The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (11 page)

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 cow
³⁷

————————

T
HE LAST TIME
S
EABROOK SAW
A
LEISTER
C
ROWLEY
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.

————————

T
HIS 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, approaching 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.

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

————————

R
HINEBECK,
NY, S
EPT.
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.