The Morning Telegraph, Sunday, August 20, 1922
By MELVILLE JOHNSON
Drawings by O. F. Howard
THERE is a sentence from Balzac that fits Benjamin De Casseres as a hollow fits its circle. It is “‘Approaching, like the angels of Swedenborg,’ toward the eternal Springtime of youth.”
“Most people,” said this “myriad-faceted stormer of Cosmic heights” in other words Ben, “are born on earth and approach Heaven or Hell. I was born, either in Heaven or Hell, whichever you prefer, and am approaching the Earth. I am a pagan, an earthman. I was born old (the fact is he was born in Philadelphia) and am getting younger every day. If you don’t believe I was born old cast your eyes on this bit of wisdom, brought forth with much labor at the ripe age of eighteen:
'Why Vice triumphs and Virtue fails
Why Wisdom's march is like the snails
Why earth is filled with Sorrow's wails?'
“After you, fully absorb that meditate on the fact that at seventeen I was writing anonymous editorials for a Philadelphia paper. Who but an old, old man would do that? And now I’ve gone into motion pictures, being twenty years younger.”
So spoke Benjamin De Casseres, whose ancestors once upon a time lived in Spain, under the pseudonym of Caceres. They lived there quite a while, but left suddenly, being more or less urged by the Inquisitor Torquemada. They finally arrived in Holland, where Ben acquired another famous ancestor by the name of Benedict de Spinoza, but Ben’s philosophy and Benedict’s, are not similar. By degrees these ancestors reached, by the way of Jamaica, Philadelphia. They little realized that from that dear old town of the Liberty Bell would issue a descendant who would make them famous. We speak of Benjamin De Casseres, philosopher, poet, newspaper man, critic, than whom there is no greater. Also the author of more unpublished books than any living scribe. That oversight is soon to be remedied. Then Mr. De Casseres will be famous with a capital F. He claims that so far he has only been infamous.
IN other words, very soon will appear on the market under the auspices of Lieber & Lewis, two young and clear-sighted publishers, a book called “Chameleon, Being the Book of Myselves,” [sic] the author of which is none other than Mr. De Casseres. After the public has placed its stamp of approval on this and began to clamor for more, there will come out in in quick succession, headed by “Cosmoramas,” a book of poems “anarchistic, passionate, mystical, ironical,” eleven more by “Our original Futurist, and most audacious, erratic Imagist of them all,” which is what James Huneker called De Casseres.
Buf what, you may well ask, was our young author doing to sustain the breath of life, while producing these masterpieces? While unpublished manuscripts, if coyly tied up in bine ribbon, may cause their creator’s heart to palpitate with joy on gating on them, they hardly buy club-steaks or give one a speaking acquaintance with the head waiter at Joel’s or carte-hlanrhe at Jack’s.
This is his story: When he was not “satirizing alt isms” for his own edification land achieving fame as the great unpublished, he was doing newspaper work. He had managed to overcome the inertia engendered by the city of his birth and with his bright, bird-like eyes fixed on New York made the two-hour journey safely, at length occupying space in the New York Herald office. He occupied different portions of space there for sixteen years, doing, as he says, everything but typesetting. These years were not consecutive, for, with his two boon companions in irony and fate, Carlo de Fornaro and Marius de Zayas, both artist newspaper men, he went to Mexico, where be became the chief editorial writer of El Diaro, the principal paper of the capital. He was a potent factor in undermining the despotism of “Diaz, Czar of Mexico.” But he became too excited at a bullfight, told the chief matador in perfect Castilian what he thought of him and broke up the party. He was not popular in Mexico City after that, so, after reading several uncomplimentary remarks about himself in the papers, he left the land of the hot tamales and returned to the lobsters of his beloved Broadway. He was welcomed back into the proof-reading fold.
BUT life was hard for Ben. No sooner had he settled into the comfortable routine of leaving the office at 2 and spending from 2 until 4 in his favorite haunts, where the wine flowed, red, white and plenty, than Mayor Gaynor, with loud acclaim, put into effect the 1 o’clock closing law. “This,” said De Casseres, “is the end of my endurance. I shall be Mayor myself,” and straightaway issued announcement which read: “I hereby announce my candidacy for Mayor of New York. Having been born in Philadelphia, I possess the supreme qualifications for fitness in that office—i.e. hypocrisy.
“I pledge myself to throw into the gutter at 1 A.M. every day all those who do not measure up to my standard of hypocrisy.
“Wait for platform to be announced later.”
The “splinters” in his platform were many and “Casserean.” His total campaign expenses were $11. He was defeated. But he had letters from the Governor, the Mayor and everything. If the 1 o’clock law affected him that way can you imagine his state of mind now?
