by Paul Pipkin
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.
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“JUSTINE” 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.
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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WAMBA 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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THERE 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.