By W.B. Seabrook with illustrations by Alexander King.
In 1929 a travelogue was released that would, through the chain reaction it set off, have a profound effect on American popular culture and by extension the American collective consciousness. It was written by a fellow with a questionable resume of personal traits said to include alcoholism, occultism, sensory deprivation, and sadism, who would ultimately commit suicide by pill-overdose. His is not a household name, and is rarely spoken, yet it is through the continued fascinated invocation of another name altogether that we unknowingly evoke his legacy: Zombie! Zombie!! Zombie!!!
He was William Buehler Seabrook, a reporter and Lost Generation writer (claiming the minor distinction of having written the first celebrity rehab tell-all) and it was his book, The Magic Island, a sensationalized account of his voodoo-mad travels throughout Haiti, that first ushered our beloved un-dead bugaboo, the zombie, onto American shores.
Though The Magic Island did
not represent the first usage in English print of the word zombie (it appeared as a term connected to a Voodoo snake god much earlier) as the author later claimed in his autobiography, Seabrook’s book was the first popular English language text to confront the phenomena of the Haitian “living dead” head-on. The book referred to these shambling, dead-eyed, unfortunates as “Zombies” and they have moved, at varying speeds, among us ever since.
The popularity of his book, with its sensational but not altogether unsympathetic characterizations, dovetailed perfectly with a zeitgeist that would also yield the nearly concurrent release of Hollywood’s iconic monster features. The result of which was an immediate pop-cultural embrace, bringing this new terror into our stable of more veteran ghouls like Dracula and Frankenstein without so much as a second interview. Seabrook’s book was all it took.
The giddy excitement entertainers felt at having a new abomination to play with resulted, almost immediately, in a broadway play—Kenneth Webb’s 1932 flop Zombie—and a film—the infamous 1932 indie, and granddaddy of all zombie flicks, White Zombie—not to mention multiple lawsuits. A scant 3 years after America first saw the word in print courts were obliged to rule “zombies” as being in the public domain. And are they ever. After 1932 it is a truly rare thing for a year to pass by completely undisturbed by the walking dead.
Zombie! Zombie!! Zombie!!!
Though it is most notable for this popularization The Magic Island, a 336p book, in actuality only devoted 12 scant pages, a single chapter titled “...Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields” to le culte des morts’ handiwork. The rest of the book is full of sensational tales of ritual, magic, sacrifice, potions, feverish midnight sex-dances, and all of the objective reportage one might expect from an alcoholic, occult-dabbling, middle-aged white man traveling through Haiti in the 1920’s.
I picked up a first edition copy a few weeks back, just out of curiosity, and was thrilled to find that not only is it a pretty fascinating read, biases and euphemistic “of it’s time” pronouncements aside, but that their were pictures! Joy! The book contains about 30 photographs taken by Seabrook during his travels, but more interestingly a large group of original illustrations by a one Alexander King.
A search for more info on Mr. King does not offer much.
AskArt offers us this: “Described as a thief, morphine addict, failing playwright and painter, Alexander King was a man of iconoclastic observations and caustic humor who began his career as a painter of human figures, focused primarily on the face. Then he became an art thief, stealing fifty prints from the Metropolitan Museum. He was jailed twice, and married four times.”
While the IMDb says only: “Alexander King, by his own admission, had a very checkered career before becoming racontuer on residence during the Jack Parr years of “The Tonight Show”. A veteran newspaperman turned press agent, he published his various anecdotes in a series of off-beat books that were very popular at the time. Nearly forgotten today, King, who claimed to have been married five times, was a fixture on the TV talk show circuit from roughly the mid-1950s until his death in 1965.”
Various searches do reveal, without a doubt, that he illustrated many books throughout the 30’s and 40’s however, and with the pedigree outlined above, he was a perfect match for Seabrook and his Magic Island.
Below I’ve reproduced 9 of King’s illustrations from The magic Island including, for a few, some corresponding text by Seabrook. Have a look…
Quote: “Louis, son of Catherine Ozias of Orblanche, paternity unknown—and thus without a surname was he inscribed in the Haitian civil register—reminded me always of that proverb out of hell in which Blake said, “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.” It was not because Louis’ black face, frequently perspiring, shone like patent leather; it glowed also with a mystic light that was not always heavenly. For Louis belonged to the chimeric company of saints, monsters, poets, and divine idiots. He used to get besotted drunk in a corner, and then would hold long converse with seraphim and demons, also from time to time with his dead grandmother who had been a sorceress.”
