By Carl McGuire
Originally Published in Bondage Life No. 7 July 1980
Transcribed by guardian46w“My propensity for putting chains on ladies was common knowledge. I’d ceased making any effort to conceal it, nor would there have been any particular point in doing so. It was a sexual abnormality like many another, and in a decadent society in which the more usual forms of twisted sex, when they occurred, went unhidden and condoned, my friends, acquaintances, servants and the countryside (so long as I never indulged in excesses that might interest the police, which I never did or ever dreamed of doing) were generally tolerant, sometimes sorry for me, sometimes bored, sometimes amused… “
--William Seabrook
And yet here was William Seabrook, a respected writer, telling the world that, back in France a decade earlier, he not only enjoyed the thought of tying up girls, he enjoyed the practice as well. That kind of honesty is rare today; back then, it was all but unheard of. But Seabrook was an exceptional man, well aware of his weaknesses as well as his gifts, who believed in telling the truth about himself. In his long-out-of-print autobiography, No Hiding Place (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1942), he tells of his Maryland upbringing, his young manhood, his battlefield experiences in World War I, his wives, his women, his successes as a writer, his mingling with the likes of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Mann, and Aldous Huxley, his travels, his alcoholism, and his love of the sight, or even the thought of a woman who was tied or chained.
And he found the raw material for his fantasy everywhere, it seems. His father was a minister and his grandfather a newspaper editor and the family home was full of illustrated books and picture albums, history, mythology, art books, magazines. “I found Andromeda chained sometimes to a rock and sometimes to the stars, Boadicea chained to chariot wheels, Beatrice Cenci chained most often <sic>(incomplete)
Where his ‘supreme want’ came from, he did not know or care. “All I know is that the lady-in-chains had been there always.”
He doesn’t call it ‘bondage’. That word, a commercial application, really, didn’t enter the language in a specific sexual sense until later. There were no precise words for the thing that drove him, and few like-minded people with whom he could even discuss it. So, like an explorer in a strange land, he used the only words he knew to describe it, and in doing so, became a pioneer, quite possibly the first to travel in that strange land and then return to tell us, unashamedly, what he had found.
It is a colorful life he writes about, college in South Carolina, newspapering in Georgia, bumming around Europe, a stint as a music critic in Atlanta, then marriage and the advertising business. Just when he began to close in on success for the first time, as an advertising executive in Atlanta, an inner demon plucked him out of the safe, predictable life and sent him to France as an ambulance driver in World War I. It was a demon he was to encounter many times, and his periodic sorties away from comfort and responsibility and toward adventure, even danger, whether in the far corners of the world or in the bottle, gave him the title of his book. For all his running, there was no hiding to be found.
He lived in the Arabian desert with the Beni Sakhr Bedouins, went on horse stealing raids with them and wrote it all down in ‘Adventures in Arabia’ in 1927. He spent two years in the mountains of Haiti, studying voodoo, and described what he found in ‘The Magic Island’, and in the process, he tells us, became the first American writer to use the word ‘zombie’ in print.
Through all his travels and his writing and his socializing with the famous and near-famous, there was his obsession, lending a delicious sexual flavoring to his life, the lady in chains, in all her incarnations. Sadly, neither of his two wives ever participated in his fantasy, but it is to their credit that they at least understood, and allowed him to seek it.
“See what Georgie Porgie’s done to me today! Isn’t it absurd!”
“One night I tied her hands behind her, and when I awoke late next morning, she was out near the wells with the other women, gabbing, laughing, chattering, with her hands still tied behind her. They’d washed her face and tidied her. I was the one who was a little embarrassed. She said it was nothing, it had happened to her before, it happened to many girls in the desert, it happened to all girls if it pleases their masters…
While settled in a country home in upstate New York with Marjorie, working on his book ‘Witchcraft’, he turned to a specific kind of research, one that involved the use of certain equipment, and certain research assistants:
Sometimes flamboyant young creatures came in their own cars and entered the Bluebeard’s castle to disappear for days or weeks. Sometimes Bob Martin, our local taxi driver, brought them from the train or ferry.
Marjorie and our servants were long-suffering. The countryside, a little shocked, a little amused, was tolerant too. Whatever went on in that weird studio in the woods, it was a matter of public knowledge that I was going to write a book about it, and that, illogically, made everything forgivable.
