The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (10 page)

Sensual and pleasure-loving, she could be spoiled, high-handed, and an impudent comedian, when not on the job and in communion
with primordial, nameless things! Toward the end of her story, I felt that Willie had been sorely tempted to continue to share
his sleeping bag with her. Maybe he would have, had he not returned to play house with Marjorie in Toulon. But I’ll let him
speak for himself, as this constituted the revelation of the original source of the branching worlds’ theme.

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W
AMBA BELIEVES THAT ALL POSSIBLE FUTURE EVENTS EXIST IN EMBRYO
…. She believes that fate, though written, projects itself into the future not as a straight line, but fan-shaped, in myriad
alternate paths multiplying to infinity.

I am walking in an unknown forest. There are as many directions to walk as there are points of the compass. I know nothing
of what awaits me in any direction, but in all directions fate awaits me, things already written in the sense that they exist
already, and are therefore inevitable, but alternate, depending on the path I take…
²¹

He reflected upon the impotence of logical process to supply foresight as to which way to turn. In the labyrinth of variables,
no choice was trivial—any moment of destiny might change the future. In light of my consternation over chronologies, Willie’s
example turned disturbingly personal:

… if you look back you will discover just as fatally a hundred cases in which seemingly pointless hazards or decisions changed
your life. Will you come over and make a fourth at bridge this evening?… a girl drops in… you find yourself married to her…
Fate, providence, blind luck, or Wamba’s fan-shaped future.
²²

Thus wrote Seabrook in 1930, serialized in
Ladies’ Home Journal,
of all places, before the book was published in April of the following year. That was four years before Murray Leinster would
publish the first branching-worlds science fiction story and over a quarter century before Everett’s scientific explanation!

… but with all her wisdom she could not help me further. She said that if I consented to remain there always, and give up
everything, including my white ways of asking, she might eventually make me understand, but that it would be a road from which
there could be no returning.

Her words were painful to me, and familiar. But they were the words which only saints or madmen, the very wise or the very
simple, have ever truly dared to follow.
²³

Willie’s continuing life would evolve from a splendid decadence in the early thirties, to a quiet respectability, to a restive
renewal of his earlier interests. I continued to pore over every source I could locate. I hoped also that I might get a handle
on the untoward “retrocognitive” sensation that I had about the man and his loved ones, their times and work.

I was no nostalgia buff, focused on any of the decades through which Seabrook had lived. I knew that my regrets and yearnings
lay all within my life span. Yet, the essence, the atmosphere of those longago moments, every so often, would seem as real
to me as the moisture on Justine’s bare breasts.

Not a believer in reincarnation or anything of the sort, I rationalized. My parents had been contemporaries of Willie’s friends
and lovers, if a bit younger than the man himself. Absorption of their views and recollections might explain the recurrent
déjà vu
that emanated from every new bit of information I uncovered.

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T
HERE REMAINED THE ODDNESS OF THE CHRONOLOGY.
It was true that the disparate perceptions and recollections of various observers could seem like altogether different worlds.
But the written record was seldom aberrant to this degree. When he had returned from the World War in 1917, Seabrook had worked
first for
The New York Times,
then for Hearst’s King Features Syndicate, to whom he may have introduced Ward Greene, a comrade from his Atlanta days—which
Greene then made into a life’s career as editor and general manager. Greene’s
Ride the Nightmare,
a fiction based on Willie’s earlier life, often dovetailed with some known facts better than did the supposedly factual chronicles
of Marjorie and other participants.

As I began to compose a rough draft from my piles of outlines and notes, I wrote in my journal:

Further research continues to alter the chronology. New bits of data serve to exacerbate the contradictions among others.
Just have to accept that the perceived reality will continue to shift during the course of the project.

In 1930, Willie had decisively parted company with Katie and returned to France to write. Though he claimed to have spent
a year writing
Jungle Ways,
his agent had made big advance money available early. Willie and Marjorie expanded and upgraded their loft above the quay
at Toulon and, by the end of April, had leased the
Château d’Evenos.
For whatever personal motive, Willie had been determined to hold control of that ruined fortress of ancient Var, even as
he could not afford to improve it, nor was much inclined to do so.

