Read On a Farther Shore Online
Authors: William Souder
Dorothy enjoyed exploring the shoreline with Carson, then sitting with her at the microscope to see what they had found.
One time Carson took Dorothy to a special place, a hole in the rock at Ocean Point that, beneath a low ceiling only inches above its floor, held a translucent pool of water. Carson called it her “Fairy Cave.” It was only accessible during the lowest tides of the year, and even then could be glimpsed but for short periods, as the ocean surge sometimes swept up and over the mossy rock from which the cave could be observed. In this hidden liminal world, Carson discovered a glittery, living universe:
Under water that was clear as glass the pool was carpeted with green sponge. Gray patches of sea squirts glistened on the ceiling and colonies of soft coral were a pale apricot color. In the moment when I looked into the cave a little elfin starfish hung down, suspended by the merest thread, perhaps by only a single tube foot. It reached down to touch its own reflection, so perfectly delineated that there might have been, not one starfish, but two. The beauty of the reflected images and of the limpid pool itself was the poignant beauty of things that are ephemeral, existing only until the sea should return to fill the little cave.
Dorothy seemed to remember everything—a day when the tide was high just at noon, another when Carson came to her with cakes and blueberries. Or a night when they sat on Dorothy’s porch watching the moonlit waters on the bay. On a nice day in July 1954, Stan and Dorothy took Carson sailing aboard
Draftee
, an outing Carson probably had not looked forward to.
Months earlier the woman who in the minds of millions was an intrepid sailor and reef diver alerted Dorothy that she was a hopeless landlubber who knew nothing about boats. Carson confessed a reluctance to embrace the “amphibious life” at West Southport.
Then, on the day of their cruise, Stan accidentally steered too near the shore in front of Carson’s cottage and the boat lurched as it scraped over some rocks. Carson told Dorothy she’d later had a good laugh about this and added—not all that convincingly—that she hoped they’d take her out again. Dorothy remembered this adventure more pleasantly, telling Carson that it had given her a good excuse to “hold your hand.”
Carson and Dorothy agreed to think of Carson’s public persona as “the other woman.” Carson claimed that she could never fully believe that the famous Rachel Carson was actually her. More practically, Carson wanted Dorothy to know that while many people might idolize her, she understood that Dorothy was not among them and instead loved her for who she truly was.
Nothing was off-limits between Carson and Dorothy—their certainty that they could tell each other anything was as durable as the rocks at Southport Island.
In a candid, almost elegiac letter to Carson, Dorothy once tried to explain the importance of her marriage. If at times it seemed there must be two Dorothys—one for Stan and one for Carson—in truth there was only a single Dorothy, one whose remarkable fortune was to be loved by two people at once. Dorothy knew Carson would understand.
It was a rainy late afternoon. Dusk had settled early and Dorothy was in a melancholy mood. She told Carson that she felt suspended in time. Earlier in the day she’d been cross with Stan, and although she apologized at once and hugged him, she knew he’d been hurt by what she’d said. Now he was having a nap and Dorothy retreated to an upstairs bedroom, telling Carson she found herself “in the corner that belongs in my heart only to you—you know where and why.” Dorothy turned on the radio—a Mahler symphony was playing—and began reading Laurens Van der Post’s
Venture to the Interior
, a gripping, sometimes harrowing account of a British exploratory expedition into an uncharted region of southern Africa. Dorothy was unable to explain how, but the final chapters of the book had been moving “beyond reason” to her:
Suddenly, at one of the most dramatic moments in the book before its climax—the music overpowered me so that I had to stop reading. Floods of tears just streamed from my eyes. The music had been subdued and at times a rich human voice had become part of it. At the time it reached me it was carrying an exquisite melody in the high strings with dark shadings in the lower strings. It seemed to complement the book completely. Then I began to think of Stan asleep in the other room and suddenly underneath the lovely melody was a pattern of discord in the brasses, incongruous and intruding—almost a warning to me it seemed. And then I knew that I’ve got to tell Stan how wonderful has
been my life with him, how good he has been to me, how rich our life together has been. He’s made me so happy—given me so much. I feel I have in no way repaid him for his years of devotion.
