The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (9 page)

Taped inside the back cover, it was a brief obituary of the author. Examining it in hopes of determining its newspaper of
origin, I found that someone had penciled on the reverse, in a very nice hand, “This belongs in the book.” Finding it, amidst
trying to profile Seabrook’s innermost self and reading the outpouring of his deepest feelings, evoked whispers of nameless
sentiments from—I knew not where.

There was a curious passage in which he described an afternoon in the autumn of 1908, when he’d been sitting on a park bench
at Lausanne by Lake Geneva. By age twenty-two, he’d tramped about Europe for over a year and done a stint of philosophical
research at the University of Geneva. In the cool of that fall afternoon, his reverie on Mont Blanc and the High Alps had
been disturbed by the arrival of a young couple in an expensive Darracq.

He’d studied them as they strolled about the park and sat on a bench next to his, the young man of about Willie’s age holding
the golden-haired girl possessively. With less than five francs in his pocket, Seabrook had watched them, in their velvet-and-furlined
clothing, pondering whether he would ever want a car and a girl like that. In his book, he would recall a foreboding of awakening
years later and finding that he had indeed wanted those things. He feared the thought of facing himself as he might have become
by then.

During the next five years, he decisively broke into journalism, married a Southern belle, Katherine Edmondson, and established
a successful advertising agency. He then had for himself the girl, the car and chauffeur to boot, the club memberships, et
cetera. At that time, he’d taken Katie and his friend Ed, who’d been one of Katie’s beaux, to a small lake by Grant Park in
Atlanta. There he had them act out for him the scene he recalled from Lausanne.

… I knew that unless I could make myself know and feel in some way that the thing was real, I might go through my whole life
in it as a sort of exteriorized dream—somebody else’s dream again…
¹⁶

Though I suspected the exercise masked the voyeuristic thrill of watching his young wife in the arms of a man she might have
belonged to in another life, the expressed levels were real enough. The “somebody else” references were nominally to a strange
hobo he’d met on the Savannah River. But they resonated in an eerily disparate way with me.

I continued to prowl the bookstores and libraries, accumulating his books and retrieving what magazine and newspaper articles
I could from microfilm. I moved from fascination with Seabrook as the probable source of the branching worlds to involvement
with the total person. As I read his adventure stories, I was frustrated in the effort to nail down their compelling quality.
He had been a good writer, sometimes superior though never great. The early lifestyle parallels might suggest a comparison
to Hemingway, still…

While I had inexplicably managed to miss Seabrook in my younger reading, I saw clearly that various writers whose works I’d
devoured had not. Images wafted up from forty years before, of summer afternoons sitting cross-legged on the floor before
my schoolteacher-mother’s bookshelves. The musty dankness of an old evaporative cooler had seemed the very essence of the
dying fifties. It had provided the only circulation as I’d fingered the already-aging pages of books with funny old covers
like those I was holding now.

How could Seabrook’s
Adventures in Arabia,
or
The Magic Island,
or at least the big-seller
Asylum
have failed to be among those books? I saw evidence that he’d been a pivotal figure in New York and in the Paris of the Lost
Generation. Later, the effects of his pioneering work had reverberated down the decades even to the present moment, almost
always without credit. It was as if, with his suicide in 1945, he had become an Orwellian nonperson.

While his name had been expunged, open season had been declared on his work, and everyone and their cousins had shamelessly
plagiarized his concepts. His later works catalyzed those convictions. The oddest impact began in late July, when his autobiography
presented itself to me. Apart from a distinctive mode of acquisition, the content had an unexpectedly personal effect when
examined in conjunction with existing biographical materials.

Reviews of his autobiography,
No Hiding Place,
in 1942 had ranged from prudish revulsion to sardonic “Seabrook the Semi-Sinister” to praise.
¹⁷
I found it poignantly wistful. I was becoming enthralled with another man’s life story, both its upside and downside. Through
all the episodes that I literally could not read with a clear eye, was the sense of his life work and activities being
driven.
In spite of his obvious efforts to be bluntly honest, even brutally frank on the deepest personal levels, the suspicion lingered
that he was goaded—by imperatives remaining nameless.

