Nature she loved
Antony Rouse
RACHEL CARSON by Linda Lear Allen Lane, £25, pp. 634 In January 1958, a Mrs Olga Huckins of Duxbury, Massachusetts, wrote enraged to her friend, the naturalist and writer Rachel Carson, to say that uninvited planes spray- ing insecticide to kill mosquitoes were also killing large numbers of birds in her bird sanctuary. The result, four years later, was Carson's best-selling Silent Spring, an attack on the reckless use of pesticides and a book which changed the way people looked at the world.
By 1962, some 55,000 pesticides had been registered in the United States. Their effects, in particular those following the widespread use of DDT, had begun to cause alarm among scientists. But Carson already a famous author of books about the sea and the sea-shore, moved the debate out of learned journals and onto the front page of newspapers.
Silent Spring was serialised in the New Yorker, became a best-seller, the subject of two documentaries on American network television, of hearings in the American Senate and debate in our Parliament. The damage that man was doing to his environ- ment had been put on national agendas and has stayed there ever since.
Linda Lear spent 10 years on her biogra- phy of Rachel Carson and the result is a bit too long, with many potted biographies of minor players clogging the narrative. Despite that, Lear's book still has momen- tum and her account of Carson's admirable but too short life is well worth reading.
Carson was born in 1907, the youngest by several years of three children. The family was poor and dreary and lived in a four- roomed clapboard house with no indoor plumbing on the outskirts of a poor and dreary town in Pennsylvania. Carson's father seems never to have done much work. Her mother was clearly ambitious for her last child and when Carson won a scholarship to a local women's college would turn up most weekends to encourage her, thus reducing her daughter's chance of a social life. When Carson moved to uni- versity in Baltimore to study biology, the family moved with her.
Carson spent many years as a modestly paid civil servant at the Fish and Wildlife Service, in its publication department. Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, was pub- lished just two weeks before the American fleet was attacked at Pearl Harbor and sank with it. Her second, The Sea Around Us, was serialised in the New Yorker and became a best-seller, 10 years later refloat- ing in its wake Under the Sea-Wind, which also became a best-seller.
Carson always wrote slowly and suffered agonies finding the right structure for her books. She was meticulous in her research. Then, during the writing of Silent Spring, her health broke down. As early as 1950, when she was 43 years old, Carson had a tumour removed from her breast. In January 1960 she fell ill again and thereafter was always in bad health, laid low by assorted illnesses and by radiation treatment.
Also, throughout her working life, she had heavy family responsibilities. She was only 28 when her father died, after which she looked after and paid for her fragile mother, an invalid niece and the niece's fatherless child until mother and niece died and she was left in charge of the small boy.
When questioned, Carson said that she never had time to marry, but the truth is probably more complicated. At the age of 46, she met Dorothy Freeman, a married woman a few years her senior who summered near Carson's cottage on the coast of Maine. This was the start of a passionate friendship, with the two women sometimes writing to each other every day. A year later Carson was already worrying that someone might get hold of this correspondence. The friendship continued, with no objection from Mr Freeman, until Carson's death. Platonic? Her biographer does not even speculate, which must merit a prize of some sort.
Apart from the Freemans, Carson seems to have had no friends outside her work. If her private life sounds meagre, that is probably what she wanted. She reasonably complained of the amount of time consumed by her sick mother, sick niece, and difficult great-nephew.
But if the time had become free, she would have spent it working, or perhaps, in old age, just observing the natural world which was her passion. But she had no old age. She died shortly before her 58th birth- day, in the spring of 1964.
DDT was eventually banned in most industrial countries, but is not banned in many poor ones. Silent Spring is still in print. In an introduction to the first British edition, in 1962, Julian Huxley remarked that the Red Admiral and the Peacock butterfly no longer adorned our buddleia bushes. Now, they're back.
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