The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook
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————— . No Hiding Place (autobiography). NY: Lippincott, 1942.
Seldes, George. Witness to a Century. NY: Ballantine, Random House, 1987.
Symonds, John and Kenneth Grant, editors. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. NY: Hill and Wang, 1970.
Taylor, S.J. Stalin’s Apologist. NY: Oxford University Press, 1990. On the life and career of Walter Duranty.
Worthington, Marjorie. The Strange World of Willie Seabrook. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1966. A hope, a prayer.
The New York Times, 1927–76 for news items, feature stories, marriage notices and obituaries concerning William Seabrook, Katherine Edmondson Seabrook-Worthington, Lyman Worthington, Marjorie Muir Worthington-Seabrook, and Ward Greene.
1. Man Ray, Self Portrait, NY: Little, Brown, 1963, 1988, p. 154.
2. Wolf, Fred Alan, Star Wave, NY: Macmillan, 1984, p. 96.
3. Deutsch, David, The Fabric of Reality, NY: Penguin Putnam, 1997,p. 49.
4. Everett, Hugh III, The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction, Princeton thesis, 1956, 138 pages (publication in DeWitt, Bryce and Neill Graham, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. The collection of all pertinent documents).
5. Feynman won the 1965 Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics (QED) and was among the earliest to speculate on the possibilities of quantum computing. Matthew Broderick’s sentimental film treatment, Infinity (Overseas Filmgroup, 1996), a story of Feynman’s early life (including the death of Arline Greenbaum, his young wife), might suggest additional motivation for his refusal to join in the conspiracy of silence against Everett’s concepts of time and reality.
6. Deutsch, David, in The Ghost in the Atom, editors P.C.W. Davies and J.R. Brown, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
7. Norton, Andre, Star Gate, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1958. Quotation is from the prologue.
8. Cramer, John, Twistor, NY: Morrow, 1989.
9. Stapledon, (William) Olaf, Star Maker, London: Methune, 1937.
10. Borges, Jorge Luis, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, editors Donald Yates and James Irby, NY: New Directions 1964, Modern Library 1983 (written 1941).
11. Heinlein, Robert A., “Elsewhen” (originally “Elsewhere”) in Astounding, Sep. 1941. Subsequently published in the collection Assignment in Eternity, pp. 69–70.
12. de Camp, L. Sprague and Fletcher Pratt, “The Incomplete Enchanter,” in Unknown, May and Aug. 1940. Unknown was the other classic “pulp.” It perished in the World War II paper shortage.
13. Jerry Pournelle attests to this in his introduction to Piper’s Federation, NY: Ace Books, 1981.
14. Annotator John F. Carr respectfully appropriated Pournelle’s sobriquet for Piper in a bio for Analog (the successor of Astounding) in Jan. 1988.
15. Piper, Horace Beam, “Time and Time Again,” in Astounding Science Fiction, Apr. 1947.
16. Seabrook, William, No Hiding Place, NY: Lippincott, 1942, p. 127.
17. Fadiman, C., reviewing No Hiding Place in The New Yorker, 31 Oct. 1942.
18. Man Ray, op. cit., p. 156.
19. LaVey, Anton Szandor, The Satanic Rituals, NY: Avon, 1972, p. 155. In “Pilgrims of the Age of Fire,” the preface to a ritual derivative of Seabrook’s account of the Yezidis, LaVey stipulates to Seabrook’s early1920s pilgrimage into the desert to Mount Lalesh, recording the journey in Adventures in Arabia with a brave and compassionate objectivity. He likens Seabrook to Bierce, Shaw, Twain, or Wells.
20. The New York Times, 17 Nov. 1930. References events supposedly only one year earlier. Typical of a number of newsprint idiosyncrasies. Their actual arrival in Africa would probably have fallen another year before that, in late 1928.
21. Seabrook, Jungle Ways, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1930–1931, p. 82.
22. Ibid., p. 83.
23. Ibid., p. 125.
24. Greene, Ward, Ride the Nightmare, New York and London: Cape and Smith, 1930, p. 158.
25. Man Ray, op. cit., p. 156.
26. Taylor, S.J., Stalin’s Apologist, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 32.
27. Seldes, George, Witness to a Century, NY: Ballantine, 1987, p. 270.
28. Seldes, ibid., p. 270.
29. Seldes, ibid., p. 270.
30. Seldes, ibid., p. 270.
31. Taylor, op. cit., p. 123, quoting Duranty.
32. Seabrook, William, The White Monk of Timbuctoo, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1934. A new French edition of his story of the life of Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba was issued in 1996 (D’ailleurs, Phébus, Paris).
