by Paul Pipkin
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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MAN 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.
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SOMETIMES, 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, a
nd 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
It’s possible that he hoped the door between Katie and him was not entirely closed. During the course of writing that year, he chose to thoroughly dissemble as to the status of his relationships: “Katie, for once, was even further away than Paul Morand; she was already heading, on an adventure of her own, for the high mountains of Mexico.”33
Oh, by the way, “… Marjorie Worthington, young American novelist who had collaborated with me on former work, and who chanced to be in Paris. She had promised tentatively to join the expedition.”34 One would hope so; after living together for nearly two years…
Conversely, in Air Adventure, he even exhibited very controlled jealousy at Marjorie’s flirtation with a young French officer. This supported Marjorie’s later position that Willie would always manage to tell the truth, in his fashion.
The Timbuktu trip was of relatively short duration, and by April they were moved into the Villa Les Roseaux. It shared a beach with the Huxleys, no doubt enjoyed by nude bather Max Eastman with his beautiful Russian wife, en route to visit Trotsky at Prinkipo.
In Witchcraft, Seabrook described how, with Marjorie working on a novel, he met a sinister “Abbé Penhoël,” through a clerical friend.35 The story went that the Abbé threw a spell on Marjorie that threatened her life.
Willie claimed that he came to her aid with psychological and magical skills, principally directed at terrorizing the offender, including a threat based on the Fan-Shaped Destiny. She was recovered by October and referenced none of that in her book. She did recall the visit that summer of Willie’s oldest friends, Max and Ward Greene, mentioning her resentment of Ride the Nightmare.36
Witchcraft contained a number of anecdotes from that time frame, including an encounter with a wanna-be vampiress on the beach, and smashing a St. Remy sorceress’s “witch’s cradle” setup. This was presumably because Willie objected to her torturing her nubile granddaughter—on the narrow platform an apprentice would straddle for hours, supposedly learning to ride on a broomstick. Perhaps her technique was offensive?
Willie wrote with official skepticism about all these matters, even as he pursued them with verve. His drinking was rapidly becoming debilitating, and much of Air Adventure had to be ghostwritten.
Nonetheless, his mystique was intact. On November 5, Aldous Huxley wrote to the Vicomte de Noailles about their neighborhood at Sarnay:
Sarnay is full of the usual Lesbian baronesses—all of them in a flutter of excitement to know Mr. Seabrook, because the rumor has gone around the village that he beats his lady friend. One is reminded of the hysterical excitement of cows when they see a bull in the next field coupling with another cow37
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THE LAST TIME SEABROOK SAW ALEISTER CROWLEY was in Paris sometime in 1933. Crowley was far into a downhill slide himself by that time. Making a meager living off an astrology scam, he had approached Man Ray with a proposition. He would demand that wealthy women who came to him for horoscopes provide him with a Man Ray photograph. Man Ray would reciprocate by requiring a Crowley forecast from his clients. The proposition was not adopted.
By mid-1933, Willie was doing nothing but drinking. At last he realized that drink was going to take him out if he didn’t do something. He wrote his publisher, Alfred Harcourt, who provided helpful assistance with getting him incarcerated for treatment, the arrangement of simple detox situations being highly problematical in those days.
He sailed for New York on the Europa in October, Marjorie taking another ship a few days later. After a brief dry-out at Doctors’ Hospital, he took a penthouse studio, with Marjorie in separate lodgings nearby. For the next couple of months, he indulged in his favorite games with various “research girls” and “secretaries.” Man Ray observed a bit of this when he came over on assignment,38 and probably chasing Lee Miller. Lee had ditched Man Ray, and then set up her own studio in New York.
Just before Christmas, drinking more heavily than ever, he gave it up and entered the Bloomingdale Sanitarium, where he was treated for seven months. Released in July of 1934, Willie entered upon four years at their new home in Rhinebeck, New York, perhaps closer to a state of contentment than he had ever known. I would come to wonder at whether, when the evening shadows of the haunted Catskills reached across the Hudson, had he ever reflected on his friend Crowley canoeing along those same banks twenty years before? Had he been able to remain mercifully oblivious to the undertow that was destined to pull him down?
