Chameleon: Being the Book of My Selves

1922 Edition (Lieber & Lewis)

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Table of Contents

The Brain and the World	7 – 12
The Mirth of the Brain	13 – 19
Wonder	20 – 30
The Almightiness of Might	31 – 38
The Intangible Life	39 – 50
The Irony of Negatives	51 – 62
History	63 – 74
The Passion of Distance	75 – 81
The Comic View	82 – 88
The Artist	89 – 98
Under a Mask	99 – 105
A Memorable Escape	106 – 116
The Masquerade	117 – 123
Respectability	124 – 130
The Impenitent	131 – 145
The Eternal Renaissance	146 – 153
Silence	154 – 162
Posterity: The New Superstition	163 – 169
An Evaporating Universe	170 – 179
The Trail of the Worm	180 – 187
Cosmic Marionettes	188– 193
The Drama of Days	194 – 198
Absorption: A Universal Law	199 – 207
Catalepsy	208 – 214
Coda	215 – 221

Publication

In the March 24, 1922, issue of The American Hebrew (p. 505), a notice appeared:

De Casseres Seeks a Publisher

The immortal Ben seeks to make some publisher immortal. The latter need only defy the time-honored conviction that books of essays, short stories and sketches are a drug on the market. Maybe such works do have a narcotic effect on the poor creatures drugged by newspaper comic strips into semi-sensibility. Certainly there is an intelligent public somewhere, an aggressive minority that would help such a publisher. Not all of us have one-dimensional brains, featuring thickness.

It seems likely De Casseres wrote this himself, given its style. Following the notice are titles for three books with brief descriptions:

• Forty Immortals: Nietzsche, Hardy, Flaubert, Maeterlinck, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Shapespeare [sic], Remy De Gourmont and others celebrated in magical prose poems.
• Chameleon: Being the Book of My Selves: The kaleidoscopic Ben revealed to the readers’ eye—a human color organ.
• Edelweiss and Mandragora: A Book for Sceptics, Rebels, and Mystics: This contains the philosophy of De Casseres in epigram and aphorism

The first two were published, Chameleon in 1922 andForty Immortals in 1926; the last was not, though its material likely ended up in other writings, if any of it was ever produced at all.

In July 1922, The Literary Review announced that Chameleon would appear “along about the the middle of August,” describing it as “a book of twenty-seven [actually 25] contradictory moods by a lyrical satirist, nihilist, and mystic.” Similar language appeared in other publications and included a purported blurb from Jack London — a friend of De Casseres — calling the book’s essays “the poetry of utter philosophy.” The notices also claimed that De Casseres had been trying to get the book published for fifteen years, though some of the essays that appear in it were published in periodicals as recently as five years prior.

Lieber & Lewis published the only edition of Chameleon in 1922. According to the U.S. Catalog of Copyright Entries, the publication date was August 12. Its listing appeared in the Publishers’ Weekly “Weekly Record of New Publications” on September 2, 1922:

Chameleon; being the book of my selves [humorous essays] . 224 p . D [22] N. Y., Lieber & Lewis $1.75

Lieber & Lewis ran ads for Chameleon in prominent periodicals, including Publishers’ Weekly, The Dial, and others. It was included in the Lieber & Lewis Catalog of Publications in 1923 and 1924. Albert & Charles Boni (later Boni & Liveright) bought Lieber & Lewis in 1924, and Chameleon appeared in the Boni catalog in 1925, but not after that.

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Reviews of Chameleon

• Aug. 20, 1922: Benjamin De Casseres—Olympus Pulled Down to the Street – The Morning Telegraph
• Oct. 1922: Reviews: Chameleon – The Double Dealer
• Oct. 11, 1922: Fireworks – Chameleon: Being the Book of My Selves – The New Republic

Additional Resources

• Chameleon at Internet Archive
• Chameleon at HathiTrust