One time, as Carson and Dorothy lounged on the rocks above the tide pools, Carson had gotten into a confessional mood that she later regretted, but Dorothy assured her that such confidences were precious to her. When they were apart, Carson and Dorothy often wrote to tell each other of things they’d seen or done that would have been more meaningful had they been together. Nature and music could make either of them cry, and it was hard to tell whether such experiences were more intense when shared or when they arrived in a letter. Dorothy told Carson she missed her more when a flight of geese passed overhead or there was intense phosphorescence on Sheepscot Bay. Dorothy said Carson had reawakened her love of the natural world—Stan’s, too—but that above all it had been finding someone who understood her so perfectly that had transformed her life when nothing of the kind had been expected.
“
Darling,” she wrote to Carson, “you and I on our Island are looking at a light so bright—invisible to others—a glorious, miraculous light that has brought to me and I hope and believe to you, untold happiness.”
Carson had finally written a letter introducing herself to Henry Beston, admitting to him that she’d meant to do so some twenty years earlier, after she’d found his cottage from
The Outermost House
on that trip from Woods Hole to the outer Cape. Beston had long since settled at a country place he called Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine—close enough to visit. Carson told Beston he’d been recommended to her as someone who would know where she could go to hear veeries, their song being in her estimation “one of the most deeply moving of bird voices.” She was also eager to thank Beston for having written a penetrating review of
Under the Sea-Wind
after its reissue by Oxford.
Beston invited her to come over, and she went
with Dorothy, and again later that summer with her mother—whom Beston and his wife, Elizabeth, found delightful.
At the end of the season, Carson sent Dorothy a first edition of
The Sea Around Us
, telling her there were not many such in existence and that it would sadden her if Dorothy did not have one. She said they both understood the book’s significance in each of their lives, and she also told Dorothy about the lines from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” that had convinced her that her destiny was entwined with the sea:
And so, as you know, it has been. When I finally became its biographer, the sea brought me recognition and what the world calls success.
It brought me to Southport.
It brought me to you.
So now the sea means something to me that it never meant before. And even the title of the book has a new and personal significance—the sea around Us.
Carson and Dorothy were both passionate about the Christmas holidays, and for them it would always be a time for recounting things they’d done together in the last year and for looking ahead to what was to come. But in the weeks leading up to the holiday season in 1954, their letters became more expectant than usual—they were going to escape together to New York just after New Year’s, and the logistics of this meeting mixed confusingly with worries that it might appear to be an assignation.
Carson had recently discovered Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” and had been struck by the several lines in it that seemed full of meaning for them, especially the phrase “time not our time.” She wondered if Dorothy was counting the days until their arrival in New York as she was.
They debated over which hotel was best. Carson thought either
the St. Moritz or the Barbizon-Plaza would be fine. She said she really didn’t care, as long as wherever they went was “out of range.” They also debated whether Carson should register under her “usual” name. Carson decided that using an alias would make her feel silly. Besides, she told Dorothy, “the hotel management doesn’t matter.” A more important consideration, in Carson’s mind at least, was the possibility that, given their train schedules, they would arrive at the hotel at the same time.
Could they, Carson wondered, hide their emotions and restrain themselves long enough to get up to their room? Or would they give themselves away right there in the lobby? Dorothy thought they could affect a nonchalant air. She told Carson that when they were alone at last she wanted to spend an hour just being close to her without speaking a word. Carson said she liked Dorothy’s suggestion for that first hour—and afterward they would see what happened.
Carson and Dorothy spent two nights at the Barbizon-Plaza. Apparently there had been some discussion about the advisability of Carson’s spending a second night there, as Dorothy later thanked Carson for staying over with her for what would otherwise have been a “desolate” night alone. Dorothy told Carson their room had been filled with a “rosy glow” that vanished the moment Carson departed, leaving just an empty room. She said how nice it would be for them to be able to remember the hours they’d had together. “Thus far I have no regrets,” Dorothy added. “How wonderful also.”
