge to see what lay below—but knew that he would quickly succumb to the added pressure of the water. The longing to visit that deeper world, which Beebe said was as unknown as the surface of Mars, stayed with him.

In 1929, Beebe met a man named Otis Barton who had built a deep-diving apparatus. In principle, it reminded Beebe of something he claimed had once been suggested to him by a young cavalry colonel named Theodore Roosevelt. It was a simple contraption, a steel sphere just under five feet in diameter, or large enough to hold two
men seated next to each other. The wall of the sphere was an inch and a quarter thick and featured three heavy quartz windows, round like portholes and just big enough to peer out into the depths or to frame a human face within should anything swim by for a look. Access was through a small hatch that bolted in place and was so heavy it had to be removed or installed with a winch. Oxygen tanks and charcoal air scrubbers inside the capsule provided a breathable atmosphere. The whole apparatus, some 5,400 pounds of it, was lowered into the sea on a cable specially designed to prevent it from twisting and causing the capsule to spin. Other cables provided electricity for a searchlight and telephone communication with the surface. Beebe, looking for a name for Barton’s invention, dubbed it the “bathysphere.”

After making initial unmanned tests in the deep waters off Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, Beebe and Barton made a series of progressively deeper dives in the bathysphere. At the time, the depth record for a submarine was 383 feet. The lowest depth reached by any human being who had survived the experience was 525 feet, which had been set by a diver in an armored suit in a lake in Bavaria. The first manned dive in the bathysphere, on June 6, 1930, went to 800 feet. On August 15, 1934, Beebe and Barton took the bathysphere down to 3,028 feet. They might have gone a bit deeper, but the lift operator on the boat deck noticed that there was only a handful of turns left on the winch and feared the cable might break off if it came to the end. Later that year, Beebe published a lively book about his diving exploits called
Half Mile Down
.

Carson was certainly familiar with this book and its charming, evidently fearless author. In visiting so deep a part of the ocean, Beebe and Barton had gone to a place nobody had ever seen—and learned much about it in the process. Although many deepwater species had been retrieved in netting operations such as those of the
Challenger
, specimens were often damaged by the change in pressure when they were brought to the surface. Observing for the first time the unimaginably rich diversity of life far below the reach of sunlight, Beebe and Barton photographed and made drawings of a wild assortment
of fish, eels, squid, and jellyfish. Some of these creatures produced their own glowing lights; others passed though the searchlight like transparent ghosts or dark, indistinct shadows. Beebe was surprised that a number of species that frequented the surface were also seen at great depths, demonstrating a previously unsuspected ability to navigate between regions of extreme pressure differentials.