by Paul Pipkin
The text for Witchcraft was finished by the beginning of 1940. In May, he began work on a biography of Dr. Robert Wood, the maverick physicist of JohnsHopkins and an early science fiction writer. The going was slow, and his drinking accelerated. He also seemed to be growing highly superstitious. His hysterical reaction to the gift of a Haitian ouanga bag sent by Hal Smith impugned an already tenuous stability. His disagreements with Smith and Jonathan Cape, whatever those might have amounted to, were a decade in the past.
In January 1941, he went to a friend’s place behind Woodstock to finish the book. There he met Constance Kuhr, one of the few female journalists to have been on the ground for the Nazi invasion of Poland. She’d then been through Dunkirk and the crack-up of France. Also, Kuhr was apparently a thoroughgoing sadist. Perhaps Willie’s psychological coin had completely flipped over from dominant to submissive.45
Little more was known. Kuhr’s methods for dealing with his alcoholism were extreme, having him scald his elbows so he couldn’t lift a glass. After he moved Constance in, Marjorie moved out. She’d been able to swallow a lot of things, but not that. When even their doctor at Rhinebeck advised her not to come back, she got a divorce.
Walter Duranty, long an admirer of Marjorie’s, was not slow on the uptake. He was moving on her within a month and, in his fashion, followed up over a long period of time. Walter provided a merciful diversion from what was coming, even though she was rapidly becoming obese and never really getting over Willie.
She would occasionally see Willie for lunch in New York. After Constance bore his son in February of 1943, he became focused on getting to England and the Continent as a war correspondent. I was a bit unconvinced by the patriotic protestations as motivation, for this old guy with a pickled liver, to want to run off to war again.
He didn’t make it. From that time on, he was in and out of hospitals for further psychiatric treatment. By contrast, continuing his sadomasochistic interests, he made a serious effort to interest Dali in the project of a ballet based on them, showing Helen Montague some “very beautiful” photographs.46
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RHINEBECK, NY, SEPT. 20 (AP)
William B. Seabrook, 59-year-old author and explorer, was found dead today from what Dr. Samuel E. Appel, Dutchess County Medical Examiner, said was an overdose of sleeping pills. Dr. Appel listed the death as a suicide… investigation showed that the author had “made threats” to take his life.47
Thus, Marjorie’s little “lamb of God,” as she’d called him, was finally released—but I couldn’t believe it was to rest in peace. I felt that he might have listened more closely to his friend Walter, and thought about holes left in people’s hearts. By God, those women had loved him so much! Devotion like theirs must count for something. Irrespective of the reasons, the depth of my identification had become profound.
It hardly seemed credible that I could have missed him. That none of his best-selling books had been on my mother’s shelves seemed impossible. Her interests had been broad beyond the seemly for a Texas schoolteacher in the fifties. Yet had I read even one, I felt a certain conviction that I would have inexorably been led to a copy of Witchcraft. Had that occurred, I knew that the figure of Justine would have become an icon in my precocious and happily perverted young mind.
I felt cheated of being shaped by this influence. How might it have changed my life? Had I read his adventure stories at fourteen, I would have wanted to be him, to follow in his dangerous footsteps. So much that I continued to ignore all other aspects of my original quest as I chased down every available source on Seabrook.
His treatment of Wamba’s Fan-Shaped Destiny was, arguably, the precursor of the many-worlds interpretation as applied to literature—twenty-seven years before the formalism was elaborated by Hugh Everett and forty-three years before it was popularized by Bryce DeWitt. He had been to the mountain and seen the promised land, and became obsessed with getting back. I believed that his obsession went, indeed, “a whole lot further back and a whole lot deeper” than to Africa in 1929.
Seabrook had been searching for something very specific since at least 1907, when he had gone to Geneva. I thought he had found it in Africa, and that returning to Europe had likely been an error. He thought he had good reason to anticipate the fun and games awaiting him back in our world. By the time they became no fun and all games, it had been too late.
Certainly I felt that the blackout, the blacklisting, of his diverse impacts on literature and culture should not be allowed to stand. Most especially the real possibility that the branching-worlds thesis in literature might well have influenced the scientific interpretation, rather than the reverse.
Likewise, his influence on the occult, and his early public proclamation of sadomasochism. That last was possibly at the behest of none other than A.A. Brill. William Pepperell Montague had seen in Seabrook a champion of his proposition that a materialism sufficiently radical would lead on to a new idealism, in which matter was not denied but transfigured.
My friend Richard used to claim that he could hear the “laughter of the gods.” At the end of Willie’s story, inside and aside was always the mischievous laughter of the sprightly composite Justine. Whenever the anomalies ganged up, she was always nearby, as “Deborah,” possibly Crowley’s consort “Leah,” or simply the figure in the red-leather mask. Maybe composed of pieces of Willie’s wives and anonymous “research girls,” possibly with a pinch of Lee Miller, but more.
