However, an evaluation in today’s intellectual climate would point out that The Edge of the Sea was also a pioneering piece of writing from an ecological perspective, a perspective that was still new and shiny in the 1950s, a perspective that Carson, almost as much as anyone, brought to the reading public’s attention as she struggled with her approach to writing this book.
It was a struggle because her original intent had been to write something rather like a field guide, but she soon realized that it was more interesting to write about the relationships among the seashore plants and animals and how the tides and the climate and geological forces affected them.
The book she finally ended up with was, and still is, a pleasure to read. We feel as though a well-informed friend has taken us by the hand as we walk along the ocean’s rim and explained all the bits of the world that we see, giving us an understanding of how they fit together and pointing out some other bits that we failed to notice before but always will notice now that we know about them.
Before the turn of the century, the great German zoologist Ernst Haeckel used the term oecology to mean the study of the “economy of animals and plants.” It was not until decades into the present century that the study of organisms as part of a community, subject to a changing world—biology in context—gained wide scientific acceptance and entered the biological lexicon as ecology. And it was mid-century before the general public, reading books like Rachel Carson’s, began to understand this way of looking at the world as distinct from the older presentation of series of biological life histories, isolated and untouched by external forces.
According to Paul Brooks, the editor of The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson’s original plan was to write a series of entries on what is to be found along the sea’s edge. The book made from them would have been entitled A Guide to Seashore Life on the Atlantic Coast. It would have been a less integrated, altogether less “ecological” book. But as she began to write, Carson grew more and more uncomfortable with the idea behind the book. The idea had had two parents—a publisher and a writer; in the end the writer got custody of the baby.
The gestation of the idea began when Rosalind Wilson, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, invited a group of literary folks “lacking in biological sophistication” to her home on Cape Cod for the weekend. While walking on the beach they found horseshoe crabs that they believed had been stranded by the storm the night before. They were compassionate, if unknowing, and so they returned all of them to the sea. The horseshoe crabs would have regarded the incident as a terrible setback to their life plan, for they had lumbered ashore to lay their eggs.
When Rosalind Wilson returned to her office in Boston on Monday morning, she sat down and typed out a memo suggesting that Houghton Mifflin find an author who could write a guidebook that “would dispel such ignorance.” Soon after, while Rachel Carson was still writing the book that was to be her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us, the proposal for such a guidebook was put to her and she accepted.
The proposal must have sounded to her like a book she had wanted to write for several years. As early as 1948 she had written her literary agent, Marie Rodell, “Among my remote literary projects is a book on the lives of shore animals, which Mr. Teale once asked me to write for his benefit.”
In 1950, she wrote to Paul Brooks that for each important form of life the book would include a “biological sketch… which, while brief, suggests a living creature and illuminates the basic conditions of its life: why it lives where it does, how it has adapted its structures and habitat to its environment, how it gets food, its life cycle, its enemies, competitors, associates.” She wanted “to take the seashore out of the category of scenery and make it come alive… An ecological concept will dominate the book.” At Houghton Mifflin, renowned for its excellent field guides, these “biological sketches” must have seemed quite straightforward. But to a writer nothing is straightforward, and to an ecological thinker, which is what Rachel Carson was, the biological sketches developed into something more complicated.
Carson was hard at work on the book when, in 1953, she wrote plaintively to Brooks, “Why is it such agony to put on paper?” Very soon thereafter she wrote to him again. “I decided that I have been trying for a very long time to write the wrong kind of book…. I think we could say that the book has become an interpretation of… types of shore…. As I am now writing, the routine… facts, that were so difficult for me to incorporate into the text, are now being saved for the captions… or for a tabular summary I’d like to tuck in at the end of the book. This solution frees my style to be itself; the attempt to write a structureless chapter that was just one little thumbnail biography after another was driving me mad. I don’t know why I once thought I should do it that way, but I did.”
Paul Brooks told me that she had been halfway through the writing of the book when she scrapped it and began again to write what became The Edge of the Sea. Lucky she did so; it is a better and more enduring book than A Guide to Seashore Life would have been, and current guidebooks can bring us up to date on recent discoveries to supplement it.
Despite her fame as the author of Silent Spring, Carson’s deep interest lay with the ocean, as witnessed not only by her three books concerning it and its shores and her formal education in marine zoology, but also by the fact that as soon as she was able financially to afford it, she bought a property on the coast of Maine—and there she built a home in which she lived for a good part of every year and did much of her writing. At her request, after her death, some of her ashes were scattered off Cape Newagen, near that home.
It wasn’t until she was forty-six years old that sales of her second book, The Sea Around Us, allowed her to move to the seashore. As a young woman, still in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, she had begun assuming the financial responsibility for her family, a responsibility that increased over the years as first her mother and then an ailing niece with a son moved in with her. When the niece died, Carson adopted the son. Later she went to work as an aquatic biologist and editor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and sold free-lance articles wherever she could for whatever fee she could command. It wasn’t easy.
She never married.
Rachel Carson was born in 1907 and grew up in rural Springdale, Pennsylvania, slightly northeast of Pittsburgh. Her mother encouraged bookish Rachel in her interests in the natural world. And there she became fascinated with the world’s oceans and read what she could find about them. I can testify to a midwesterner’s yearning for the sea, for I grew up in that part of the country and to me the ocean came to represent force, power, mystery, and great beauty, a vivid contrast to my everyday world, and I always assumed that someday I would live beside it. It wasn’t until I was well into my seventh decade that I acted on that assumption. But now, in a home not too distant from Rachel Carson’s, I can watch the tide pull the sea from the shore and return it as I write this introduction.
As a very young woman Carson believed that for a career she would have to choose between her scientific interest in the ocean and her already developed skills in and love of writing. It wasn’t until the 1930s that she found a way to blend the two. It was then that she recalled reading Tennyson: “On a night when rain and wind beat against the windows of my college dormitory room, a line from Locksley Hall burned itself into my mind—