The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  Maybe an old boyfriend calling, while she was at her mother’s, with a revelation of cosmic significance that she had somehow overlooked? All that crap that they go through as they flail about without a clue as to what they want. “Didn’t know I needed you, baby, till you left town.” A bitter lampoon of self-serving young male bullshit ran through my mind as I paced the floor. “Well hell, I almost got off my dead butt to find you. Now that somebody else wants you, I’ll have to kill you or myself if I can’t have you.” Or worse, her addressing me with “… if only you weren’t so much older.”

  In my nervous stalking about, I’d wandered back into the bedroom. Idly inspecting the closet, I spied the errant ties hanging on a rack with other unused items. Now, why in hell would she have troubled to hang those up? I wondered, in the suddenly oppressive silence of the enclosed room, as I fingered the neckties. Then came an eerie perception that their material was to no degree crumpled or creased, as though they had been hanging there for years, like their fellows—untouched, unused.

  An irrational fear gripped me. Momentarily, it seemed as though I might have stepped briefly into a universe that had housed such a magical little being, then been transported back—back here. Here, to a sad and lonely place where she did not exist at all, where my memories of her were sheer dementia. Oh no, oh please God…

  I snapped to as a revelation nullified my gloom. I was not going to let it happen! If she didn’t show, I’d call Joe before the convention offices were boxed up, get her address and other registration information, and catch a few hours’ sleep. One way or another, night would find me on the causeway across the Atchafalaya swamps, on my way to Atlanta.

  By God, I would make it happen! Between her sexual tastes and involvement with the Seabrook saga, there was enough for me to work with. There were levels here, true enough. Part of it was the old Halloween thrill again, but there was something so much more—that would move me at any cost.

  Was it significant that I confronted the fact of having fallen hopelessly in love with her at the very moment she pulled into my driveway?

  I watched through the window as she got out of her car. In tight blue jeans, studded denim jacket over a halter top, she was as exquisite as she had been the night before. Relief was tempered as I saw her dab her eyes under her dark glasses. Not out of the woods yet, I thought; but unlike minutes before, I felt ready to deal with anything. Inside the door, she laid her head against my chest. I asked her what was wrong, hoping I exuded the confidence I’d acquired by taking a fundamental decision.

  “Y’know the thing where you can’t remember ever being called a ‘child’ till after you’re age of consent? Then, we wanna get all parental…” she answered, gesturing with an upturned palm. “Believe me when I say, if some people don’t have a thing in their lives, they’re all—about how nobody else should.”

  “The bad news is, babe, that’s the great majority around us.”

  “I never know what’s up, with Mother and me. She’s not too stoked by me on the road alone. Hey, I really thought she would fret less with someone ‘looking after me.’ I am such a retard. I flipped her off, was way harsh on her to deal with my going. Now I feel all gnarly.”

  “Well, you’re of age and have your own means,” I spoke carefully, surmising that the means were precisely the issue.

  She mockingly slapped her forehead. “I forgot!” She grabbed up the heavy leather case with an air of urgency, “We’re outta here.” We’d just started out the door when the phone rang. I cursed under my breath and began to put down my bag. “Nay, please, let it go.” There was alarm in her voice, and I looked at her curiously. She tugged on my wrist in a childlike gesture I was coming to recognize. Something about taking the hand was important to her. “I’m way sure it’s her,” she explained. “She was going off about calling you and ‘taking care of this.’”

  It’s true. I’ve become a cranky old man, especially on issues of sex and politics. “Justine, nobody is going to put any paternalistic threats over on me. I grew up around all that trailer-trash behavior, too. But, after fifty years, I’ve been around too many blocks to take it.” Yes, I did take it personally. It brought back thoughts of JJ and everything that had gone into tearing us apart.

  ————————

  “WE’RE SO NEW AND BEAUTIFUL.” The strange cadence had returned to her speech, a stress thing? “It’s about not wanting her to even touch us right now.” Her voice begged, “I don’t want anything to touch us!” I shook my head, not because I wasn’t impressed.