33. Seabrook, William, Air Adventure, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1933, p. 4.
34. Seabrook, ibid., p. 4.
35. Perhaps the model for the love interest in Worthington’s next novel, Come, My Coach, NY: Knopf, 1935, about a woman who fell in love with a priest.
36. Worthington, Marjorie, The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1966, pp. 123–124. Willie and Max had been blood brothers from their teens at Mercersberg Academy. Greene’s work has also fallen into obscurity. Some was moderately groundbreaking, such as a play, Death in the Deep South. Compatible with his image, however, he is best remembered for his script writing of Disney’s Lady and the Tramp.
37. Letters of Aldous Huxley, editor Grover Smith, NY: Harper and Row, 1970. Letter from Huxley to Noailles dated 5 Nov. 1932. (See also Between the Wars, essays and letters, Chicago: IR Dee, 1994.)
38. Man Ray, op. cit., p. 156.
39. Seabrook, No Hiding Place, p. 386.
40. Seabrook, ibid., p. 370.
41. Seabrook, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1940, p. 188.
42. Seabrook, No Hiding Place, p. 372.
43. Seabrook, ibid., pp. 372–375.
44. Seabrook, ibid., p. 373.
45. Seabrook, ibid., pp. 387–394.
46. Worthington, op. cit., p. 248.
47. The New York Times, 21 Sep. 1945.
48. Seabrook, Witchcraft, pp. 217–218.
49. “Proud Druse Race Enraged at French,” The New York Times, 2 Nov. 1925. Also, “Foreign Policy Association at Dinner in Astor, Discuss Mandate in Near East; Wm. B. Seabrook, here from war zone, says they hate French more than Turks,” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 1925.
50. Leinster, Murray, op. cit., pp. 19–21.
51. McHugh, Vincent, The New York Times, 7 Sep. 1940.
52. Seabrook, Witchcraft, p. 34.
53. Polchinski, Joseph, “Weinberg’s Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” in Physical Review Letters, 28 Jan. 1991, p. 400.
54. The audiotape of this panel discussion, conducted at the Fifty-fifth World Convention Of Science Fiction, San Antonio, Texas, 1 Sep. 1997— featuring John Cramer and Ron Collins—is available from The Sound of Knowledge, San Diego, CA. It confirms that a female participant put this question to Cramer, as it does the rest of the synopsis herein.
55. Greene, Ward (original title Ride the Nightmare), NY: Avon, 1949.
56. Worthington, op. cit., pp. 193–194.
57. Crowley, op. cit., p. 794. See also Seabrook, “Wow!” in Golden Book, summer 1935, pp. 313–316; reprinted in Worlds Beyond, ed. Damon Knight, NY: Hillman Periodicals, Dec. 1950.
58. Seabrook, Witchcraft, pp. 264–267 in the chapter “Justine Dervish Dangling”; pp. 273–74 in a lengthier chapter, “Justine in the Mask,” which dwells on Justine’s personality, the sensory deprivation technique, and gives other examples of her psychic abilities.
59. Deva Dasi is documented in local Texas media, particularly Dallas Morning News, Scene Magazine cover story, Sun., 27 Nov. 1977. Also Texas Monthly magazine, Jan. 1979, feature story by J. Bloom, p. 50.
60. Davis, Lynn, “Lost Child.” The verses accompanying JJ’s photograph.
61. Crowley, Confessions, pp. 784–787.
62. Higgins, Susan, “Gregory’s Drum,” T a ler’s Tales Publications, Fall 1995.
63. Worthington, Strange World, p. 248.
64. Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp. Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins) told Michael Swanwick that he had been an informal consultant to the Group. (Comments from Swanwick at the Fifty-fifth WorldCon.)
65. Taylor, op. cit., p. 351. “Even during these years of extreme paranoia, when the ‘Red Scare’ was reaching its peak, the FBI made the decision not to investigate Duranty … Duranty had ceased to be of interest to the Bureau after January, 1951.”
66. Priestley, Man and Time, NY: Doubleday, 1964 (Crescent, 1987) 1964, pp. 260–261—quoting from Dunne’s two later books, The New Immortality, London: Faber, 1938, and Nothing Dies, London: Faber, 1940, “… your attention may visit a scene, and you may see again the one you seek. You may hear again the spoken words, you may receive and give the same caresses. But the attention of that other may not be there … You can meet again every one you have ever known, at any age you can remember. They will welcome you gladly—if you wish it. They will acknowledge that you had been right, after all, in those little quarrels … It will be a terrible moment when you realize that the words are dictated by you … You will have what you have always wanted … a little heaven of private pleasure—and a hell of utter loneliness. To avoid, or to escape from that, you must be willing to surrender some of your sovereignty.”
67. Moore, Ward, Bring the Jubilee, NY: Del Rey, 1955, Ballantine, 1997, p. 219.
68. Schneck, Stephen, The Nightclerk, NY: Grove Press, 1965, pp. 56–64. Compare to the chapter “Justine in the Mask” in Witchcraft, p. 274, for similarities, as well as Seabrook’s inimitable observation that no one interferes with a girl who’s poised and happy, even if her boyfriend is sticking pins in her!
69. Worthington, Strange World, concluding on pp. 40–41.
70. Baldwin, Neil, Man Ray, American Artist, C.N. Potter, 1988, Da Capo Press, 1991, p. 166.
71. Man Ray, op. cit., pp. 153–156.
72. Seabrook, Witchcraft, p. 268. “It can be that this whole thing has happened before.” He then quotes the mathematician Cassius Jackson Keyser of Columbia, “Simultaneity of events is relative, not absolute; the sense of time is only an imperfect sense of the fourth dimension in space.” A possible example of Seabrook hinting at what he could.
73. Lenin, V.I., Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1909. The work on physics and philosophy Lenin was writing in Geneva.
74. Chambers, Robert W., The King in Yellow, 1895. The story referenced, “The Street of the First Shell” is set in the Paris of the Franco-Prussian War. As “shop-girl fiction,” its inclusion with outré tales related to the “Hastur cycle” of Bierce and Machen has been, possibly unjustly, criticized for a century.
75. Seabrook, No Hiding Place, p. 370. Principal authorities (fourteenth through nineteenth centuries) that Seabrook may have studied in Geneva are listed in Michelet’s 1856 book on demonology and witchcraft.
76. Greene, op cit, p. 118. Compare Witchcraft, p. 218. Seabrook identifies the girl branded with the Star as Hirsig, but to Greene she was a “Justine.”
77. Seabrook, Adventures in Arabia, pp. 214–217. “The Druses undoubtedly got it from India, but have developed it into something quite different … a Druse soul flies at the moment of death into the body of a new-born Druse baby … the survival of personal memory was rare … not one Druse in ten thousand recalled anything of his former state … Obviously the Druses are a ‘closed corporation.’ According to their doctrine the number of Druse souls is fixed.” It is interesting that Seabrook neglects mention of a similar belief in “metempsychosis” shared by the Yezidis. That Kurdish sect survives today in the Middle East, former Soviet Central Asia, and a German diaspora.
78. Deutsch, op. cit., p. 275, 278.
79. Priestley, John B., Time and the Conways, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1938, pp. 75–76.
80. Clark, VèVè A., with Millicent Hodson and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Volume One, NY: Anthology Film Archives, 1984, p. 407: “Before coming to Rhinebeck, Seabrook had fought in the Spanish Civil War …” On location in Rhinebeck in the summer of 1975, they reiterate this nonsense in the course of interviews with locals: “others knew he had fought with communist forces against Franco in Spain.” (p. 408) The Spanish Civil War began with the fascist rising of mid-July, 1936. International Brigades were deployed by the fall, with the American “Lincoln Brigade” reaching Spain by the winter. Franco’s final victory was declared on 1 April 1939. The authors themselves had dated Seabrook’s residence at the Rhinebeck property from 1935, well before the war. In other words, the absurd quotations above would have Willie’s neighbors convinced that he was a participant in events, which were taking place in Spain, even as he was residing among them! Why the authors of a scholarly work would include these as statements of fact is a dilemma that pleads for comparison with the content of this “Fragment.”
