On a Farther Shore (9 page)

Williamson fell in love with Shallowford the moment he saw it. But he was anxious, too.
He wondered if anything in ordinary life could ever match the fearsome thrill of war, which had been so horrific and yet so intense that, in a perverse way, he was afraid that he missed it. How could commonplace safety and security substitute for the action and camaraderie of soldiering? The world after the war had seemed to him a “poor and dispirited” place, the joys and passions of youth remote and possibly forever lost. Williamson felt unsure he had the imagination to reclaim his former happy life, and this was a “dark secret” he carried within himself.
The Williamsons moved to Shallowford in the fall of 1929. Over the winter, Williamson decided that what would cheer him up was to go fishing come spring.

As the days of fishing and watching and studying the river accumulated, Williamson started thinking about a book about a salmon, something that would be similar to
Tarka
.
Finally, in January 1935, Williamson began the book he tentatively called “Salar the Leaper,” but fortunately retitled
Salar the Salmon
. In the scientific name for the Atlantic salmon, which is
Salmo salar
, the word “salar” actually means “leaper.”

Williamson’s research consisted almost entirely of firsthand observation. He was on the river for hours at a time in every kind of weather. But for reasons he never explained,
Salar
became a misery to write. As he labored away in the upstairs writing room of his perfect, charming cottage, with the sounds of the river through his open window for company, Williamson held on grimly to the principle known to all writers—and ignored by many—that it matters not if you write only a little in a day as long as you write every day.
Williamson would later recall that
Salar
had been a “continuous anguish to write,” a chore he so bitterly resented that he spent forty minutes of every hour he worked on the book wishing he were doing anything else.
In his last letter to Lawrence, Williamson confided that
Salar
was an “awful book” that was so “boring” and “dull” that it was dragging the life out of him. Lawrence’s death that spring only deepened Williamson’s melancholy.
And yet by August 1935 the book was finished. Williamson admitted he’d cut the ending short, feeling that if the salmon didn’t die he himself surely would.

None of this difficulty was apparent in the book itself, which was, in a word, brilliant. Williamson had entered into the watery realm of his protagonist—an animal that cannot speak or think or in any way comprehend its existence—and made that world come alive.
Salar
turned out to be a book as much about water as it was about a fish, a story of currents and colors and perceived pressures, about salt and fresh, deep and shallow, cold and warm, light and dark. Salar comes in from the moving, tide-swept ocean to the quieter but still ceaselessly changing river, where he takes his rest in quiet pools and works his way against the weight of water during the sudden floods called
“spates,” heading instinctively upstream to spawn and die. In one thrilling passage, Salar is hooked by a fisherman and a deadly contest ensues:

Salar the Salmon
was published in Britain in October 1935, and the following summer in the United States.
Anita Moffett wrote a long, adoring review in the
New York Times
, calling it “a rare and beautiful book that should take its place as a classic among the few which are written at once with a poet’s insight and a naturalist’s knowledge.”

Exhausted but happy to be done with
Salar
, Williamson went on holiday while the book was being readied for publication. The trip would be, like the Christmas Truce, a turning point in his life. In early September 1935, Williamson boarded the
Bremen
at Southampton and sailed for Bremerhaven, where he got on a train for Berlin to begin a tour of Germany. His itinerary included, by invitation, a stop at the annual National Socialist Rally at Nuremberg for a close look at the country’s popular but controversial chancellor—and recently self-anointed “führer”—Adolf Hitler. Williamson’s semiofficial visit, which joined up for a time with a more organized excursion of foreign press, had been arranged by an English friend connected with a couple of Nazi cultural ministers. On the train ride to Berlin, Williamson amused himself by looking at the sturdy black-and-white cows that browsed in the fields along the way.

The author of
Tarka
was well-known in Germany and got a warm
reception. Many of Germany’s leading writers had fled the country during Hitler’s rise to power, and the lesser authors who remained were steering clear of social themes and devoting themselves instead to nature writing and idyllic depictions of rural life. An assortment of censoring authorities, including the Gestapo and the Interior Ministry, routinely raided bookstores and libraries to get rid of hundreds of banned titles.

Williamson’s later accounts of this trip didn’t make clear exactly how long it lasted, but he was evidently in Germany for at least a few weeks, through the Nuremberg rally that ended on September 16, 1935, and for a number of days after that. He traveled extensively through the country, accompanied by a rotating assortment of Nazi minders. The Nuremberg rally did not disappoint—something like a million people swelled the city, and the sky remained continually lit up with fireworks. On the first morning Hitler was to address the crowd, Williamson described a spectacle that was Wagnerian in scale and dramatic effect, set in a vast arena draped in swastikas.

The day was warm and sunny—Hitler weather, someone said. Williamson thought the führer’s speech seemed calmer and more restrained than in the days during his rise to power. After Hitler’s speech, Williamson was amused when Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels appeared before the crowd. Goering, Williamson said, was a “Falstaff-like figure,” capering and laughing, waving to the crowd and stopping to be photographed with eager onlookers. Later on, Williamson admiringly noted Hitler’s stamina as the führer stood in his open motorcar, right arm outstretched in salute for hours during a parade of regional Nazi organizations.

Wandering about after the review, Williamson found himself at the rally headquarters and was suddenly standing close to Hitler. He wondered anxiously what he would say if he were to be introduced. Hitler was impressive: “He
was very quick in his head movements,” Williamson wrote. “He spoke rapidly, I got the idea his natural pace is much swifter than the ordinary, his eyes falcon-like, remarkably full of life. A man of spiritual grace; he calls himself a medium; which
means the small inner voice has been developed until it possesses the physical brain.”