For a few years after this he contented himself with writing and having published, mostly in radical papers, his poems, which “captured the imagination,” so filled were they with “fervor, revolt and agony and his attempt to find the relationship of his own soul of humanity to the eternal.” Edgar Saltus said of him, “De Casseres suggests a Titan in an inkstand—Prometheus chained by newspaper limitations.” Then in 1915, under the auspices of Albert and Charles Boni, came out the only book he has ever had published, “The Shadow Eater,” of which Henry Tyrell wrote: “New York in its time has been the home of Bryant, Halleck, Drake, Poe and Walt Whitman, and New York at the present moment is, as it has been for the better part of two decades past, the home of De Casseres, a poet comparable to any of those named for literary artistry, for intellectual keenness and intensity, for spiritual heights soared and shuddering depths plumbed.”
“His recent volume, ‘The Shadow Eater,’ a gathering of Stygian chants, is a sort of free verse, something like Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ and more like the Psalms of David, which will seize and hold the attention of literary appraisers as the work of an exceptional genius. But it will never have the least chance of making De Casseres known. And De Casseres, notwithstanding his years of disjointed utterance in the accents of immortality, is so widely unknown that his very obscurity is an inexplicable puzzle.
“And all these years he has continued writing his polished, poignant blasphemies, his smouldering, passionate complaint against existing social order and the universal scheme of things, his exotic art and literary criticisms couched in language no scintillant with jeweled phrase and rhetoric and epigram, now repellant with Rabelaisian brutality. Yet withal, if De Casseres is not famous to-day it is because he takes pride in his obscurity.
But if De Casseres was not famous here he had been discovered in France by the late Remy de Gourmont, who had translated into French and published in the Mercure de France many of De Casseres’s poems, in particular “Pater Noster,” which had been privately circulated here, to which he appended keen, critical appreciation. In the last book De Gourmont wrote before his death, “Pendant l’Orage,” was included an essay by De Casseres on the Germans, the Kaiser and Socialism. De Gourmont was not the only Frenchman to give credit to De Casseres. Jules de Gaultier said about him, “You put before us the law of irony under the most dazzling of its historic forms—Christ—and your complete work will enrich English literature with a new philosophic lyricism.”
Meanwhile De Casseres struggled on in unappreciative (with the exception of a few individuals) America. He wrote articles for the Sunday Times and book reviews for the same paper; also for the Post and the Bookman and enriched Don Marquis’s “Sun Dial” with much imagist poetry and satire, also turning out stuff facetious enough for Life. Finally in 1920 he joined the staff of the Famous Players-Lasky. He is still with them.
His apologia for joining motion pictures was: “For twenty years I struggled up the slopes of Olympus. My feet were sore from the stones; my hands were torn by the briers; my face was cut by the bushes; but still I struggled on toward the heights of Olympus, toward Zens and the gods. At length I approached the top and, lifting my weary head, looked over the edge of the topmost plain. Did I see Zeus and the gods and goddesses? No; I saw Charlie Chaplin throwing star dust pies.”
Mr. de Casseres admits not only has he been good for motion pictures, but motion pictures have been good for him. “I used to think in abstract terms,” he said. “Now my thoughts are concrete. I am returning to the primitive. I am thinking in pictures. The time is coming when there will be a great school of authors writing directly for the screen who will think in terms of pictures and write into the camera. The future of the screen is unbounded.”
“If,” he went on, “I had enough money I would build throughout the country a series of little picture theatres where the stories written for the intelligensia [sic] would be produced and the music would be written expressly for the picture. I would film the poems of Shelley, the stories of Poe, some of my own things and the scenarios of writers trained to write for the screen. These little picture theatres would not be a philanthropy. I would make the audiences pay well to see what a really good film is, and they would be worth the price. But in the meantime I am having the time of my life editing, writing sub-titles and cutting the things that are put on my desk. In fact, I am thinking of getting an airplane so I can get to the office more quickly from 163d street, having conceived a great enthusiasm for the sport in my recent flight at Atlantic City, which cost me a dollar a minute. I was up twelve minutes.”
In spite of De Casseres’s enthusiasm for the screen, he still has a desire to write fiction and says he will do so as soon as somebody will endow him so he can devote all his time to it.
It is interesting to note that before De Casseres found a publisher for “Chameleon” he circularized fifty-seven publishing houses. Three of them answered him. The others preserved a conventional silence. One of the three said, “If you kindly pass out of existence and let this book (referring to “The Muse of Lies,” which is coming out later) come out as a discovered manuscript of the seventeenth century school, I can promise a great success for it.” Ben refused to die.
“Chameleon” is dedicated to “Bio,” who is Mrs. De Casseres: for after nearly half a century of bachelorhood he finally decided to try a new experiment. It is no longer an experiment, but a fixed habit. Mrs. De Casseres insists that she taught him the vice of eating, which mitigated somewhat his liquid diet, but Ben still says he “wants to die in Cuba.”