I was resolved to learn as much about this man as I possibly could. Some commentators had characterized both his autobiography
and the biographical work
The Strange World of Willie Seabrook,
by his second wife, the novelist Marjorie Worthington, as factually unreliable. Well, if such work by anyone has ever avoided
becoming somewhat self-serving, I have yet to see it. But I quickly discovered what the critics and reviewers were talking
about.

Both Marjorie’s and Willie’s senses of chronology sometimes seemed to be nonexistent. I set about to reconstruct for myself
when the reported events of certain periods of his life would have to have occurred. And what was more important, in what
sequence. There were times when I would survey my notes and it would seem that the “card decks” visualized by Deutsch, composed
of alternative snapshots of moments in entropic order, had been scattered randomly across my carpet. Some felt almost like
my hypnotic regression vision, like a moment in a shoeshine stand where 1962 and 1963 had seemed impossibly coeval.

I endeavored to collate the sources and resolve the anomalies in chronology, which seemed to grow even as I studied them.
I found that, contrary to my first impressions, Willie and his work had not entirely disappeared after his 1945 suicide. Various
writers and publishers, with even more varied motives, had raised the more titillating and scandalous aspects of his saga
at least once per decade since his death.

For some reason, these recurrent revelations never seemed to attract the attention of a mass audience. A 1968 paperback of
Witchcraft
had gone largely unnoticed, and Seabrook had remained a footnote in the literature of the occult during a decade when it
was all the rage.

The silence on the erotic front was, to me, even more puzzling. The late century had seen an increased popularity of sadomasochism.
I would have thought that further commentary would have been begged by the sensational value of testimonials from respected
figures, like George Seldes and Man Ray, concerning the kinky sex lives of the Lost Generation.

Most of all, I was drawn toward those extraordinary women who appeared to have loved Willie Seabrook all his life, and beyond.
In reality according to his detractors, they should, by all rights, have despised him.

Marjorie Worthington would find herself, in her late years, appalled by her own history. She tried to cover up having willingly
borne the marks of Willie’s whip and proudly wearing his collar to parties in Paris and New York, one in 1933 celebrating
the publication of her own work.
¹⁸

At the same time, her continuing adoration would force even the hateful “politically correct” commentators of our own petty
era to concede that she had continued to believe for the rest of her life that he would eventually be rediscovered and live
forever through his work.

She’d written a book in that hope, that prayer, and I hoped that Katie had lived long enough to read it. Katie and her second
husband (who had formerly been Marjorie’s) had disappeared from public life after their marriage early in 1935. I had gotten
no leads on their later history.

I had developed a sense of morbid kinship with those lost souls of a lost generation, most of them dead before I was barely
a man. Most haunting of all was the fascinating and elusive composite figure whom Willie had called Justine.

Willie spent most of the late teens and early 1920s in New York City, where he and Katie became major figures in Greenwich
Village Bohemian society. Katie opened the first Greenwich Village coffeehouse at 156 Waverly Place—that is, the first not
to become a speakeasy. It quickly became the in-place for Village society, belonging to the remarkable Katie. How many women
in modern times have done such a thing as follow their men to war?

He was ten to fifteen years older than the bulk of the Lost Generation. I had the notion that many were predisposed to sit
at his knee owing to that, absorbing, then imitating things that he had already said or done. It was probably impossible to
establish that Willie had inspired the life choices of those literati, however.

But in my imagination, I beheld paths leading from the mystique of the Gothic South, tramping across Europe into the Great
War, debauching in the literary life of Paris and the Village, to safaris into Africa. I knew that it must be true; the sands
of time and the heavy footprints of the later immortals had obscured those of the lone adventurer.

Willie was reluctant to admit, when writing for publication, to any more than the bondage component of his sadomasochistic
games. He wrote that he had confessed all about the Justine of
Witchcraft
to his friend Dr. A.A. Brill, the dean of Freudians in America, but I found no indication that Brill had ever documented
the fact. I had to turn to the memoirs of others to find the obvious spelled out.