  The telephone continued to demand attention to whomever was trying to reach me from my world. My wonderful world of tears and hopeless prayers at the kitchen table, where even my dreams had become tableaux of remorse. After ten rings it ceased, as the Caller ID picked up the plea of whatever urgency from my reality. I could return it later, if it mattered more than the rest of this painful void.

  And you know what? I didn’t want anything to touch us either. In fact, I wouldn’t have it. I suppose now that something must have broken inside me, when I judged that reality was to be simply a place that didn’t hurt. Looking back, I honestly don’t know whether I could then have coped with a wider understanding of the inevitability that had already touched us.

  We drove out on Interstate 10, the afternoon’s photonic inferno blasting us toward Houston. She’d handed me the keys and said we could switch later. Of course, she immediately tuned the radio to something loud and strident. I imagined that she was still shaken from the confrontation with her mother. She fished in her purse and came up with an old half-pint metal flask. While she took only a small sip, the evidence of maintenance drinking made me uneasy.

  Hardly new, and not so beautiful, it was a disturbing reminder of Linda’s habits at the onset of her decline. Loosening up, she began to read some computer pages she had in her bag. With luck, we could make the state line by dark. Which was good, for we’d then have to slow down the bright colored, sportylooking car through Louisiana, over what had become known as Drug Highway.

  I glanced at the sheets she’d been absorbed in and asked her what she was reading.

  “Off the Net, slash fiction.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  She snickered and explained this cybernetic genre. It seemed that the “slash” denoted the mark between two names, like “Kirk/Spock” or “Mulder/Krycek.” These titles originally identified mainly gay knockoffs on popular television series, e.g., Mulder on Krycek. In time, this “fan-fiction” venue had expanded into broader kinky fantasies.

  She had been reading “A Woman’s Touch,” which featured Agent Scully and a young female intern working under her, as it were, at the FBI—and about to pull in Mulder for a threesome… I strained to hear her rendition over the radio. It was blaring a music vaguely reminiscent of my young cousin’s noise of choice. According to her, it had been christened after factories, idled for retooling, where the style had originally been performed.

  “Some of the writing is kick-ass,” she enthused, “I’ve got one at home you’ll get up on; Scully gets tortured in an ‘S ’n M’ club installation. Is that lascivious, or what?” I reached into my coat pocket and handed her the paperback, with a caution that she might find it too tame.

  “Can we turn down the industrial?” I rather had to shout.

  “Postindustrial,” she corrected, “rules!” Though complying with my request, laughing eyes challenged me to follow up. She knew very well that the name would be the full extent of my familiarity.

  The story of how the paperback had come to me got her attention, and we began to discuss it as she searched the contents. She focused, as expected, on the Justine portions. I pointed out how Greene’s early “Justine” resembled Crowley’s Leah Hirsig more than did the Justine rendered by Seabrook. In the process, she was insistent that I tell her what I knew about Aleister Crowley.

  Willie’s interest in the occult was a given, and he certainly had the money and leisure to
travel. Despite all that, there was absolutely nothing to support occasional assertions that Seabrook had known Crowley in his Paris years, during the time of the “Paris workings.”

  His friend Walter Duranty had been, in fact, a participant in Crowley’s famous series of magical rituals performed in Paris during early 1914, but many years before Duranty had met Seabrook. Crowley had arrived in New York near Halloween of 1914, a time when Willie had been fully consumed with success in Atlanta.

  Marjorie Worthington had written:

  In some way—and I believe it dated from his earlier association with Aleister Crowley during the Greenwich Village period in both their lives—Willie’s witchcraft and magic were tied in with his sexual sadism.56

  There was no doubt that the period she was referencing began with a first meeting with Crowley in 1917, after Willie’s return from the First World War.