A day later Dorothy again wrote to Carson to say how happy their time together had been. She said it was “queer to see the moon above the skyscrapers” but that seeing it with Carson was all that mattered: “
Darling, again let me tell you how sweet every moment of our being together was for me. Another lovely memory to be added to so many others. Of course, I believe the setting for our type of happiness is at its best in the natural world but if we can’t always have that we can create our own ‘quiet bower’ in a man-made environment, can’t we? It wasn’t too bad, was it dear?”
Carson and Dorothy were together in New York for about forty-four hours—long enough, somehow, for Dorothy to feel the need to
say at the end that she had no regrets about any of it
thus far
. Carson, meanwhile, was uncharacteristically circumspect in the days following their meeting—saying little more than it had made her happy and that she could now return to
The Edge of the Sea
with renewed energy.
She said they’d had a “lovely interlude.”
Dorothy’s caution—did she fear that regret would come with time?—was as unusual as Carson’s reticence. Had they been intimate in a way they were now reluctant to acknowledge? Sex seems not to have been part of their relationship, or at least not an essential feature of it. Their surviving correspondence describes a transcendent, romantic friendship that existed in a realm above ordinary physical love and desire. Nowhere in their many hundreds of letters to each other are there the declarations of mutual attraction so common among sexually intimate couples. Their longing for each other was intense, an “overpowering emotional experience” that swept them up like an inrushing tide. They remarked often on the impossibility of anyone else understanding their feelings for each other. Rarely together in the same place for long—a few days here and there, sometimes a week or longer at West Southport—their relationship existed mainly on paper and in their own hearts and minds.
Their differences were complementary. Carson was famous and ambitious and had never given a thought to living any life other than a writer’s life. She knew a lot about the world, but nothing of love. Dorothy was private and shared a rich, loving marriage with Stan. Together they had a son, and now a daughter-in-law and a grandchild named Martha whose company was a delight.
Dorothy could cook and take care of things; Carson, despite years at the head of a sprawling family, was indifferent to domestic matters.
What they shared was an intensity of feeling for nature and books and music—a love for the beautiful things in life that are associated with the highest category of Platonic love. Platonic Eros is a hierarchy, with carnal desires at the bottom rung of
what the classicist Allan Bloom called Plato’s “ladder of love.” At the top is “beauty itself,” and it was on this highest rung that Carson and Dorothy began their
affair of the heart. From the beginning, they related to each other mainly through their shared appreciation of “beautiful things” that were larger and more perfect than themselves.
A few weeks after their rendezvous in New York, Dorothy wrote to tell Carson that the night before, feeling anxious and having had too much coffee, she’d lain awake for a long time. At last her thoughts settled on their time together in Maine the previous spring, their “Maytime”:
Oh, darling, live over those days together sometime. Such happiness as those days brought to me. I remember the morning I got up before you did, to stand at the window for a long while looking down on your own special world. Darling, the tears came that morning—the whole situation was so lovely—so far lovelier than anything my wildest imagination could conjure up. Do you remember?
Alone with this memory in the small hours of the morning, Dorothy said she’d gone to get the letters Carson had sent the previous winter confessing the fullness of her love. Dorothy wondered how many hours Carson had spent writing them—they were so perfect and so finely composed—and she thought how the world would have valued that time had Carson instead devoted those same hours to writing things meant for everyone. Dorothy was amazed at how much they had discovered about each other over the past year and at the way there always seemed to be still another level of deeper understanding that could be achieved.
Although they never doubted one another, their letters sometimes betrayed the inherent fragility of what was a mostly long-distance relationship. They frequently worried that their words might be misconstrued. In letter after letter, one or the other of them finds herself apologizing for some slip of the pen—only to hear back at once that there was no misunderstanding for which to be sorry. For a while,
Dorothy had asked herself how long this incomparable thing could last. But no more: