William Seabrook

William Seabrook
File:William Seabrook (1884–1945) 1931 by Robert H. Davis (1869–1942) OeNB 19223094.jpg William Seabrook in 1931
Born	William Buehler Seabrook (1884-02-22)22 February 1884 Westminster, Maryland
Died	Rhinebeck, New York
Occupation	Writer reporter
Nationality	American
Period	20th century
Genre	Occult, travel
Literary movement	Lost Generation

William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, journalist and writer, born in Westminster, Maryland. He began his career as a reporter and City Editor of the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, worked at the New York Times, and later became a partner in an advertising agency in Atlanta. He is well-known for his writing on, and engaging in, cannibalism.

Seabrook's 1929 book The Magic Island, which documents his experiences with Haitian Vodou in Haiti, is considered the first popular English-language work to describe the concept of zombies.

Early life

Seabrook graduated from Mercersburg Academy. He then attended Roanoke College, received a master's degree from Newberry College, and studied philosophy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

In 1915, he joined the American Field Service of the French Army and served in World War I. He was gassed at Verdun in 1916 and was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. The following year, he became a reporter for the New York Times and soon became an itinerant.

Besides his books, Seabrook published articles in popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and Vanity Fair.

Family life

In 1912, Seabrook married his first wife, Katherine Pauline Edmondson. They divorced in 1934. Soon after, he married Marjorie Worthington in 1935. The marriage ended in 1941. This was followed up by his marriage to Constance Kuhr, which began in 1942 and ended with his death in 1945.

Cannibalism

In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to western Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook wrote about his experience of cannibalism in his travel book Jungle Ways; however, he later admitted that the tribe had not allowed him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he had obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself. He reported,

It was like good, fully-developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.

Seabrook might have eaten human flesh also on another occasion. When his claim of having participating in ritualistic cannibalism turned out wrong (and he hadn't yet dared reveal the hospital story), he was much mocked for it. According to his autobiography, the wealthy socialite Daisy Fellowes one day invited him to one of her garden parties, stating "I think you deserve to know what human flesh really tastes like". During the party, which was attended by about a dozen guests (some of them well-known), a piece of supposedly human flesh was grilled and eaten with much pomp. He comments that, while he never found out "the real truth" behind this meal, it "looked and tasted exactly" like the human flesh he had eaten before.

Later life

In autumn 1919, English occultist Aleister Crowley spent a week with Seabrook at Seabrook's farm. Seabrook went on to write a story based on the experience and to recount the experiment in Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today.

In 1924, he travelled to Arabia and sampled the hospitality of various tribes of Bedouin and the Kurdish Yazidi. In the first part of the book, Seabrook seeks out Mithqal Al-Fayez and lives with him and his tribe for several months. When the topic of religion came to them in conversation, Seabrook admitted to Mithqal that he did not believe in the Trinity, but rather in the oneness of god, and that god sent many prophets including Muhammad; on hearing this, Mithqal asked if William would like to enter Islam and William agreed, with him repeating the Shahada after Mithqal shortly after. His account of his travels, Adventures in Arabia: among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes and Yezidee Devil Worshipers was published in 1927; it was sufficiently successful to allow him to travel to Haiti, where he developed an interest in Haitian Vodou and the Culte des Mortes, which were described at length in his book The Magic Island. The book is credited with introducing the concept of a zombie to popular culture.

Seabrook had a lifelong fascination with the occult, which he witnessed and described firsthand both in Third World countries, as documented in The Magic Island (1929), and Jungle Ways (1930). He later concluded that he had seen nothing that did not have a rational scientific explanation, a theory which he detailed in Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940).

In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain René Wauthier, a famed pilot, and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he went to collect a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan. The book is replete with information about French colonial life in the Sahara and pilots in particular.

In December 1933, Seabrook was committed at his own request and with the help of some of his friends to Bloomingdale, a mental institution in Westchester County, near New York City, for treatment for acute alcoholism. He remained a patient of the institution until the following July and in 1935 published an account of his experience, written as if it were no more than another expedition to a foreign locale. The book, Asylum, became another best-seller. In the preface, he was careful to state that his books were not "fiction or embroidery".

He married Marjorie Muir Worthington in France, in 1935, after they had returned from a trip to Africa on which Seabrook was researching a book. Due to his alcoholism and sadistic practices they divorced in 1941. She later wrote a biography, The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, which was published in 1966.

Death

On September 20, 1945, Seabrook committed suicide by drug overdose in Rhinebeck, New York. He left behind one son, William.

Popular culture

The Abominable Mr. Seabrook is a graphic biography of Seabrook by Joe Ollmann.

Bibliography

Books

• Diary of Section VIII (1917)
• Adventures in Arabia (1927)
• The Magic Island (1929)
• Jungle Ways (1930)
• Air Adventure (1933)
• The White Monk of Timbuctoo (1934)
• Asylum (1935)
• These Foreigners: Americans All (1938)
• Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940)
• Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory (1941)
• No Hiding Place: An Autobiography (1942)

Short stories

• "Wow!" (1921) Etext of the story, The Genesis of "WoW!", and A Note on the Text.

External links

• Works by William Seabrook at Faded Page (Canada)
• The Life and Works of William Buehler Seabrook at the Wayback Machine (archived October 27, 2009)
• The Works of William Buehler Seabrook: An Annotated Bibliography at the Wayback Machine (archived October 26, 2009)

Pictures

Undated pictures of William Seabrook are available:

• Cites the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek.