Emily Matchar - The Zombie King

L ast summer I drove to Westminster, Maryland, in search of anything I could find related to the life of a man named William Seabrook. Id become fascinated with Seabrook one night during an insomniac crawl through ever-narrowing passages of the Internet, when I stumbled upon a description of him as a member of the Lost Generation who, in the late 1920s and 30s, was a household name in America an adventurer and travel writer and occultist who smoked opium with princesses and drove an ambulance during World War I and flew a four-seater Farman from Paris to Timbuktu. He rode the Arabian Desert with Bedouin horse thieves and was friendly with Aldous Huxley and Jean Cocteau and Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann. When he returned from his reporting trips, crowds of journalists would greet him on the tarmac, eager to report the details of his journeys. Gertrude Stein wrote about him. He tasted human flesh. He introduced zombies to America.

And yet no one remembers him now. Not even, it turns out, in the town where he was born and raised. There are no first edition copies of Seabrooks half-dozen books behind glass in the Westminster Branch Library, no National Register plaque beside the door to his gingerbread house on East Green Street. At the Historical Society of Carroll County, in downtown Westminster, an elderly woman at the front desk tells me she has never heard of Seabrook, then sends me down to the basement to dig through their archives. Theres no record of him there, either. In the hometown of William Seabrook without whom we would not have The Walking Dead or Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead or Shaun of the Deadnobody knows who he is.

And yet the reason that zombies shuffle through every corner of our popular culture is because in 1928, on the desolate Haitian island of La Gonave, William Seabrook came face-to-face with one.

Seabrook was born in Westminster in 1884. His father, William L. Seabrook, was a lawyer; his mother, Myra, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, family. His paternal grandfather, William L.W. Seabrook, was the editor of Westminsters American Sentinel newspaper, a powerful local Republican and reportedly a onetime friend of Abraham Lincoln.

When Seabrook was eight, his father, having felt the call to the ministry, gave up his law practice and entered a Lutheran seminary, taking Seabrooks mother and younger brother with him and leaving William behind in the care of his paternal grandparents. Years later Seabrook would describe his father as a man with a mediocre mind who dragged his family into the genteel poverty of the ministry in the name of a silly mythology. His resentment against his mother ran even deeper. After giving birth to his younger brother and, later, his sister, shed gone from being Seabrooks slender, laughing girl-mother to a stout, bossy, chronically dissatisfied ministers wife.

The only adult figure for whom Seabrook had any affection was his grandmother, Piny, who raised him in Westminster. As Seabrook described her in his writing, Piny was barely of this world. She was born on a Maryland plantation, he wrote, in the caul (the amniotic sac unbroken around her, which was said to impart on a child a supernatural aura), and nursed by an Obeah slave girl. Piny possessed visions and powers since childhood but was married off as a teen to Seabrooks white-bearded grandfather, who brought her to Westminster and forced her to live an unhappy life among the tedious bourgeoisie. To feed her opium addiction, she hid a bottle of laudanum in the crook of a backyard tree.

Seabrook believed Piny saw in her odd, morose grandson a kindred spirit: Another little soul which, like herself, found normal, ordinary life unbearable. And it was through her that he had his first experience with the unexplained, a subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. He and Piny would often walk together in Shreivers Woods, just outside Westminster. Seabrook knew the woods well; he would often go there to gather chinquapin nuts or fish for minnows in the stream. But one day, Seabrook wrote, while he was strolling with Piny, the woods became strange. They arrived at a clearing he didnt recognize. Suddenly, the trees surrounding him were not trees but the legs of beautiful bright-plumaged roosters, which were as tall as houses. Taking him by the hand, Piny led him beneath the legs of the roosters as the enormous birds shuffled and crowed.

On another occasion, Piny took Seabrook up a hill with an ancient, stone tower on its summit. Seabrook entered the tower and found a woman sitting on a throne. She wore green robes, golden clogs, and had red-gold braided hair. Her wrists, ankles, and waist were bound by gleaming metal circlets joined by a chain. Seabrook wrote:

Piny let go my hand and I went forward alone to sit by the leather foot-stool and put my arms around the ladys knees. She pressed my head against her knees and stroked my hair. She led my hands down the soft silk folds to her chained feet and pressed them tightly there until my own hands held and drew the chains tighter. I was trembling with happiness.

Throughout his childhood, Seabrook had been preoccupied by the image of what he called the girl in chains. He would spend hours looking through the many art and mythology books in his familys library, fantasizing over pictures of Venus hanging by her wrists from a tree. He even sent away for an Ivory Soap calendar featuring Queen Zenobia, knowing shed be pictured in chains. How could Piny have known, he later wrote, that this was his greatest fantasy?

Seabrook began his writing career shortly after college, as a reporter at the Augusta Chronicle. After a short time on the job, though, a habitual sense of restlessness took over, and he left to travel through Europe. He found himself one day sitting on a park bench in Geneva, intently watching a well-dressed young couple as they strolled nearby. He admired the mans fashionably pointy beard and velvet-collar coat, the womans slender ankles and golden hair. He coveted the mans expensive car, gleaming behind them in the afternoon sun. Would I ever want a car like that, a girl like that? he asked himself.

He soon returned to the U.S. and set out to shape a life of normalcy and privilege. He married Katie Edmondson, the daughter of a Coca-Cola executive, and settled in Atlanta, where he founded an ad agency and joined the Rotary Club. It didnt take long, though, for Seabrook to be overwhelmed by urges his new life could never satisfy. In the middle of one workday, he called Katie and a close friend named Ed and insisted they join him at a local park. When they arrived, he had them pose together, trying to recapture the sense of envy and desire hed felt that day in Geneva. There it all was, he would later write. The automobile, the girl, the silk, the fur, caught in the afternoon suns highlights and I kept saying to myself, Im Ed there. Ive got all that, as Ed has. All that belongs to me, and I can keep it all my life if I want to.

But Seabrook couldnt force himself to fit into that life. In 1916, he joined the American Field Service as an ambulance driver and left to serve in the war. He was 31, older by a decade or more than many of the wars other notable volunteers Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, E.E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos, all in their teens or early twenties. For Seabrook, the war was more a means of escape than a fight for an ideal. I was a dog running in circles, he wrote, running away from myself.