Deep-Sea Creatures of Bittersweet Orange and Metallic Opaline Green

THE BATHYSPHERE BOOK: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths, by Brad Fox

Consider the siphonophore. An inhabitant of the lightless ocean, it looks like a single organism, but is actually a collection of minute creatures, each with its own purpose, working in harmony to move, to eat, to stay alive. They seem impossible but they are real. In 1930 William Beebe was 3,000 feet underwater in a bathysphere, an early deep-sea submersible, when he spotted a huge one: a writhing 20-yard mass whose pale magenta shone impossibly against the absolute blackness of the water. As you can imagine, it made an impression.

“The siphonophore mind, Beebe thought, asks us to rethink our individuality, to consider our epidermis as only one way to measure the extent of our bodies,” writes Brad Fox in “The Bathysphere Book,” a hypnotic new account of Beebe’s Depression-era underwater exploration. “In that light, our furious competition, our back-stabbing and fights over resources, is nonsense. Better we work together, getting closer and closer, more finely attuned to each other’s needs until we are indistinguishable.”

Beautifully written and beautifully made, “The Bathysphere Book” is a piece of poetic nonfiction that strives to conjure up the crushing blackness of the midnight zone. Full color, overflowing with stunning illustrations of the uncanny creatures that live beyond the sun, it raises questions of exploration and wonder, of nature and humanity, and lets readers find answers on their own. If it has a thesis, it is a call to follow the example of the siphonophore, whose components have managed the rare trick of joining together without losing themselves along the way.

The bathysphere was designed by Otis Barton, an engineer who did not let crippling seasickness stop him from accompanying Beebe on the dives. They spent four years exploring the waters off Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island, watching light and color vanish as they dropped ever deeper, relaying observations to Gloria Hollister, the scientist and explorer who manned the boat above. Fox quotes their notes liberally, elevating their stark strangeness to poetry that would sound very nice read in the grim voice of T.S. Eliot:

30 ft: Very large blotched parrotfish, three feet long.
Oxygen gauge reading 500 pounds.
More Chaetodons, four bands, 12 inches.
Sounding 9 fathoms.
A six-foot Shark quite near. It swam
around a huge brain coral when it saw us.
Sounding 9 fathoms.

Reveling in scientific language that is descriptive to the point of inscrutability, Fox devotes chapters to oddities from the history of deep-sea exploration, which take on the surreal quality of the rhapsodic passages of “Moby-Dick.” We learn that “the Swiss editor Conrad Gesner thought all glowing creatures were powered by the moon” and that, “in 1799, Alexander von Humboldt stimulated a jellyfish,” a wonderfully perplexing declaration presented without context. Rather than squish such miscellany into a narrative, Fox tosses them out and lets them drift. The result is a dreamy, relaxing read, studded with brief chapters like this one, “Odds and Ends Left at Nonsuch”:

Bromide tablets
Castor oil
Licorice-flavored cough lozenges
Epsom salts
2 tubes of K-Y lubricating jelly
Rhubarb and soda

When he loops back to his narrative, Fox’s sentences are tense and surprising. He shows Beebe spotting “a squid that looked chaste” and “a jack-in-the-box Punch-and-Judy head wearing a cap made of waving tentacles,” with “a face that is no face.” The blinding flash of bioluminescence gives the briefest vision of “a thick, eel-like creature, fanged,” with “jagged teeth like nails through a board.”

“A slipped gear in the grind of reality, and he’d been thrust briefly into a nightmare of fluorescent tearing and gnashing. And then it was gone and he was back in the ball.”

Beebe was fixated on things that could be seen only indirectly, and Fox channels his subject so successfully that his meaning is often found lurking in the corner of your eye. When it matters, though, his writing is forceful. He makes no effort to explain away the astonishing racism of some of Beebe’s writing, and does not flinch when exploring the horrific legacy of Beebe’s mentor Madison Grant, a eugenicist whose book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” was called “my bible” by Adolf Hitler. Fox’s obituary for Grant could be nailed to the door of anyone writing about repellent men of the past:

“By the time he died, over 30,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under laws he’d campaigned for. Beebe’s friends and sponsors were not simply men of their time. They represented a side in an ongoing debate with a body count.”

As he slipped deeper and deeper beneath the waves, Beebe bore witness to “a black so black it called his very existence into question,” and saw creatures that could be recorded only by describing them to Else Bostelmann, a painter who worked like a police sketch artist to render animals she would never see in colors like “bittersweet orange, metallic opaline green, orange rufous and orange chrome.” Featured throughout the book, her paintings are playful and bizarre, like illustrations from The Atlantis Saturday Evening Post. They are worth the price of admission on their own.

Staring into the darkness, Beebe reached states of near hallucination that may have been abetted, Barton said later, by an overactive oxygen pump. On returning to the surface, he found it impossible to adequately describe his experiences. “Now it was done,” writes Fox, “and reasoning about it, even talking about it, was useless.” But he maintained a sense of childlike optimism that pervades the book, cutting through the limitless cold of the sea: “Having traveled the world from the depths of the sea to the highest mountains, tramped through jungles and flown across continents, Beebe was more and more adamant that wonder was not produced by swashbuckling adventures — it was a way of seeing, an attitude toward experience that was always available. At every turn, the world’s marvels were right before our eyes.”

W.M. Akers is a novelist, the creator of Deadball: Baseball With Dice, and the editor of the newsletter Strange Times. His newest book is “Pocket Full of Stars.”

THE BATHYSPHERE BOOK: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths | By Brad Fox | Illustrated | 336 pp. | Astra House | $29