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Oct. 2 - Old Books to New Places

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

October 2, 2003

Baghdad - Whenever I travel to some distant place, I try to take along a book about it that was written a long time ago. So, in addition to seeing the place now, I can compare it a bit to what someone has seen before. Probably my most frequent literary guide has been Graham Greene, who floated around Haiti, Sierra Leone and Liberia decades before I got to those places as a correspondent.

This time, I've brought an author I hadn't read before - W.B. Seabrook. Seabrook grew up at the end of the 1800s on the Kansas prairie, fascinated by a picture in a children's book showing majestic Oriental kings riding their camels to Bethlehem. After World War I, he washed up in Greenwich Village, a "not astonishingly successful writer" (his words) who hung out at "a sort of coffee house" run by his wife, Katie. (It was at 156 Waverly Place. Anybody know what's there now?)

One day, into the place walks a man as mysterious as those picture-book kings - Daoud Izzedine, a Druze from Beirut. Seabrook begins pumping him for stories about Arabia and, in 1924 he and Katie pack their steamer trunks and sail.

The trip yielded a 1927 book, now yellowed and smelling of dust, that I found at George Lenz's used book shop on New York Avenue in Huntington. The title hints at Seabrook's mania for the exotic: "Adventures in Arabia - Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes & Yezidee Devil Worshipers" As an adventurer, Seabrook burned hot and soon burned out. His made his raucous trek through what is now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq at age 38. Eleven years later, he wrote his most famous book, "Asylum," about checking himself into a Westchester County mental hospital for an alcohol dependency he couldn't shake. A decade after that, in 1945, he committed suicide.

But back to the happier 1924. Seabrook is rushing around New York to prepare for his trip. "I sought out Arab cooks and amiable sons of Sinbad in the Washington Street slums, and Arab scholars on Columbia Heights." When these tutors asked why a comfortably fed New Yorker was going to their world, he had trouble with the answer. "I am afraid it has become only too apparent that I went for no useful, moral, scholarly, political, humanitarian, or reasonable purpose whatsoever. I went for the joy of it, and because I believed I should love it."

So what's not reasonable about that?