About that time, Aldous and Maria Huxley took a house at nearby La Gorguette. Then began Willie’s days of wine and roses…
or perhaps gin and poppies would be more apropos. Anyway, Marjorie’s chronicle came into play, debatably more reliable than
his own account for the next several years.

Those were the heady days of the Lost Generation. George Seldes named Seabrook among the outstanding Riviera personages of
the time, along with D.H. Lawrence, Frank Harris, H.G. Wells, and Angelica Balabanoff, former secretary of the Comintern.
Lawrence died that summer. Huxley was at the small, depressing funeral and likely Willie also.

The accounts of other observers to this period began to “flesh out” the story of his sadomasochism, whereas he himself denied
any interest in pain per se, other than for its role in his psychic experimentation. Willie’s writing had focused on classical
images of Grecian slave-girls bound to pillars. His approach made me think back to the columns of a private sex club that
had once existed in the Deep South, where Willie would have made himself right at home. I certainly did, when Linda and I
had encountered it many years before. The columns had flanked the rear of the stage and the club girls, attired as classical
slaves, were especially fetching when they were occasionally bound to them naked.

Ward Greene, when writing through the viewpoint of a character hopelessly in love with “Beth” (Katie), handled the public
bondage with prim disdain.
²⁴
Marjorie, writing at age sixty-five, had put it all off on Willie and his “research girls,” distancing herself from the whole
enterprise and denying any personal participation.

However, the Marquis de Sade was very
in
among the surrealist crowd, as was primitive art (so that Willie’s collections were much admired). The wife of arts patron
Charles de Noailles was most proud to be a descendant of “the divine Marquis.”

Propelling me into more and more extensive research was a growing empathy, no longer with Willie alone, but with all the characters
of his drama: Walter and Jeannot Duranty, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Man Ray, and Lee Miller. Now there was a babe in any time!
Her lips adorned
Observatory Time—The Lovers,
arguably the ultimate surrealist painting, and her gorgeous blonde body was immortalized in her mentor’s photographs.

The 1988 republication of Man Ray’s memoirs contained never before seen photos from the Man Ray Trust. Shot at Seabrook’s
Paris apartment in 1930, they would have been perfectly in place in a modern bondage and discipline magazine. It was difficult
to believe they were almost seventy years old. Each new revelation engorged my fascination further.

A curly-haired woman, trussed up on the carpet in leather straps, brought me up short. I enlarged it as much as possible to
get a better look at her face… as well as for the fact that it was a damned erotic picture! Highly stylized twenties makeup
constituted far too much of a mask to make out her features, though she seemed pretty. I found that I had to sit back and
remind myself that all those people were
dead,
and had been for years.

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M
AN RAY DESCRIBED A SILVER DISCIPLINE COLLAR
he designed at Seabrook’s behest and had executed for Marjorie. It created a sensation at social functions. In his
Self Portrait,
he wrote,

He (Seabrook) made her wear the collar thereafter whenever they went out to dinner and took a certain pleasure in watching
her at the table eating and drinking with difficulty.
²⁵

Marjorie’s account included none of that. Her “winter of 1930” appeared to really be that of 1930–31. I was gradually recalling
and becoming used to an older and more precise usage in which the winter was named for the year of the solstice at which it
began. In the company of one Natasha, “a playmate of Marjorie’s,” they had sailed on the
Berengaria,
Willie’s old tub of choice, to be in New York for the publication of
Jungle Ways.

Constant name-droppers, Willie and Marjorie spiced the stories of their interludes with the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell
Hammett, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair. In April, after a flap over his treatment of cannibalism had assured the book
a roaring success with a scandalized and therefore titillated public, they returned to Europe. Their stateroom party before
departure was the first point where their respective chronologies came fully into sync.