Quote: “The celebrants approached, processionally, singing, from the mystery house. At the head came the papaloi, an old man, blue-overalled, bare-footed, but with a surplice over his shoulders and a red turban on his head, waving before him the açon, a gourd-rattle wound round with snake-vertebrae. At his right and left, keeping pace with him, two young women held aloft, crossed above his head, two flags on which were serpentine and cabalistic symbols, sewn on with metallic, glittering beads. Behind him marched a young man bearing aloft, horizontally on his upstretched palms, a sword, and next the mamaloi, a woman in a scarlet robe and feathered headdress, who revolved as she progressed in a sort of dervish dance; next came marching, two and two, a chorus of twenty or more women robed in white, with white cloths wound bandana-wise on their heads, and as they slowly marched they chanted:
Damballa Oueddo,
Nous p’ vim
It would be best translated, I think, Oh, Serpent God, we come.”
Quote: “In the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.”
Quote: “One of the most dreaded forms of Haitian-African magic includes the dressing of a corpse in a garment of the person marked for vengeance and then exposing it to rot away in some secret place in the jungle. Men have gone stark mad seeking that jungle-hidden horror, and others have died hopelessly, searching. Fear, hunger, thirst, jungle-terror, one may say. Names again, tags, labels. But marked for death by the Voodoo curse, they died.”
Quote: “It seemed that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.”
So while this text offers the first English language popularization of the word “zombie” those last 3 Illustrations, interestingly, represent the first images anyone associated the word. All in all fascinating bit of pop-cultural, if not exactly ethnographic or anthropological, history.
Jay A. Graybeal says in his terrific summation of Seabrook’s story: “Big lusty, restless, red-haired William Buehler Seabrook spent more than 20 years seeking fantastic adventure, then putting what he found into books which thrilled some, shocked many. But he never will write the story of his greatest adventure. Secretly and alone he embarked upon it not long ago by way of an overdose of sedative. The coroner says Bill Seabrook committed suicide. But his friends have a different explanation for what happened. They say he only was making another more drastic attempt to accomplish what he had tried, vainly, all his life to do—to get away from himself.”
Alester Crowley, an acquaintance of Seabrook’s, put it rather more bluntly in a diary entry: “The swine-dog W. B. Seabrook has killed himself at last.”
In 1966, a year after his death, a critic writing a review for a Seabrook biography said: “his principal literary contribution, it would seem, is the word zombie.” That may in fact be the truth. But how very impressive, built as it was on 12 short pages of reportage, that contribution turned out to be.
Zombie! Zombie!! Zombie!!!
Hope you enjoyed.
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Related Linkage:
The Roots of the Modern Zombie Movie
Zombies in Popular Culture
Scifipedia: Zombies
The History of Zombies
Zombies in Early Horror Films
Voodoos and Obeahs
Gothic capitalism: The Horror of Accumulation and the Commodification of Humanity.
Black Religion and Black Magic: Prejudice and Projection in Images of African-derived Religions
Perverse, Subversive, and Absurd
Or: The Poster Art of Tomi Ungerer.
Tomi Ungerer’s work, along with that of a handful of others, might rightly be considered to not only embody the design style of the 60’s and 70’s, but to have played a central part in that style’s ascendence. Throughout those decades Mr. Ungerer’s work was everywhere, encompassing everything from politics and commercial concerns to erotic publications and children’s books. He was prolific, and in no realm more so than in that of the poster.
As it happens just yesterday I came across the perfect resource to illustrate that point, the 1971 book The Poster Art of Tomi Ungerer, compiled and edited by Jack Rennert. Below I’ve reproduced, for your viewing pleasure and Mr. Ungerer’s glorification, a small sampling of the terrific poster work contained therein. Have a look…
Anti-war poster, published 1967. Created for a group of students and faculty at Columbia University.
Sketch for poster, 1967. (The more things change… aye?)