  Whether or not Willie had been introduced to Aleister Crowley over lunch in 1917, by the journalist Frank Harris, there was little doubt that was about the time he met the woman he styled Deborah Luris. “Deborah,” like Leah Hirsig, an apparent part of the Justine composite, stuck in Willie’s libidinous imagination. Retiring to Georgia to try out the life of a gentleman farmer at his father-in-law’s expense, he continued to visualize her tied to trees or pillars.

  Confessing his fantasy to Katie, he was astonished, though highly gratified, when she encouraged him to follow up. He promptly went to visit “Deborah” in New York for a week of passion that he alleged was his first actual practice of bondage. This evidently so impressed him that he and Katie moved to New York.

  While both Willie and his biographers suggested a break with Katie’s family upon the relocation, there must have been some back-and-forth to the Georgia farm for several years. For one thing, Crowley visited with them there in the late summer or early fall of 1919, just before returning to the Continent. Crowley, never burdened with the conceit of humility, would comment on the visit in his “autohagiography”:

  In the autumn I accepted an invitation to visit my friends William and Kate Seabrook on their farm in Georgia to which they had retired. He had held an important position on the Hearst papers, and his sanity and decency had revolted against so despicably disgusting a job. He knew he was a genius and the effect of knowing me was to make him ashamed of himself. Alas, not long after my influence was removed, he became a backslider.57

  While No Hiding Place and Witchcraft contained many anecdotes of Village life in the late teens and early twenties, no chronology of that period was in any sort of evidence. I had found I could refer somewhat to Greene’s fictionalized treatment, Ride the Nightmare, for at least the flavor and some of the sequence. Greene had “Jake,” his fictional Willie, meet “Justine” in 1919 after returning from service with the U.S. Army—rather than 1917 following Willie’s actual release from the Field Service.

  This divergence was in marked contrast to his treatment of the features syndicate where “Jake” was employed; the characters there being almost one for one with the personalities of Hearst’s old King Features Syndicate, where Willie had worked in those years. Greene had also clearly filled in with fiction a near-total ignorance of Seabrook’s life before they worked on the Atlanta Journal, beginning in 1908. He even seemed doubtful that Willie had ever been to Europe before the war.

  Near its conclusion, “Jake” was considering departing for France with “Beth” (Katie) and “Justine,” presented as a shy and beaten-down creature whom he had inherited from a figure representing Crowley. Like Leah Hirsig, this repressed character was a former schoolteacher. The contrast with the Justine Willie would draw ten years later in Witchcraft was striking.

  There, Seabrook would describe a happy and vivacious, almost kittenish, young woman with whom he was clearly in love. She, in turn, contrasted with the cool sophisticate of No Hiding Place. In fact, “Deborah” more closely resembled the personality of the roleversatile “Santolina Marr,” a creation of Greene’s fiction.

  “Maybe I’m really reaching, but there also exists a discrepancy between Willie’s and Marjorie Worthington’s accounts of when they met and then cohabited in Europe. She was adamant that it was in the spring of 1926, though she doesn’t supply details of their life together until two, maybe three, years later, which is when the other sources indicate they got together.

  “It’s odd that many of Marjorie’s recollections of their early relationship seem to exist in a time frame offset by as much as two years, as are Greene’s fictional events. Remember, Seabrook places his meeting with at least part of the Justine composite, Hirsig, in 1917, though the residence and circumstances he describes did not exist for another two years.”

  First mentioned by Greene, “Justine” would seem to have been initially based on Crowley’s consort. But Crowley didn’t abandon the Hirsig woman in New York, nor did Seabrook ever acquire her. The sad, timid, and suppressed victim described by Greene was very different from the bouncy, opinionated Justine of Seabrook’s 1940 account, his partner for kinky sex games.58

  His 1942 autobiography, taken alone, supported the model as being the young Village sophisticate of the twenties whom he styled “Deborah Luris.” He’d asserted that Marjorie had represented that woman in her mural of his life. Worthington’s book made no specific mention of her, and Marjorie’s vague descriptions of Willie’s various “research girls” added nothing to this identification.