Seabrook had described Justine’s presumed Leah Hirsig component thus: “… that was her name in the phone book, and in the cold world outside.” Referencing her nudity, he noted “the one thing she did wear. She couldn’t very well avoid wearing it, because it had been branded into her fair hide with the red-hot point of a Chinese sword: on her breast she wore a Star…”48
Even before I had found Ward Greene’s strange book, Ride the Nightmare, and read of a Justine kneeling in the same position as Leah at Washington Square, I had somehow sensed that composite literary device was at least one key to the enigma.
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AMONG THE SYNCHRONISTIC CURIOSITIES that had been accumulating in my journal, two more had been waiting to set the stage for what was about to happen. These took place when a trip on union business took me back to my hometown of Fort Worth, just before the WorldCon in late August.
The first was to be the weirdness of my acquisition of a 1949 paperback version of Ward Greene’s lightly fictionalized early life of Seabrook, Ride the Nightmare. I’ll describe the circumstance of its finding later; suffice it to say that it originally appeared to rival the appearance of the autobiography. The next offering of the “Library Angel,” however, had been so involved with the circumstances of my own life as to freak me.
I’d made my obligatory pilgrimage to the shelter house at Lake Arlington, bathing in treasured misery over my lost JJ, that gracious source of tears for worlds that might have been. I resolved to reestablish contact with my boyhood friend Charles, whom I’d not seen for ten years. Thus sensitized, and dreading telling him of Linda’s death, I was wholly unprepared for having the wounds so unexpectedly salted.
Charles for some years had two wives, not sequentially. You will have likely gathered my total indifference whether the circumstances constituted de facto, if not legal, bigamy. I will mention that our beloved Marilyn, a Native American, was his wife in the eyes of the Lakota religion. The rest is no one else’s business and too precious to all concerned to debate.
Our lives had been intimately, if not bizarrely, entangled when our inseparable friend Big Richard had met a violent death typical to bikers. Neither are the details of that tragedy germane, except that the emotional complications had left me with guilt, which had generated an estrangement from Charles and Marilyn for many years. It was my burden, not theirs.
Perhaps I should say it was not germane, as far as I know, a caveat that I would soon learn to apply to many observations. In any event, what
I had to deal with was the news that Marilyn had died, due to complications resulting from multiple sclerosis, less than a year before. I’d not even known she was ill, and now the loose ends would never be tied up. Like the big hole where Big Richard used to stand, like the emptiness left by Linda, it would never be filled.
I’d spent forty-eight hours in near-continuous conversation with Charles, rehashing what had happened, not happened, might have happened, and should have happened. Near the conclusion of that masochistic marathon, I was stunned by an event that drew fresh consideration to my bookseller’s behavior, and perhaps to a perceptual abnormality I’d experienced when discovering Ward Greene’s book.
Charles is a pack rat who seems to have nearly everything he’s ever owned. In itself, the fact of him dredging up a copy of the 1968 reprint of Witchcraft out of a box of books, lost among a decades-long accumulation of auto and motorcycle parts, might not seem all that strange. Still, Charles can remember the exact location of nuts and bolts he removed decades past. That he found no recollection of ever having possessed such a book was somewhat singular. As youths, we’d had a passing interest in the esoteric, after all.
For some hours I’d compared the paperback to a photocopy I’d made—only weeks before the book had inexplicably vanished from the library’s reference shelves. I deduced that what Charles had found could only be the 1968 reprint. Deduction being indicated, in that the odd paperback’s flyleaf contained only the original 1940 publication data.
I could not resist associating the conditions of the find with the blank I continued to draw about prior contacts with Seabrook’s work, the light of my recent obsessions coloring it very personally. It felt as if these things had always stood near to me, surrounding me, waiting for me.
Driving back to San Antonio in a simmering emotional soup, I came face-to-face with what I was engaging in. Psychological pabulum could not replace those who had been the meaning of my life. I thought of boyhood experiments when we had tried to send our consciousness into our futures; the marginal evidence that, sometimes, we had apparently succeeded. Through a glass darkly, too weak a connection to do any greater good… If it were mental illness, should I go madder than Phil Dick, so what? What did I have left to lose? In truth, I questioned whether my life had been worth the living at all, if catastrophic errors always outweighed the good. Near the end of my tether, one more thread had frayed.
I couldn’t shake the stuff boiling up in me. There were thoughts of my mother, and a world changed beyond recognition in just my lifetime. There was regret at finding myself childless late in life and fear of facing myself as the lonely old man I was already becoming. I experienced a dark nostalgia that was far from comforting, as if an irrational belief that I might have lived better had it been in other times. Behind and around it all was a heartbreaking homesickness, for the places and people lost every time another door had closed.
As I gained the San Antonio city limits, intent on either a stiff drink or a happy pill, the radio had been babbling about El Niño kicking up, generating a flurry of storms in the Caribbean and the Gulf. In earlier years I had a strong interest in climatic change and would have paid more attention. Apart from the possibility of some welcome relief from the oppressive heat wave, it seemed small potatoes compared with the storm within my own soul.
I watched a lone seagull in the evening twilight, flapping along above and beyond the branching interstates, which I knew he used, like the rivers, as a map. Would that the “paths of probability” I’d been studying were so clearly defined! Those might rather resemble a topographical map of a steep gorge or mountain—”bundles” of lines of very similar paths. Worse, the nonlinear terms might signify a constant crossing and recrossing, loops in which every convergence might be seen as the other end of a divergence.