The lady in chains came in many guises. The most striking, perhaps, was one he encountered early on, a remarkable young woman named Deborah Luris. If Seabrook sexually was a man ahead of his time, Miss Luris, for a woman, was light-years ahead of hers. Visiting in New York, shortly after World War I, he met her through a mutual friend, then promptly forgot her, until a poem brought her back. Reading a translation of Heinrich Heine, he stumbled across a passage in which the writer tells a woman that in a dream, he saw her chained to a pillar. The image haunted him. “The lady I saw chained by the waist to the Corinthian pillar was at first anonymous,” Seabrook says, “But one night her features began to take form in my imagination and I recognized with some surprise the face of a girl I’d met casually in New York, and then completely forgotten.”
She was the type that’s always being chained to pillars or tied to trees, or loaded with barbaric bangles in Victorian steel engraving…
“Sure, why not? Come on up. But why be so solemn and self-conscious about it? It might be fun, you could take me to walk in the park at night, on a leash! Something new, what!... even for Greenwich Village.”
He sent a telegram to Miss Luris and, two afternoons later, met her in the dining room of the Brevoort Hotel. She laughed out loud when she saw me, and said, “So, you really came, I somehow didn’t think you would. You sounded too fantastic to the real. Have you got a whip under your coat and a pocketful of chain?”
She’d spoken rapid French to the waiter, was obviously, as our talk went on, as well read as I, or better. Presently, as I sat pleased but nonplused and wondering whether I’d bitten off more than I could chew, she was telling me coolly as if we were a couple of kids planning a Sunday picnic that a fashion-illustrator friend of hers had gone off to Bermuda and lent us a garret studio overlooking the Square. There was a big built-in couch, she said, with a ‘conveniently located’ pillar running up to the rafters. She already had a wide metal belt, and suggested that the basement of Hammacher-Schlemmer would be a good place to get whatever locks and chains ‘we’ needed. She’d come along, if I liked.
“Have you ever done anything like this before?” I asked.
I had an idea it was going to be fireworks. When people uncork parallel or complementary chimeric wish-fantasies, sparks generally fly. And so, they did, for a week.
As he became more adjusted to his fantasy life, he more openly took pleasure in it, and Miss Luris was often there as an enthusiastic participant. While he and Katie were living in Greenwich Village, they often were invited to unusual parties.
Miss Luris was one of the belles of the ball. Everybody wanted to dance with her, and nearly everybody did. She never asked to have her hands unchained. Her cavaliers and dancing partners held drinks to her lips, fed her cold turkey in aspic, and when she had to powder her nose, damsels disappeared with her and aided. I had come a long way from Westminster, Maryland, Doddsburg, South Carolina, and Rotarian Atlanta. I had left a world where fantasy was almost reprehensible as crime and begun to touch a world in which no fantasy was taboo so long as the fantasist didn’t smoke cigars in elevators and went back to work the next day.
In his attitude toward his own desires, Seabrook seems to have moved from a kind of shame to a kind of acceptance. When he first met Katie (a gay, brave girl, a good girl and a wise girl, too), his obsession made him unworthy of her, “We were both wrong for each other, I intrinsically wrong, unstable, twisted, she wrong only for me, as right and straight within herself as they ever come.” At another point, he tells us of the two ‘itches’ that dominate his life, the itch to write, and ‘that other diseased itch which urged me toward forbidden fantasies’.
‘And as for my private obsession, my delight in girls-in-chains, it was less fantastic, less outside the norm, less difficult of gratification here, than in the land from which I’d run away. It was a less unusual thing here for an otherwise sound man to indulge in twisted sex fancies, and mine, which Brill had long ago explained to me was a mild form of sadism, fetishistic rather than bloody, cruel, or brutal, was common in Arabia. Mitkhal knew all about it, just as my friends and acquaintances in New York knew all about it, and regarded it with an even more tolerant detachment than they… So that if it had pleased me to dangle a dozen of the most beautiful houris then available in the Euphrates Valley from the ceiling on the first night I went to bed with his niece, neither Mikhal nor she would have raised their eyebrows.
William Seabrook was a complicated man, not the most stable of men, but a talented person who was driven to experience all that life had to offer. Finding himself in pursuit of a sexual grail so forbidden that few had ever spoken or written about it, he chose to recognize it, express it, and take delight in his quest.