Anti-war posters, published 1967.
Poster concerning race relations in the U.S. published 1967.
Quote: “Expect the unexpected” is a fitting description of all of Tomi’s posters. The element of surprise, the element of the absurd, is a clear constant in his posters. When Tomi is finished with a poster design, he will step back a bit, and if he’s really satisfied with what he’s done, he’ll say, “It’s absurd!”
This very absurdity, achieved by elements of surprise and exaggeration, makes for a good poster: one of the key elements of a good poster is that it be arresting, that it be immediately compelling. This propensity for gleefully combining the improbable with the absurd is carried through in all of Tomi’s works.” -Jack Rennert.
Poster for retailers TRUC exploring the theme “TRUC is stranger than fiction.”
Finished art of proposed poster for the film. Ungerer worked directly with Kubric to develop this in 1964.
1967 image for the poser and promotional materials for Otto Preminger’s unproduced film.
Image for Lysol’s “We want to put you in a fresher world” campaign, circa 1969.
Originally created for the New York State Lottery, but unused, these paintings were recycled for use by the Village Voice. Published 1968.
A sharp shooter and his target. Images created as limited edition prints, devoted to contemporary artists, published by George Plimton’s Paris Review in 1968.
Quote: “Hans Pflug, writing about Tomi’s work when he first came to the United States, noted: ‘His drawings and advertisements all give the impression of having occurred to him in a flash, and of having been captured on paper with equal immediacy.’ To watch Tomi at work is to know that this was an accurate observation and is still so. What is amazing to me, is that Tomi at once gets a complete image of what he wants to do, and putting it down on paper becomes almost the automatic reflex of his clearly ‘seen’ image. He rarely goes back over his lines. They are immediately, cleanly, and finally, put down on paper. He may not be satisfied when he’s finished and will throw the whole thing out, but he’ll seldom redo or rework his lines or colors.” -Jack Rennert.
Poster announcing the launch of the color weekend supplement of London’s Daily telegraph. Published 1966.
Part of an extensive campaign for The New York Times (which I may devote a full post to in future) exploring the tag-line “An adult finds out…” Published 1965.
Three images created for the overseas division of Kent cigarettes, riffing on a proposed commercial tag-line “the moocher’s choice.” These were ultimately not used because, among other cultural obstacles, in the Middle East stealing can result in having one’s hand cut off. Created in 1969.
Quote: “The main influences in my work were, as a child, Mathias Grunewald, Durer, Schongauer, as well as Hansi and Schnugg, both Alsatian illustrators. Later came Goya, Bosch, the Japanese graphists (Hokusai, etc.), the old issues of Simplicissimus, and Wilhelm Busch.
My high school records were crowned with the final remark: ‘Perverse and subversive.’
My interest and hobbies vary and alternate: flying kites and balloons, old toys, books, bondage, erotica, minerology, botany, medicine, jazz-the list is vain and endless. My most meaningful author is Louis Ferdinand Celine, my favorite painter is Ingres, and Bach’s is just about the only music that gives me total satisfaction.” -Tomi Ungerer, from the introduction to The Poster Art of Toimi Ungerer
Two of six posters created in 1969 for the Rock venue The Electric Circus exploring the tag-line, “the ultimate legal experience.”
Images contracted by AIGA to celebrate the “50th anniversary of Graphic Arts in the United States.” The first was published in 1966, the second was a sketch of an alternate idea.
Poster image for the launch of Coca-Cola’s chocolate flavored “protein soda” derived from a soybean derivative. The poster was created in 1968 but the product failed.
See original sketch.
This image was created in 1971 by Mr. Ungerer for the poster book itself, and is a self portrait. It wasn’t used.
It was no easy task choosing what to include here but I hope you enjoyed these.
You can visit Tomi Ungerer’s homepage if you’d like to see some more of his work.
Also I’ve posted a small set of pieces Mr. Ungerer created for a 1966 IBM exhibition called Some Computer ABC’s over at the Nonist Annex.
Lastly, in that I was unable to find anything comparable on the web—the horse’s mouth and all that—I wanted to offer the full text of the biographical sketch Mr. Ungerer wrote for the introduction to the book. You can read it here.