In April of 1937, the Huxleys arrived in the U.S. The Seabrooks helped them obtain the old Astor estate where they stayed near their friends late in the year. Aldous became friends with J.B. Rhine. That giant of parapsychology had managed, for a time, to beat back the establishment and force the recognition of paranormal studies by mainstream science. Evidently Huxley had plugged Willie in with Rhine. By the summer of 1938, Seabrook was growing restive, and drove down to Duke University to observe some of Rhine’s famous ESP experiments.
What took me down to visit professor Rhine and have a look at what he was doing, was neither clean, clear nor cold. It was a private obsession of mine that went a whole lot further back and a whole lot deeper than any taste for the esoteric picked up by living with voodoo priests in Haiti and witch-doctors in Africa. It went so deep indeed and so far back, and had entangled me in so many complications—paralleling the other tangles and complications I’ve confessed—that instead of trying to deal with it chronologically I have held it all until what happens in this chapter brought it to a head.39
Though he congratulated Rhine and others for lifting the study of the paranormal into a cold and clear scientific light, his response was to convert his barn studio into a “medieval hexen-küche.”40 Detailing his view in Witchcraft, he held that Rhine and his associates might learn something from the alchemists of old, to turn up the heat under the crucibles of science. He complained of cold and sterile methods wanting of the psychological heat and stress necessary to ignite dormant psychic powers.
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THIS SUPERNORMAL STUFF IS ALL IN THE SAME BAG, you know, whether you split it into telepathy, clairvoyance, mystical vision, fourth-dimensional excursions, or the metaphysical corollaries of the Einstein theory in which space if not time curves round and back on itself like a serpent swallowing its tail. Dr. Rhine is not merely experimenting, you know, with telepathy and clairvoyance confined to the immediate instant, to the “nick” of time. He is experimenting also with precognition, previsionary clairvoyance, seeing into the future. Also with retrocognition, i.e., seeing back into the past clairvoyantly.41
More than once I had seemed to discern implied interest in an underlying theory that remained forever unstated—a “final theory” of the paranormal, which had some sort of involvement with the nature of time. Thus, when he converted the studio into his magician’s workshop-cum-dungeon, approach
ing the study of the paranormal through systematic torment of his “research girls,” the enterprise was not as facetious as it might initially sound. As seen by her centrality in Witchcraft, all hearkened back to the wonder of Justine in Avignon. I had no doubt that he was, by that time at least, seriously attempting to unlock the gate to alternate realities.
Since his earlier days, he had garnished his sexually generated proclivity with valuable tips accumulated in Haiti, Africa, and from the Rufai Dervishes in the Middle East, who practiced torture as a path to spiritual enlightenment. In a sense, that would give Witchcraft some problems as a factual document.
Accounts of his adventures in the teens and twenties tended to be overlaid with elements that were generated at the barn in 1938 and 1939. Those, in turn, were embellished with data gleaned from the Rufai, and other things that had happened years before. On the other hand, this amalgam of composite pictures provided some interesting insights. But it was probable that ultimate success eluded him. In frustration, he began to drink again.
Marjorie worried, both about his drinking, and in fear that the sadomasochistic activities would go too far. The neighborhood was amused and tolerant, the cab driver calling up with, “Got another ‘research girl’ for you, Bill, and she’s a lallapaloosa.”42 Willie and the girls even did a photo shoot for Life magazine in a Virginia swamp entitled “Life Goes to a Hexing Party.” Behind the hoopla and the sex, however, was something deadly serious.
Willie attested that he wrote over a hundred thousand words of observations on what seemed to happen in the barn with the girls, some volunteers and others paid retainers, who suffered in the cage, the witch’s cradle, and other devices.
What they voluntarily endured and saw mystically and described, would constitute, stripped down… a document, beside some of the socalled mystical revelations of the religious ecstatics of the Middle Ages.43
The Huxleys returned from California to observe, which Seabrook implied to be partial inspiration for Aldous’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, a spoof on the quest for immortality.44 Other observers and possible participants included Walter Duranty. The young scholar Maya Deren, who subsequently became an authority on Voudon herself, was definitely there. During 1939, he did a series of lecture tours, some on the occult, spent a few months in New York, then back to the doings at the barn.