81. Seabrook, No Hiding Place, p. 212. Compare with Greene, op. cit., p. 106. The Cubbyhole corresponds to the name of a nightspot in Greene’s fiction.
82. Though unorthodox as to tense, the account of Wamba’s farewell is linguistically compatible with a translation from the simple syntax and vocabulary of the pidgin mix cited. The Fragments, overall, contain certain idiosyncratic spellings and stylistic usages typical of William Seabrook’s known writings.
83. Seabrook, Mrs. Katherine, Colette and Baba in Timbuctoo, 1933. Katie’s second children’s book.
84. Spratling, William, File on Spratling, NY: Little, Brown, 1932, pp. 57–58. Katie was in Mexico in 1932 with Clare Spencer, wife of Harrison Smith of Cape and Smith, visiting Bill Spratling in Taxco. Hal Smith, who would later send the “ouanga” bag to Seabrook, then deleted Spratling from his list of authors.
85. Concerning the belief that Eleanora (Maya) Deren had been one of Seabrook’s “research girls”: is the Fragments’ “Eleanor” actually Deren? Her employment by Seabrook, in a research and secretarial capacity during the term of the “barn experiments,” is confirmed in The Legend of Maya Deren, Clark et al. Her chroniclers present, on pp. 411–416, a letter from Deren to Herbert Passin, later a professor of anthropology at Columbia, dated 16 Feb. 1940. It contains an account of meeting Seabrook at Martha’s Vineyard, during the summer of 1939, while she was working for and living at the home of writer and critic Max Eastman. Confirming literary research she had done for Seabrook’s Witchcraft, which she included in her resumés, she goes on to describe a trip to Rhinebeck earlier in that week of mid-February. With a major blizzard settling in, she had read portions of the manuscript, specifically mentioning material from the chapters on “Justine,” finding them “reasonable and interesting.” Subsequently, however, she recounts being put off by Willie’s categorically sadomasochistic proposals and deciding to return to New York. Willie was not exercised, as more young women were due to arrive that weekend. The letter is low-key, even comical, in comparison to Passin’s lurid and fantastic recollections of Deren’s alleged verbal account of her experiences in the Hudson Valley. Her chroniclers carry on as though they had discovered something highly illicit. The thread of their 1975 investigation into the genesis of her interest in Voudon, during this employment by its earlier authority, is lost.
Seeking self-definition throughout her short life, Deren had variously styled herself “Elinor, Elinka, Eleanora,” and ultimately the nickname “Maya.” While her chroniclers assert that Deren documented the period 1 Jun. 1939–29 April 1940 in detail, there exist conflicts regarding Deren’s activities while she was with Willie’s friend Eastman (a devotee of open marriage) through her association with Seabrook. The Legend of Maya Deren, p. 304 compares her soft berth with Eastman to her subsequent employers: “She would not be as fortunate working for Seabrook and Dunham, each of whose careers dominated Eleanora’s own.” The chroniclers had initially sought the genesis of her obsession with Voudon, which was to consume much of her career. It was even rumored to be involv
ed with her early death, from a cerebral hemorrhage, in 1961. It appears that Seabrook, the foremost white authority on Voudon in the early century, was declared a dead end due to implications that the chroniclers regarded as inappropriate. While citing Worthington, Strange World, pp. 221–22, they ignore pp. 218–219. After disposing of Hal Smith’s “ouanga” bag by fire, Marjorie wrote: “… three ‘Lizzies’ have decided to come one at a time! That will teach me to fool around with magic … It was the middle of February, and soon after Lizzie Number One arrived, the snow began to fall, and by the next day had worked itself up into a blizzard … Willie came down from the barn at intervals. The first Lizzie, a girl he had hired a year ago and who had returned for more, wasn’t working out. She was not, he said, ‘the flaming thing she was last summer.’ She seemed tired and he felt sorry for her, so he let her go after a day or two.” The notes from Marjorie’s Journal continue, with the next “Lizzie” working out well as of Friday, 16 Feb. 1940. On that same day, Deren was back in New York City, writing her account of the visit for Passin. It is reasonable to conclude that “Lizzie Number One” was Eleanora Deren. While providing no definitive answer, this suggests a different picture from those presented by either her or the chroniclers.