————————

“J
USTINE
”
WAS HANGING FROM HER WRISTS
with her toes on a stack of phone directories that she could kick away if so inclined. Willie explicitly stipulated that
the exercise, conducted in a darkened room, was to assist her into a trance state. I was unconvinced that the episode had
begun for largely research purposes. The whole setup, letting the submissive regulate her own misery, was too typical of a
pure sex game. At least, my personal experience suggested that.

From the adjacent room, Willie became concerned with the tone of her mumbling. Checking on her, he found that she had kicked
away all support and had been hanging free for longer than was safe. He got her down and revived her from the trance state
against her protests. She recounted being enthralled by an elaborate and amusing series of events, involving a lion, at a
street circus in what sounded to be a small European city.

Wanting to see more, she’d chastised Willie for lacking the courage of his convictions. It had, after all, been a matter of
her
pain! That defining occurrence early in their relationship was to become central to the book
Witchcraft,
and would supply Willie with a public rationale for the ongoing practice of his sexual proclivity.

The upshot was that he took her on “her first trip to Europe,” some six months later. In the ancient Papal city of Avignon,
they’d happened upon the circus with all the details she’d described, down to the cranky old lion pissing on the spectators
in the front row.

They could never fully re-create that precognitive effect, though “research” involving Justine went on over a period of years.
She failed to foresee the Armistice, boom, depression, the death of the Pope, though Willie remained overheated by the possibilities.
He had made for her a leather mask, allegedly for sensory deprivation effects, under circumstances that suggested the project
took place after his African expedition of 1929.

I began to visualize the enigmatic Justine, with her features obscured by the leather mask, as though in one of the surrealist
productions presented by Willie’s friends at the
Château d’Noailles.
At the same time, she had grown as real to me as any of the old celebrities whose names both Willie and Marjorie dropped
with frequency. The “diabolical” leather helmet in no way “dehumanized,” but marked her guise as an icon of mystery. The flesh
beneath grew as familiar in my imagination as any I’d known or touched.

Around the year 1923, a distinct chronology appeared, for a while, in step with Willie’s career of writing books about his
travels and adventures in exotic lands. Also in 1923, Seabrook had sought to write Aleister Crowley’s story for syndication.
Then, at Katie’s
156
coffeehouse, they connected with a young
Bedou
nobleman from Lebanon, who provided them with an entrée to the desert sheiks. They embarked in the spring for fifteen months
among the Arabs,
Druse,
and
Yezidi
“devil-worshippers.”

Decades in the future, a brilliant old carney, Anton LaVey, would bid to fill the late-century shoes of Aleister Crowley,
publishing his
Satanic Bible
and companion
Satanic Rituals.
A cursory examination revealed that Seabrook was not simply a source but, concerning some matters, LaVey’s
only
source. Ironically, that latter-day “most evil man in the world” proved another of the few with the moral rectitude to credit
derivation from the lost author.
¹⁹

Over the following several years, Willie and Katie would go on to make a couple of extended visits to Haiti, but he would
never receive credit due for his impacts on anthropological and archaeological studies. I knew that every beginning anthro
student is conditioned to hold a grand contempt for the adventurer-explorers who preceded them. No “Indiana Jones” allowed.
If, by chance, a conclusion of an adventurer should prove out, these “scientists” of our time bury the evidence in the back-dirt
and mum’s the word.

The Seabrooks were reported to have landed at Grand Bassam, on the Ivory Coast of French West Africa in November of 1929.
²⁰
Wamba, the sexy young witch of the
Yafouba
tribe, was truly an alluring figure. Known throughout the forest for her power, Wamba seemed to wear as little as was plausible,
except for her red-leather hat decorated with a feather plume—which turned out to be an earlycentury French fire helmet. She
would sit crosslegged, fanning herself with a silver-handled cow’s tail, surveying all before her with a bland, disturbing
smile.