Word: seabrooke
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...typical ritual, according to William Seabrook, late, hard-drinking popularizer of the incredible: "Before an altar surmounted by a crucifix turned upside down, and on which the girl who is a virgin lies naked, the black-robed priest intones parts of the true Mass backward, in dog Latin, substituting the word 'evil' for 'good' and the word 'Satan' for 'God.' The prostitute, robed in scarlet, performs the duties of acolyte; the goblet of wine is placed between the breasts of the recumbent virgin and a part of the wine is spilled over...
Died. William Buehler Seabrook, 59, explorer-author who raised readers' hair and eyebrows with his adventures among Haitian voodoo worshipers and African cannibals (The Magic Island, Jungle Ways), once detailed his stay in a mental hospital where he went to be cured of alcoholism (Asylum); by his own hand (overdose of sleeping pills-see MEDICINE); in Rhinebeck...
Born. To William Buehler Seabrook, 57, writer on voodoo, cannibalism and himself (Witchcraft, Jungle Ways, No Hiding Place), and Constance Kuhr Seabrook, 31, his third wife: a son, William Kuhr, 7 lb. 3 oz.; in Rhinebeck...
Between long periods of melancholy, drunkenness and adventure, Seabrook struggled to write books, short stories, articles. Finally, desperate and dipsomaniac, he went voluntarily to a New York State hospital for the insane (Bloomingdale) where he was forcibly kept from drink for nearly a year. On leaving, he was sufficiently cured to write three books, "to dance with Mrs. Vincent Astor . . . and win the Herald Tribune garden-club prize for the best-kept lawns and flower beds...
...Later Seabrook relapsed, turned the barn at his swagger Dutchess County home into a scientific "research" laboratory. With "research girls" for guinea pigs, Seabrook and his friends "evoked . . . 'gods' and 'devils,' " dabbled in witchcraft and clairvoyance. Once more Seabrook began to drink, was cured again by an impetuous girl who forced him to plunge his elbows into boiling water. This treatment shocked him back to reality, made him realize that "the only way to write a book is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of a chair -and write it." Result...