  ————————

  “‘LURIS’ IS A PERSIAN TITLE FOR THE ROM, OR GYPSIES and appears in arcana involving elves and demons, as well as being the Latin for law. While a known surname, it’s rare. I finally concluded it was yet another pseudonym.”

  Justine leafed through the book, “So what is Greene saying about Willie and Marjorie?”

  “He doesn’t. In Greene’s world ‘Jake’ and ‘Beth,’ who is Katie, stay together, preparing to go to Europe sometime in the mid-twenties, possibly with Justine in tow. They’re still together through the entire tale, with the writer’s omniscient eye, interestingly enough, detesting it as much as does ‘Beth’ or Katie’s admirer in the story. But when Greene published in 1930, Willie was already living with Marjorie on the quay at Toulon.”

  Chronology had become weirdly distorted amongst the various sources during those years. Ward Greene’s fictional story had petered out before the foreign adventures; no help there. Marjorie was emphatic that she had followed Willie to set up housekeeping in Europe in the spring of 1926. But the timing of her meeting Ford Madox Ford, from whose wife they obtained the Toulon loft, suggested 1929.

  Marjorie also wrote of meeting the French literary giant Paul Morand at Seabrook’s loft above the quay prior to his role in arranging Willie’s African adventure. The problem was—when could that have been? Morand had been on a long Southern U.S. itinerary during most of 1927, during the bulk of which Willie had been in Haiti with Katie.

  More decisively, Morand’s own time in Africa, which had prompted him to bring a project to Seabrook, had been in 1928, while Willie was still in Connecticut writing Magic Island. Still, Marjorie remained committed to the notion that she had been with Willie in France at least two years before it appeared possible, including that proposition in her biographics.

  Dating had to be considered tentative for yet another two years. This was unfortunate, for those years enveloped the trip to Africa during which Willie had discovered the Fan-Shaped Destiny, my central focus. Morand was convinced that an author other than himself, due to his sensitive diplomatic position, simply had to undertake a special mission to Africa. The purpose was to live with a tribe practicing ritual cannibalism, of which little was known in the West beyond gross comic-strip stereotypes of savages dining on missionaries.

  Willie’s account of this in Jungle Ways generated sensational controversy. I explained to Justine that whether he sampled human meat in the jungle with the Gueré, obtained some later from a medical school in Paris, or ate it in a Black Mass with Satanists was of
total indifference to me. The writers of all my Seabrook sources had, of course, doted on it. It sufficed to say that he initiated such a decades-long popular fascination that Anton LaVey would be inspired to employ the same publicity-generating formula in the sixties.

  Seabrook’s account had him meeting Paul Morand after the publication of Magic Island and going into the Ivory Coast in the winter of twenty-nine. Both Willie and Marjorie placed their first meeting at a bridge party, which he set on an October evening. According to Willie, that was just before he and Katie had embarked to connect with Morand in Paris and initiate the African adventure.

  Other chroniclers went along with those assumptions, but placed their meeting in 1929. The problem was that the documented events of their lives in France during 1930 would leave no time for the trip to Africa. It made far more sense for that sequence, the meeting with Morand, meeting Marjorie, and then leaving with Katie for France and Africa, to have started in the fall of 1928.

  Willie and Katie had determined to soon part, but they remained close companions and made the Africa trip together. When they embarked on the Berengaria, it was not Katie, but Deborah Luris (“Justine”) who was throwing an absolute fit over his proposed liaison with Marjorie.

  “As if Willie was too drunk to remember?” Justine studied, no doubt getting as confused with all the bits of data as had I. “Some kinda shit, about how long he and Marjorie had been shacked up?”

  How had she arrived at that on the few details she had so far? “There are indications in some of his other writings that do support that. At first, I thought it was because they’d lived together before he and Katie were known to be separated, and was still leaving their future status open. But it doesn’t explain Marjorie’s lack of supporting detail for over two years. And there is something I can’t put my finger on which gives this the same texture as the two-year discrepancy as to when he came home from the war and met Justine.”