Looking back, there is a thrilling chill in remembering what could have been the synchronistic moment, when the quantum membrane between metaphor and reality became strained to its limit. The bird seemed to dive right at my car but, just as I thought it would smash into the windshield, it had turned and risen again. I continued to watch with bewilderment until, again leisurely, it disappeared into the dusk. For the bird no longer seemed to be escaping, but running toward the gathering storms.
IV
The Justines
WAKING TO VERIFY THAT I HAD SURVIVED MY NIGHT of passion with Justine, I lay in bed thinking about what all this was possibly going to mean. I could smell coffee brewing and hear her talking to my dog. I knew this much—a sadly forgotten joy had been returned to my life. If there was any way on God’s green earth to keep this improbable encounter going, even if for only a little while longer, I would do anything and everything necessary. I looked for my robe, then spotted Justine’s clothes scattered about the bedroom floor and concluded that she must be wearing it. Good sign.
I paused by the mirror for a reality check. Not really overweight, but gravity definitely in evidence: belly sagging a bit; butt okay; muscle tone mediocre. It was obvious I was no fan of the sun, and looked as white as the belly of a toad. The upside of that was that my skin looked about as it always had, with little wrinkling. But my grayed hair and beard struck me as looking old, old, old.
I hit the shower, scrubbed and deodorized everything I could reach, trimmed wild hairs, and prayed that I had farted all I was capable. As I dressed, I was keenly aware of the regimen being utterly unlike anything I ever did in the morning. The thought of her looking at me, and wondering what she possibly could have been thinking the preceding night, sickened me.
I slipped quietly into my main living area and stood watching her as she sat behind my desk. The growing lump in my throat should have clued me right off that I was over the top. An encounter, which should have been some fun before both went our separate ways, had become something I wanted to keep forever. Wisdom would be that I could all too easily kill it by clutching too hard, but I didn’t want to let go.
My malamute lay at her feet, happy, protective, and content for there to be a woman in the house again, maybe vaguely hoping that he wouldn’t be left alone so much anymore. Justine was absorbed in reading my Seabrook files, her toes caressing Kong’s big furry neck. She had one knee drawn up, foot beautifully arched against the edge of the seat. The robe spilled open to display the muscular cut of those legs that had been so unbelievably wrapped around mine just a few hours before.
She was reading from my file of hard copies, shot from microfilmed book reviews and bio items on Seabrook, from the thirties and forties. She’d hardly had to search, as my materials were spread all over the room, but it was apparent that she had been flagrantly prowling through them.
On my desk was a rough draft from which portions of this present account were later transcribed. It was incomplete, particularly as regards the Seabrook background—much of it no more than glorified notes. My copy of Adventures in Arabia lay open to the drawing of a silver “bride’s girdle” or belt, of the Yezidi, so obviously related to her own barbaric jewelry.
Adventures in Arabia, arguably, was second only to T.E. Lawrence in establishing the popular literary and film image of life among the desert tribes. Willie used the name of “Arabia” in the old fashion to denote the entire Arab domain; he did not visit the Arabian Peninsula. The book had secured his position as an authority on the Druse. He and Katie were on the ground in the Syrian puppet states of “Greater Lebanon” when a Druse rebellion against the French Mandate broke out in the summer of 1925.
Marjorie Worthington asserted later that he had fought with the Druse against the French. This was not impossible. Willie, still technically attached to the French Army and a frequent visitor to France, would have been inhibited against using such an adventure for self-promotion. In any event, he was in demand from newspapers and foreign-policy clubs back in New York in late 1925.49
It took nothing away from the validity of our mutual interest to presume that I had one real chance with Justine. Her involvement with the Seabrook s
aga was clearly intense and personal. If I could contrive to remain an integral part of her quest, there might be a remote chance of molding this thing closer to my heart’s desire.
She looked up, “Hey. Prompt me why you aren’t, like, a college professor or something?” She gestured to my piles of research materials, and I laughed. It was not as though I hadn’t been asked that before. Things just had not fallen that way in this life. On an impulse, I told her about the bikers and strippers with whom I had spent my youth. “Professor” had, in fact, been the biker name the dancers had given me.
She nodded understanding. “I can see why you’re so up on Willie.” She turned back to the copy of a 1936 American Magazine article, “Green Hills Far Away,” in which Seabrook rationalized not finally returning to his life as an expatriate. Directly, she leaned back and sighed, looking at the pictures on my desk. Speaking carefully, as though trying to stay on top of something inexplicable, “Sentimental, much?”
Unclear whether she was referring to Willie or me, I tried to balance between both. “He tried to understate the sentimentality in his writing, but he couldn’t conceal it. You know, I think there’s something of that nature at the core of most tough guys.”
She snapped back from the pictures. “Take long for you to learn that?” she demanded, in an interesting twist.
“Lifetimes, babe,”—I laughed—”many incarnations.”
She picked at the edges of my draft pages. “Cool with me scanning this?” I nodded assent. Of course, it served my purpose to show her anything she wanted to see.