Back in France, the saturnalia continued. The Seabrooks were visiting with Jeannot Duranty at her home in St. Tropez. The
former Jane Cheron had, in earlier years, been engaged in a
ménage à trois
with her husband and Aleister Crowley.
²⁶

George Seldes, whom Mussolini had kicked out of Italy in retaliation for his book,
Sawdust Caesar,
got into the act. I will give Seldes the last word on these matters. Willie had demonstrated for Seldes and his companion
the equipment in his Toulon loft overlooking the Mediterranean, musing that sadomasochism was too noisy a business for apartments
anywhere.

Willie showed us what he called his lion’s cage—and all sorts of riggings from the wooden ceiling, chains and pulleys. He
said he preferred to hang his women by their feet when he whipped them… He now asked the beautiful blonde from… Texas, whom
I had brought along, if she would be willing to spend some time in the lion’s cage and be treated like a wild animal—and to
my amazement Miss Texas agreed.
²⁷

It seemed that Willie had himself spent some five days being whipped and chained within the cage. Maintaining that his search
for psychic transcendence was not mere pretension, he told Seldes, “I wanted to walk along the borderland of genius and insanity,
the dividing line, the crest. I wanted to look at the other side, I wanted to see the face of God, and yet return.”
²⁸

“His first wife (Katie), who could have been typecast for the role of ‘beautiful Southern aristocrat,’ which she was, divorced
him. She grew tired of being whipped.”
²⁹
After twenty years? Right.

His second wife (Marjorie), who years later wrote a biography in which she called Willie “a fine, intelligent and lovable
man with a touch of genius as well as madness,” ran away from the loft several times and stayed at the apartment of my friends
nearby. Once she showed us the welts made on her back by Willie’s whips. But she always went back.
³⁰

I’ve quoted Seldes’s final word in full. He had not understood what those people were about. When Willie and Katie, whose
full control over her own life no one ever doubted, ended their relationship—the reasons were patently far more complex.

While Marjorie’s views and feelings were always conflicted, there could be no doubt that he had meant everything to her. She,
an independent woman and successful author in her own right, struggled for years to save Willie from alcohol and his own demons.
Selfsacrifice for another having yet to be redefined as “codependency,” she only left him after he had gone over altogether
into the masochistic end of the equation, in an irretrievably self-destructive fashion. No, Seldes and maybe even Man Ray
did not fully understand, but they were honest and sympathetic friends.

————————

S
OMETIMES, WITHIN THE SWAMP OF LITERARY CRAP,
may be found a spark of humanity so genuine that it softens the heart of even the most opportunist critic. I digressed to
contemplate the continuing affection of Willie’s comrade Walter Duranty for the aging dancer Isadora Duncan in her fading,
dissolute years:

I knew that she was fat and lazy and drank to excess and did not care whether she was illkempt or sloppy, but I knew also
that she had a hole in her heart which excused everything. In all human experience there is nothing so devastating as a hole
in the heart, no matter what it comes from.
³¹

That I might well have said the same of Linda toward the end, that struck the spark. Willie, and Katie, and Marjorie, and
all those around them became even more real to me. No longer was it merely a matter of empathy. Somehow, what they had created,
what they
were,
was for me still tangibly alive.

Hardly literary immortals, these had been lost in obscurity. Their books were flaking into dust and gathering cobwebs on the
shelves—unread, unloved, forgotten. No, this was more real than such a vapid immortality. It was as solid as ornate iron lampposts
and the infrastructure of old bridges, glimpses of which would, more and more often, call me back, back to bygone times—
to their times.

During 1931, Willie prepared for a return trip to the Sahara to expand upon the story of Père Yakouba,
The White Monk of Timbuctoo.
His friend and patron Paul Morand was away in the Far East, but Seabrook eventually prevailed upon other contacts with the
Trocadero museums to lend assistance to the proposed expedition. He and Marjorie left on the first leg of their air adventure
on January 13, 1932. Winding down a drinking bout of heroic proportions with Yakouba, he would include an odd reminiscence
of a night when he retired “in a jumbled time-sequence,” unable clearly to distinguish the moment from a time decades past.
³²