Continuing my summer visits to the seaside and shoreline, in the Friday ‘picture postals’ post. This week, a stroll down to the New York shoreline and the New York Aquarium in the company of H.P. Lovecraft.
He visited the New York Aquarium in 1922, and then again in April 1929. On the latter visit he and his friend Frank Belknap Long had some long-distance horse-play with Lovecraft’s aunt, in which Lovecraft claimed to have purchased a giant seahorse with the intention of bringing it home to Providence.
“I have purchased one of these and am bringing it home!” Below is the same card, but in a later more vivid over-painted version, with Lovecraft and Long’s messages on it front and back…
My thanks to the Brown University repository for making these available.
Here’s my transcription…
Greetings again! I continue my diary from a bench on the Battery [Battery Park, alongside the aquarium], facing the winds and foam of the immemorial sea! We visited honest old Mac [Everett McNeil, elderly writer of boys adventure stories] this afternoon as per schedule & were pleased to find him bright & much improved – though he is still of course quite weak, & probably won’t be out of the hospital for a week or so yet. Someone else was there to see him – an old lady who was at school with his sister. We took him some oranges which Belknap [Long]’s mother sent him. (|| After our call we went down to the Battery [Park] & inspected the Aquarium – which I hadn’t seen since 1922. Now we are seated on a bench, absorbing the spirit of the sea & having our shoes shined by a sweet boy. Afterward we shall stroll about the ancient parts of Manhattan, toward Paul’s, Fraunce’s Tavern, etc – & finally return to 230 [Long’s parents] …. stopping en route at the Hotel Pennsylvania for guide leaflets & time tables to direct me in my coming antiquarian wanderings. [He was headed to Washington] [“More tales” or “More follows”]. Yr aft. Nephew & obt. servant HPL.
Long has then written: “Howard has purchased an enormous, living sea horse (eighteen inches!) I sincerely hope that it lives to imbibe Providential Atmosphere! – FBL Jr.”
The front of the card excitedly records his finding of a “marvellously cheap” Washington Excursion, perhaps discovered among the Hotel Pennsylvania brochures.
His next postcard shows a mundane view of the Aquarium frontage, with a hand-written note that Lovecraft has bagged the front-right seat behind the driver on the coach to Washington, which he deems the best seat to have in a long-distance coach. Otherwise the card does not concern the Aquarium.
Here are some other scenes from the Aquarium at that time…
The setting:
What Lovecraft would have seen there in 1922, concisely described in Guide to the nature treasures of New York city (1917)…
Some of the denizens, from the same card-set:
“It is no coincidence that the monsters of his later stories resemble combinations of various denizens of an aquarium” — de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography, 1975.
Visitors appear to have been given a set of tokens on entrance, these presumably giving entrance to halls and pools holding ‘the main attractions’ and thus preventing crowding. Note especially the stylish Octopus token…
It’s possible that this was an inspiration for the metallic octopus-disk in Long’s late story “Dark Awakenings”…
The small object which rested on his palm did not seem to have been compressed or injured in any way by the tight constriction to which it had been subjected. I thought at first it was of metal, so brightly did it gleam in the sunlight. But when I picked it up and looked at it closely I saw that it was of some rubbery substance with merely the sheen of metal.
I had never before looked at any inanimate object quite so horrible. Superficially it resembled a tiny many-tentacled octopus, but there was something about it which would have made the ugliest of sea monsters seem merely fishlike in a slightly repulsive way. It had a countenance, of a sort, a shriveled, sunken old man’s face that was no more than suggestively human. Not a human face at all, really, but the suggestion was there, a hint, at least, of anthropoid intelligence of a wholly malignant nature. But the longer I stared at it the less human it seemed, until I began to feel that I had read into it something that wasn’t there. Intelligence, yes — awareness of some kind, but so much the opposite of anthropoid that my mind reeled at trying to imagine what intelligence would be like if it was as cold as the dark night of space and could exercise a wholly merciless authority over every animate entity in the universe of stars.
Lovecraft later encountered Long’s private home aquarium, on a visit for Christmas 1934…
“I took the midnight coach [from Providence] & arrived in Manhattan the next morning … all the [Long] household were united in absorption in Belknap’s new hobby – tropical fish. These sprightly finny citizens – whose ideas anent [about] temperature are much like my own – form quite a heavy responsibility; since their diet, aeration, & heat have to be regulated with the strictest care. Their infinite variety, however. makes them much more interesting than [the then-common domestic] goldfish; so that I fancy the present fashion for them will prove reasonably permanent.” (Selected Letters IV).
The New York Aquarium encouraged such home ventures…
Lovecraft also visited the the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Jonathan Bourne Whaling Museum) in August 1929, when he also visited the aquarium at the famous Wood’s Hole.
He also also known to have taken a trip in a glass-bottomed boat, to observe a ‘living aquarium’ on the sea-floor…
“… sailed out [from Miami] over a neighbouring coral reef in a glass-bottomed boat which allowed one to see the picturesque tropical marine fauna & flora of the ocean floor.” (Selected Letters III, page 380).
But in terms of inspiration, the 1922 visit to the New York Aquarium seems a key possibility. Or an unrecorded Boston visit circa 1919 or thereafter, to the Museum of Natural History in Boston. There he would have seen, beautifully lit and incredibly life-like…
131 glass models of sea slugs, hydroid jellyfish or craspedotes [made] for the Museum of Natural History Society in Boston in 1880.
According to the de Camp biography of Lovecraft, he saw their collection of such models (flowers and presumably also the sea creatures) at Harvard, and quite early. de Camp, presumably drawing on Sonia’s memory of her courtship of Lovecraft circa Autumn (Fall) 1921, states in the biography that…
Once he [Lovecraft] showed her [Sonia] the display of glass flowers in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard
These were made by the Blatschkas, who specialised in sea-creatures and fungi. They sold by catalogue a great many (700?)… “Blaschka glass models of marine invertebrates” of which Harvard made a collection of 430 species. These are now documented in the photobook Sea Creatures in Glass: The Blaschka Marine Animals at Harvard (2016). Cornell also has a collection of 570 such items, though it was heavily used for teaching and became much degraded through use. The Cornell collection is being painstakingly restored where possible, and the best restorations featured in a 2017 exhibition.
Regarding the tokens from the New York Aquarium: Many attractions used to have a machine in which one would insert a penny and another coin to “watch” the penny being turned into an oval with attraction’s name and a picture and with edges defined by raised dots. I remember them at the World’s Fair, the Empire State Building, etc. These were a favorite thing to collect when I was a kid since they only cost a quarter in addition to the penny. I just realized that the manufacture of it in the machine was probably an illusion (especially since they would be mutilating US currency).