De Casseres, Psalmist of Night and Nietzcheism, Lives Unknown in New York and Writes Like Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire and King David, While Railing at the Metropolis as “A City Whose Splendor is in the Dazzling Glitter of All That is Monstrous and Soulless.”
By Henry Tyrrell.
A POET in New York—city of madness, frenzy, incessant noise and hideousness—would be as unthinkable as a Puritan Bacchante.”—Benjamin de Casseres.
Yet 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 Benjamin De Casseres himself—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” (Wilmarth Publishing Company, New York), a gathering of Stygian chants in a sort of free verse that is something like Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and more like the Psalms of David, 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.
Not only is he un-honored in New York and in his native Philadelphia, but fame has also overlooked him in countries other than his own, where nevertheless his malefic force has been more than vaguely felt. In Mexico, less than a dozen years ago, as the chief editorial writer of the influential newspaper of the capital, El Diario, he was a potent factor in undermining the despotism of “Diaz, Czar of Mexico,” though nobody seemed to realize the fact until all was over. Even after he had returned with his journalistic associates Fornaro and De Zayas to the nocturnal haunts of his beloved, accurst Manhattan, and while yet the long arm of Mexican intrigue could reach out through Washington and drag Fornaro to prison, De Casseres remained serene, cynical, smiling and unmolested.
AND all these years he has continued writing his polished, poignant blasphemies, his smoldering, passionate complaint against existing social order and the universal scheme of things, his exotic art and literary criticisms, couched in language now scintillant with jewelled phrase and epigram, now repellant with Rabelaisian brutality. Such writing found publication for the most part in elusive radical magazines.
Yet withal, if De Casseres is not famous to-day, it is chiefly because he takes a perverse pride in obscurity. Mystery, one might say, hunts him up, pursues and envelops him. He meets her more than half way. He is a true bird of the night, spiritually and literally.
It wa no doubt with deliberate purpose that DeCasseres enslaved himself to his exacting occupation of proof-reader on a metropolitan morning newspaper; for so he can maintain the intellectual freedom and material independence necessary to his mocking, challenging philosophical attitude towards the world, and at the same time escape the torture of having to behold the hideousness of New York by daylight. Like Dupin, the detective hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he is accustomed to draw the shades, barricade the door of his apartment and retire to rest at the earliest peep of dawn, sleeping through the day.
PLEASURE? social intercourse? Interesting personal queries these, under the circumstances—but by no means readily available. The principal pleasure of De Casseres seems to be in—
"Flying the flag of Rebellion from the Temple of Pain,
Knowing the Thing that skulks in the adytum."
Two of his boon companions in art and irony are Carlo de Fornaro and Marius de Zayas, both artist newspaper men and mordant caricaturists whom celebrities fawn upon because they fear them.
The “Shadow Eater” poems are dedicated to Fornaro, “who was the first to understand, appreciate and sympathize with them.” Significantly, they bear the date-line, “New York City, 1902-1906.” This in a way is autobiographical, since it fixes the period in which these three fiery young publicists first got together to plot the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz of Mexico. The “revolutionists’ table” around which they fore-gathered in the Tenderloin chile-con-carne resort conducted by Joel Rinaldo, the Greaser, is still pointed out to sight-seers.
THIS necessarily incomplete portrait of our Poet Shadow Eater may be helped out by a bit of ancestral background.
Benjamin de Casseres was born in Philadelphia, about forty years ago, of Spanish Hebrew parents, through whom he traces his lineal descent from the 17th Century Jewish philosopher Spinoza. Not Spinoza, however, but Nietzsche, is his psychic godfather. Needless to say, Benjamin de Casseres is a born radical, the foe of industrialism and prescribed morality, opposed in toto to the present order of things economical, political, aesthetic and social. He is a citizen of the world, master of many languages, and a deep student of art, specializing on the archaeological remains of the ancient Aztecs.
BEFORE he went to Mexico De Casseres was in a way to make his mark in New York journalism. But he was too much in earnest to be taken seriously.
That was about the time De Casseres wrote to his editor:
“I am organizing a Society for the Promotion of Official and Private Hypocrisy. It will be composed of pink-tea zanies, niszies, witlings, boobies, jolterheads, candidates for re-election, Tartuffes, Chadbands, Pecksniffs, jobbernowls, doddards, moon-calves, dunderpates and a few of the Wise Men of Gotham. I have applied to the Mayor for an all-night license.”
The following selections from “The Shadow Eater” may be taken as measurably self-explanatory:
Notes
The remainder of the article includes version/excerpts of the following poems:
- The Masque of Bronze (i.e., The Protagonist)
- My Comic Perspective
- The Dead Who Live
- De Profundis
- The Way Out: Bio
- Bird of the Night
- Long Vigil of the Human Soul (i.e., The Long Vigil)
Publication History
- Fort Wayne (IN) Journal-Gazette, June 9, 1918, Sec. 3, p. 6
- Salt Lake Telegram, Nov. 13, 1921, p. 7