About six years ago I became friends with the great nature writer John Hay and that friendship has been a source of deep pleasure for me. One day, while I was visiting him in Maine, we found ourselves talking about his near-contemporary, Rachel Carson.
“She had a place just down the road in Boothbay,” he said. “That house was her salvation when the world attacked her.”
He shook his head.
“The things they did to that woman were criminal. After she wrote that wonderful book she got so attacked and insulted by the goddamn money people, by the chemical companies and all. They called her a communist and pervert. The poor woman was dying of cancer at the time. They killed her before she died.”
In a time when our government sneers at the science of global warming and evolution, it’s worth remembering the bravery of the dying Carson in the face of that ugly slander. But this morning as I walked the beach near my house I thought about John’s comments in a different light, with an emphasis not on the political savagery that Carson endured, but on the solace she found in her coastal home, her place away from the world, where she could focus on tidal pools and hermit crabs, on art and science. With the centennial of Carson’s birth upon us we will likely be hearing a lot about the changes that Silent Spring wrought, namely the banning of DDT and other chemicals, and the return of many threatened species as a result. But what interests me just as much as those changes is where they came from, how the most public of effects began in the most private of places. It was within her retreat on those Maine beaches, deep in her own thoughts and in her own place, that Carson began to develop the insights and thoughts that would so impact the world. And it seems to me that in this way Rachel Carson epitomizes the way so many writers, and scientists, find their lives pulsing between retreat from and engagement with the world. In fact, because of the way that Carson moved between an intensely private life—full of contemplation and quiet observation—and a political life with great consequences (word choice), she seems an almost archetypal example of a core (word choice) contradiction of the writing life. To some extent, we are all worldly hermits.
Before he retired to Maine, John Hay lived in a modest house atop a hill on Cape Cod, the house surrounded by many acres of scrub oak. “It’s like a fortress up there with the winding road and the hill,” a friend of John’s said to me before I visited. “He’s got a buffer from all the busy-ness. I’m surprised he hasn’t built a moat.”
During my first visit with John, he addressed his need for that buffer.
“Why did I come here to the middle of nowhere?” he said. “What was I looking for? I suppose I came here following some vague urge for space. You have to understand that when I was a boy the population of this country was only about ninety million—now there are three hundred and twenty million of us! This town had only eight hundred people, a small village. I suppose I had a hunch that it was space that I was after in coming here.”
Space was one of the key words in John’s vocabulary, a hieroglyph that held the key to many of the choices he had made in his life. It took me a while to begin to understand what he meant by the word. During our early meetings it seemed somewhat vague and nondescript. It was only later that I would begin to see that it was synonymous with freedom. And I would begin to see that it was also connected, in ways I wasn’t quite sure of yet, to creativity and wildness.
Another writer who retreated in New England had a different way of putting the same thing. Melville spoke of the need for writers to be at least part recluses—or, in his term, “isolatoes”—and he believed in putting up walls to build the atmosphere necessary for the most intense sort of creation. Exhibit A would be the final draft of Moby Dick, written far from the sea in western Massachusetts, with Melville staring out his window at the whale of Mount Greylock. He wrote all day, sinking himself into his “strange wild work,” while drinking six cups of tea until a perceptible halo of moisture arose from his head. It is a romantic picture, but it reveals a practical truth: that one of the conditions necessary for great and intense writing may be something as simple as space. Holing up is not the only way to make a book, but it is one way.
Over the past few years, I’ve given myself a reading list of isolatoes: Montaigne in his study within his chateau, quotes of old Greeks and Romans engraved in the thick wood beams; E. B. White in his spartan boathouse with the window framing Penobscot Bay; Robinson Jeffers up in the Hawk Tower, built out of stone with his own hands, beside Tor House, also hand-built, staring out at the Pacific from his cliff at Big Sur; And yes—why not?—the king of the clichés of retreat, Henry David Thoreau in his cabin at Walden. All of these writers argued for the artists’ need to escape from the world. Montaigne wrote, “We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” E. B. White seconded the motion in describing his boathouse: “It is because I am semidetached while here that I find it possible to transact this private business with the fewest obstacles.”
I admit that it is a strange and contrary impulse to focus on retreat during times of war, when you can’t help but find a military connotation in the word. But one thing I’ve learned from my reading is that retreat often leads to its opposite. For instance, in 1937, a decade before John Hay’s move to Cape Cod, E. B. White, then 38, left New York City behind and headed up to his farm in Maine. In Barbara Mallonee’s beautiful essay “Reading E. B. White: Perfect Pitch, Perfect Catch,” I found White’s own description of his move: “A person afflicted with poetic longings of one sort or another searches for a kind of intellectual and spiritual privacy in which to indulge his strange excesses.” But one odd byproduct of this retreat, starting about the time of Hitler’s first advancements, was that White’s “determinedly personal essays,” to use Mallonee’s term, became increasingly, though subtly, political: suddenly within those essays sentences about the war began intertwining with those about chickens.
In this turn to the political he was not alone among my gallery of retreaters. All of these supposed recluses were, strange as it might sound, determinedly political—Thoreau most obviously and famously, with the ripples he caused in Walden Pond spreading outward to, among other places, India and the American South, with both Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledging Thoreau as a main, if not the main, influence on their work. Then there’s Montaigne, emerging from his retreat to work as a prominent political advisor during the French civil wars, and Jeffers, who went from literary superstar to pariah because he stuck to his larger biocentric view of the world, a view forged in the privacy of his wanderings in Big Sur, and because he vehemently opposed World War II, even as his country swelled with patriotism.
And finally there’s Rachel Carson, who by closely observing her tidal pools and eel grass, gave us a book that led to the most lasting environmental changes of the last century. One ecotone we have tried to inhabit in this journal is between literature and the politics of environmentalism, and it seems to me that one could do worse than take Carson as a model, both as artist and activist. During these crowded times, with the world warming and the concept of space under assault as population soars and privacy disappears, we need to remember to occasionally put the cell phone down and turn off the computer, and retreat into our own back shops or boathouses. Like the other members of my gallery of isolatoes, Rachel Carson reminds us of the necessity of retreat, and puts the lie to the more cowardly definitions of the word. She shows us that by continuing to return to our most private places, we are deeply engaging the world.