Before and after the Nuremberg rally, Williamson was much impressed by Germany under Nazi rule. Everything appeared crisp and orderly. Not a speck littered the streets. The people seemed happy, vigorous, optimistic—and contemptuous of any suggestion that Germany was preparing for war. In the countryside, gray-uniformed troops were on the march everywhere, and somehow their martial bearing struck Williamson as thrilling rather than threatening. Under the recently proposed Nuremberg Laws, Jews would soon lose their German citizenship. Just a month earlier, Nazi storm troopers had held truck parades in Munich and Berlin denouncing Jews as enemies of the state. German businesses now routinely posted signs banning Jews as customers—a practice that reminded Williamson of the “colored only” signage he had seen on a visit to the southern United States. Williamson said he’d arrived in Germany expecting to find Jews hidden away and cowering behind closed doors, even though he suspected the newspapers outside of Germany exaggerated Jewish persecution under the Reich. But this didn’t seem to be the case at all. Williamson saw Jews on the streets, and he even ate at a large popular restaurant that was Jewish-owned—although his German escort declined to join him there. When someone told him that Hitler had said privately that if he had his way “there would not be a Jew alive in Germany today,” Williamson said he didn’t believe it.

As the tour went on, traveling from city to city, hotel to hotel, it took on a predictable rhythm of late dinners and still-later cocktail hours—followed by a drowsy start over sausages and wine late the next morning. Williamson was dazzled by the women he encountered in the bars, some of them bored and looking for company, others who were surely prostitutes. He discovered that his traveling companions among the foreign press were offended by his enthusiasm for Hitler, while his German escorts were chilly on this point for different reasons, apparently mistrusting the Englishman for coming on too strongly.

It was evidently expected that Williamson, on his return to England, would write some articles friendly to Germany for the British papers—a quid pro quo for what had been, after all, a propaganda junket. This didn’t work out, as Williamson couldn’t find any publication interested in a sympathetic view of Nazism. His new friends in Germany were disappointed but not surprised, as they were accustomed to the foreign press being more interested in news about concentration camps and ethnic violence than it was in the glories of the new Germany.

Williamson had been favorably disposed toward Hitler’s Germany before he visited it. He felt a kinship with Hitler that was based on the hopeful feelings Williamson had about regular Germans after the Christmas Truce.
He even thought it possible that he’d met Hitler as a young German soldier on that night. Williamson was convinced that Hitler was a man of peace, determined to avoid war while putting his country right—perhaps the sort of man Richard Jefferies had had in mind as
The One to rule a better world.
There was a renewal in Germany, in its cities and forests, on its farms and among its strong, happy people, that reminded Williamson of the world he wanted to live in—a linkage between fascism and the romanticism of his own work that he found undeniable.

Williamson believed, without the slightest evidence, that T. E. Lawrence, had he lived, would have felt the same way about Hitler. Both men so dominated Williamson’s thoughts that he began to fantasize about what the three of them—Hitler, Lawrence, and Williamson—might have accomplished.
In the spring of 1936, the
Dorset County Chronicle
picked up a report from a British radio magazine that could only have originated with Williamson himself. As the story went, Williamson had persuaded T. E. Lawrence that they should do a series of programs promoting world peace from the Albert Hall in London. These would be broadcast on the radio and would involve—the article didn’t explain this part—the agreeable participation of Hitler.

How this demented idea gained enough traction to be picked up
in the papers is hard to explain. Harder still is to understand how it was that Williamson gradually came to believe the story was true, and that Lawrence had died on his motorcycle after cabling his agreement to the plan.
Whatever temporary luster this myth might have lent to Williamson’s reputation vanished a year and a half later when Williamson joined the British Union of Fascists. He remained an unapologetic member even as Germany rained war across Europe. The group was outlawed in 1940.

An ocean away, Rachel Carson was busy.
In the spring of 1936, Elmer Higgins asked Carson to write something “of a general sort” about the sea. Carson later recalled getting carried away with the assignment, as “the material rather took charge of the situation.” The result, an elegant essay titled “The World of Waters,” stunned Higgins, who immediately rejected it. The piece, he told Carson, was too good for a minor government production. He suggested that she submit it to the
Atlantic Monthly
magazine.
This she did not do right away, concentrating instead on her freelancing assignments for local newspapers and her new full-time position at the bureau.
In the spring, Carson entered “The World of Waters” in a writing contest sponsored by
Reader’s Digest
. It didn’t win.

Then, in early 1937, Carson’s older sister, Marian, died of pneumonia, leaving Carson and her mother to care for Marian’s two pre-teen daughters, Virginia and Marjorie—who were already living under the same roof.
In June, Carson finally sent “The World of Waters” to the
Atlantic
, where it was immediately accepted. The magazine’s editors thought the piece would “fire the imagination of the layman.” They asked Carson for a few changes and to agree to a new title: “Undersea.”
In August, she received a check for $100.

“Undersea” appeared in the
Atlantic
’s September 1937 issue.
Carson had the magazine use “R. L. Carson” as a byline, explaining that this was an identity she preferred at the Bureau of Fisheries to enhance her credibility by permitting readers to assume that she was
a man. The essay was an animated distillation, just four magazine pages long, of seemingly everything that Carson knew firsthand or had learned from the scientific literature about the life that crowded the sea, from the water’s edge at the high-tide mark to the depths of black chasms beneath the open ocean. Carson went beyond mere description of the lives of starfish and eels and crabs and fish into the deeper meanings of oceanic natural history. Here, in the tidal wash and beneath the waves, appeared nature’s demonstration of the systemic biological forces that link all life in the present and through the ages—the myriad churning, interrelated existences that are the leading edge of evolutionary history: